tells the story of the great Black abolitionist Frederick Douglass.
AS REMARKABLE as it may seem, Frederick Douglass was for decades
written out of the history of how slavery ended in the United States.
Major historical works of the early 20th century, such as James Ford Rhodes' History of the United States and John B. McMaster's History of the People of the United States,
hardly mention the former slave who became one of the most far-sighted
abolitionist leaders and possibly the greatest radical orator in
American history.
Fortunately, the civil rights struggles of the mid-20th century
rescued Douglass from historical obscurity. Along with a generation of
more radical historians, such as Herbert Aptheker, Benjamin Quarles and
Philip Foner, the civil rights movement elevated Douglass to his
rightful place in American history. In 1963, Ebony magazine put a
portrait of Douglass on its cover and declared him "the father of the
protest movement" and "the first of the 'Freedom Riders' and
'Sit-Iners.'"
Fast forward to today, and there has been a regression. Nearly
everyone in the U.S. recognizes Douglass as historically important, yet
few are taught much about the history he helped to create. Schools and
streets may carry the name of Frederick Douglass, yet the real story of
his life--along with the history of slavery, abolitionism and the Civil
War--remains little known or deeply misunderstood.
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DOUGLASS WAS born a slave in February 1818 and came of age in a world
that was changing rapidly. The early 19th century saw a transformation
of the U.S. economy driven by the rise of the cotton economy and the
resulting expansion of plantation slavery.
King cotton became massively profitable with the invention of the
cotton gin in 1793, and the profits from slave-produced cotton and the
textile industry fueled the industrial revolution getting underway in
England and the Northern U.S. Along with the growth of profits came a
growth in the Southern slave system's scope and reach.
Douglass lived on the periphery of this system rather than at its
heart. Born on a plantation on Maryland's Eastern Shore, Douglass spent
his early life in this border state, where the slave system was smaller
and weaker than in most other Southern states. Ninety-seven percent of
slave owners in Maryland owned five slaves or less.
Slavery in Maryland coexisted uneasily alongside a growing system of
wage labor. In the booming urban center of Baltimore, where Douglass
lived for part of his youth, this system played an increasingly
important role.
The city was rich in political and cultural activities. For instance,
Benjamin Lundy published an early abolitionist newspaper there called The Genius of Universal Emancipation from 1824 until 1835.
Maryland was home to a large and growing free Black population.
Forty-five percent of all Maryland Blacks were free by 1850--and
Baltimore's free Black population was the largest in the country.
The tensions between slavery and early industrial capitalism in
Maryland mirrored the growing contradictions between the two systems
nationally. Historians such as Barbara J. Fields have noted that these
tensions within "middle ground" states like Maryland "imparted an extra
measure of bitterness to enslavement, set close boundaries on the
liberty of the ostensibly free, and played havoc with bonds of love,
friendship and family among slaves, and between them and free Black
people."
These conditions shaped Douglass's early life, during which he was
secretly teaching himself to read and developing his anti-slavery
worldview. Living in such close proximity to a large free Black
population--one with a reputation for labor militancy, no less--impacted
Douglass in important ways. It's no accident that Maryland produced not
only Douglass, but other great anti-slavery leaders like Harriet Tubman
and Henry Highland Garnet.
The existence of this free Black population directly impacted
Douglass's life in at least one other crucial way. Douglass' first wife,
Anna Murray, was a free Black woman living in Baltimore. After they met
in 1838, when Douglass was 20, Murray came up with the plan for how he
would flee the state and escape slavery. As part of the escape plan,
Douglass would disguise himself as a sailor, wearing a uniform Murray
had borrowed from a free Black seaman.
Douglass and Murray fled first to New York, then to New Bedford,
Mass. Here, Douglass came into direct contact for the first time with
the abolitionist movement that would define the next three decades of
his life.
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WITH THE expansion of slavery in the first half of the 19th century
came new troubles for the slave owners. The trickle of runaway slave
became a flood as thousands escaped North every year on the Underground
Railroad. Slave rebellions increased across the South--the most famous
of which was led by Nat Turner in Southampton, Va., in August 1831.
This slave resistance was a critical factor in the development of the
movement for the abolition of slavery. By 1838, the year of Douglass'
escape from slavery, the movement was blossoming. Historians estimate
that 1,400 anti-slavery societies existed around the country as of that
year, with at least 112,000 members. The movement became more radical as
Blacks came to play a more central role. Abolitionists who believed
slavery would gradually die out on its own or that freed slaves should
be sent back to Africa were pushed to the margins.
The movement's best-known leaders were whites, like William Lloyd
Garrison, but the free Black population became its backbone. Thousands
of Blacks subscribed to abolitionist newspapers such as Garrison's The Liberator--which Douglass later said was "my meat and my drink."
The main split in the abolitionist movement encountered by Douglass
in the 1840s was between those who favored a political strategy for the
movement, and those who opposed involvement in the political system and
saw the Constitution as a pro-slavery document--"a pact with the devil,"
as Garrison called it.
Garrison's faction was more prominent early on, and it was this group
that Douglass gravitated to. As Douglass developed himself as an
anti-slavery orator, growing audiences flocked to hear him speak.
Thousands read his newspaper articles and essays. Douglass' insight into
the workings of the slave system and his clear calls for justice and
equality were unmatched, even in a movement made up of talented writers
and speakers.
But the ideas of Garrisonians were contradictory. They combined the
harshest denunciations of slavery and the American political system with
agitating for the North to remove itself from any connection with the
South--to break away from the Southern states and form a separate
country, free of the taint of slavery.
This wasn't rooted in material reality at all. Furthermore, the
Garrisonians were pacifists and felt the best and only way to spread the
anti-slavery movement was by nonviolent "moral persuasion."
As the conflict between North and South grew more intense, the force
of events moved Douglass away from Garrison and towards a strategy of
political agitation and armed force to end slavery.
Black leaders played a more and more important role in the struggle.
Alongside Douglass were fighters such as Garnet and David Walker, whose
militant calls for slave rebellion undoubtedly influenced Douglass.
Yet the views of Black abolitionists varied as well. Some, such as
Garnet, became ardent advocates of colonization as a way to build an
independent Black society, free of white racism. Douglass rejected this
view and insisted that the Black struggle was rooted in the U.S. He
began to argue that the democratic values articulated in the U.S.
Constitution, though not honored in practice, could be a powerful weapon
with which to attack slavery.
Douglass began to chart his own path. In 1847, he founded his first newspaper, the North Star.
Though he reaffirmed his commitment to Garrisonian wing of the movement
as late as September 1849, it was clear that he was following a
different trajectory. Speaking in Boston that same year, he rejected his
earlier insistence on nonviolence, saying that he would "welcome the
intelligence tomorrow, should it come, that the slaves had risen in the
South, and that the sable arms which had been engaged in beautifying and
adorning the South were engaged in spreading death and devastation
there."
By this point, Douglass established himself as a leading voice for
freedom and equality--and not only for Black Americans, but for women as
well. He frequently spoke and wrote in support of women's equality and
the right to vote, and he was present at the Seneca Falls Convention on
women's rights.
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"WHEN HE spoke, he roared," the historian James Oakes writes of
Douglass. Douglass' understanding of American society was deep and
multifaceted. He described with unparalleled skill how the slave-owning
elite in the South used racism to maintain social control:
The slaveholders...by encouraging the enmity of the poor laboring white man against the Blacks, succeeded in making the white man almost as much a slave as the Black slave himself. The difference between the white slave and the Black slave was this: the latter belonged to one slaveholder, and the former belonged to the slaveholders collectively...Both were plundered, and by the same plunderers...The slaveholders blinded them to this competition by keeping alive their prejudice.
Douglass called out the hypocrisy of all U.S. society, not just the
Southern slaveholders. Most famously, he denounced the celebration of
the Fourth of July as "a thin veil to cover up crimes which would
disgrace a nation of savages."
As time went on, the U.S. veered ever closer to civil war. With every
milestone--the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850; the battles of "Bloody
Kansas" in 1854; the Supreme Court's Dred Scott decision of 1857;
John Brown's October 1859 assault on the U.S. armory in Harper's Ferry;
and the election of Abraham Lincoln from the recently formed Republican
Party--the conflict between the Southern slave system and the Northern
industrial system grew shaper.
During this era, Douglass tirelessly worked for the abolitionist
cause, traveling at home and abroad to speak to large audiences.
According to one writer, a "partial" list of Douglass' speaking events
for just the month of January 1855 included at least 21 addresses, in
cities stretching from Maine to Massachusetts to New York to
Pennsylvania. Between 1855 and 1863, Douglass gave more than 500 known
speeches in the U.S., Britain and Canada.
Douglass was especially keen in recognizing how the conflict between
North and South was leading inevitably toward a war that would end
slavery. He was relentless in criticizing the shortcomings of Lincoln
and the Republicans:
The Republican Party...is opposed to the political power of slavery, rather than to slavery itself. It would arrest the spread of the slave system...and defeat all plans for giving slavery any further guarantee of permanence. This is very desirable, but it leaves the great work of abolishing slavery...still to be accomplished. The triumph of the Republican Party will only open the way for this great work.
But he disagreed with other abolitionists who called for a boycott of
the 1860 presidential election. As he wrote a few months before the
vote:
I cannot fail to see that the Republican Party carries with it the anti-slavery sentiment of the North, and that a victory gained by it in the present canvass will be a victory gained by that sentiment over the wickedly aggressive pro-slavery sentiment of the country...The slaveholders know that the day of their power is over when a Republican president is elected.
Douglass was proven correct. In response to Lincoln's victory,
Southern states began seceding from the Union before he was even
inaugurated. Within months, the Civil War Douglass had predicted was
underway.
During the war, Douglass played a key role in pressuring Lincoln and
the Republicans to make the destruction of slavery a war aim. In
particular, he was central to the North's decision to allow Black
soldiers to fight for the Union. In a speech to a Black audience in
Philadelphia in 1863, Douglass argued that enlisting to fight would
advance the cause of equal rights after the war:
Never since the world began was a better chance offered to a long enslaved and oppressed people. The opportunity is given us to be men...Once let the Black man get upon his person the brass letters U. S.; let him get an eagle on his button, and a musket on his shoulder, and bullets in his pocket, and there is no power on the earth or under the earth which can deny that he has earned the right of citizenship in the United States...In your hands, that musket means liberty.
Throughout the Civil War and the period of Reconstruction that
followed, Douglass fought not only for emancipation, but full equality
for the Black population. When other abolitionists were ready to declare
victory, Douglass insisted that the struggle must continue "until the
Black man has the ballot."
It is true, as historians have argued, that Douglass' politics
moderated later in his life, particularly after the end of
Reconstruction in South. Yet more than any other abolitionist, Douglass
understood the connection between anti-racism and the struggle against
all forms of oppression. His most famous quote remains apt to the world
we live in today, and our struggle to transform it:
If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.
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