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Frederick Douglass February, 1817-February 20, 1895
Ethnicity: African American Birth Date: February, 1817 Death Date: February 20, 1895 Genre(s): JOURNALISM; NONFICTION; PUBLISHING; ESSAYS Table of Contents: Biographical and Critical EssayJump to Additional DLB Essay(s) on This Author: The American Renaissance in New England WRITINGS BY THE AUTHOR:
SELECTED BOOKS
Frederick Douglass's life encompassed slavery and freedom, absolute poverty and international fame and gentility. Though he made his escape from slavery at the age of twenty-one, he spent his remaining fifty-seven years fighting that institution through oratory and the press. His North Star was among the first successful black newspapers in the United States, and his three autobiographical books were early, stinging indictments written as first-person accounts of life amid slavery. His work as editor and writer served to counteract much of the antiblack, proslavery sentiment of the rest of the American press system. One example of the latter, apocryphal though it may be, is the retort by the editor of the famous New York Sun when blacks wanted a retraction printed after slanderous comments were published concerning black businessmen. They were told that the Sun shone for white men, not black; and if the gentlemen wanted anything printed they might as well start their own newspaper. Throughout his life, Douglass was a voice for the unheard and a champion for the unprotected. His life and his work demonstrate the best and the most courageous in American activist, crusading journalism. They show what the power of the press, harnessed in the cause of the oppressed, could do. In addition, they demonstrate what a noble creature the human individual is: determination, not formal education, helped develop in him an oratorical power and a gift for persuasive writing rarely matched in the journalism of his time. He was born Frederick Augustus Washington Baily, in Tuckahoe, Talbot County, Maryland, the son of Harriet Bailey, a slave, and a white man whose name he never learned. "From certain events ... the dates of which I have learned since, I suppose myself to have born about the year 1817," he later wrote. Biographers have confirmed that his mother was one of very few literate slaves. Though the practices of slavery resulted in his removal from his mother at a very early age, Douglass was deeply influenced throughout his life by his memory of her. He served in varying capacities under slavery, as a house servant, a farm laborer, and a shipyard worker. Because of his strong spirit and evident desire for freedom, he was sent to a slave-breaker to be trained, worked to death, or beaten into submission. One reason for this treatment was that he had learned a little bit of reading from the compassionate and well-intentioned wife of one of his masters, and had tried to pass on this learning by establishing a school under the trees for fellow slaves. Another reason was that he had been betrayed by another slave in a plan to escape. He did escape on 3 September 1838, using a borrowed sailor's suit and a sympathetic black freedman's "protection papers," which indicated that an individual described on the paper, slightly resembling Douglass, could move freely about the country. Douglass, whose last master had been the foreman of a shipyard in Baltimore, made his escape from that city to Philadelphia, where, he wrote in his autobiography, he "lived more in one day than in a year of ... slave life." The next day he moved on to New York City, where he married a freedwoman, Anna Murray, who had encouraged and financially supported his escape. Together they moved to New Bedford, Massachusetts, under the new surname of Douglass. His difficulties in finding work and the demeaning treatment he received at the hands of prospective employers and coworkers stayed in his memory and gave inspiration and impetus to his eventual work as an antislavery journalist and orator. Douglass's experiences as a free man included tending furnaces, where he "often nailed a newspaper to the post near my bellows and read" while working. One newspaper of which he was a regular and avid reader was William Lloyd Garrison's Liberator, and he attended all the meetings of that editor's Abolitionist Society held in New Bedford. He did not long remain a quiet observer and, despite the danger which public notice might bring him, spoke before a society gathering in New Bedford's Christian Church on 12 March 1839, just over six months after his escape from slavery. Two years later he met Garrison in person and began the life of public speaking which was to propel him into public notice and to help propel the country into emancipation and universal suffrage. In addition to public addresses on slavery, he traveled with Stephen S. Foster promoting the Liberator and the Anti Slavery Standard. Little did Garrison realize that such an arrangement would not only further the abolitionist cause but would also launch the career of one of black journalism's most prominent pioneers. Beginning in August 1841, Douglass was part of a national and international team of lecturers who took the cause of abolitionism into churches, town halls, and wherever groups of people, friendly or hostile, would listen. Between 1842 and 1847, the Liberator printed his letters and the texts of many of his lectures. His autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, written in 1845 to convince audiences of the truth of his assertions, put his freedom in jeopardy from bounty hunters who would have profited from returning him to his former master. Taking the advice of friends, he left his wife and four children in August 1845 and sailed for the British Isles. He spent two years in England, Ireland, and Scotland lecturing and corresponding with the Liberator and the National Anti-Slavery Standard. While he was in Europe, an edition of his autobiography, printed in Dublin, helped fund his travels and his antislavery lecturing. He also established a circle of friends and supporters who would remain loyal throughout his career. Their concern for his safety led several English friends to raise £150 to purchase his freedom papers. In addition to official freedom status, the two years in Europe gave Douglass a vision of liberty which was to haunt him upon his return to America on 20 April 1847. He returned with the intention and the funds to establish a newspaper, but opposition by Garrison led him to put the thought aside and to rededicate himself to lecturing against slavery. But the editorial urge was strong, and in the 1 November 1847 issue of the Ram's Horn, a black newspaper, he announced plans for the North Star, which would "attack slavery in all its forms and aspects"; advocate "Universal Emancipation; exact the standard of public morality; promote the moral and intellectual improvement of the colored people; and ... hasten the day of freedom to our three million enslaved fellow-countrymen." It would also create lasting ill will between him and Garrison, who considered Douglass ungrateful for abandoning the Liberator and the speaking engagements Garrison felt he was better suited for. The paper was to be published in Rochester, New York, with subscriptions at two dollars per year. That Douglass expected and counted upon the support of the free black community is attested to by a comment in the inaugural issue of the North Star. He wrote that he had long wanted to see "in this slave-holding, slave-trading and Negro-hating land" a newspaper "under the complete control and direction of the immediate victims of slavery and oppression." It was his belief that "the man who has suffered the wrong is the man to demand redress ... the man who is STRUCK is the man to CRY OUT ... he who has endured the cruel pangs of slavery is the man to advocate Liberty." Initial funding for the paper, $2,174, collected by supporters in England, did not go far enough; after six months of operation, Douglass acknowledged that he and partner Martin R. Delany had trouble getting subscriptions and support at home. He was especially disappointed by the lack of financial and moral backing from the black community; only one in five subscribers was black. At the same time, the North Star was "too free from party dictation to receive much support from any existing anti-slavery paper." This very apparent jab at the Garrisonians hints at the pain the rupture from Garrison must have caused him. In April 1848 Douglass mortgaged his home to keep the paper afloat. Douglass's paper was very clearly marked with the imprint of its editor. The collaboration with Delany lasted only six months; thereafter, the paper was Douglass's work. Douglass sought freedom and self-determination for blacks and parted company with some leaders of the time who promoted sending blacks to Africa in the quest for freedom. When Henry Clay tried to revive the Colonization Society and to encourage blacks to end the "Negro problem" through voluntary expatriation, the North Star retorted, "We are at home here; and our staying here is evidence that we wish to stay here." Colonization was, Douglass wrote, "the twin sister of slavery." The North Star, like Douglass himself, was not to be limited to the issues of emancipation and suffrage for black people. The paper's slogan was "Right is of no Sex--Truth is of no Color--God is the Father of us all, and we are all Brethren." In the second year of the paper Douglass was actively supporting woman suffrage and education, as well as married woman's rights. He spoke at the Seneca Falls convention in the summer of 1848. Although by 1850 the paper had subscribers throughout the United States as well as in London, Liverpool, Derby, Dublin, Belfast, Edinburgh, and Glasgow, its financial difficulties continued. Douglass finally was forced to seek a merger with Gerrit Smith's Liberty Party Paper. The new organ, named Frederick Douglass's Paper, appeared in June 1851. It survived until mid-1860. He selected the name as much to distinguish the paper from the many other "Stars" in the publishing firmament as to use what he knew was the prestige and drawing power of his name to attract subscribers and financial backers. The paper was similar to most contemporary abolitionist publications: a four-page, six-column weekly, heavy on exhortation and vigorous in style. Its contents included coverage of local and state antislavery meetings, submitted by unpaid correspondents; reports reprinted from other reformist publications; antislavery verse--most of it doggerel, but some by luminaries like Lowell and Whittier; book reviews and serialized novels; and advertisements, including the ever-popular patent medicine endorsements. One biographer has pointed to the high standard set by Douglass: "He would tolerate no grammatical debaucheries," and typographical errors rarely occurred. With the merger of the North Star and the Liberty Party Paper, the financial problems facing Douglass were temporarily lessened. Gerrit Smith, leader of the Liberty party, took over the debts of the North Star and pledged a monthly contribution to the support of Frederick Douglass's Paper, which was to serve as the official organ of the party. Douglass's work as an editor was accompanied by a continuing career as an antislavery lecturer and by the challenging and dangerous role he played as "conductor" of the Rochester branch of the Underground Railroad. He harbored fugitives overnight in his home, arranged for their safe passage to Canada, and often supplied funds for their journey. Rather than support "solutions" to the problems of blacks such as colonization, Douglass promoted job training; an 1853 editorial was entitled "Learn Trades or Starve." But he was selective: young men should be apprenticed as farmers and mechanics, not as waiters, porters, and barbers, even then traditional positions for black free men. In June 1858, on the advice of Julia Griffiths, an Englishwoman who had come to Rochester to help with the newspaper, Douglass introduced an additional publication, Douglass Monthly, a magazine directed toward circulation in the British Isles. It was as much a recognition of the continuing devotion to the abolitionist cause there as a promotional effort. Funds were again running low, the Liberty party had fallen on lean economic times and could not be counted on for monthly contributions needed to pay expenses, and various fund-raising efforts had netted little toward solvency. The monthly, with a yearly rate of two dollars, had as little success as other fund raisers had. The death of Frederick Douglass's Paper came shortly after the forty-three-year-old Douglass returned from a second forced exile in England and Scotland, this time of six-month duration and occasioned by the John Brown raid at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, in 1859. Because Douglass had been sought out by Brown and had been a guest in Brown's home as the fiery reformer planned his insurrection, the editor was suspect and in danger of arrest and execution. Danger was nothing new to Douglass, an early civil rights activist who had been pitched off a train in Lynn, Massachusetts, in 1841 for refusing to ride in the Jim Crow car after he paid for a first-class coach seat. Citing delinquent subscribers, continuing expenses, and receipts "nearly zero" for the weekly, Douglass folded his weekly newspaper in mid-1860. But as he had pointed out five years before, the years and the dollars devoted to the paper had been worthwhile "in the development of my own mental and moral energies, and in the corresponding development of my deeply injured and oppressed people." As his second autobiography, My Bondage and My Freedom (1855) attests, Douglass's editorial work had forced him to look closely and continuously at the limitations placed on black existence in pre-1860 America. His lecturing with the Garrisonians had been directed against slavery and against union with slaveholding states. Gradually, however, he came to argue for the use of voting power to take advantage of what he felt was the antislavery nature of the Constitution. He promoted woman suffrage because of its inherent logic as well as because of the need to broaden the base of antislavery sentiment. In 1853 he had told the Rochester Women's Rights convention, "Someone whispers in my ear, that as teachers, women get one-fourth the pay men do, while a girl's tuition is the same as a boy's." From Gerrit Smith's abolitionist Liberty party, Douglass moved to action within the Republican party. He was initially dissatisfied with Abraham Lincoln's cautious handling of the slavery controversy, considering him cowardly and ignoble. When Lincoln issued a call to arms following the attack on Fort Sumter in 1861, Douglass urged black men to form companies of militia to aid in the Union effort. When the president resisted enlistments by black men into the army (despite the fact that it was customary to accept blacks into the navy), Douglass saw more of the bowing to expediency which angered him. The final straw was Lincoln's recommendation to Congress in 1861 of colonization for slaves and free blacks. Douglass wrote that he was "bewildered by the spectacle of moral blindness, infatuation and helpless imbecility which the government of Lincoln represents." He did little to soften his criticisms until the Emancipation Proclamation was finally published on 1 January 1863. Then, he took up the cause of black troops. Not only did he urge enlistment in the pages of the Monthly but he actively worked as a recruiter. The first man he signed up for the Massachusetts Fifty-fourth and Fifty-fifth Negro Regiments was his youngest son, Charles, followed closely afterward by his eldest son, Lewis. His argument was that "liberty won only by white men will lose half its lustre." But when he began hearing reports of black soldiers receiving lower pay than whites, and of captured black soldiers being sold into slavery, he took his grievances to the White House. Lincoln agreed to consider military commissions for blacks and asked for the editor's assistance. A short time later, Douglass was led by Secretary of War Stanton to believe that he would receive a commission in the army to do recruitment for black divisions. With this understanding, he returned to Rochester and prepared his valedictory issue of the Monthly. He was leaving journalism, he told his readers, but not because there was no longer need for or value in the work. "I have lived to see the leading presses of the country, willing and ready to publish any argument or appeal in behalf of my race, I am able to make," he wrote, and pointed to the accomplishments of his journalism: "It has done something towards battering down that dark and frowning wall of partition between the working minds of two races, hitherto thought impregnable." However, "I discontinue my paper, because I can better serve my poor bleeding country-men whose great opportunity has now come, by going South and summoning them to assert their just liberty...." The commission never came, but Douglass continued to work for black enlistment. At the same time, his advice was sought by Lincoln in his reelection campaign. His political life had begun with involvement in the abolitionist movement, and the announcement of the Emancipation Proclamation had seemed to end one phase of his life's purpose. It had also given him reason to trust in Lincoln's basic honesty, and he became an informal consultant to the president in the months before his reelection. In this capacity he began pressing for black suffrage; he eventually saw that hope became a reality, though not in Lincoln's lifetime. Such was the esteem in which Lincoln held Douglass that when guards sought to bar the black leader from the inaugural ball, Lincoln personally saw to it that he was admitted and, in welcoming him to the festivities, made quite clear Douglass's standing in his estimation. Douglass half hoped for a cabinet or other government position under Lincoln but was disappointed. Douglass's major contributions and, apparently, his greatest loves remained oratory and writing. In addition to his own papers, his works appeared in the Washington Evening Star, the Journal of Social Science, the North American Review, Harper's Weekly, Cosmopolitan Our Day, Century Magazine, Woman's Journal, the London Times, and Zion's Herald. His lectures and speeches were heard in temples and town halls across the United States. Douglass's journalistic career was resumed briefly in the New National Era, which he joined in 1870 as corresponding editor. The weekly venture, devoted to the "defence and enlightenment of the newly emancipated and enfranchised" black citizens of Washington, was supposed to be a cooperative effort, but save for his sons Lewis and Frederick, who had found jobs as printers at the Era when no one else would hire black trainees, Douglass soon found himself with little help he could count on. The business end of the paper went badly and, to prevent a noticeable failure of a black enterprise so soon after emancipation, Douglass bought the paper during the second year of its existence in what he later called a $10,000 misadventure, hoping that the drawing power of his name would bring needed support and circulation. He wanted to use the paper to lift "a standard ... for my people which would cheer and strengthen them in the work of their own improvement and elevation." He also used its columns to scold and chide black scholars and professionals who he felt were not making contributions to the betterment of their fellows. It was not enough for them to be scholars and book-learned; they had to be givers as well as receivers, he insisted: "There is no question about it, the colored race are [sic] still on trial, and the inquiry is still made as to whether the colored man has within him the elements of a self-sustaining progress." In 1874 economics caused him to suspend publication of the Era. Douglass served in various minor posts in government, including that of U.S. marshal of the District of Columbia under the Hayes administration, and recorder of deeds in the Garfield and Arthur administrations. In 1881 he published a third autobiography, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, Written by Himself, which he updated in 1892. In the 1881 book, he philosophized about what he had learned from the failures of his journalistic ventures, "which to some extent has been heeded, for I have kept well out of newspaper undertaking since." Douglass's wife died on 4 August 1882. On 24 January 1884 he married Helen Pitts. He was United States Minister Resident and Consul-general to the Republic of Haiti and chargé d'affaires to Santo Domingo between 1889 and 1891.
The very full life Frederick Douglass lived is reflected in his voluminous writing, and in the many speeches he delivered, reprinted in newspapers and often published in pamphlet form. Though a fire of mysterious origins destroyed his Rochester, N.Y., home in June 1872, and with it his complete collection of the newspapers he had poured his life into, collections of his letters and speeches, as well as excerpts from his papers, have survived. Other reflections of his contributions come in the tributes which poured in from across the country following his death of a heart attack on 20 February 1895. The Sacramento Bee called the seventy-eight-year-old activist/statesman "honest and sincere, therefore he commanded respect, attention, admiration, even though he frequently evoked bitter opposition." The Boston Transcript called him "a noted and notable man"; the New York Mail and Express characterized him as "the last conspicuous figure in that brilliant and picturesque group of anti-slavery agitators and orators ... who will be gratefully and reverently remembered by all future generations." The Indianapolis News called him "the most distinguished of American negroes"; the Washington Post eulogized him as "one of the great men of the century measuring magnitude by the influence which he was enabled to exert"; and the Chicago Advance said Douglass was "for years the most picturesque and historically significant personality in America." FURTHER READINGS ABOUT THE AUTHOR
References:
Written by: Sharon M. Murphy, Marquette University Source: Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 43: American Newspaper Journalists, 1690-1872. A Bruccoli Clark Layman Book. Edited by Perry J. Ashley, University of South Carolina. The Gale Group, 1985. pp. 160-168. Gale Database: Dictionary of Literary Biography
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