Easton Press Frederick Douglass books
Frederick Douglass biography
Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey, who later became known as Frederick Douglass, was born a slave in Talbot County, Maryland, between Hillsboro and Cordova, in a shack east of Tappers Corner and west of Tuckahoe Creek. He was separated from his mother, Harriet Bailey, when he was still an infant. She died when Douglass was about seven and Douglass lived with his maternal grandmother Betty Bailey. His mother's ancestors likely had Native American heritage.
The identity of his father is obscure. Douglass originally stated that he was told his father was a white man, perhaps his owner Aaron Anthony. Later he said he knew nothing of his father's identity. At age seven, Douglass was separated from his grandmother and moved to the Wye House plantation, where Anthony worked as overseer. When Anthony died, Douglass was given to Lucretia Auld, wife of Thomas Auld. She sent Douglass to serve Thomas' brother Hugh Auld in Baltimore.
When Douglass was about twelve, Hugh Auld's wife Sophia started teaching him the alphabet. She was breaking the law against teaching slaves to read. When Hugh Auld discovered this, he strongly disapproved, saying that if a slave learned to read, he would become dissatisfied with his condition and desire freedom. Douglass later referred to this statement as the "first decidedly antislavery lecture" he had ever heard. As detailed in his autobiography Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845), Douglass succeeded in learning to read from white children in the neighborhood and by observing the writings of men with whom he worked.
As Douglass learned and began to read newspapers, political materials, and books of every description, he was exposed to a new realm of thought that led him to question and then condemn the institution of slavery. In later years, Douglass credited The Columbian Orator, which he discovered at about age twelve, with clarifying and defining his views on freedom and human rights.
When Douglass was hired out to a Mr. Freeman, he taught other slaves on the plantation how to read the New Testament at a weekly Sabbath school. As word spread, the interest among slaves in learning to read was so great that in any week more than 40 slaves would attend lessons. For about six months, their study went relatively unnoticed. While Freeman was complacent about their activities, other plantation owners became incensed that their slaves were being educated. One Sunday they burst in on the gathering, armed with clubs and stones to disperse the congregation permanently.
In 1833, Thomas Auld took Douglass back from Hugh after a dispute ("As a means of punishing Hugh," Douglass wrote). Dissatisfied with Douglass, Thomas Auld then sent him to work for Edward Covey, a poor farmer who had a reputation as a "slave-breaker." There Douglass was whipped regularly. The sixteen-year-old Douglass was indeed nearly broken psychologically by his ordeal under Covey, but he finally rebelled against the beatings and fought back. After losing a confrontation with Douglass, Covey never tried to beat him again.
In 1837, Douglass met Anna Murray, a free black in Baltimore. They married soon after he obtained his freedom.
From slavery to freedom
Douglass first unsuccessfully tried to escape from Mr. Freeman, who had hired him out from his owner Colonel Lloyd. In 1836, he tried to escape from his new owner Covey, but failed again.
On September 3, 1838, Douglass successfully escaped by boarding a train to Havre de Grace, Maryland. He was dressed in a sailor's uniform and carried identification papers provided by a free black seaman. He crossed the Susquehanna River by ferry at Havre de Grace, then continued by train to Wilmington, Delaware. From there he went by steamboat to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and eventually reached New York; the whole journey took less than 24 hours.
Abolitionist activities
Douglass continued traveling up to Massachusetts. There he joined various organizations in New Bedford, including a black church, and regularly attended abolitionist meetings. He subscribed to William Lloyd Garrison's weekly journal The Liberator, and in 1841 heard Garrison speak at a meeting of the Bristol Anti-Slavery Society. At one of these meetings, Douglass was unexpectedly asked to speak.
After he told his story, he was encouraged to become an anti-slavery lecturer. Douglass was inspired by Garrison and later stated that "no face and form ever impressed me with such sentiments [of the hatred of slavery] as did those of William Lloyd Garrison." Garrison was likewise impressed with Douglass and wrote of him in The Liberator. Several days later, Douglass delivered his first speech at the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society's annual convention in Nantucket. Then 23 years old, Douglass said later that his legs were shaking but he conquered his nervousness and gave an eloquent speech about his rough life as a slave.
In 1843, Douglass participated in the American Anti-Slavery Society's Hundred Conventions project, a six-month tour of meeting halls throughout the Eastern and Midwestern United States. He participated in the Seneca Falls Convention, the birthplace of the American feminist movement, and signed its Declaration of Sentiments.
Autobiography
Douglass' most well-known work is his autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, which was published in 1845. Critics frequently attacked the book as inauthentic, not believing that a black man could possibly have produced so eloquent a piece of literature. The book was an immediate bestseller and received overwhelmingly positive critical reviews. Within three years of its publication, it had been reprinted nine times with 11,000 copies circulating in the United States; it was also translated into the French and Dutch languages.
The book's success had an unfortunate side effect: his friends and mentors feared that the publicity would draw the attention of his ex-owner, Hugh Auld, who could try to get his "property" back. They encouraged him to go on a tour in Ireland, as many other ex-slaves had done in the past. He set sail on the Cambria for Liverpool on August 16, 1845, and arrived in Ireland when the Irish famine was just beginning.
Travels to Europe
Douglass spent two years in the British Isles and gave several lectures, mainly in Protestant churches. He remarked that there he was treated not "as a color, but as a man." He met and befriended the Irish nationalist Daniel O'Connell. When Douglass visited Scotland, the members of the Free Church of Scotland, whom he had criticized for accepting money from U.S. slave-owners, demonstrated against him with placards that read "Send back the n_____". Douglass' work on Catholic emancipation in Ireland earned him the nickname "The Black O'Connell". He was widely respected for his championing of many forms of equality; not only slavery and race equality but women's rights and, in Ireland, Catholic emancipation.
Pre-Civil War
In 1851, Douglass merged the North Star with Gerrit Smith's Liberty Party Paper to form Frederick Douglass' Paper, which was published until 1860. Douglass came to agree with Smith and Lysander Spooner that the United States Constitution is an anti-slavery document, reversing his earlier belief that it was pro-slavery, a view he had shared with William Lloyd Garrison. Garrison had publicly demonstrated his opinion of the Constitution by burning copies of it. Douglass' change of position on the Constitution was one of the most notable incidents of a division that emerged in the abolitionist movement after the publication of Spooner's book The Unconstitutionality of Slavery in 1846. This shift in opinion, as well as some other political differences, created a rift between Douglass and Garrison. Douglass further angered Garrison by saying that the Constitution could and should be used as an instrument in the fight against slavery. With this, Douglass began to assert his independence from the Garrisonians. Garrison saw the North Star as being in competition with the National Anti-Slavery Standard and Marius Robinson's Anti-slavery Bugle.
In March 1860, Annie, Douglass' youngest daughter, died in Rochester, New York, while he was still in England. Douglass returned from England the following month, taking the route through Canada to avoid detection.
By the time of the Civil War, Douglass was one of the most famous black men in the country, known for his oratories on the condition of the black race, and other issues such as women's rights.
Lincoln's Death
At Lincoln's memorial, Douglass was in the audience as a tribute to Lincoln was being given by a prominent lawyer at the time. The tribute was not as successful as some of the audience there would have hoped. Resultantly Douglass was goaded by the people to stand up and speak. At first out of respect for the speaker he declined but eventually he gave into the pressure and with no preparation he gave a fantastic tribute to the President for which he had so much respect. The crowd, roused by his speech, gave him a standing ovation. A witness later said: "I have heard Clay speak and many fantastic men, but never have I heard a speech as impressive as that." Whilst this is anecdotal, it is a commonly accepted fact that Lincoln's wife gave Douglass Lincoln's favorite walking stick which to this day resides in Cedar Lodge. This is both a testimony to the success of Douglass' tribute to Lincoln and also to the effect and influence of his powerful oratory.
The Reconstruction era
After the Civil War, Douglass held a number of important political positions. He served as President of the Reconstruction-era Freedman's Savings Bank; as marshal of the District of Columbia; as minister-resident and consul-general to the Republic of Haiti (1889-1891); and as chargé d'affaires for Saint Domingue. After two years, he resigned from his ambassadorship due to disagreements with U.S. government policy. In 1872, he moved to Washington, D.C after his house on South Avenue in Rochester, New York burned down — arson was suspected. Also lost was a complete issue of The North Star.
In 1868, Douglass supported the presidential campaign of Ulysses S. Grant. The Klan Act and the Enforcement Act were signed into law by President Grant. Grant used their provisions vigorously, suspending habeas corpus in South Carolina and sending troops there and into other states; under his leadership, over 5,000 arrests were made and the Ku Klux Klan was dealt a serious blow.
Grant's vigor in disrupting the Klan made him unpopular among many whites, but Frederick Douglass praised him. An associate of Douglass wrote of Grant that African Americans "will ever cherish a grateful remembrance of his name, fame and great services."
In 1872, he became the first African American to receive a nomination for Vice President of the United States, having been nominated to be Victoria Woodhull's running mate on the Equal Rights Party ticket without his knowledge. During the campaign, he neither campaigned for the ticket nor even acknowledged that he had been nominated.
Douglass spoke at many schools around the country in the Reconstruction era, including Bates College in Lewiston, Maine in 1873.
Later life
In 1877, Frederick Douglass purchased his final home in Washington D.C., on the banks of the Anacostia River. He named it Cedar Hill (also spelled CedarHill). He expanded the house from 14 to 21 rooms and included a china closet. One year later, Douglass expanded his property to 15 acres (61,000 m²), with the purchase of adjoining lots. The home is now the location of the Frederick Douglass National Historic Site.
After the disappointments of Reconstruction, many African Americans called Exodusters moved to Kansas to form all-black towns. Douglass spoke out against the movement, urging blacks to stick it out. He was condemned and booed by black audiences.
In 1877, Douglass was appointed a United States Marshal. In 1881, he was appointed Recorder of Deeds for the District of Columbia. His wife (Anna Murray Douglas) died in 1882, leaving him in a state of depression. His association with the activist Ida B. Wells brought meaning back into his life. In 1884, Douglass married Helen Pitts, a white feminist from Honeoye, New York. Pitts was the daughter of Gideon Pitts, Jr., an abolitionist colleague and friend of Douglass. A graduate of Mount Holyoke College (at that time Mount Holyoke Female Seminary), Pitts had worked on a radical feminist publication named Alpha while living in Washington, D.C..
Frederick and Helen Pitts Douglass faced a storm of controversy as a result of their marriage. She was a white woman and nearly 20 years younger than he. Both families recoiled; hers stopped speaking to her; his was bruised, as they felt his marriage was a repudiation of their mother. But individualist feminist Elizabeth Cady Stanton congratulated the two.
The new couple traveled to England, France, Italy, Egypt and Greece from 1886 to 1887.
In later life, Douglass was determined to ascertain his birthday. He was born in February of 1816 by his own calculations, but historians have found a record indicating his birth in February of 1818.
In 1892 the Haitian government appointed Douglass as its commissioner to the Chicago World's Columbian Exposition. He spoke for Irish Home Rule and on the efforts of Charles Stewart Parnell. He briefly revisited Ireland in 1886.
Death
On February 20, 1895, Douglass attended a meeting of the National Council of Women in Washington, D.C.. During that meeting, he was brought to the platform and given a standing ovation by the audience. Shortly after he returned home, Frederick Douglass died of a massive heart attack or stroke in his adopted hometown of Washington D.C.. He is buried in Mount Hope Cemetery in Rochester, NY.
Frederick Douglass quotes
"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 roar of its many waters"
"To make a contented slave it is necessary to make a thoughtless one. It is necessary to darken the moral and mental vision and, as far as possible, to annihilate the power of reason."
"I assert most unhesitatingly, that the religion of the South is a mere covering for the most horrid crimes - a justifier of the most appalling barbarity, a sanctifier of the most hateful frauds, and a dark shelter under which the darkest, foulest, grossest, and most infernal deeds of slaveholders find the strongest protection."
Frederick Douglass books in order
A Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845)
The Heroic Slave. Autographs for Freedom. (1853)
My Bondage and My Freedom (1855)
Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1892)
Douglass also edited the abolitionist newspaper The North Star from 1847 to 1851; The North Star was merged with another paper and became Frederick Douglass’ Paper.
Source and additional information: Frederick Douglass