From Slave to Abolitionist/Editor
Alone in New York, Frederick soon realized that although he was
free, he was not free of cares. Through word of mouth on the street,
Frederick learned that southern slave catchers were roaming the
city looking for fugitives in boarding houses that accepted blacks.
He learned that no one, black or white, could be trusted. After
finding out this news, Frederick wandered around the city for
days, afraid to look for employment or a place to live. Finally,
he told an honest-looking black sailor about his predicament.
The man took him to David Ruggles, an officer in the New York
Vigilance Committee. Ruggles and his associates were the City's
link in the underground railroad, a network of people who harbored
runaway slaves and helped transport them to safe areas in the
United States and Canada.
Secure for the moment in Ruggle's home, Frederick sent for his
fiancee, Anna Murray. The two were married on September 15, 1838.
Ruggles told Frederick that in the port of New Bedford, Massachusetts,
he would be safe from slave catchers and he could find work as
a caulker. Upon arriving in New Bedford, Anna and Frederick stayed
in the home of the well-to-do black family of Nathan Johnson.
To go along with his new life, Frederick decided to change his
name so as to make it more difficult for slave catchers to trace
him. Nathan Johnson was at the time reading The Lady of the
Lake, a novel by Scottish author Sir Walter Scott, and he
suggested that Frederick name himself after a character in the
book. Frederick Baily thus became Frederick Douglass.
Once settled, Douglass was amazed to find that his neighbors in
the North were wealthier than most slave owners in Maryland. He
had expected that northerners would be as poor as the people in
the South who could not afford slaves. Many free blacks lived
better than Thomas Auld or Edward Covey. On the New Bedford wharves,
he saw how industry made extensive use of labor saving mechanical
devices. In loading a ship, 5 men and an ox did what it took 20
men to do in a southern port. To Douglass's eye, men who neither
held a whip nor submitted to it worked more quietly and efficiently
than those who did.
Still, New Bedford was not a paradise. Although black and white
children attended the same schools, some public lecture halls
were closed to blacks. Churches welcomed black worshipers but
forced them to sit in separate sections. Worst of all, white shipyard
employees would not allow skilled black tradesmen, such as Douglass,
to work beside them. Unable to find work as a caulker, Douglass
had to work as a common laborer. He sawed wood, shoveled coal,
dug cellars, and loaded and unloaded ships. Anna Douglass worked
too as a household servant and laundress. In June 1839, Anna gave
birth to their first child, a daughter which they named Rosetta.
A son, Lewis was born the following year.
After living in New Bedford for only a few months, a young man
approached Douglass and asked him if he wanted to subscribe to
the Liberator, a newspaper edited by the outspoken leader
of the American Anti-Slavery Society, William Lloyd Garrison.
Douglass immediately became caught up in the Liberator's
attacks on southern slaveholders. "The paper became my meat
and drink," wrote Douglass. "My soul was set all on
fire."
Inevitably, Douglass became involved in the abolitionist movement,
regularly attending lectures in New Bedford. The American Anti-Slavery
Society, of which he was a member, had been formed in 1833. Like
Garrison, most of the leaders in the society were white, and black
abolitionists sometimes had a difficult time making their voices
heard within the movement. Nonetheless, the black leaders kept
up a constant battle to reduce racial prejudice in the North.
Douglass also became very involved with the local black community,
and he served as a preacher at the black Zion Methodist Church.
One of the many issues he became involved in was the battle against
attempts by white southerners to force blacks to move to Africa.
Some free blacks had moved to Liberia, a settlement area established
for them in West Africa in 1822. Douglass, along with others in
the abolitionist movement were opposed to African colonization
schemes, believing that the United States was the true home of
black Americans. In March 1839 some of Douglass's anticolonization
statements were published in the Liberator.
In August 1841, at an abolitionist meeting in New Bedford, the
23 year old Douglass saw his hero, William Lloyd Garrison, for
the first time. A few days later, Douglass spoke before the crowd
attending the annual meeting of the Massachusetts branch of the
American Anti-Slavery Society. Garrison immediately recognized
Douglass's potential as a speaker, and hired him to be an agent
for the society. As a traveling lecturer accompanying other abolitionist
agents on tours of the northern states, his job was to talk about
his life and to sell subscriptions to the Liberator and
another newspaper, the Anti-Slavery Standard. For most
of the next 10 years, Douglass was associated with the Garrisonian
school of the antislavery movement. Garrison was a pacifist who
believed that only through moral persuasion could slavery end,
he attempted through his writings to educate slaveholders about
the evils of the system they supported. He was opposed to slave
uprisings and other violent resistance, but he was firm in his
belief that slavery must be totally abolished. In the first issue
of the Liberator in 1831, he had written:
"On this subject I do not wish to think, or speak, or write
with moderation .....Tell a man whose house is on fire to give
a moderate alarm; tell him to moderately rescue his wife from
the hands of a ravisher.....but urge me not to use moderation in
a cause like the present.....I will not retreat a single inch----AND
I WILL BE HEARD."
Ever controversial, Garrison made many enemies throughout the
country. He made sweeping attacks on organized religion because
the churches refused to take a stand against slavery. He also
believed that the U.S. Constitution upheld slavery, for it stated
that nonfree individuals (slaves) should be counted as three-fifths
of a person in the census figures used for determining a state's
share of the national taxes and its number of seats in the House
of Representatives. Garrison said that abolitionists should refuse
to vote or run for political office because our government was
so ill founded. He also called for the Union to be dissolved,
demanding that it be split between a free nation in the North
and a slavehold confederacy in the South.
Garrison also supported political equality for women and he fought
to make it part of the abolitionist program. Some men were entirely
against him on this issue, while others thought that it distracted
attention from the struggle against slavery. In 1840, when he
insisted that women be allowed to serve as delegates to abolitionist
conventions, much of the membership of the American Anti-Slavery
Society split off and formed a separate organization. The new
group, the Foreign and American Anti-Slavery Society, was not
opposed to working with political organizations, and many of its
members supported the small, newly formed antislavery Liberty
party. Although the often abrasive Garrison splintered the antislavery
movement, he was a powerful leader. His sincerity and passionate
devotion to the abolitionist inspired many people, and his views
had a strong effect on Douglass. For three months in 1851, Douglass
traveled with other abolitionists to lectures through Massachusetts.
Introduced as "a piece of property" or "a graduate
from that peculiar institution, with his diploma written on his
back," he launched into stirring recollections of his years
in slavery. Many of his friends in New Bedford thought that the
publicity was dangerous for him, but he was careful to omit details
that would identify him as the fugitive slave Frederick Baily.
Douglass was an immediate success on the lecture circuit. "As
a speaker, he has few equals," proclaimed the Concord, Massachusetts,
Herald of Freedom, the newspaper praised his elegant use
of words, and his debating skills. "He has wit, arguments,
sarcasm, pathos - all that first rate men show in their master
effort." His flashing eyes, large mass of hair, and tall
figure added to his performance. Douglass's early speeches dealt
mainly with his own experiences. With dramatic effect, he told
stories about the brutal beatings given by slaveowners to women,
children, and elderly people. He described how he had felt the
head of a young girl and found it "nearly covered with festering
sores." He told about masters "breeding" their
female slaves. But he also used humor, making his audiences laugh
when he told how he broke the slave breaker Edward Covey. He especially
delighted in imitating clergymen who warned slaves that they would
be offending God if they disobeyed their masters. The stories
that Douglass told were just what the people wanted to hear. At
the time, a flood of proslavery propaganda had been disbursed
by southern writers to combat abolitionist literature. According
to these articles, most slaves were content with their easy life.
Supposedly, slaves worked only until noon, dressed and ate better
than most poor whites, and enjoyed job security that would be
envied by most northern factory workers. Many people in the North
were taken in by the slaveholders' fictions, and abolitionists
were often harassed by hostile mobs.
Douglass's life story refuted the proslavery accounts; even so,
he declared, his years in bondage would be deemed blissful by
many slaves laboring in the Deep South. After a few months of
speaking, Douglass began to add comments about the racial situation
in the North. He reminded the people in his audiences that even
in Massachusetts a black man could not always find work in his
chosen profession. He described how he had been thrown out of
railroad cars that were exclusively for white passengers. Even
here, he said, churches segregated their congregations and offered
blacks a second place in heaven. After Douglass's first trial
period as a lecturer was over, he was asked to continue with his
work, and he eagerly agreed. During 1842, he traveled throughout
Massachusetts and New York with William Lloyd Garrison and other
prominent speakers. He also visited Rhode Island, helping to defeat
a measure that would have given voting rights to poor whites while
denying them to blacks.
In 1843, Douglass participated in the Hundred Conventions project,
the American Anti-Slavery Society's six month tour of meeting
halls throughout the west. Although Douglass enjoyed his work
immensely, his job was not an easy one. When traveling, the lecturers
had to live in poor accommodations. Douglass was often roughly
handled when he refused to sit in the "Negro" sections
of trains and steamships, and worst of all some of the meetings
that were held in western states were sometimes disrupted by proslavery
mobs. In Pendleton, Indiana, Douglass's hand was broken when he
and an associate were beaten up by a gang of thugs. Such incidents
were common on the western frontier, where abolitionists were
often viewed as dangerous fanatics. Despite these incidents, Douglass
was sure that he had found his purpose in life.
His abilities as a speaker grew as he continued to lecture in
1844. Many abolitionists thought he was growing in his ability
too quickly and that audiences were no longer as sympathetic to
him, they thought it was best to keep a little of the plantation
speech, it was not a good idea for him to seem too learned. They
advised him to stick to talking about his life as a slave and
not about the goals of the antislavery movement. To some degree,
the fear proved to be correct. People gradually began to doubt
that Douglass was telling the truth about himself. Reporting on
a lecture that he gave in 1844, the Liberator wrote that
many people in the audience refused to believe his stores: "How
a man, only six years out of bondage, and who had never gone to
school could speak with such eloquence - with such precision of
language and power of thought - they were utterly at a loss to
devise."
With his reputation at stake, Douglass decided to publish the
story of his life. During the winter of 1844-45, he set down on
paper all the facts - the actual names of the people and places
connected with his years in slavery. When Douglass showed the
finished manuscript to abolitionist leader Wendell Phillips, his
friend suggested that he dispose of it before he was found out
and shipped back to Maryland. Douglass was adamant about having
his story printed. He did not care if Thomas Auld and every southern
slave catcher learned who he was, the rest of world would hear
his story too.
In May 1845, 5,000 copies of the Narrative of the Life of Frederick
Douglass, an American Slave was published. William Lloyd Garrison
and Wendell Phillips wrote introductions to the book. Almost immediately,
Douglass's autobiography became a best seller. The success brought
by Douglass's Narrative after its publication in 1845 was due
in large part to its moral force. His book is a story of the triumph
of dignity, courage, and self-reliance over the evils of the brutal,
degrading slave system. It is a sermon on how slavery corrupts
the human spirit and robs both master and slave of their freedom.
The book enjoyed widespread popularity in the North, and European
editions also sold very well. However, Douglass's fame as an author
threatened his freedom. Federal laws gave Thomas Auld the right
to seize his property, the fugitive slave Frederick Baily.
The fear of losing his freedom prompted Douglass to pursue a dream
he had long held; in the summer of 1845 he decided to go to England.
There he would be free from slave catchers, and also have the
opportunity to speak to English audiences and try to gain support
for the American antislavery movement. By 1838 all slaves within
the British Empire had been given a gradual emancipation and were
free. The vigor of the English abolition movement was still very
strong.
As the wife of a traveling lecturer, Anna Douglass had probably
grown used to her husband's long absences. By August 1845, the
Douglasses had 4 children: 6 year old Rosetta, 5 year old Lewis,
3 year old Frederick and 10 month old Charles. Anna not only raised
the children, but also toiled in a shoe factory in Lynn, Massachusetts
where the Douglasses had moved in 1842. Douglass sailed to England
on the British steamship Cambria. He was forced to stay in the
steerage (second class) area of the ship, but he made many friends
on board and was even asked to give a lecture on slavery by the
captain. Some men were so angry at his speech that they threatened
to throw him overboard. The captain had to step in and threaten
to put the men in irons if they caused any more trouble. The rest
of the voyage was peaceful.
For nearly two years, Douglass traveled throughout the British
Isles. Everywhere he went, prominent people welcomed him to their
homes. Everywhere he spoke, enthusiastic crowds came to hear the
fugitive slave denounce the system which he had grown up in. He
was quite happy in his new surroundings. As he wrote to William
Lloyd Garrison in January 1846, "Instead of the bright blue
sky of America, I am covered with the soft gray fog of the Emerald
Isle. I breathe and lo! The chattel becomes a man. I gaze around
in vain for one who will question my equal humanity, claim me
as a slave, or offer me an insult." He was also astonished
that he encountered so little racial prejudice among the British.
The main topic of Douglass's lecturers were slavery, but he also
discussed a number of other causes that had become important to
him. Douglass had hated the way slaveowners would encourage their
workers to drink themselves into a stupor during Christmas holidays.
He saw alcohol as another means used to humiliate slaves. During
his stay in Ireland, he also met with Daniel O'Connell, the Irish
Catholic leader who was fighting to end British rule in his country.
Douglass spoke out in favor of Irish independence. In the summer
of 1846, Douglass was joined by William Lloyd Garrison, and they
traveled around England as a powerful team of antislavery lecturers.
In Scotland, the two became involved in a campaign against the
Free Church of Scotland. The church was partly supported by contributions
from American slaveholders of Scottish ancestry. Douglass and
Garrison added their voices to the cries of local antislavery
activists: "Send the money back." The church kept the
money, but the dispute gained publicity for Douglass's battle
against American slavery.
The World Temperance Convention that was held in London in August
1846 was the scene of Douglass's most controversial speech. There
he attacked the American temperance movement because it failed
to criticize slaveowners who used alcohol to pacify their workers.
He also felt that the temperance activists were hostile to free
blacks. The Reverend Samuel Cox, a member of the American delegation,
publicly accused him of trying to destroy the unity of the temperance
movement. Douglass responded that Cox was a bigot and, like many
other clergymen, a secret supporter of slavery.
By the fall of 1846, Douglass was ready to return home. Garrison
and other friends convinced him to stay another six months, but
Douglass rejected suggestions that he settle in England. His work
lay in America where his people labored in bondage. However, recapture
remained a frightening possibility for Douglass if he returned
to the United States. The problem was unexpectedly resolved when
two English friends raised enough money to buy his freedom. The
required amount, $710.96, was sent to Hugh Auld, to whom Thomas
Auld had transferred the title to Douglass. On December 5, 1846,
Hugh Auld signed the papers that declared the 28 year old Douglass
a free man.
Douglass appreciated the gesture of his English friends, even
though as an abolitionist he did not recognize Hugh Auld's right
to own him. In the spring of 1847, Douglass sailed from England
aboard the Cambria. He had left the United States as a respected
author and lecturer and was returning with a huge international
reputation. Thousands of people heard his lectures and he aroused
much goodwill for the abolitionist cause in the British Isles.
His tour had been an unqualified success.
Douglass was met by friends and family upon returning home. However,
some abolitionists criticized him for letting his freedom be bought
because he was thereby acknowledging Hugh Auld's right to own
him. Douglass's rebuttal was that his freedom was the gift of
friends and that he recognized Hugh Auld as his kidnapper,
not his master. Now that the ransom had been paid, he could fight
the battle against slavery with a free mind.
During his travels in England, Douglass had demonstrated some
independence from the Garrison abolitionist faction, addressing
a meeting sponsored by a rival antislavery group. Upon his return
to America, he decided to found and edit a new abolitionist newspaper
with the help of funds raised by his English friends. Garrison
was opposed to this because he needed Douglass as a lecturer
and thought there were already enough abolitionists papers at the
time. Douglass dropped the idea for a while. In August 1847, he
joined Garrison on a lecture tour throughout the North, Garrison
became seriously ill and Douglass was forced to continue the tour
without him.
After finishing the tour in the fall of 1847, he again began drawing
up plans for a new abolitionist paper. The goal of his paper would
be to proclaim the abolitionist cause and fight for black equality.
Rather than publish his paper in New England,, where the Liberator
was based, Douglass decided to move farther west, to Rochester,
New York.