Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, After Slavery as an Abolitionist

Today we will learn and reflect on the third
autobiography of Frederick Douglass was a first-
generation black leader and abolitionist orator. One
of his mistress masters started to teach him how to
read as a young slave boy until her husband halted
her lessons, but she taught him just enough that he
was able to break the code, and with help from the
neighborhood white playmates in Baltimore he was
able to steadily improve his reading comprehension.

It was against the law in many states of the Deep South to
teach black slaves how to read, the fear was that education and
literacy would broaden the horizons of the slave and ruin him
as a slave as he yearned for the freedoms he read about, and
for Frederick Douglass, this was indeed true. After several
attempts, he managed to run away from Maryland to Boston in
the 1830’s.
At the end of our talk, we will discuss the sources used for this
video, and my blogs that also cover this topic. Please, we
welcome interesting questions in the comments. Let us learn
and reflect together!

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Life and Times of Frederick Douglass,
After Slavery as an Abolitionist

Since he had a way with words, Frederick Douglass was asked to tell his
story as an ex-slave at abolitionist rallies. Not only was he a leading
abolitionist orator and writer, writing several best-selling books, including
several editions of his autobiography, but he was also a leading black
leader during and after the Civil War, disproving by example the notion
that ex-slaves were necessarily intellectually inferior to whites,

In another video, Frederick Douglass, in his first autobiography tells his
white readers his life experiences as a slave in the Upper South, in
Virginia and Maryland. He discusses, among other topics:
(REPEAT)
• How slave families in the Upper South were often broken up, how
breeding slaves to sell to the growing black belt plantations from
Georgia to Alabama was often more profitable than using slaves to
harvest crops in the exhausted soils.
• How he barely knew his mother, and how he suspected that a master
on a neighboring plantation was his father.
• How savage whipping and sexual abuse was often a way of life as a
slave in the Deep South, how white masters could do as they wished
with their property.

https://youtu.be/7VkzhyNnuQk
• How slave families in the
Upper South were often
forced to breed then broken
up, sold to growing black
belt plantations from
Georgia to Alabama.
• How he barely knew his
mother, and how he
suspected that a white
master was his father.
• How savage whipping and
sexual abuse was often a
way of life as a slave in the
Deep South.

Most of the first autobiography was included in the third autobiography
written decades later, with some additional details on how he made his
escape that were originally omitted so he did not compromise the escape
attempts of other slaves. We talked about how he spent the first few
years of freedom as a laborer on the Massachusetts docks.
But these early decades of freedom were never carefree. Racial
discrimination, segregation and humiliation was present everywhere in
the United States, in the North as well as in the South, the differences
were mainly due to differing economics, slaves just did not make good
business sense up North.

The Underground Railroad, Charles Webber, painted 1893

The Constitution also guaranteed that federal runaway slave laws
would be in force, which meant that all blacks, both freedmen
and runaway slaves, had to worry that slave traders would kidnap
them, legally or illegally, and ship them south to be sold into
slavery.
For example, the movie, Twelve Years a Slave, was based on a
true story about a black freedman was kidnapped from a
northern state and was held as a slave for twelve years before the
courts ordered that he be freed, since he was illegally enslaved.

Frederick Douglass
remembers, “In the South I
was a slave, thought of and
spoken of as property,” as
chattel, like talking livestock.
“In the Northern states, a
fugitive slave was hunted like
a felon, to be hurled into the
terrible jaws of slavery,
doomed by an inveterate
prejudice against color,” “shut
out from cabins on
steamboats, refused
admission to respectable
hotels, caricatured, scorned,
scoffed, mocked and
maltreated by anyone with a
white skin.” Whipping Old Barney Last Time he saw his Mother

When William Lloyd Garrison, leading abolitionist and newspaper
publisher, heard Douglass speak, he encouraged him to join the
abolitionist movement. In 1843 the New England Anti-Slavery Society
resolved to hold One Hundred Conventions, an abolitionist speaking tour
from Vermont and New York to Indiana. They had varying degrees of
success, but at Indiana they encountered a mob of sixty ruffians who tore
down the speaker’s platform, assaulted the speakers, knocked out some
teeth, and as Frederick Douglass attempted to defend himself with a
large stick they scuffled and broke his arm.

Soon after this, Frederick Douglass printed his first
autobiography, and fearing for his freedom and
safety, departed for refuge in England. He was denied
first cabin ticket on the steamship, but once aboard
the captain and passengers invited him to give a
lecture on slavery.

Frederick Douglass remembers, “My visit to
England did much for me in every way.” “Instead
of a democratic government, I am under a
monarchial government.” “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. I employ a cab and I am seated beside
white people; I reach the hotel and I enter by
the same door; I dine at the same table, and no
one is offended.” “I find no difficulty in entering
any place of worship, instruction, or
amusement, on equal terms, with people as
white as any I ever saw in the United States.”
Never did he hear in England those words he
heard often in establishments in Boston, “We
don’t allow niggers in here.”
Frederick Douglass in his twenties.

Frederick Douglass spent two years touring and speaking in
England and Ireland. During his journey his friends in England
corresponded with his old master, Captain Auld, to accept 150
pounds sterling to formally ransom him from slavery. With his
letters of manumission Frederick Douglass had some protection
from abduction by slave traders, and though his fame also
provided protection, he was never completely safe from
kidnapping. His friends also raised enough money for a printing
press to publish the first newspaper with a colored publisher.

FREE At the Wharf in Newport, MS Revisits Old Home
Commissioners to Santo Domingo
Illustrations for Frederick Douglass’ Autobiography

(REPEAT) Frederick Douglass told them that “the
greatest hindrance to the adoption of abolition
principles by the people of the United States was
the low estimate placed upon the negro as a man.
Because of his assumed natural inferiority, people
reconciled themselves to his enslavement and
oppression as inevitable if not desirable.”

In the Land of King Cotton, Picking, 1909
Frederick Douglass told them that “the greatest hindrance to the
adoption of abolition principles by the people of the United States
was the low estimate placed upon the negro as a man. Because of
his assumed natural inferiority, people reconciled themselves to
his enslavement and oppression as inevitable if not desirable.”

This equality disappeared once on
board the ship bound for America.
Frederick Douglass remembers, “It
was rather hard after having
enjoyed for so long a time equal
social privileges, after dining with
persons of great literary, social,
political, and religious eminence
and never, during the whole time,
having met with a single word,
look, or gesture, which gave me the
slightest reason to think my color
was an offense to anyone, now to
be cooped up in the stern of the
Cambria, and denied the right to
enter the saloon lest my presence
should disturb some democratic
fellow-passenger.”
"At the bus station in Durham, North Carolina." May 1940, Jack Delano.

Frederick Douglass named his paper the North
Star, after the North Star the runaway slaves
followed at night in their flight to freedom, on
his return to America in 1847, and it was
initially published weekly, then it merged with
another abolitionist paper, ceasing publication
in 1860. Frederick Douglass remembers, “A
slave, brought up in the depths of ignorance,
assuming to instruct the highly civilized people
of the north in the principle of liberty, justice,
and humanity! The thing looked absurd.
Nevertheless, I persevered.” He had visitors
who doubted it was he who wrote his
editorials, they expected that his articles and
editorials were written by ghost white writers. Frederick Douglass with Helen Pitts, his
second wife, and her sister Eva Pitts, 1880

His opinions diverged from those of William Lloyd
Garrison, his abolitionist mentor. Frederick
Douglass remembers that they both thought that
“the first duty of the non-slaveholding states was
to dissolve the union with slaveholding states.”
Douglass later reconsidered, and that despite the
three-fifths clause stipulating that a slave counted
as three-fifths of a freedman, that the Constitution
was in spirt an “anti-slavery instrument demanding
the abolition of slavery,” that “there was no
necessity for dissolving the union,” and that the
Constitution was not “designed to maintain and
perpetuate a system of rape and murder like
slavery.”

During this time, he was also “station
master and conductor of the
underground railroad” assisting fleeing
runaway slaves in pursuit of their
freedom, risking fines and imprisonment
if he were caught. Frederick Douglass
remembers, that though it was “a means
of destroying slavery, it was like an
attempt to bail out the ocean with a
teaspoon, but the thought that there
was one less slave, and one more
freeman, having myself been a slave,
and a fugitive slave, brought to my heart
unspeakable joy.” Harper’s Ferry

JOHN BROWN AND FREDERICK DOUGLASS
In 1859, on the eve of the Civil Ware, Frederick Douglass’ life would again
change after he met John Brown, he would once again be forced to flee
England for refuge and another speaking tour. John Brown was a
firebrand abolitionist who waged war in bloody Kansas. The Kansas-
Nebraska Act, recently passed by Congress, proclaimed that the voters
could decide by referendum whether the new state of Kansas would be a
slave state or a free state. Both pro-slavery and anti-slavery forces flocked
to bleeding Kansas and a mini-Civil War erupted, and John Brown and his
sons were in the thick of the armed struggle. The struggle there subsided,
so Brown went east for fund raising, and managed to raise some funds
and arms, and met Douglass in Rochester, New York.

Tragic Prelude,
John Brown, by
John Stuart Curry,
painted 1938

John Brown by John Stuart Curry
Frederick Douglass describes John Brown like he
was a character out of a novel:
"His eyes were bluish gray, and in conversation
they were full of light and fire. When on the
street, he moved with a long, springing, race-
horse step, absorbed by his own reflections,
neither seeking nor shunning observation. Such
was the man whose name I had heard in
whispers; such was the spirit of his house and
family; such was the house in which he lived;
and such was Captain John Brown, whose name
has now passed into history, as that of one of
the most marked characters and greatest
heroes known to American fame.”

Frederick Douglass remembers
how, after a spartan dinner,
“John Brown denounced
slavery in look and language
fierce and bitter; thought that
slaveholders had forfeited their
right to live; that the slaves had
the right to gain their liberty in
any way they could; did not
believe that moral suasion
would ever liberate the slave,
or that political action would
abolish the system. He said
that he had long had a plan
which could accomplish this
end, and he had invited me to
his house to lay that plan
before me.”
John Brown on his
way to his execution,
Currier and Ives,
1863.
The Artist
represented John
Brown with a look of
compassion, a
madonna-like slave-
mother and Child
obstructs his passage
to the scaffold.
Virginia flag in
background says in
Latin, "Thus always
to tyrants."

John Brown was talking about armed insurrection and had this
romantic notion that his armed band would gather in the
mountains, and that slaves would flock to his positions, the weak
would escape north to freedom, and the strong would join their
band of freedom fighters. During this time the increased
enforcement of the fugitive slave laws also raised tensions
between north and south.
Such excited talk raised the temperature, abolitionist speakers,
including Frederick Douglass, started raising the prospect that
slaves would need to be freed through blood.

Also, Frederick Douglass
remembers, “In the midst of
these fugitive slave troubles
came the book known as Uncle
Tom’s Cabin, a work of
remarkable depth and power.
Nothing could have better
suited the moral and humane
requirements of the hour. Its
effect was amazing,
instantaneous, and universal.
No book on the subject of
slavery had so generally and
favorable touched the
American heart.”

John Brown by John Stuart Curry
Then struck John Brown. Frederick Douglass tells
us, “On the night of October 16th, 1859, a party of
nineteen men, fourteen white and five colored,”
“brought with them a large supply of arms for
themselves and anyone who might join them, and
invaded the town of Harper’s Ferry, disarmed the
watchman, took possession of the arsenal, rifle
factory, armory, arrested and imprisoned of
prominent citizens, collected fifty slaves, put
bayonets in their hands, killed three men,
proclaimed general emancipation, held the ground
for more than thirty hours, but were subsequently
overpowered and nearly all killed by US troops
under the command of Colonel Robert E Lee.”

What effect did this have? Frederick Douglass
remembers, “This raid upon Harper’s Ferry was
as the last straw to the camel’s back. What in
the tone of southern sentiment had been fierce
before became furious and uncontrollable now.
A scream for vengeance came up from all
sections of the slave States and from great
multitudes in the North.” And, most ominously,
“all who were supposed to have been any way
connected with John Brown were to be hunted
down and surrendered to the tender mercies of
slaveholding and panic-stricken Virginians, and
there to be tried after the fashion of John
Brown’s trial, and of course to be summarily
executed.” So immediately Frederick Douglass
boarded a ship to England from Quebec and
requested that papers in his desk written by
John Brown be secured.
The Last Moments of John Brown, by
Thomas Hovenden, painted 1884

What role did Frederick Douglass play in Harper’s Ferry? John
Brown had been a guest of many nights in his house, Douglass
liked the idea of armed bands holing up in the mountains freeing
slaves, but he desperately tried in vain to talk John Brown out of
raiding Harper’s Ferry, he refused to participate, Douglass said
Harper’s Ferry was a steel trap and predicted Brown would not
get out alive. And there was correspondence between them
both.

Douglass
argued
against John
Brown's plan
to attack the
arsenal at
Harpers
Ferry, by
Jacob
Lawrence

During the months following the raid,
Frederick Douglass remembers that
“Emerson’s prediction that Brown’s gallows
would become like the cross, was already
being fulfilled. The old hero, in the trial
hour, had behaved so grandly that men
regarded him not as a murderer, but as a
martyr. All over the North men were
singing the John Brown song. His body was
in the dust, but his soul was marching on.
His defeat was already assuming the form
and pressure of victory, and his death was
giving new life and power to the principles
of justice and liberty.”

CIVIL WAR AND RECONSTRUCTION
After the start of the Civil War, and especially after the Emancipation
Proclamation, freed blacks who lived in the North no longer needed to
worry whether slave traders would kidnap and enslave them. The clamor
over the John Brown affair had calmed down by then. After
Emancipation, William Lloyd Garrison announced that the battle was
over, and tried, but did not succeed, to dissolve the American Anti-
Slavery Society, but he did close down his newspaper, The Liberator.
Frederick Douglass opposed this, and vigorously fought for civil rights for
the newly freed blacks during the Reconstruction and Jim Crow
Redemption eras.

Emancipation
from Freedmen's
viewpoint,
illustration from
Harper's Weekly
1865

Frederick Douglass continued to give lectures on civil
rights, he wrote this his third autobiography in 1881,
which was also a best seller, and started another
newspaper. He never held elective office, but he was
appointed Marshall of District of Columbia by
President Hayes, which supplemented his retirement
funds. He was also appointed as one of the members
in a diplomatic team sent to Santo Domingo.

In 1877 Frederick
Douglass, newly
appointed U.S.
Marshal of the
District of
Columbia,
greeting African
American citizens
in his office at the
City Hall.

During the Civil War Frederick Douglass consulted with
President Lincoln on racial issues many times. Frederick
Douglass lobbied to permit black freedmen to join the
army, and there were several black regiments after the
Emancipation Proclamation was issued, and after that he
lobbied for equal pay for black soldiers.

Frederick Douglass appealing to
President Lincoln and his cabinet to
enlist Negroes," mural by William
Edouard Scott, 1943

Frederick Douglass remembers his
response, “Lincoln began by saying that
the employment of colored troops at all
was a great gain to the colored people;
that the measure could not have been
successfully adopted at the beginning of
the war; that the wisdom of making
colored men soldiers was still doubted;
that their enlistment was a serious
offense to popular prejudice;” “that the
fact that they would not receive the
same pay as white soldiers seemed a
necessary concession to smooth the
way to their employment at all as
soldiers; but that ultimately they would
receive the same pay.”
Frederick Douglass appealing to President Lincoln and his
cabinet to enlist Negroes, by William Edouard Scott, 1943

Frederick Douglass recalls Lincoln’s second
Inaugural Address shortly before the end
of the Civil War, when Lincoln proclaimed,
“Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray
that his might scourge of war may speedily
pass away. Yet if God wills that it continues
until all the wealth piled up by the
bondman’s two hundred and fifty years of
unrequited toll shall be sunk, and until
every drop of blood drawn with the lash
shall be paid by another drawn with the
sword, as was said three thousand years
ago, so still it must be said, ‘The
judgements of the Lord are true and
righteous altogether.’”

At the Inaugural Reception two white policemen were
guarding the door and initially they refused to admit
Frederick Douglass, saying they had instructions that no
colored may enter. Douglass replied that “he was quite
sure there must be some mistake, for no such order could
have emanated from President Lincoln: and if he knew I
was at the door he would desire my admission.” He would
not budge, so the policemen politely escorted him inside.

Frederick Douglass was touched by how
much deference President Lincoln showed
him at the Inaugural Reception, this black
man, famous though he was. He
remembers, “Like a mountain pine high
above all others, Mr. Lincoln stood, in his
grand simplicity, and home-like beauty,
recognizing me, even before I reached
him, he exclaimed, so that all around
could hear him, ‘Here comes my friend
Douglass.’ Taking me by the hand, he said,
‘I am glad to see you in the crowd today,
listening to my inaugural address; how did
you like it?’

I said, ‘Mr. Lincoln, I must not detain you
with my poor opinion, when there are
thousands waiting to shake hands with you.’
‘No, no,’ he said, ‘you must stop a little,
Douglass; there is no man in the country
whose opinion I value more than yours. I
want to know what you think of it?’
I replied, ‘Mr. Lincoln, that was a sacred
effort.’
‘I am glad you liked it!’ he said, and I passed
on, feeling that any man, however
distinguished, might well regard himself
honored by such an expression, from such a
man.”

When he remembers his sorrow when Lincoln was
assassinated, Frederick Douglass paints how he
remembered the Great Emancipator, “Lincoln always
impressed me as a strong, earnest man, having no time
or disposition to trifle; grappling with all his might the
work he had in hand. The expression of his face was a
blending of suffering with patience and fortitude. Men
called him homely, and homely he was; but it was a
manifestly human homeliness, for there was nothing of
the tiger or other wild animal in him. His eyes had in
them the tenderness of motherhood, and his mouth
and other features the highest perfection of a genuine
manhood.” “His accusers, in whose opinion he was
always too fast or too slow, too weak or too strong, too
conciliatory or too aggressive, would soon become his
admirers; it was soon to be seen that he had conducted
the affairs of the nation with singular wisdom, and with
absolute fidelity to the great trust confided in him.”

Frederick Douglass, after the Civil War, after
Emancipation, understood that though the
former slaves were now free, that they were not
yet truly free.

A cotton plantation on the Mississippi, 1884

A cotton plantation on the Mississippi, 1884
“The freed man was free from the individual master but was still the slave of society. The black man had neither
property, money, nor friends. He was free from the old plantation, but he had nothing but the dusty road under
his feet. He was free from the old quarter that once gave him shelter, but a slave to rains of the summer and the
frosts of the winter. He was, in a word, literally turned loose naked, hungry, and destitute to the open sky.”

Furthermore, “to guard, protect,
and maintain his liberty, the
freedman should have the ballot;
that the liberties of the American
people were dependent upon the
Ballot-box, the Jury-box, and the
Cartridge-box.”
Now the black man was not only not truly free, but he was
also despised even more. “The first feeling towards him by
the old master classes was full of bitterness and wrath. They
resented his emancipation as an act of hostility towards
them, and since they could not punish the emancipator, they
felt like punishing the object which that act had
emancipated.”
Freeing of the Slaves, by John Steuart Curry, 1900's

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Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, After Slavery as an Abolitionist

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