DIVERSITY | Offering a place for everyone
29 December 2008
The Pen of Frederick Douglass
Escaped slave emerges as leading journalist and abolitionist
This article is excerpted from the book Free At Last: The U.S. Civil Rights Movement, published by the Bureau of International Information Programs. View the entire book (PDF, 3.6 MB).
Although the U.S. political system proved unable to dislodge slavery from the American South, the “peculiar institution,” as southerners often called it, did not go unchallenged. Determined women and men — blacks and whites — devoted their lives to the cause of abolition, the legal prohibition of slavery. They employed an array of tactics, both violent and nonviolent. And just as in Martin Luther King’s day, the pen and the appeal to conscience would prove a powerful weapon. While the American Civil War was not solely a battle to free the slaves, the abolitionists persuaded many northerners to concur with the sentiment expressed in 1858 by a senatorial candidate named Abraham Lincoln: “A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free.”
The stirring words of African-American and white thinkers forced increasing numbers of their countrymen to confront the contradiction between their noble ideals and the lives of bondage imposed on black Americans in the South. Perhaps the most powerful pen belonged to Frederick Douglass, an escaped slave, journalist, publisher, and champion of liberty. Douglass was born into slavery in either 1817 or 1818. His mistress defied Maryland state law by teaching the boy to read. At age 13 he purchased his first book, a collection of essays, poems, and dialogues extolling liberty that was widely used in early 19th-century American schoolrooms. From these youthful studies, Douglass began to hone the skills that would make him one of the century’s most powerful and effective orators. In 1838, Douglass escaped from the plantation where he worked as a field hand and arrived in New Bedford, Massachusetts, where he would launch a remarkable career.
In 1841, the leading white abolitionist, William Lloyd Garrison, sponsored an anti-slavery convention held in Nantucket, Massachusetts. One attendee familiar with Douglass’s talks at local black churches invited him to address the gathering. “It was with the utmost difficulty that I could stand erect,” Douglass later wrote, “or that I could command and articulate two words without hesitation and stammering.” But his words moved the crowd: “The audience sympathized with me at once, and from having been remarkably quiet, became much excited.” The convention organizers agreed. Their Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society immediately hired Douglass as an agent.
In his new career, Douglass spoke at public meetings throughout the North. He condemned slavery and argued that African Americans were entitled by right to the civil rights that the U.S. Constitution afforded other Americans. On a number of occasions, racist mobs attacked these abolitionist gatherings, but other whites befriended Douglass and championed his cause. After one mob knocked out the teeth of a white colleague who saved Douglass from violent attack, Douglass wrote his friend: “I shall never forget how like two very brothers we were ready to dare, do, and even die for each other.” Douglass praised his colleague’s willingness to leave a “life of ease and even luxury … against the wishes of your father and many of your friends,” instead to do “something toward breaking the fetters of the slave and elevating the dispised [sic] black man.”
In 1845, Douglass published the first of several acclaimed autobiographies. His writings educated white Americans about plantation life, disabused them of the notion that slavery was somehow “good” for blacks, and convinced many that no just society could tolerate the practice. But with Douglass’s sudden fame came a real danger: that his master might find and recapture him. Douglass prudently left the country for a two-year speaking tour of England, Scotland, and Ireland. While Douglass was overseas, his friends purchased his freedom — the price for one of the nation’s greatest men was just over $700.
In Great Britain, Douglass was exposed to a more politically aggressive brand of abolitionism. When he returned to the United States in 1847, Douglass broke with William Lloyd Garrison. Garrison favored purely moral and nonviolent action against slavery, and he was willing to see the North secede from the Union to avoid slavery’s “moral stain.” Douglass pointed out that such a course would do little for black slaves in the South, and he offered his support for a range of more aggressive activities. He backed mainstream political parties promising to prevent the extension of slavery into the western territories and other parties demanding complete nationwide abolition. He offered his house as a station on the Underground Railroad (the name given to a network of people who helped fugitive slaves escape to the North) and befriended the militant abolitionist John Brown, who aimed to spark a violent slave uprising.
In 1847, Douglass launched The North Star, the first of several newspapers he would publish to promote the causes of equal rights for blacks and for women. Its motto was “Right is of no Sex — Truth is of no Color — God is the Father of us all, and we are all brethren.” Douglass was an early and fervent champion of gender equality. In 1872, he would run for vice president on an Equal Rights Party ticket headed by Victoria Claflin Woodhull, the United States’ first woman presidential candidate.
Douglass campaigned for Abraham Lincoln in the 1860 presidential election. When the American Civil War — pitting the northern Union against the rebellious southern Confederacy — broke out shortly after Lincoln’s inauguration, Douglass argued that the Union should employ black troops: “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 earth which can deny that he has earned the right to citizenship.” Too old himself to fight, Douglass recruited black soldiers for the 54th and 55th Massachusetts Regiments, two black-manned units that fought with great valor.
During the great conflict, Douglass’s relations with Lincoln initially were choppy, as the president worked first to conciliate the slaveholding border states crucial to the Union war effort. On September 22, 1862, however, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, declaring the freedom — on January 1, 1863 — of all slaves held in the areas still in rebellion. In March 1863, Lincoln endorsed the recruitment of black soldiers, and the following year he flatly rejected suggestions to enter into peace negotiations before the South agreed to abolish slavery. The president twice invited Douglass to meet with him at the White House. Douglass later wrote of Lincoln that “in his company I was never in any way reminded of my humble origin, or of my unpopular color,” and the president received him “just as you have seen one gentleman receive another.”
Douglass’s remarkable career continued after the war’s end. He worked for passage of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution — the postwar amendments that spelled out rights that applied to all men, not just to whites, and prohibited the individual states from denying those rights. While it would take a later generation of brave civil rights champions to ensure that these amendments would be honored, they would build on the constitutional foundation laid by Douglass and others. Douglass went on to hold a number of local offices in the capital city of Washington, D.C., and to continue his work for women’s suffrage and equality. He died in 1895, by any fair reckoning the leading African-American figure of the 19th century.
