Frederick Douglass: Freedom's Voice

– Welcome to University Place Presents. I’m Norman Gilliland. His life story reads like a novel by Alexander Dumas: born into slavery, disguised, escaped, looking over his shoulder all the while, fearing that he might be recaptured and sold back into bondage. Becoming an orator and one of the great voices for freedom in this country during one of its pivotal moments. Rose to the highest levels of recognition, met with the President of the United States, Abraham Lincoln, and went on to live a long and fruitful life as a voice of freedom. His name, Frederick Douglass, and he’s the subject of a book by my guest, Greg Lampe, who is a former provost of the University of Wisconsin Colleges, and author of Frederick Douglass: Freedom’s Voice. Welcome to University Place Presents.
– Greg: Yeah, thank you, nice to be here.

– We know a lot about Frederick Douglass because Frederick Douglass wrote a lot about himself. Three autobiographies?
– Correct, yeah. - And what does he tell us in these? Do they compare, the facts line up from one to the next?
– Yeah, overall, yes, the facts line up. What’s interesting about looking at the autobiographies is that they take place in different periods of time. So the first autobiography was written in 1845, just years after Douglass had escaped from slavery and was a fugitive for seven years or so. And he was writing about primarily that period, obviously. So he talked a lot about where he was born on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, who had enslaved him, and actually disclosed the names of the plantation owners and the overseers. And that was pretty risky considering his fugitive status, which we can talk about. His second autobiography was written in 1855, and in that autobiography, he details more. He still recaptures all the details of his enslavement, but then he also details his life as a abolitionist orator and his frustrations with the lack of progress for emancipating the slaves and moving the country forward. And then his last autobiography, which took on two different versions, about five to six years apart, really detail his entire life from 1893 or so. And then he died, of course, in 1895. In there, he discloses how he escaped from slavery and his stances about women’s suffrage, and particularly his work against lynchings at the time because that had become a real issue following the Reconstruction period. So he did evolve his. . . How I wanna put this? His story in his autobiographies evolved as he evolved, and became more nuanced, and at times, a little more impatient. And also always an eye, as it was the tradition in 19th century, an eye toward his legacy, which he was very sensitive about, and wanted to create sort of the image of this heroic figure, which obviously he still is today. So it worked, and he was heroic in many, many ways.

– How much did he know about his own origins?
– He didn’t know a lot. He was born on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. He never knew his birth date. He estimated it to be around 1817, and he guessed it was February because the last time he saw his mother, ’cause he had been separated from his mother, which was a practice during slavery. He was born to an enslaved mother and so he was a slave, but the last visit he had with his mother was in February when he was about seven years old. And she had brought him cake, and it was the last time he saw her. And so he determined, “I must have been born in February of 1817.” Later on, scholars would say he was close. He was actually born in February 1818. And so he knew his mother. He didn’t know who his father was. In his autobiographies, this is an interesting shift, or early on, he said, well, he had heard rumors that his father was his master, Aaron Anthony. Over time, he distanced himself from that to it could be a white man in 1855. And then, well, he didn’t hardly mention it in the last autobiography.

So yeah, so his origins were on the Eastern Shore. And the Eastern Shore, what’s important to note about that is it was an area rich in slavery. And Douglass’s family, his clan, had been on the Eastern Shore for over 100 years before he was born. So the Bailey clan had very deep roots, literally and figuratively in the Eastern Shore.
– And the name Bailey, he took from
– From the clan.
– The clan.
– Yeah, from his clan.
– And what were his earliest memories then of being a slave and what he did as a slave on this plantation on the Eastern Shore of Maryland?
– His earliest memories are living in a cabin with about 20 other siblings and cousins at a cabin where his grandmother was the one in charge, his Grandma Bailey, who he writes about very lovingly in his autobiography. She was a fisherperson by trade, and she was charged with taking care of the younger. . . The newly-born children into slavery. He was there for about seven years. And then in that time, he didn’t even know he was a slave. He had a happy childhood there. And he recalls that with great fondness. Then at seven years old, he’s moved to the Lloyd plantation, which is a large enterprise. Hundreds of slaves
– Still in Maryland.
– Still in Maryland, still on the Eastern Shore. And so he is exposed for the first time to the whole notion of slavery, a traumatic, of course, departure from his grandmother, who leaves him at the plantation. And there, he witnesses the brutality of slavery, which he recalls, of course, later on in his speeches, his anti-slavery speeches. He also experiences hunger for the first time ’cause he wasn’t always the obedient person. He was from the beginning had his very independent and strong-willed, which doesn’t surprise anyone who’s read about Douglass. And he experiences mostly hunger and cold during that period. But he’s also brought into the home of the Lloyds and allowed to be what is sometimes called a house slave. And I think in that environment, he hears a lot of white people talking about different issues. And so he doesn’t develop this plantation, Southern, strong Southern drawl or accent, dialect because one of the things that follows him onto the stage when he gets up to speak is that, wow, he doesn’t sound like a slave. He’s way too articulate. He’s way too polished. - He doesn’t have the accent.
– Doesn’t have the accent.

But anyway, that’s his first seven years is spent there. And then as he grows a little bit older, he’s sent by his slave overseer, Aaron Anthony, to Baltimore to live with a brother-in-law. That was a huge move for Douglass.
– For the better?
– For the better, absolutely. Away from the plantation with all its ugliness in terms of how people were. . . How enslaved people were treated to Baltimore, Maryland, where in Baltimore, there’s a large free Black. . . Well, not free, there’s a large free Black population. There’s also a pretty large enslaved population. And his primary role in Baltimore, at least initially, was to be a friend and brother to the son of Sophia and the Aulds. And so Tommy was the boy’s name, and he befriended Tommy, and he basically hung out with him and was a companion. And so Hugh and Sophia treated him not like a son, but he had all the comforts of a home and enjoyed that.
– So at the age of seven or so, he was just a companion to his master’s son in Baltimore.
– Right.
– Sounds great. - Yeah. And then at the age of 12, as again, he continues to evolve and get increasingly restless, as you can imagine, a 12-year-old would. And Tommy’s in school and being educated, and his question was, “Well, why am I not being educated? Everybody around me is being educated.” And so in the evening when Sophia would be reading from the Bible or a book to her son, he would sit and listen to her read. And finally he asked her, “Could you please teach me to read?” And she did, which at the time was a risk because enslaved people were not supposed to learn to read.
– There were, I believe, some laws against it in some states.
– Yeah, and Baltimore was among those, Maryland was among those, and so at great risk, she taught him to. . . Started teaching him to read until Hugh Auld, her husband, found out and then it ended abruptly. But the foundation had been laid.
– And of course, her husband was concerned, as everyone was with these laws, that teaching a slave to read would then encourage that slave to freedom, seek freedom.
– Exactly, and that’s true for Douglass especially. Early on, he realized that this was pretty freeing. The other thing that he found really important during this period was his master’s wife, Sophia, would also read from the Bible, and mostly from the Old Testament. So he started getting grounded, like in the story of Job, which he talks a lot about.
– Norman: Patience.
– That there are other people who have to carry heavy burdens.
– Perseverance.
– Perseverance, and then there’s redemption and hope.

So this was a very formative period for him. And among the most formative events, and if I failed to mention this, this would be really not good. He discovered The Columbian Orator, a textbook at the time about oratory, which also was designed to give young schoolchildren a chance to read about the morals and virtues of a free society, of a republic.
– So he saw maybe some irony in that?
– I’m sure he did. And because he had been learning to read and developing his reading skills, he could read out of that book, a very popular textbook of actually 18th and 19th century by Caleb Bingham. And Bingham was a former schoolteacher. He had a bookstore in Baltimore. He was really dedicated to instructing the young people of the nation, both boys and girls, by the way.
– Oh, that’s unusual.
– About the virtues of the republic. And so the first 20 pages or so of that book are dedicated to the art of oratory, or what he called the art of eloquence. Subsequently, he has randomly put in place orations, dialogues, great writings. George Washington’s in there, the great leaders in Europe and in Great Britain, all around the notion of liberty and justice and freedom.
– And it’s easy to overlook today with so many media options, the importance of oratory in the 19th century of not just in getting a message across, but as a way of bringing people together and even entertainment.

– That’s right, and it was called the Golden Age of Oratory because oratory was the means of communication in terms of debating the merits of proposals, in terms of entertainment, as you mentioned. The Lyceum was a very big deal in the 19th century, where you would get speakers of all cuts and from all over the United States speaking for the purpose of entertaining or educating. It was just part of the culture.
– And as he learns oratory, what is the situation for, we’ll still call him Frederick Bailey at this point?
– He is still in Baltimore and he is now able to recite. . . The whole notion of The Columbian Orator was you memorize these pieces and you recite them, and you learn the language of liberation, basically. And so he’s learning that language, and he’s also learning about what it means to be an effective orator. So write down the hand gestures and how to organize a speech, and it was really important to be conversational and natural. All these words fit Douglass as he emerges from slavery.
– His life from a slave, though, his life as a slave, clearly there’s a turning point. . . There would be a turning point in the life of any slave who escapes, says, “Now, it’s time to go.”

– Yep, so at the age of 12, his overseer dies on the Eastern Shore, and he’s brought back to the Eastern Shore because they’re going divide up now the slaves that he owned. That was Aaron Anthony who died. So they divide the slaves, and as circumstances would have it, they send Douglass back to Baltimore, where he lives a little bit longer until the Aulds in Baltimore decide, well, they don’t decide, but Douglass is now needed on the plantation. He’s old enough, he’s strong enough, they needed him to come back.
– So he’s getting a worse job.
– Yeah, he’s no longer a house slave. He is actually in the field. Turns out that he doesn’t take to the field life of a slave, being a field hand, very well, and his overseer then sends him to what they called at the time a slave breaker or someone to break the spirit of someone who’s
– Like you would break a horse.
– Exactly, and this man named Edward Covey had the reputation as being very successful at this. And under him, Douglass is worked really hard. He’s beaten regularly, whipped, and just to the point where Douglass can hardly. . . Well, he can’t stand it anymore. And he actually takes on Covey, and it’s a famous fight, and Douglass describes it as two hours. It may have been more or less, but in the end, he’s victorious over this slave breaker. And normally, what would happen in that case is they’d send him deeper south.
– Yes, sure, where it could be harder
– For him to escape.
– Harder lifestyle and harder to escape.

– But Covey, as I’ve read about him, was so proud of his reputation. He didn’t want to do that. And he didn’t want people to know that Douglass had whipped him, basically. I mean, not whipped him with a whip, but physically handled him. And so he sends him to the Freeland farm to be a farmhand. The Freelands had a reputation of being, if you can say this about enslaved people, a kind slave owner. So Douglass was well-treated. He was clothed. He wasn’t beaten, but he had to work. And of course, now Douglass is 16, 17, he starts to meet with people in the area, his Black comrades, and they begin to plot an escape. And they determine they’re going to escape on Easter because Easter is a time when there’s free movement.
– Slaves get to visit their families and that kind of thing.
– So they would put a boat in Chesapeake Bay, and they would float their way north to freedom. Well, one of the people in the plan got nervous and told on them, and they were caught. Douglass and about two other of his comrades were caught. They were marched to St. Michael’s, which was about a good 10 to 12 miles away and jailed. And when Douglass was released, and instead of being sent again south, they sent him back to Baltimore. Which there’s a lot of conjecture about, but many of the scholars on Douglass, Douglass scholars do speculate that Douglass had. . . People realized he was really
– Had something extra.
– Right. And when he got to Baltimore, Hugh and Sophia Auld promised him that at age 25, they would free him from slavery. Of course, he’s 18, so that’s a long time.
– Still a seven-year sentence.
– And so while he’s in Baltimore this time, he becomes a member of the Baltimore Mental Improvement Society, which is a society of all Black men, pretty much, who debate on a regular basis, give speeches to one another, and educate each other about the world. He also discovers religion, organized religion, and joins an AME Zion Baptist church. He is befriended by a man named Lawson, who becomes his mentor and his first real loving friendship that they develop. And Lawson teaches him further about the Bible, and tells Douglass that he’s a special person and was born for special purpose.
– Oh, that’s a turning point, isn’t it?
– Yes, it was, so all this movement and Douglass teaching Sabbath schools, for example, and teaching fellow slaves how to read and going to church and experiencing Black preachers both on the plantation and as in Baltimore, all this is the foundation for him in terms of his life mission or goal.
– Which requires, in order to fulfill it, escape.
– Freedom, exactly. So at age 20, and in all this time, in that two-year period, 18 to 20 years old, he falls in love with a free Black woman named Anna Murray. And she is a domestic servant, but a free woman. And that also fuels him because an enslaved man can’t marry a woman who is free. So together, they plot an escape. He has friends who are sailors. He puts on a sailor uniform, gets his friend’s papers. I think it was Navy papers. Gets on a train dressed as a sailor, and literally rides the railroad to freedom to Philadelphia and then a steamship to New York. And when he gets to New York, he sends for Anna, and they marry in New York, and then he moves to New Bedford, Massachusetts at the direction of the abolitionists, who in New York were kind of guiding him at that point. He connected with them. And they sent him to New Bedford.
– Norman: New Bedford, a very busy place in the 1840s and ’50s.
– Greg: It’s a major whaling port. Lots of ships. One of the things I failed to mention in Baltimore, when he was 18, he had been trained as a caulker on the wharfs of Baltimore. And so he had a trade, he learned a trade. And so the idea was maybe he could carry that trade forward from Baltimore to New Bedford and be a caulker. He’d have a livelihood while he got established in New Bedford.
– What kind of life did he experience as a caulker, as a professional in New Bedford? Was it anything approaching equality? Who was he working with?
– No, it didn’t go well at all. In fact, the first time he went to work down at the wharfs in New Bedford, he was beaten. And so he had to find other work. It just didn’t work for him. And so what he did was he went on then to work in a candle factory and eventually joined the Black abolitionist, the local Black abolitionist folks in New Bedford, where they met regularly as anti-slavery meetings, organized meetings. He joined the AME Zion Church in New Bedford, where he established himself very quickly as a leader and went into pastoral training and became a licensed pastor, or at least on his way to being a licensed pastor. And they happily married. And there were a lot of Quakers in New Bedford who supported the Black community. But still, even though things were looking up, he was still a fugitive.

– And he must’ve changed his name by now.
– And he changed his name when he got to New Bedford to Douglass. The person he was staying with actually was reading “Lady of the Lake,” an epic poem where the heroine
– Sir Walter Scott. - Sir Walter Scott, and the heroine was Douglass, and said, “This would be a very good name for you.” Which fit, again, into Douglass’s kind of intellectual vision for himself as a heroic figure.
– He must still have been looking over his shoulder though for slave catchers.
– Yes, the fugitive slave law was well underway, except in New Bedford because there were so many Quakers and it was a very healthy-sized Black population. If slave catchers were to come into New Bedford, Douglass would’ve been protected, would’ve been guarded, would’ve had ample warning. And so that was the good part about New Bedford.

– So he’s an abolitionist at this point, I mean, in practice as well as in spirit. And is he, like, taking to the road, making the rounds?
– Yeah, in 1841, August of 1841, Garrison and the white abolitionists from Boston came to town. They had heard about Douglass in New Bedford. They had known he had become a leader, an established leader in the Black abolitionist movement in New Bedford. And they went and heard him speak. And Garrison writes a great deal. William Lloyd Garrison, who’s the leader of the anti-slavery movement, the moral suasion wing of the anti-slavery movement, heard him speak. And so invited him to Nantucket to a larger convention and to speak in front of white people for the first time. And Douglass writes a lot about this in his autobiographies of how white people had always been the enemy, basically, and so he was very, very nervous. But he did very well, to the point where Garrison recognized this is a person that could shed bright light on slavery, the atrocities of it with firsthand experience, and offered Douglass an opportunity to become a full-time abolitionist with the Garrisonian abolitionists.

– Douglass scarred by the whippings he had received?
– He was scarred, but not mentally. He had a very strong will, as I’ve tried to establish, and he was beaten, and savagely at times. But when you look at the time he spent in that setting, and I don’t want in any way diminish that he was beaten, but it was a short period of time, not enough to really break him. And when he was on the verge of being broken, he fought back, and it turned out pretty well for him, where it could have gone literally deeper south. - His voice and his presence, also powerful when he was an orator?
– Yes, his physical presence, people write about this. Elizabeth Cady Stanton has the best, I think, description of him on the stage, on the platform. She called him. . . She said he was majestic in his wrath. He was angry, he spoke pointedly. He was courageous in the sense that he would hold up America’s sin of slavery in front of everyone. He continuously asked, “Why was I a slave? Why am I a fugitive? I am a human being.” And his very presence on the stage was a testament to the fact that he was a human being. And he was fearless when it came to evoking the sins of America, not just of the North, but just the sin and going against everything that was decent in the Declaration of Independence. That was his touchstone. America is not living up to its promise. We hear these words today, but in the 19th century, for a Black man, considered a brute, less than human, to be getting up and questioning Americans, white Americans, particularly white Northerners, oftentimes affluent white Northerners about not living up to the promise, right, of the Declaration of Independence. That was something very different.

– So he takes to the road. How widely does he travel as a proponent of abolition?
– So he does, he takes to the road immediately. In the years that follow, in the four years that follow, he actually participates in two 100 convention tours. There’s a 100 convention tour of New York, and there’s a 100 convention tour of Rhode Island where he is literally, it’s 100 conventions. So he is on the road with the white abolitionists traveling from town to town, usually following the path of the railroad or the stage coach. And remember, he is a Black person, so he is relegated to, when he is on a train, he’s forced to
– Ride with the baggage, in some cases.
– Ride with the baggage and in any kind of steamship, in steerage. Of course, Douglass would not tolerate that. And so there’s a great story about him being picked up in New Bedford by the railroad, and him sitting in the cars with the whites. And he did this a number of times, and they would throw him off the train. And after a while, the railroad decided they weren’t gonna stop at New Bedford because Douglass was continuously doing civil disobedience, basically. But yeah, he traveled widely. He had trouble finding places to sleep and places to stay. If there were white abolitionists friendly towards the movement and friendly towards a Black person staying in their home, of course he could do that, but that was not always the case. He struggled with that. - On these trips, these road trips, speaking tours, did he run into violence?
– He did, and these were not calm meetings. A lot of times, the smaller local meetings were relatively calm, although Douglass had the reputation of calling and even disagreeing with the abolitionists publicly.
– Well, there was a spectrum of abolitionists. Wasn’t there a spectrum of opinion?
– Yeah, so he was not afraid to do that, but occasionally they would get into the. . . They would be speaking in a town that wasn’t friendly. And a good example of that is Pendleton, Indiana. Now, Indiana was pretty close to the slave, to the South and organized slavery. And a mob had formed to basically kill Douglass, or at least injure him severely enough that he couldn’t speak. And so in the middle of a meeting, they came and beat him with. . . They broke up the platform, the wooden platform, and beat him with the platform, and nearly killed him. The white abolitionists rescued him and brought him back to a home where he was administered, but then Douglass being Douglass decided he was gonna go back to the same place the next day, and he was not going to allow anyone to deter him from his mission to end slavery.

And that happened repeatedly in this whole period from 1841 to 1845. There were outbreaks at various conventions, even in Boston, in Faneuil Hall in the 1840s and later in the 1860s. They would try to shout. . . They called it shouting him off the platform. And Douglass believed that he was a citizen and he was entitled to all the rights of a citizen, including the right of free speech. So he never was shouted off the platform. People shouted over him, but he never would leave a platform. He would always stay and finish his remarks, despite all the noise.
– And along the way, getting considerable press, I would think.
– He was, locally, and then more of a northern newspaper, The Liberator of course carried lots of stories. When I was doing my research, I found stories in the New National Era, which was an abolitionist newspaper. The local newspapers covered him too. A lot of times, local newspapers at that period would just replicate what was in the national news, but they always had a local column. And they would describe Douglass on the platform, and people were just aghast at how strong he was, how voracious he was as a speaker, yeah.

– Newspapers were, of course, as you imply Greg, key for communication at this point. Did he eventually have a newspaper of his own?
– Yes, in fact, one of his goals early on in the 1840s was to have his own newspaper so he could have his voice heard. When he fled to England and when he was in England, the white abolitionists there, the women particularly, the Female Anti-Slavery Society in England, actually bought his freedom. And so that was very controversial because by buying his freedom
– It implied that he had been a slave in the first place.
– He had been a slave in the first place, and that didn’t sit well with the abolitionists. But for Douglass, that was the liberation he was so, so desiring. So they paid for his freedom and they raised money for a press so he could come return to the America again, to the U.S., a free man rejoined with his wife Anna and his family, and they moved to Rochester, New York.
– The Garrisonians were not supportive of him having his own newspaper. They believed that was overkill. They were really, actually threatened by the fact that he would publish his own newspaper. It was called The North Star. And he did publish it in Rochester, and he had a lot of benefactors in Rochester, which is why he moved to Rochester. He had a lot of support from the local community, and he thrived there as an independent editor. And again, continued to speak as an abolitionist speaker.

– We’re, I think by this point, getting into the 1850s and the most contentious of the pre-Civil War years.
– Greg: Yes.
– Norman: In addition to abolitionists, is he having other allies in the northern states, obviously for the most part, who are not necessarily abolitionists, but they’re saying it’s time for slavery to go?
– Greg: Yeah, in the 1850s, it was such a crucial period for Douglass. Douglass was a Garrisonian abolitionist up until the 1850s, and Garrisonians believed that moral suasion was the way forward, that you could convince people, if you could bring slavery into the hearts and minds of the audience, the people of the North, they would see the immorality of it and work to end it. And they wanted to dissolve the Constitution and start anew. They wanted a peaceful
– Transition.
– Transition, and that’s what they were working toward. By the 1850s, Douglass was evolving to the point, particularly with other Black abolitionists, but also white abolitionists, and with the political climate as it was, becoming very discouraged and started to believe that the Constitution, contrary to what the Garrisonians believed, that the Constitution was not a pro-slavery document, but contained the workings of actually a way forward to end slavery and start anew.
– It did, from the get-go, specify that there would be an end in 1808 to the importation of slaves.
– And then beyond that, he realized that the Constitution could be amended, which would set in motion, from his view, a new republic, a reborn republic with no slavery. That was his vision. And he began advocating for that in the mid-1850s and started getting some attention, particularly from the Republican party.

– And meanwhile, back in New Bedford, or in Boston, let’s say, there was still some contention between abolitionists and pro-slavery exponents, even in Massachusetts. - Yeah, it was. . . Douglass wrote a lot about the two prongs of being a Black person in the U.S. One of them, of course, was slavery. That was the most insidious part of the nation. But right up there with that was racism. And he called it racism. He called it that this was a nation where even when a Black man was free or a fugitive in the North, it was sometimes harder to deal with racism than it was with slavery because slavery was explicit. Racism was a lot of times implicit. And he was always considered 3/5 a citizen, and he thought, “I’m a whole person.
– But from a Constitutional standpoint, in terms of population and representation, slaves were 3/5.
– Greg: Yeah.
– Various curious times in retrospect, and even in Boston, as we see, there are some strong events going on as we approached the 1860s.
– Greg: Yeah, the tension in that decade, 1850 to 1861 or so, a little more than a decade, really, the pressure continued to rise. And among the abolitionists, they arose because there was the American. . . It was the National Abolitionist Society and the American Abolitionist Society, and Garrison was kind of in both camps, but the American Abolitionist Society was the more political wing. And Douglass began to see, why couldn’t you do both? Why couldn’t you rely on moral suasion and arguing for equality for all people, not just Black people, but for women and immigrants as well, and take political action to end slavery? So he began to evolve in that way, much to the dismay of the Garrisonians because they were staunchly opposed to seeing the Constitution as anything but a pro-slavery document. So he was pretty fierce at that point in his beliefs.

– And how does his world change with Fort Sumpter and the onset of the Civil War?
– The minute the Civil War breaks out, Douglass identifies that as a time of jubilation, that finally we’re going to settle this issue of slavery. He was also very disappointed in the president, Abraham Lincoln, who wanted to define the war as a war to save the Union. And so Douglass immediately went to work on the platform, calling out Lincoln basically, and saying, “This war is not about the Union. A new Union could be formed with the ending of slavery.” And he got a lot of attention taking on a white president and very prominently and rigorously and relentlessly advocating for “Let’s define this for what it is, and let’s allow Black men to enlist in the Army and showing the South that to save the Union, we’re going to end slavery, and we’re going to arm all men to do that.”
– And two of the first enlistees, Black enlistees were his own sons.
– Exactly, Douglass had gone to the White House to meet with President Lincoln. He went after the Emancipation Proclamation in January 1, 1863, which allowed Black soldiers to enlist. And Douglass went right out and recruit. . . He was a major recruiter for Black men to enlist in the Massachusetts 64th regiment. His two sons, two of his three sons enlisted immediately and became members of that, captured in the movie Glory. It’s an older movie now, but it was captured
– Norman: The attack on Fort Wagner.
– Yeah, and then seeing how Black troops were treated and didn’t get the uniforms or didn’t have the same treatment or weren’t armed in the same way, Douglass went to the White House, obviously, to argue for better treatment of Black soldiers, including pay, which was very important.

– But also very heavy lift.
– A heavy lift, and again, asked Lincoln to reframe, basically, the war, which Lincoln did. And again, this is a complicated matter, much more complicated and nuanced than we can talk about here, but that relationship was important. In fact, after Lincoln was assassinated, in his will, he had willed Douglass one of his walking sticks as a token of his appreciation and fondness for Douglass, even though they clashed.
– A gentleman’s disagreement from what we know, although there’s no transcript at all of their one-on-one meeting.
– Greg: No, not at all.
– We can only hypothesize, I guess, what they would’ve said, but as you said, Greg, Douglass would say, “Emancipation now!” and Lincoln would say, “We have to preserve the Union before we can emancipate.
– Right, and that was the tension. And it turned out, on a practical matter, because the war was not going well, and there were lots of other factors, but mostly the war was not going well and there were a lot of Northern soldiers being killed, the exigence of that period was, we need to increase our numbers. Douglass loved this because then he could argue, “Well, you’ve armed us. We’re dying for our country, for the Union, then we absolutely deserve equal rights and full rights as citizens of the United States.”
– Yes, and it was so blatantly clear that they were still not getting anything near that from the South when they would be massacred when captured, in some instances, by the Southern troops.

– And remember, in emancipation, freed slaves as the North freed territories. So it wasn’t a blanket emancipation, but it was enough to get Black soldiers. And the fear, of course, from the white person’s side was that when you arm Black soldiers, that well, they won’t follow orders. They’re not trainable. Well, it turned out that they were obviously highly trainable and excellent soldiers and willing to die for the Union. So I think both men, both Lincoln and Douglass, got their wishes in some way at a very high price. But nevertheless, the war ended and the Union was preserved, and Black men had established that they deserved to be full citizens.
– So at the end of the war, there of course has already been emancipation by then, 14th Amendment a couple of years after that, which frees things up some more in African-American equality. But then what is Douglass’s thrust? Does it have to do with racism and just more of what you might call a civil equality?

– Yeah, he did dedicate himself to defining how Reconstruction would go and should go for the South in terms of how those formerly enslaved people would be treated. And initially, things in Reconstruction went pretty well in terms of establishing land for Black people and property and so on. But the minute the war was over, Douglass was concerned about that, and in addition, getting the vote for Black men, which infuriated Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the women’s rights movement because Douglass was one of the only men at Seneca, well, was the only man at Seneca Falls in 1848 at the Women’s Convention that produced the Declaration of Sentiments, which declared women’s right to the vote. He signed that declaration and was supporting suffrage from that point forward. But when the war ended, he said, “Time out.” Not quite that way, much more eloquently, but he talked to Elizabeth Cady Stanton– Actually, they debated about this publicly and why he would privilege, so to speak, the Black vote, the Black men’s vote. He promised Elizabeth Cady Stanton and other leaders of the women’s suffrage movement that once the vote was secured, he would return to the women’s suffrage movement, which is what he did. They got the amendment in place, Black men could vote, and that was a key to citizenship for Douglass, and it was a key element for that.

Of course, we all know what happened in terms of, specifically in the South, making it very difficult for Black people to vote.
– In practical terms, poll taxes and violence.
– But the amendment was in place, and so post-Civil War, and this is a period that, again, has been very carefully studied. Douglass sets his sights on basically how to. . . How do African Americans advance themselves in this society? And he identified education as a critical component of that. In fact, he actually was an advocate for technical education, which was more with the trades. That infuriated some of the Black leaders, as you can imagine, who wanted more liberal arts, in today’s language, education. But Douglass was practical. He said, “If we could get jobs, as, like, apprenticeships and so on, we can advance the race.”
– And that’s still the thinking today, whether Black or white. Who knows the apprenticeship, the trade.
– So that was one thing he did. He was an advocate for education. He was also an advocate for one of his key terms, which was self-reliance. He saw himself as self-reliant, and he wanted other Black Americans to be self-reliant. We cannot depend on the white population. We need to advance ourselves.
– Well, that’s in keeping with the philosophy of the American frontier, self-reliance.
– Self-reliance and the self-made man. He saw himself as self-made. Although he had lots of help along the way, he, in essence, was a self-made man. Studied vigorously, spoke a number of different languages, never stopped learning. And that’s why it’s so hard, to this day, that’s why he invites so much study because he was so complex, so interesting and intriguing. But no one ever doubted his courage and his persistence. He was relentless when it came to anything he took hold of.

– In your book though, speaking of self-made versus with some assistance, you do have a charming vignette where he’s doing all these speaking tours and his wife is sending his clothes after she’s getting the clothes taken care of and mailing them to him.
– Yeah, that account, in his world as an abolitionist, came from his daughter, Rosetta, his oldest daughter. He had two daughters. Annie died at the age of 10, but Rosetta grew into adulthood, and Rosetta wrote this beautiful piece in the 20th century, reflecting on her mother. And in that is a beautiful description of how she would know where he was gonna be because they published all of the itineraries.
– Norman: Train schedules and itineraries.
– And she would literally send him clean shirts and a fresh suit so that he would be at his best. He had so much support, and he credited his wife for her management of his family. He was always gone. Well, gone, probably 10 months out of the year he was traveling. And he had children, of course, and she was the person who raised those children. She also was not literate. So that’s the other part of this, that she had help in sending things to Douglass while he was on his way. When he went to England for two years, she was home with those children, pretty young children at the time. And so yeah, she was quite the partner and played a very important role.

– Can you give us some profiles then of the children that went into public service in particular?
– Yeah, Rosetta, I don’t know all the story of each of the children. I know that they all lived into adulthood, that two of them served in the Union Army. One, Frederick Douglass, Jr., was a writer and worked in Washington, D.C. It’s kind of sketchy. I had the good fortune of meeting the descendant of Frederick Douglass, Jr., Frederick Douglass’s son, at a conference I was attending in Washington, D. C. for new authors at the time, in the late 1990s as part of the Park Service. Invited me and others to meet and then I had the good fortune of meeting the family, which took my breath away, honestly. But then we got on a bus in Washington, D.C. and rode to the Eastern Shore, and we got to see the plantation. And what was nice about that is the descendants of the Lloyds and Frederick Douglass’s descendants met for the first time.
– Oh, really?
– And I got to see that. It was really a wonderful moment. And again, just to see where, “the big house” is what Douglass called it is still standing, as is. . . The slave quarters are gone, but the foundations are there, so you can see it all.
– And one of his other sons then, I guess both of them were both in the military, but also later involved in what would be called African-American improvement.
– Yes, that’s right. They were very much engaged in that effort, led in part by their father, who kept insisting on, “Let’s keep improving. Let’s overcome these stereotypes.”

– He did have some controversy later on in the family, didn’t he, in his own particular sphere.
– Right, Anna Murray Douglass died in the late 1880s. Two or three years later, Douglass married Helen Pitts Douglass, Helen Pitts, and that was very controversial. Obviously she is a white woman, and Douglass was very clear about this. He said, if he had to justify it publicly, he always said, “My first wife, I followed the lineage of my mother. My second wife, I followed the lineage of my father.”
– It’s a very rational way of looking at it.
– That’s how he would frame it, but Helen was absolutely important because after Frederick Douglass died in 1895, she was responsible for preserving his legacy. She was the one that made sure that the house was preserved, that the Library of Congress received his papers, that his world would be absolutely honored in the future. And she was, like Douglass, relentless in that pursuit.
– And I think her father, if I remember correctly, never spoke to her again and disinherited her as soon as she married Douglass.
– And Douglass’s sons and daughter, the same thing, except over time, they did reconcile. But Douglass was, again, he had a very strong sense of the personal, so it’s always hard to know what he was thinking. But he certainly, when he got on the platform, let you know in no uncertain terms that this was a very loving relationship. And to him, it kind of lived out his vision of equality and integration.
– Blur those lines
– Blur those lines, and we’re all equal, we’re all whole human beings. He was a humanist at heart, and he lived that and demonstrated it very clearly throughout his life and even in his personal life believed in that.

– In terms of his legacy, how would you describe it? And of course, we’ve mentioned his family members who followed in that path to a great extent, but in a larger sense, how would you describe the legacy of Frederick Douglass?
– I think Frederick Douglass, that’s a tough question for me because there’s so much legacy. I think just in terms of leadership and vision, he provides a case study in how to lead even when you’re not respected, that you can earn respect, and that there’s a pathway to that. And that is to stay true to yourself and to hold up the values that you believe in and root them, as he did, in touchstone documents like the Declaration of Independence, and to root them in the Bible because there are lots of biblical references in his speeches. And I think the key point is never lose hope. He was an eternal optimist against tremendous odds. Not only odds in terms of his color, but just odds in terms of being successful and staying alive and continuing to fight for equality.
– There’s this great kind of farewell image of Douglass in his library.
– Greg: One of my favorite pictures.
– Norman: Says so much about him in his last years.
– Greg: The final day of his life, which was, let’s see, it was February 20, 1895. He had returned from a women’s suffrage conference in Washington, D.C. for dinner, and he was going to go back, and as he was leaving his home, walked down his hallway, he collapsed and died. But what’s important about that is up to his final day, he was still working.
– Still working.

– And in this case, he was working for women’s right to vote. But prior to that, even the month prior to that, he was also traveling with Ida B. Wells, a prominent African-American woman who was fighting against, documenting lynchings in the South and fighting lynchings, and she had inspired Douglass to join her in that fight. So he had really two areas that he was heavily engaged in right up until his death. And that was his fight against lynchings, which was like a terrorist act.
– An ongoing struggle that would continue well into the 20th century. - And really tied specifically to the South. And then women’s suffrage, which was a national issue. And so, yeah, I think his legacy is one of commitment, perseverance, and living out your vision. I think it’s a tremendous life that he had. And that picture of him at his desk. Again, studying Douglass, I was able to get access to his library beyond where it’s kind of cordoned off, and got a complete listing of the books in his library. And his books are as varied as his background, history and language and culture and philosophy. I mean, if you were a proponent of the liberal arts, he was a liberally educated man.

– And is his house still there?
– Yes, his house is still there. It’s part of the national parks now in Anacostia, and you can visit, it’s just right outside, like 15 miles from Washington, D.C., and it’s intact. It’s a wonderful experience to go there. The other thing that they did build in the back of his house was the grotto, where he used to write. . . It wasn’t there, but they recreated it. And it’s a little area where he would go to escape his family to write. And in one corner of that grotto is a standup desk, where he would write his speeches standing up because he would deliver them standing up.- Good idea. - And then he had a little, like what would be like a couch and a fireplace. So on one end was a fireplace, a couch, and then a standing desk where he would write his speeches. And I asked if I could see it ’cause I had read about it, it was in Rochester. He had that same setup. And they said, “Oh, yeah, we can take you back. We don’t take many people back there.” And when I went in there, everything kind of fell right into place. I just felt so blessed to be able to see that, but it gave me another picture of Douglass besides the picture of him at his desk writing, which he did extensively all the time, never stopped writing. But then to see where he would write his speeches, a facsimile, but nevertheless, a accurate reproduction was really inspiring.
– Greg Lampe, a pleasure to share the life and story of Frederick Douglass. - Yeah, thank you so much for having me, it’s a pleasure.
– Greg Lampe is the author of Frederick Douglass: Freedom’s Voice. I’m Norman Gilliland. I hope you can join me next time around for University Place Presents.