Authors: Fergus Bordewich
Four or five months after he arrived in New Bedford, a young man tried to sell him a subscription to the
Liberator
. When Douglass explained that he was himself an escaped slave and was too poor to pay, the young man put him on the subscription list at no charge. Douglass was then working at a brass foundry that made fittings for ships. His job was to blow the bellows and empty the flasks in which the castings were made. It was hot, difficult work. He would nail the newspaper onto a wall and read it as he worked. “I already had the spirit of the movement, and only needed to understand its principles and measures,” he wrote. “These I got from the
Liberator
.” The newspaper immediately took its place next to his Bible. Douglass began to feel, for the first time, reading Garrison's inspired screeds, that the complete liberation of his race might actually be possible, and that it could be brought about through concerted human action. He threw himself into the local abolitionist movement “from a sense of delight, as well as duty,” attending antislavery meetings, speaking out in his church against colonization, and beginning to “whisper in private, among the white laborers on the wharves, and elsewhere, the truths which burned in my breast.”
In the summer of 1841, an antislavery convention was held on the island of Nantucket, the capital of the American whaling industry, and a Quaker stronghold. William C. Coffin, a prominent banker and abolitionist, knew Douglass from New Bedford, and invited him to tell the convention something about his life. Douglass, who had never spoken before a white audience, was nearly paralyzed with anxiety. “It was with the utmost difficulty that I could stand erect, or that I could command and articulate two words without hesitation and stammering,” he later recalled. “I trembled in every limb.” Haltingly, he spoke of how he had been taken from his mother in infancy, “a common custom in the part of Maryland from which I ran away,” and then later, traumatically, from the beloved grandmother who had raised him; of the coarse blankets upon which he had slept in a common bed with other slaves; of being awakened at dawn by the shrieks of an aunt stripped, and tied to a joist, and whipped until she bled; of his life as a slave in Baltimore, where he was taught to read by a kind mistress, and taught the trade of caulking; of the craving for death that overtook him as he grew old enough to understand the hopelessness of his plight; of his first, failed, attempt to flee to the North by canoe up the Chesapeake, and his betrayal by another slave; and, circumspectly, of his escape to New York three years before. Garrison followed Douglass at the podium, and by repeatedly referring to the story that the Nantucketers had just heard magnified its power with his own eloquence. “Here was one âevery inch a man,' ay, a man of no common power, who yet had been held at the South as a piece of property, a chattel, and treated as if he were a domesticated brute,” Garrison thundered. Douglass, though he remembered little of what he had said, must have had a powerful effect, for after the meeting John A. Collins, an agent of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, offered him a job as a traveling speaker. Douglass, with a shyness that would very soon evaporate, at first demurred, but eventually surrendered to Collins's pleas.
Douglass set out with a naive enthusiasm, traveling initially with a supercilious white agent named George Foster through the eastern counties of Massachusetts. (During one trip, in April 1842, he visited a community of radical reformers near the town of Florence, where he encountered the pathetic spectacle of his benefactor David Ruggles, now blind and dependent on the charity of friends, undergoing a water cure at a nearby spa.) Douglass's job was simply to tell the story of his enslavement and es
cape, to present himself as a living artifact, as it were, of the “peculiar institution,” flesh and blood proof of its cruelty and sinfulness. He was usually introduced dramatically as a “
chattel
,” a “
thing
,” a “piece of southern
property
,” an effective rhetorical flourish with middle-class Yankee audiences for whom the degradations of slavery were a kind of pornography. Douglass soon began to recognize in this language a form of condescension, a verbal dehumanization that left him feeling ashamed and angry. While he understood the propaganda punch that this kind of pitch delivered, he also realized that he simply did not think of himself as a “thing.” He was in his own mind a man, and he wished to be presented as one. He also grew tired of repeating his life story over and over. But when he deviated from the script to express his own
ideas
about slavery, Foster would whisper insistently, to just “tell your story, Frederick.”
Douglass was not alone in his resentment. Many blacks were becoming frustrated with white leadership of the abolitionist movement. With some notable exceptions, blacks had less interest than whites in the era's gallimaufry of general moral reform, which encompassed everything from temperance and women's rights to communal living, fad diets, and spiritualism. There was also a growing recognition that the abolitionist movement itself was infected with racism. Samuel Ringgold Ward, a former slave and a powerful orator in his own right, chided abolitionists “who love the colored man at a distance.” It was a glaring fact that although blacks' donations provided about 15 percent of the budget of the American Anti-Slavery Society, its leadership was almost completely white, and African-American traveling agents received only about half the salary of their white counterparts. “This northern freedom is nothing but a nickname for northern slavery,” Peter Paul Simons, a porter, caustically told a black abolitionist gathering in New York, in 1839. “Our friends tell us we must not fill low stations, for it degrades us the more, but they take good care not to adopt the means that some of our talented men might fill respectable stations.”
Douglass knew what Ward and Simons were talking about. Collins and Foster kept telling him, “Give us the facts, we will take care of the philosophy.” They also advised him to “have a
little
of the plantation manner of speech than not; 'tis not best that you seem too learned.” Douglass could not deny the realism of their advice, for when he expressed himself in his own terms, with correct grammar and moral judgment, he could
hear audiences, who expected someone raw from the lash and crude in speech, grumbling, “He's never been a slave, I'll warrant ye.” But Douglass would not, and could not, conform. Not only a talent for oratory, but a sense of dignity, of integrity, was coming to life in him. He told Foster, “I must speak just the word that seemed to
me
the word to be spoken
by
me.”
Douglass was one of the most charismatic members of an emerging generation of black intellectuals who were beginning to give African Americans a national voice through antislavery lecturing, journalism, and the ministry. More than anything else, however, it was the steady growth of independent black churches that provided the African American with what John Mercer Langston, the founder of the Ohio State Anti-Slavery Society, a black organization, called the “opportunity to be himself, to think his own thoughts, express his convictions, make his own utterances, test his own powers.” Between 1836 and 1846, African Methodist Episcopal congregations grew from eighty-six to nearly three hundred, and spread from the church's original base in Philadelphia as far west as Indiana. Black Baptist churches, meanwhile, had grown from just ten in 1830 to thirty-four in 1844. Not surprisingly, black churches were usually outspoken in their denunciation of slavery, and many of them were woven into the web of the abolitionist underground, like the Bethel AME church in Indianapolis, a key station on the Underground Railroad, and Cincinnati's Zion Baptist Church, which regularly sheltered fugitives in its basement. Not all black churches were so engaged. Many shied away from politics altogether. Douglass withdrew from his own church because it was insufficiently antislavery. Also, few black ministers met his demanding intellectual standards. Most, he once rather nastily asserted, “have not the mental qualifications to instruct and improve their congregations.”
At the same time, black newspapers, self-improvement societies, debating societies, schools, and reading rooms were also proliferating. Black abolitionists were usually in the forefront of this movement. At a typical meeting, in December 1842, the black Philomathian Society of Albany, New York, debated the proposition “Is the human mind limited,” under the supervision of the abolitionist William H. Topp. In Philadelphia, a library intended for blacks who were excluded from the city's white institutions was founded by Robert Purvis, who also headed the local Vigilance Committee. David Ruggles had organized a similar library in New York.
In several states, committees organized by blacks led petition campaigns for black suffrage, fought discrimination on public transportation and in schools, and demanded the passage of personal liberty laws that would help protect fugitives once they reached the North. In contrast to white abolitionism, with its evangelical overtones, the antislavery passion of black Americans came out of the personal experience of bondage and of the ingrained racism that governed their daily lives. As one former slave put it, it was “more than a figure of speech to say that we, as a people, are chained together.” Some blacks openly advocated armed rebellion against slavery, citing as an example the successful mutiny of slaves aboard the
Amistad,
in 1839, as proof that the slave masters could be overthrown. It was the slaves' “solemn and imperative duty to use every means, both moral, intellectual, and physical that promises success,” Henry Highland Garnet declared in 1843, at a national convention of black leaders. Douglass, still deeply influenced by the pacifism of his mentor, William Lloyd Garrison, had not yet reached this point. But he would.
The antislavery movement provided Douglass and a host of his fellow speakers with a forum for their views and life experience that African Americans had never enjoyed before. The stories that they told of floggings, sadistic overseers, shattered families, and prostituted mothers and sisters overwhelmed skeptical Yankees for whom slavery was an unpleasant but abstract national problem, and turned thousands of them into active abolitionists. Douglass soon became one of the movement's most popular lecturers. “All the other speakers seemed tame after Frederick Douglass,” Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote, after a convention at Boston's Faneuil Hall. His immensely popular autobiography, first published in 1845, made his name close to a household word.
The Douglasses, who now had three children, two daughters and a son, had moved to Lynn, Massachusetts, to give Frederick easier access to the railroad. Leaving Anna and the children at home, he lectured widely in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, and New Hampshire. When he could not find a church or hall that would allow him to speak, he would take his stand in the street and keep talking for as long as people paid attention to him. Mobbing had dropped off in New England by 1840, but discrimination was still rife. Douglass was several times dragged off trains for refusing to ride in the “Jim Crow” car that was reserved for blacks. On one occasion, on the line between Boston and Portland, a con
ductor sent six men to remove him from the first-class carriage for which he had paid his fare, finally lifting him out of the train while he still clung to part of his wooden seat.
In the spring of 1843, the New England Anti-Slavery Society resolved to hold a series of one hundred conventions, beginning in Vermont and New Hampshire, and ending in Ohio and Indiana. Douglass was selected as one of the corps of traveling speakers who would cross the country. He was thrilled. This was his breakthrough, his opportunity to carry his message to a national audience. “I never entered upon any work with more heart and hope,” Douglass wrote. “All that the American people needed, I thought, was light. Could they know slavery as I knew it, they would hasten to the work of its extinction.” Beginning in Vermont, where he lectured in the old abolitionist stronghold of Ferrisburgh, near the home of Rowland T. Robinson, he and his fellow speakers moved on to central and western New York state, and then by steamer to Cleveland, Ohio, where he joined in a convention with some of the most prominent African-American speakers of the time, including Charles L. Remond, Henry Highland Garnet, Amos Beaman, Charles M. Ray, and others. “From Ohio,” he wrote, “we divided our forces and went into Indiana.”
The final leg of the tour proved to be an unexpected ordeal. Douglass was used to the racism of the East Coast, but he was unprepared for the savagery that he met with in Indiana. Richmond, only seven miles south of Levi Coffin's Newport, was a hotbed of proslavery sentiment. When Quakers arrived there with six wagonloads of legally freed slaves from North Carolina, a local newspaper denounced this addition to what it called “a worse than useless population,” asserting, “This town is one of the great headquarters for these blacks, that the semi-abolitionists of the South, who are horror-struck by the idea of colonization, are continually throwing off their own hands and sending here to steal their living from the hospitable citizens of our place. It is a disgrace upon our town, and a dead weight to its improvement.” In neighboring Jackson County, Indiana every African American who came into a certain store was “seized and tied up and held until it could be ascertained whether or not a reward was offered for him among the notices of runaway slaves displayed at the local post office.” When a white mob rampaged through black neighborhoods in Dayton, Ohio a short distance across the state line, in 1841, the
Richmond Palladium
sneeringly blamed it on abolitionists, who it alleged
had “excited all the latent passions of mobocracy.” There was even racism among Quakers. Many were repelled by the aggressive polemics of the abolitionist movement, and by 1840 some Yearly Meetings were urging their members to withdraw from all antislavery activity. One Henry County, Indiana Quaker was quoted as saying that she would faint if a black man ever appeared at her door, while another announced that she would be afraid to step outside to visit a neighbor's house if the slaves were freed.