What Hath God Wrought (95 page)

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No body of literature exemplified or propagated the faith of the American Renaissance in human potential more than the writings of the men and women who had escaped from slavery. The Transcendentalist Theodore Parker called them the “one series of literary productions that could be written by none but Americans,” adding that “all the original romance of America is in them.”
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While the autobiographical accounts of Henry Bibb, William Wells Brown, Sojourner Truth, and others make fascinating reading, the greatest of these accounts appeared in 1845:
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself
. A brief 125 pages, it cost 50 cents and sold a successful thirty thousand copies, emboldening its author to write two longer autobiographies later in his life. The book fell into obscurity during the first half of the twentieth century, from which it has been rescued by an outburst of attention from scholars in recent decades. They have enabled us to perceive in Douglass’s narrative a paradigm of many aspects of American experience.

The eight-year-old Maryland slave boy had been separated from his mother almost all his life and never knew his father’s identity (but suspected his master). When his owner died in 1826 and the estate needed to be parceled out among three heirs, this virtual orphan had been allocated to Thomas Auld, the late master’s son-in-law. The new owner left little Freddy with his brother and sister-in-law, Hugh and Sophia Auld of Baltimore, to serve as a companion for their young son in return for his keep. Sophia, a kindly woman and a devout Methodist, began to teach both children their ABC’s and to show them how to read from the Bible (specifically, the Book of Job). Her husband put a stop to this. “If you teach that nigger how to read there would be no keeping him,” he warned. “It would forever unfit him to be a slave.” Frederick Bailey (as he was originally named) remembered these words uttered in his presence, and they “sank deep into my heart.” Resolving to unfit himself for slavery, he determined to continue the quest for literacy in secret. He earned small change and paid it to neighbor boys to teach him; he studied discarded newspapers. Eventually he learned about the movement to abolish slavery. In 1838, at the age of twenty, Frederick Bailey escaped and made his way North. Changing his name to Frederick Douglass as a precaution against recapture, he became the most famous of many self-liberated slaves, a leader of the abolitionist movement, and a powerful voice for African American rights during and after the Civil War.
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Douglass’s realization of the critical importance of literacy to the winning and exercise of freedom was common among members of both races. Hugh Auld’s belief in the incompatibility of literacy and slavery, shared by most whites, provoked many laws throughout the southern states designed to prevent the kind of unauthorized literacy represented by Denmark Vesey, David Walker, and Nat Turner. Even in the North, the laws of several states restricted the opportunities for free Negroes to get an education, for literacy was associated with citizenship, a status that few states accorded their black residents. The published narratives of other escaped slaves besides Douglass tell of going to heroic lengths to learn how to read. After emancipation, many of the newly freed people eagerly embraced opportunities for adult education.
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As in Douglass’s case, the first inklings of literacy often came from religious sources. In after years a former slave recalled how she picked out from a hymn book the words “When I can read my title clear / To mansions in the sky,” by Isaac Watts. “I was so happy when I saw that I could really read, that I ran around telling all the other slaves.” Among its many functions, literacy undergirded the religion that provided African Americans, whether enslaved or free, their most important sense of community. Douglass remembered his people’s evocative spirituals and cautioned whites against the facile interpretation of them as signs of contentment. “Those songs still follow me, to deepen my hatred of slavery, and quicken my sympathies for my brethren in bonds.”
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At the age of fourteen he underwent a classic conversion experience in Bethel Chapel of the African Methodist Episcopal Church in Baltimore. After achieving his freedom he joined the AME Church, Zion, in New Bedford, Massachusetts, and became a lay exhorter.

In 1833 Thomas Auld had attempted to set his adolescent slave to plantation labor under an overseer with a reputation as “negro-breaker.” But when this brute tried to whip him, young Frederick prevailed in a dramatic contest of physical strength and willpower. The overseer gave up rather than admit to others his embarrassing failure. This victory, Douglass recalled with satisfaction, “revived within me a sense of my own manhood.” He had brought the principles of human dignity and equality from the pages where he had read about them into real life. In his autobiography Douglass returned these principles to print as an inspiration to others, an example of the triumph of human nature over animal force, a paradigm of the American Renaissance.
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Eventually Douglass’s owner sent him back to Baltimore to learn the trade of a ship-caulker and turn over his wages. But slavery had long been declining in Baltimore, where the mixed economy and urban mobility left slaves who “hired their own time” with a measure of personal independence. The young man took full advantage of his opportunities to make friends among the city’s large community of free Negroes. He joined one of their self-improvement societies, in which he met a free black woman named Anna Murray, whom he later married. Douglass’s eventual escape from slavery was made possible when a free black sailor (risking severe punishment) lent him his identification papers. Like so many other talented young Americans, white as well as black, Frederick Douglass found liberation in the city, and he praised the advantages of urban life over rural in his autobiography. “Going to live in Baltimore laid the foundation, and opened the gateway, to all my subsequent prosperity,” he wrote; “I have ever regarded it as the first plain manifestation of that kind providence which has ever since attended me.”
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Not long after assuming his new life as a free man in Massachusetts, Douglass began attending antislavery meetings in local black churches. In August 1841, he delivered an antislavery speech on Nantucket Island that brought him to the attention of William Lloyd Garrison’s abolitionist movement. The testimony of escaped slaves had proven powerful in arousing moral indignation. The American Anti-Slavery Society hired Douglass and sent him on speaking tours of northern states. Douglass’s interest in oratory went back a long way. During his boyhood years in Baltimore, he had managed to get fifty cents to buy a copy of a schoolbook called
The Columbian Orator
, compiled by the antislavery editor Caleb Bingham. From it the youth imbibed stirring ideals of equal rights as well as the prevailing concepts of how to exert power through elocution, together with sample speeches from masters like Cicero, Demosthenes, Daniel Webster, and Edward Everett. It was one of the few possessions he took with him on his flight to freedom. Once free, Douglass rose to his occasion. In an age of great American oratory, Frederick Douglass made himself one of the greatest orators of all. “Speech!” he declared: “The live, calm, grave, clear, pointed, warm, sweet, melodious and powerful human voice is the chosen instrumentality” of heroic reform.
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In his crusade against slavery, Douglass voiced the urgent concern of the American Renaissance with the dignity of human nature.

Douglass’s career as author and traveling lecturer illustrates how the revolutions in communications and transportation facilitated nationwide reform movements such as antislavery. Historians have remarked on how the antislavery movement became both more insistent and more broadly based in the 1830s. This transformation was no accident. The same technological developments that permitted the formation of the new mass political parties likewise empowered other agencies for influencing public opinion. The abolitionist movement could not have flourished without the mass production of periodicals, tracts, and inexpensive books (including antislavery books for children), the circulation of petitions to Congress, the ability to gather national conferences, and convenient travel for its agents. The determination of southern postmasters to block abolitionist mailings recognized the importance of the distribution of information to the cause of antislavery. In a world where people communicated and traveled, the continued existence of slavery in the United States when many other countries had abolished it came to seem anomalous and embarrassing. Suddenly, there was much more reason than ever before to pay attention to the formation of public opinion on this sensitive subject. “In November 1831, the Georgia legislature offered five thousand dollars for the apprehension of William Lloyd Garrison,” notes the historian Daniel Feller. “Who in Georgia, only a few years before, would have known or cared about the fulminations of an obscure Boston editor?”
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Meanwhile, the success that Frederick Douglass enjoyed on the lecture circuit brought its own problems. The better known Douglass became, the greater the danger that his owner would identify him and track him down. Furthermore, some incredulous hearers began to question whether he could possibly be an authentic former slave. An anxious white abolitionist advised Douglass not to seem too literate and articulate, but to “have a
little
of the plantation manner” in his speech. Douglass refused to let his well-meaning but irritating white friends control him; he insisted on being (as the historian Nathan Huggins put it) “his own man.”
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As a solution to the problems posed by his oratory and published
Narrative
, Douglass left the United States for an extended speaking tour of the British Isles in 1845–47. There he would not be liable to recapture as a fugitive; there audiences welcomed his eloquence. After the emancipation of the slaves in the British West Indies in 1833, the British abolitionist movement had turned its attention to other countries, and especially the United States. Social reform, like literature, transcended boundaries in the English-speaking world of improved communication and transportation. Antislavery became one of many transatlantic reforms that included temperance, Sunday schools, missions to the heathen, the distribution of Bibles, and rights for women. Nineteenth-century reformers, their faith strengthened by the expectation that they worked to hasten the millennium and the Second Advent of Christ, were far more hopeful than reformers in our own chastened world. Douglass shared their confidence that right would triumph. He got along well with British reformers and intellectuals; he reached out to the working-class Chartists and Irish nationalists; he encouraged the Calvinist Free Church of Scotland to break relations with slaveholding Calvinists in the American South. His friends raised 150 pounds sterling (then $1,250) to buy out Thomas Auld’s legal claim to Frederick Bailey, so Frederick Douglass could return to the United States in safety.
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Welcomed back to America by his wife and children, Douglass found the abolition movement badly factionalized. Censorship of the mails had essentially frustrated the movement’s attempt to convert moderate southerners; within the slave states, only Kentucky managed to sustain its own abolition movement. As a result, abolitionist efforts had more and more come to focus on a northern audience. But the abolitionists disagreed among themselves about how best to influence this audience. A serious split developed among them over questions of tactics that stemmed from different attitudes toward American society as a whole.

Those who sided with William Lloyd Garrison found American government and society thoroughly corrupt. Besides the abolition of slavery, they also supported pacifism (nonresistance to evil), anarchism, and equal rights for women—causes so unpopular that they tainted opposition to slavery with the brush of ludicrous impracticality. (The Garrisonians’ professed pacifism, significantly, did nothing to reassure slaveholders, since Garrisonians were more likely, in practice, to condemn the violent suppression of slave escapes and revolts than the actions of the slaves themselves.)
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Garrisonians also usually embraced religious views outside the evangelical mainstream. They tended to be Unitarians, Transcendentalists, Hicksite Quakers, or “come-outers” who had seceded from their original denominations. (The expression referenced the biblical injunction, “Come out of her, my people, that ye not be partakers of her sins”—Revelation 18:4.) When an international antislavery convention meeting in London in 1840 refused to accept American women as delegates and relegated them to the visitors’ gallery, Garrison dramatically took a seat alongside the women instead of on the convention floor.
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Reacting against Garrison’s broad and radical agenda, in 1840 about half of the abolitionists seceded from the American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS) that he controlled; they organized the rival American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society (AFASS), under Lewis Tappan’s leadership. Members of the AFASS considered slavery a grotesque anomaly in an otherwise relatively wholesome American society. They wanted abolitionism to function as one of the reforms within the evangelical “benevolent empire,” as had the colonization movement. While supporting temperance and the evangelical religious agenda of Bibles and missions, they stayed away from Garrison’s most radical “isms.” Instead of “coming out” from the churches, they hoped to work within and transform them.
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But the Garrisonians’ religious beliefs generally alienated them from the Evangelical United Front that the Tappanites found congenial. In their stance toward the world, Garrisonians had more in common with members of utopian communities than with the international evangelical reform enterprise. Indeed, some utopian communities, such as those at Hopedale and Northampton, Massachusetts, had close explicit ties with Garrisonian abolitionism.
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