Death of Douglass: We still live

Orator, statesman, reformer, editor, and author Frederick Douglass died unexpectedly on February 20, 1895 at his home in Washington, D.C. called Cedar Hill. He was about 77 or 78 years old. A former slave, he secretly learned how to read, but remained headstrong and independent — qualities which his enslaver attempted to break him of. After one particular whipping, a teenaged Douglass fought back. He was never beaten again.

After escaping from enslavement (with the help of several, including David Ruggles), Douglass made his way north and met with his free black wife. Now on free land, Douglass reflected, "I lived more in one day than in a year of my slave life." He became an outspoken advocate for abolition and was recognized as one of the most powerful speakers of the day. He wrote his life story in three autobiographies, the last of which was revised and reissued only three years before his death. In that book, The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, reiterated his history of enslavement and his escape to freedom but also explained his more recent life story. For example, years after the Civil War, he was granted a government post, U.S. Marshal of the District of Columbia, making him the first African American to receive a federal post that required approval from the Senate.

In those years, however, many black Americans felt a disconnect with Douglass, who had entered a life of privilege that some believed did not reflect the black American experience. Further, he had married a white woman after the death of his first wife, a decision that met with disapproval even from his loving family. He had shifted his interest to women's rights and women's suffrage (the day of his death, he attended a rally for the cause alongside Susan B. Anthony). Douglass did not agree. He knew that more work was necessary, even after Emancipation - and, more than that, it was not white people who would continue the progress of black people, but black people themselves. As he wrote in his final autobiography:

Taking all the circumstances into consideration, the colored people have no reason to despair. We still live, and while there is life there is hope. The fact that we have endured wrongs and hardships which would have destroyed any other race, and have increased in numbers and public consideration, ought to strengthen our faith in ourselves and our future. Let us, then, wherever we are, whether at the North or at the South, resolutely struggle on in the belief that there is a better day coming, and that we, by patience, industry, uprightness, and economy may hasten that better day. I will not listen, myself, and I would not have you listen to the nonsense, that no people can succeed in life among a people by whom they nave been despised and oppressed...
Greatness does not come to any people on flowers beds of ease. We must fight to win the prize. No people to whom liberty is given, can hold it as firmly and wear it as grandly as those who wrench their liberty from the iron hand of the tyrant. The hardships and the dangers involved in the struggle give strength and toughness to the character, and enable it to stand firm in storm as well as in sunshine.

Douglass: where the light comes

"It was a meeting long to be remembered," concluded William Cooper Nell in a letter to a colleague. The letter, dated February 15, 1848, described an anti-slavery speech given by Frederick Douglass in New Bedford, Massachusetts. In the "mere sketch," Nell emphasized that, "New Bedford has a widely spread fame as an Anti-Slavery town." The inhabitants of that town of 16,000 had actively helped gain sympathy for the cause, in part because the population included "twelve hundred colored people," 75% of which had come from enslavement. Douglass was one of them for a time.

After running away from enslavement, Douglass temporarily settled in New Bedford (and it was here that he chose his last name). Returning to New Bedford that February, he particularly noted the corruption of the federal government which had just annexed Texas, which he believed was a ploy to enhance slave power in the Senate, not to mention "the spirit of conquest that possesses the American heart," as Nell reported. In his speech, Douglass also broke down the views of Senator Henry Clay, who had been favoring colonization. This plan to remove free blacks and send them to Africa was an injustice, Douglass said. Nell quoted Douglass:

It [e.g. the colonization plan] is our deadly enemy, we shall not obey its wishes, but shall do that which Mr. Clay 'wishes' us not to do; we shall stay here in our country, identified with the slave, laboring to obtain our rights and his, and we shall secure them... The hand of Providence is with, and guides us; crush us to the earth, and we rise again; try to starve us, and we grow strong and vigorous; close up your hearts, legislate against us, and try to make us hate the land of our birth, and we love it the more. You may try to keep us low, ignorant and in the dark; but the light is shining all around; to it, though slowly, yet surely will come... Slavery cannot exist where the light comes.

Nell imagined what it would be like if Douglass and Clay had a public debate over the question in Washington, D.C. "What a spectacle!" he imagined, "A negro, and recently a slave, debating with the 'Demosthenes of the nation.'"

Nell's letter was published several days later in the North Star, an anti-slavery newspaper founded by Douglass and Nell in New York. At the end of it, he reiterated their shared belief that the press would help their cause, and that those who supported the North Star were supporting abolitionism. Douglass's speech, he reported, resulted in 20 new subscribers that day.

Douglass: murder, robbery, inciting insurrection

Though Frederick Douglass claimed to disagree with abolitionist John Brown's radical raid on Harper's Ferry, the governor of Virginia presumed he was a co-conspirator in the bloody failure. Gov. Henry A. Wise went so far as to write to the President of the United States James Buchanan on November 13, 1859:

I have information such as has caused me, upon proper affidavits, to make requisition upon the Executive of Michigan for the delivery up of the person of Frederick Douglass, a negro man, supposed now to be in Michigan, charged with murder, robbery, and inciting servile insurrection in the State of Virginia.

Douglass had moved to Michigan and, for a time, even Canada to avoid being accused of associating with Brown, with whom he had met some two months before Harper's Ferry. In one of his  autobiographies, Douglass admits "there is no reason to doubt" that the President aided Wise in attempting to find him. Within six hours of his fleeing from his home in Rochester, New York, United States Marshalls swooped into the town in search of him.

By then, Douglass was already a well-known figure and orator, known as the courageous and intelligent escaped slave from Maryland, who had since become an author and journalist. Only two weeks before Governor Wise's letter to President Buchanan, Douglass wrote to the local Rochester newspaper that he was innocent of involvement with Harper's Ferry. Referring to "the thing calling itself the Government of Virginia," Douglass railed against the accusation that he intended to be one of the soldiers in the insurrection which came from one of the men about to be executed for his own involvement:

This is certainly a very grave impeachment, whether viewed in its bearings upon friends or upon foes, and you will not think it strange that I should take a somewhat serious notice of it... I have always been more distinguished for running than fighting, and, tried by the Harper's-Ferry-insurrection-test, I am most miserably deficient in courage... The taking of Harper's Ferry wras a measure never encouraged by my word or by my vote. At any time or place, my wisdom or my cowardice has not only kept me from Harper's Ferry, but has equally kept me from making any promise to go there... My field of labor for the abolition of slavery has not extended to an attack upon the United States arsenal. In the teeth of the documents already published and of those which may hereafter be published, I affirm that no man connected with that insurrection, from its noble and heroic leader down, can connect my name with a single broken promise of any sort whatever. So much I deem it proper to say negatively. The time for a full statement of what I know and of All I know of this desperate but sublimely disinterested effort to emancipate the slaves of Maryland and Virginia from their cruel task-masters, has not yet come, and may never come. In the denial which I have now made, my motive is more a respectful consideration for the opinions of the slaves' friends than from my fear of being made an accomplice in the general conspiracy against slavery, when there is a reasonable hope for success.

Douglass, Nell, and The North Star

With the publication of his autobiography about his own escape from enslavement, Frederick Douglass dedicated himself to speaking out against slavery. He also established an abolitionist newspaper in New York called The North Star in December 1847. Soon after, however, his lecture duties took him to Massachusetts and he left his newspaper in the capable hands of William Cooper Nell (who was born free in Boston). In a letter to Nell dated February 5, 1848 (also meant for publication in The North Star), Douglass apologized for his absence:

I very much regret the necessity which just at this time requires me to be absent from my editorial duties: for though the North Star should grow brighter as the night grows older and darker, I deem it of considerable importance that it appear bright at its very dawn. At this time more than at any other period of our enterprise, the Star will be subject to unfriendly as well as friendly criticism. I however feel confident that with the friendly aid which surrounds you, the paper will lack nothing of interest during my unavoidable absence.

The newspaper was then only about a month old and Douglass took the opportunity to add subscribers during his travels. He particularly hoped to "interest and enlist the energies of our colored fellow countrymen" to sustain the newspaper for their "improvement and elevation." As editor and publisher, he was particularly proud to note that The North Star was "the only permanently established periodical in the hands of the oppressed and enslaved of this land." Even so, Douglass noted, white subscribers outnumbered blacks five to one. "Though this fact indicates a most gratifying interest in our enterprise by our white friends," he wrote, "it reveals a palpable deficiency of interest on the part of our colored friends."

One black supporter was Henry Highland Garnet, a man born enslaved in Maryland. In his letter to Nell, Douglass notes that Garnet attended one of his lectures and expressed an interest in their newspaper. Garnet particularly praised the publication's lack of affiliations; most newspapers at the time were connected either to political parties or religious sects. The North Star, however, was separate from both "slaveholding government" and "slaveholding church."

Douglass's anti-slavery lecture tour took him from Springfield to Lynn to Fall River in Massachusetts. He was disappointed by his varying amounts of success. Even so, he looked forward to his upcoming stop in New Bedford. There, he noted, was "the only town in which I have felt myself really at home since I left the South." New Bedford was where Douglass settled after freeing his enslavers and he proudly and fondly recalled it as the place of his first freedom and where he earned his first dollar. It also is where he assumed his name "Douglass."

What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July?

An excerpt from the speech by Frederick Douglass in Rochester, New York on July 5, 1852:

Fellow citizens, pardon me, allow me to ask, why am I called upon to speak here today? What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence? Are the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice, embodied in that Declaration of Independence, extended to us? and am I, therefore, called upon to bring our humble offering to the national altar, and to confess the benefits and express devout gratitude for the blessings resulting from your independence to us?

...Fellow citizens, above your national, tumultuous joy, I hear the mournful wail of millions! Whose chains, heavy and grievous yesterday, are, today, rendered more intolerable by the jubilee shouts that reach them. If I do forget, if I do not faithfully remember those bleeding children of sorry this day, "may my right hand cleave to the roof of my mouth"! To forget them, to pass lightly over their wrongs, and to chime in with the popular theme would be treason most scandalous and shocking, and would make me a reproach before God and the world. My subject, then, fellow citizens, is American slavery. I shall see this day and its popular characteristics from the slave's point of view. Standing there identified with the American bondman, making his wrongs mine. I do not hesitate to declare with all my soul that the character and conduct of this nation never looked blacker to me than on this Fourth of July!

Whether we turn to the declarations of the past or to the professions of the present, the conduct of the nation seems equally hideous and revolting. America is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future. Standing with God and the crushed and bleeding slave on this occasion, I will, in the name of humanity which is outraged, in the name of liberty which is fettered, in the name of the Constitution and the Bible which are disregarded and trampled upon, dare to call in question and to denounce, with all the emphasis I can command, everything that serves to perpetuate slavery—the great sin and shame of America! "I will not equivocate, I will not excuse"; I will use the severest language I can command; and yet not one word shall escape me that any man, whose judgment is not blinded by prejudice, shall not confess to be right and just....

What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July?

I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass-fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are, to Him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy—a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages.

There is not a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States at this very hour.

Go where you may, search where you will, roam through all the monarchies and despotisms of the Old World, travel through South America, search out every abuse, and when you have found the last, lay your facts by the side of the everyday practices of this nation, and you will say with me that, for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival.

Douglass dedicates monument

The Freedman's Monument, or Emancipation Monument, in Washington, D.C. was not the only project to memorialize Abraham Lincoln. It was, however, the first to solicit donations solely from former slaves or, according to the National Park Service, "those who had most directly benefited from Lincoln's act of emancipation."

The statue, designed by Thomas Ball, was unveiled on April 14, 1876. In his right hand, Lincoln holds a copy of the Emancipation Proclamation over a pedestal with an image of George Washington. Lincoln's left hand hovers over a kneeling former slave whose chains have been broken.

The dedicatory speech was made by author and activist Frederick Douglass at the statue's unveiling. Calling it a "national act — an act which is to go into history," he emphasized the event's importance for freed men (and presumably women):

Wise and thoughtful men of our race, who shall come after us, and study the lesson of our history in the United States; who shall survey the long and dreary spaces over which we have traveled; who shall count the links in the great chain of events by which we have reached our present position, will make a note of this occasion; they will think of it and speak of it with a sense of manly pride and complacency.

The memorial, though depicting Lincoln, was intended to honor the concept of emancipation. Even so, Douglass's speech elevates Lincoln as the personal savior of enslaved people. Douglass concluded:

Fellow-citizens, the fourteenth day of April, 1865, of which this is the eleventh anniversary, is now and will ever remain a memorable day in the annals of this Republic. It was on the evening of this day, while a fierce and sanguinary rebellion was in the last stages of its desolating power; while its armies were broken and scattered before the invincible armies of Grant and Sherman; while a great nation, torn and rent by war, was already beginning to raise to the skies loud anthems of joy at the dawn of peace, it was startled, amazed, and overwhelmed by the crowning crime of slavery—the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. It was a new crime, a pure act of malice. No purpose of the rebellion was to be served by it. It was the simple gratification of a hell-black spirit of revenge. But it has done good after all. It has filled the country with a deeper abhorrence of slavery and a deeper love for the great liberator.

The statue was unveiled on the 11-year anniversary of the day Lincoln was shot (which was also the country's centennial year), rather than the anniversary of his death the next day, possibly as a symbol of recognizing the living aspect of Lincoln's legacy.

It is worth noting that a copy of the statue in Boston was removed in 2020. The controversy stems from the statue depicting a black man kneeling to a white man. Though likely not the artist's intention, the symbolism is inappropriate in the 21st century.  

*I am particularly indebted to Lisa's History Room (a wonderful vignette-styled blog) for making me aware of this date.

Frederick Douglass and a Valentine

It is unknown exactly when Frederick Douglass was born in Talbot County, Maryland. He was, after all, a slave at the time, and record-keeping was hardly a priority. He knew little about his own family or, as he put it, "The reader must not expect me to say much of my family. Genealogical trees did not flourish among slaves."

As for his birth date, he wrote, "From certain events... I suppose myself to have been born in February, 1817." Others suggested February 1818 (the more likely year). Douglass adopted February 14 as his birthday in honor of a visit from his mother in 1825 when she gave him a heart-shaped ginger cake and called him "Valentine." He never saw her again.

Despite a law against doing so, Douglass was taught the alphabet at 12 years old. Around the same time, he began to recognize his own concern for civil rights. At about 20 years old, he escaped from slavery, traveling to Delaware, Philadelphia, and New York in less than 24 hours. He went on to tell his story as an advocate for abolitionism and in several autobiographies. His first, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, was published in 1845. The compelling story was an instant success, going through multiple editions in only a few years. He published My Bondage and My Freedom in 1855 and Life and Times of Frederick Douglass in 1892.

Death of Paul Laurence Dunbar

At the age of 33, Paul Laurence Dunbar died on February 9, 1906. He was born the son of a former slave and an escaped slave in Kentucky. His father had served for the Union Army in the Civil War as a member of the Massachusetts 55th Infantry Regiment. His mother loved poetry and music and encouraged her children to read.

Dunbar's earliest poem was written when he was six years old. The only African-American in his high school, he rose to leadership roles in the debate team, the school newspaper, and the literary society. He took whatever employment he could, including a job as an elevator operator, but always pursued writing. His first book of poems, Oak and Ivy, was published in 1892. Though the book made little impact nationally, Frederick Douglass called Dunbar "the most promising young colored man in America."

After moving to Toledo, Ohio, Dunbar finally got some acclaim from his second book, Majors and Minors, published in 1895. William Dean Howells wrote the introduction to his third collection. Dunbar was invited to England to recite his poetry, he got married, he found a job at the Library of Congress. There, he showed his first signs of tuberculosis. He and his wife soon split, and he went to visit a half-brother in Chicago. It was there that he died at the age of 33. Still, he outlived another promising young writer of the 19th century by two years who shares his death anniversary, several decades earlier. More on him later today.

Death Song

  Lay me down beneaf de willers in de grass,
  Whah de branch'll go a-singin' as it pass.
  An' w'en I's a-layin' low,
  I kin hyeah it as it go
Singin', "Sleep, my honey, tek yo' res' at last'."

  Lay me nigh to whah hit meks a little pool,
  An' de watah stan's so quiet lak an' cool,
  Whah de little birds in spring,
  Ust to come an' drink an' sing,
An' de chillen waded on dey way to school.

  Let me settle w'en my shouldahs draps dey load
  Nigh enough to hyeah de noises in de road;
  Fu' I t'ink de las' long res'
  Gwine to sooth my sperrit best'
Ef I's layin' 'mong de t'ings I's allus knowed.