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Alison Stewart
This is all of it on wnyc. I'm Alison Stewart. Thank you for spending part of your day with us. In honor of our country's 250th, we're devoting Fridays to history Today. You'll hear part of my full bio conversation with historian David Blight, author of Frederick Douglass, Prophet of Freedom, which won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize. We'll learn about Douglass's early life, his birth into slavery in Maryland, his escape to the north, and how he became one of the most famous famous abolitionists of the 19th century. Plus, we discuss his relationship with President Lincoln, how he navigated the politics of abolition, and his final years before his death in 1895. So let's start my conversation with David Blight about Frederick Douglass early life.
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David Blight
Slavery on the Eastern Shore of Maryland was a good deal different than on the other side of the Chesapeake Bay. There were very few cities or towns. There was more plantation style agriculture and Douglass. Indeed, Frederick Bailey grew up in part on the largest land holding in all of Maryland, the Wye Plantation, which was a vast, self sufficient plantation that grew everything it needed and it backed up right onto the Chesapeake Bay. So in effect it backed back up onto access to the ocean. But the Eastern Shore was always a little bit more out of the way and some might say backward than the Eastern Shore. In fact, in Douglass's own descriptions of it, he described the area he was born in as the worn out soil of the Eastern Shore. Of course, that was when he was remembering his slavery days there.
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Interviewer
Slavery destroyed families. How did it destroy Fred Bailey's biological family?
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David Blight
Well, Frederick Douglass was born probably in the cabin of his grandmother Betsy Bailey. His mother, Harriet was one of several daughters and he never knew his kinfolk. He barely knew his mother. He last saw her when he was only six years old and he had very few vivid memories of her. In fact, he invented images of her in his writing. He never knew who his father was, although he always heard that his father was one of his masters. And the best two candidates are his original owner, Aaron Anthony, and his second owner, Thomas Auld. But we still don't know for sure who Douglass father was. He didn't even know his siblings and he had four of them until he was about eight years old. He was sent from Baltimore. He had just been sent to Baltimore. He was sent back to Baltimore, I'm sorry, back to the Eastern Shore because his owner, Aaron Anthony, had died and all of Anthony's slaves were to be divided up. And there's a very vivid moment in Douglass's autobiographies where he describes all of Anthony's 25 or 30 slaves being lined up and divided up among kinfolk or sold to so and so or given to so and so. And he looked around and he said, these. Many of these were my siblings. And he said, I didn't even. He didn't even know who they were. Now he was sent back to Baltimore at that point, which was one of the several strokes of luck in his life to be. In fact, he was given to Thomas Auld, who was related to Aaron Anthony. But anyway, Douglass kinfolk and family, if you will, was destroyed by slavery. In fact, he had little in the way of any sense of family until after he escaped from slavery at age 20 and made his own family. In fact, one of the great themes of Douglass early life, and for that matter throughout his life, was this search for home, this sense of a search to know what home was, where it was, and indeed who his kinfolk actually were. He will actually spend the rest of his days to the age of 77 trying to figure out who his father was. But he never really did conclusively know his paternity.
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Interviewer
You write about a savage beating of his aunt. How did that change him?
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David Blight
He sees his Aunt Hester beaten by his owner, Aaron Anthony, who was possibly his father. Her naked back. She is strapped up to a wall. Anthony did not know that Little Fred was in the room. Little Fred was 6 years old and hiding in a crawl space next to a fireplace in the kitchen house at the Weyer House Plantation. He sees his aunt beaten bloody because, according to Douglas remembrance, she had rejected Anthony's sexual advances. She was only a late teenager at that time, and Anthony was known to abuse his women slaves and in this case, brutally abused her. Douglass saw that. He saw the blood drip on the floor. He vividly describes it in the autobiography and makes a great deal of antislavery propaganda about that beating. It's not the first and it's not the last beating he will see,
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and
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David Blight
indeed he will receive any number of beatings himself, but he turns that blood and that violence into, in his writing, into a metaphor of at least one aspect of the very depths of what slavery could do to human beings. To both their bodies and to and their minds.
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Interviewer
There are a few moments when Frederick Bailey catches a small break. It actually turns out to be a huge break, I should say, because he sent to Baltimore, he's loaned out to Baltimore, and he encounters a woman who has never had a slave before, Sophie Auld. How did her initial treatment of him change him forever? And I think we should point out, she starts to teach him to read.
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David Blight
Oh, yes. Sophia Auld was his mistress, white mistress in Baltimore, where he is sent when he's seven years old. And in the first year and a half or so that he was there. He was supposed to be there to be the companion of the auld's son. His name was Tommy, and that's fine. But he was obviously a bright kid, this Fred was. And Sophia Ald took him in, according to Douglass. Later, she took him in like another son. And she began to teach him to read and write. She taught him his letters. She read out loud with him. She allowed him to collect other kinds of reading. She read the Bible with him. And that is how he learned his initial literacy. Until Sophia's husband, Hughald came in one day and saw her teaching little Frederick to read and allowing him to recite. And according to Douglass, his memory of it was that Auld vehemently instructed his wife, you shall never teach that kid to read again. If you give an N word an inch, they'll take an L, according to Douglass. And forbade his wife to teach literacy. Douglass has a wonderful reminiscence of that in the second autobiography where he says, that was the first anti slavery speech I ever heard. He decided on the spot. He tells us, that if all thought reading was so terrible, then maybe it's something he ought to get. Of his 20 years as a slave. He spent 11 of those years on the Eastern Shore. But he spent nine of those years on and off in Baltimore. A city. A city that was a major port to the ocean, a major maritime center. A city in which he encounters all kinds of other people. And a city in which he got very involved in the large free black community of Baltimore. There were far more free blacks in Baltimore than there were slaves. It's there that he meets Anna Murray, who would be his first wife. And it was in Baltimore where he had enough freedom of movement not only to plan an escape, but to begin to imagine his way out of Baltimore. And the escape plan was simply, although it was incredibly dangerous and it took enormous bravery to do it, he dressed as a sailor. He jumped on a train one morning all perfectly planned for when the train would leave. With his little trunk, he had borrowed the identity papers of a black sailor who was retired. And he took three trains and three steamboats or ferry boats. He crossed three major rivers, and in about 38 hours from Baltimore, he arrived at the base of Chambers street in lower Manhattan in New York City. Had he been caught, we wouldn't even know about him. He'd have been sent back to Baltimore and probably finally sold south somewhere into cotton slavery. But that escape worked. It not only worked. Within two days, he found his way to the house of David Rubbles, who operated a kind of vigilance group in New York City to protect fugitive slaves. It was from there he wrote a letter back to Baltimore. We don't know who that letter went to because Anna was not literate. But somebody got the word to Anna that he was safe in New York and that she was to come. This was all preplanned. She had her bags packed, and she managed to buy a ticket. Same three trains, same three ferry boats, and she arrived in New York City in the same 38 hours. And they got married in the parlor of David Ruggles, only a matter of five days after he had escaped out
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Interviewer
of Baltimore and New York. Friends, if you'd like to go see where that was, there's a Lovely plaque at 36 Lispennard street, right on the corner of Church street there. What advice does David Roeckel give Fred Bailey now that he's arrived in New York? He's got to make a life.
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David Blight
Well, he tells him, first get the hell out of town. He says he and Anna should go north to New Bedford, Massachusetts. It would be safer. It was not safe in 1838 in New York City. For most fugitive slaves, it was very risky business. But up in New Bedford, the big. The major whaling port of New England, it was known as a kind of an enclave for fugitive slaves. It had a strong black community. And Ruggles even gave him a couple of names to look up as soon as they arrived. And Anna and Frederick, again on steamboats and then by carriage, made their way to New Bedford, Massachusetts, where they spent their first night in the home of a free black man who was himself earlier an escaped slave. His name was Johnson. But at the first morning in that house, Douglass says, I think I need a new name. And Mr. Johnson agreed with him. And Douglass thought, well, what? What should I pick? And he, Mr. Johnson told him, well, don't pick Johnson. There are way too many of us, Way too many of us. And Johnson, according to Douglass, had Just been reading Sir Walter Scott's lady of the Lake, which was an epic poem by the great Scott writer. And the hero in that epic poem is a man named Douglass with one S. Johnson tells him this. Douglas said, I like that name. I like the sound of it, but I'm going to give it one more square for distinction. And that's how Douglass became Frederick Douglass.
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Interviewer
Frederick Douglass is New Bedford working as a laborer. He takes a liking to another piece of writing, the Liberator, a paper. How does this paper ignite his career as an abolitionist?
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David Blight
It's almost as important as the Columbian orator. When Douglass discovers this newspaper edited by William Lloyd Garrison in Boston, this radical anti slavery paper, he was stunned. He read it voraciously every month. I'm sorry, every week. It was a weekly paper. And he would even tack it on the wall in one of his jobs. He, he worked the bellows in a foundry down by the docks. And he said he could work that bellows with one arm and he could kind of follow the newspaper. He would tack it up on the wall and he would read the Liberator while working that bellows. I mean, all of us may have had jobs early in our life where we weren't doing anything intellectually challenged and we looked for something to distract us. But the paper was full of analyses of slavery. It was full of stories. Slavery. At that point, Douglass didn't care what the ideological bent of the paper was. He was just thrilled to find a newspaper that was engaged in this radical criticism of the existence of slavery and even the existence of racism. And it will soon lead to him being discovered by some of the disciples of William Lloyd Garrison. Because Douglass didn't only read this Liberator, he got involved in the local black church. In fact, it's one of the first things he did. There was a small African Methodist Episcopal Zion church in New Bedford. They called it the Little Zion. And he may have gotten involved there literally the first month or two they were there. But within the first year they had him preaching. They found out this kid could preach and he'd been doing that already. Back on the Eastern Shore. He was running a kind of a debate group and a preaching group among his slave buddies when he was 18 on the Eastern Shore. But he started to preach and the congregation decided to ordain him in the AME Zion Church. that point you could be ordained as a preacher just by the congregation getting together with its elders and declaring you a preacher. He was invited in the late summer 1841, when he's 23 to take the steamer out to Nantucket to an anti slavery convention on Nantucket Island. And it was in August 1841 at Nantucket in the Athenaeum Library, which is still there, where Douglass gave his first real speech to white abolitionists. And he was a hit, a big hit. In fact, it was a two day convention. He spoke on the first day and they invited him to speak again the second day. And what Douglass did in this first speech, we don't have an actual text of it, but we know the kinds of speeches he was then quickly giving was basically telling stories from his from his slave life.
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Alison Stewart
You're listening to my full bio conversation with historian David Blight, author of the biography Frederick Douglass, Prophet of Freedom, which won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize. Next, we continue with Frederick Douglass's story as he builds a national reputation as an orator while navigating the complexities of his family life and personal relationships. This is all of it on wnyc. I'm Alison Stewart. We're back with more of my conversation with David Blight, author of the Pulitzer Prize winning biography Frederick Douglass, Prophet of Freedom. In this part, we pick up Douglass's story as he emerges as one of the nation's most powerful public speakers. His words and the deeply personal way he delivered them were bold and unusual for their time. To get a sense of their power, let's listen to an excerpt from one of his most famous speeches delivered on July 5, 1852. What to the slave is the 4th of July? Here's actor Philip Darius Wallace with a dramatic reading recorded for the U.S. national Archives.
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Philip Darius Wallace
You proclaim before the world and before the world proclaim, we hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal and have been endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights in that of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Yet you hold in bondage a seventh part of the inhabitants of your country, the existence of slavery in this country branch of republicanism, a sham. Your humanity a base pretense, your Christianity a lie. It destroys your moral power abroad. It corrupts your politicians at home. It saps the very foundation of religion. It makes your name a hissing.
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Alison Stewart
Now, Douglass was not beloved by everyone. Sometimes he was chased and beaten. His home was attacked. And one time in Battery park, right here in New York City, he was surrounded by a mob for even daring to walk with a white woman. But these events never stopped him from traveling the nation and across the pond to England and Ireland to give speeches on the evils of slavery and the importance of abolition. I asked David Blight, what void Frederick Douglass filled in the anti slavery movement with his writing and oratory skills.
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David Blight
Well, if it's a void he's filling, it is. He's not the first, but he certainly became the most prominent former slave black American to stand up on the platforms out in park like settings, in pulpits of churches, in town halls and city halls. He became the witness, the former slave who could tell his story of enslavement, who could tell about the psychological, the potential psychological destruction of the slave system. The void he filled was that role of being the witness of the actual experience. Now, I would add to that, though, he was much more than just the black spokesman. He wanted to be much more than simply the exhibit up on the stage, the exhibition up on the stage. Douglass early on became astute analyst, an analyst of the meaning of slavery, an analyst of the meaning of racism, an analyst of the threat of slavery itself to the existence of the United States. And he became really very quickly a master storyteller. He was brilliant at unfolding narratives verbally through oratory. He is simply a master storyteller. And we see that very early, as
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Interviewer
people wrote about him, they always seem to include his physical description and they always commented on him being of mixed race and the way he looked. First of all, I would love to know your thoughts on why that is. And did he mind being objectified like that or did he find a way to use it?
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David Blight
Oh, it's mostly that he found a way to use it. I think he did mind at times. But this is, we're talking here, the middle of the 19th century, and race consciousness was so complete and so, you know, ubiquitous, there was no way to avoid it. So, yes, Douglass was light skinned, relatively light skinned, but clearly a black person. There was no, there was never any question about him passing, but he made it perfectly well known and open that his father was white and might have even been his master. He told that story over and over and over and he would play off it, he would, he would joke off at times, you know, well, I can do this, you know, and that's probably because of my white father, but I can do that, and that's probably because of my black mother. So Douglass would sometimes use it to his advantage. He was very good at converting, shall we say, the awkward truths into humor, into ways of connecting with his audiences. And again, it took time. He did not walk out of slavery a, you know, a fully formed orator by any means. He had to practice it over and over and over and he learned how to connect with audiences, what they cared about, what stories would. Would grab them, how he could have them in his hands. And abolitionists, especially in these early years, were hugely controversial. They were not loved in most towns. In fact, they courted the scorn of their audiences. It was considered a success for some of these traveling troops of abolitionists. If they had a few things thrown at them, that meant the audience had been worked up, they had been troubled, they had reached somebody. They just hoped that what was thrown at them wouldn't kill them.
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Interviewer
He is not physically present as a husband or a father.
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Alison Stewart
Did you get a sense from his
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Interviewer
letters or why being physically with his family wasn't a higher priority?
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David Blight
Well, for one thing, it's the way he made a living being on the road. Itinerant lecturer, getting paid 50 bucks a lecture. And by the way, after the Civil War, he would make 100 to $150 a lecture. That's serious money, especially if you can go on the circuit and do 30 lectures in one trip. So part of that was making a living. Part of that is using his voice. He had adoring relationships with all four of his surviving adult children. There's no question about that. We know that from the letters. He could be a very doting father in some ways. He was certainly a doting grandfather. Later on, he and Anna will end up with 21 grandchildren. And that came from only three of the surviving adult children, because Lewis, their oldest, never had children. He was terribly wounded in the battle of Fort Wagner in the Civil War, in the groin, as they say, and could never have children. So family and home were extremely important to Douglass. But there's no question. Yeah, I once tried to calculate. I never could really do it, but by using travel itineraries and so on, and the average number of speeches and this and that, I tried to calculate, you know, for a decade or so how much time Douglass was actually at home and how much he was on the road. And it became hard to do. But what if it. What, you know, what would be the conclusion if I had found that he was gone 60% of the time? I actually had interesting conversations with some women historian friends of mine. It was actually a year I spent in England at Cambridge, where I wrote eight chapters of this book. And we had a lunch one day. There were three or four of us sitting around, and I asked them what they all thought of all this, and they said, david, don't be too hard on Douglass. This is what prominent men did in the 19th century. Think if he'd been in Congress, he wouldn't have been home much either. Think of senators and so on and so forth. Of course they were right. But I couldn't help thinking at times that this is a classic case of the absent father for those young people, the three sons. I suspect it was especially hard for the son. And later on, as I discuss in the book at really some length, Douglass three sons, especially two of them and his daughter Rosetta, all had difficult, turbulent lives. Rosetta, in part because she made a very bad marriage to a Civil war veteran, had seven babies with him in 12 years. That will lock up a woman's life in a hurry. And Rosetta, by the way, had the best education of all the four Douglass children. They even had a governess for her for a year. She went to a special school for another year. She tried to become a teacher for a while. But anyway, the Douglass children struggled to make a living. Struggled with their lives and even their own families. And of course that doesn't make them that special. Lots of people struggle. But I do think there's evidence in my book, and there's certainly evidence laying around out there that it was never easy to be Frederick Douglass son and daughter. He became so famous. He had this. He had a real problem with fame or what we today would call celebrity. They didn't have that word then. But Douglass, by the time of the Civil War, and especially in the wake of the Civil War when his travels were safer, was recognizable everywhere.
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Interviewer
Frederick Douglass had various relationships with different women, different level of, levels of intimacy. Some of his relationships were professional. He was at Seneca Falls, he knew Susan B. Anthony. He had collaborated with Ida B. Wells during the course of his life. We mentioned earlier, Julia, you have a whole chapter. My faithful friend Julia. That's Julia Griffith, the British abolitionist. Perhaps the most curious is his relationship with, and I'm going to let you say her name because I'm not sure how to pronounce it.
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David Blight
That's Otelje Assing.
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Interviewer
Otelje Osining, a German born activist who moves to the States, moves to Hoboken, New Jersey and essentially moves into Frederick Douglass life. How would you describe their relationship?
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David Blight
Turbulent, mysterious and very difficult to explain. Of all the problems to solve in Douglass's biography, and there are several, so it's trying to get to the bottom of and explain Otelia Assing. That was the most difficult of all. Otelia osing was a German. 48 Er, that means she was greatly influenced by the Republican Revolutions of 1848. She was a German Jew, although not a Practicing Jew. In fact, she was a ferocious atheist. Her father and her mother were writers and poets. In fact, her father had been imprisoned after the revolution of 48. She was very well educated, extremely well read, fluent in at least three languages. But she came to America to cover as a journalist the American anti slavery movement. You know, this slavery issue in America was tearing America apart in the 1850s. And she began to read the Abolitionist. And when she read Douglass's second autobiography, My Bondage and My Freedom, in 1855, she was knocked out of her shoes, so to speak. And only a year later, she traveled out. Less than a year later, she traveled out to Rochester, New York. Really didn't have an appointment. She just went up to the Douglas home and said, may I interview you? Of course he said, yes. And well, one thing led to another to another, but in effect, as you suggested, Alison, she tried never to leave. Now, their relationship would be roughly about 22 years, on and off, on and off. But she would go out to Rochester, where the Douglases lived, and spend summers as a sort of friend of the family. I could go on and on about this. Was it a sexual relationship? Probably. I can't prove even that. And I have a colleague in this field whom I have enormous respect for, Lee Fought, who wrote a book called the Women in the World of Frederick Douglass. It's a brilliant book. I highly recommend it. She doesn't believe it really was a sexual relationship. And we've had wonderful, you know, fawn arguments about all that. At the end of the day, it may not matter what Ossing was, though clearly, again, not unlike Julia Griffiths had been. She clearly was an intellectual companion. But here's the problem. She was also, and it must be said, as I say in the book, an extraordinarily difficult and arrogant woman. She hated Anna Douglas and said so in these letters to her sister back in Europe. Said so in ugly language. She also was very critical of Douglass's adult children, even though she became fairly close with them. She was always wrapping them in these private letters for their. For being, quote, leeches on their father and so on and so forth. In effect, assing, at least in these letters, resented anybody that got between her and Douglass.
- [32:31]
Alison Stewart
You're listening to my full bio conversation with historian David Blight, author of the biography Frederick Douglass, Prophet of Freedom, which won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize. Next, in our final installment, we look at Douglas's political life, his support for the Republican Party, his later years, including his service as a US minister to Haiti, and how the world responded to his death and his in 1895. This is all of it. You're listening to all of IT on wnyc. I'm Alison Stewart. Today is History Friday, and we're wrapping up my full bio conversation with historian David Blight, author of Frederick Douglass, Prophet of Freedom, which won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize. In this final installment, we talk about Douglas's political life, his support for the Republican Party, his later years, and how the world responded to his death in 1895. I began by asking David Bly whether he considered Douglass a political figure leading up to and during the Civil War.
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David Blight
Oh, yes, he's an enormously political figure. Politics, though, like for all of us, for Douglass, was a learned instinct. He came of age as a Garrisonian abolitionist. He was supposed to denounce politics and denounce voting. Well, he's not doing that any longer. By the early 1850s, Douglass became in the 1850s in his newspaper, an extraordinarily astute analyst of American politics and especially of the question of slavery. In American politics. He desperately wanted to wield influence if he could. The trouble is, he couldn't. By and large, he was on the circuit giving lectures and speeches, but he was never inside any particular political body. However, with the Civil War and its revolutionary transformations, he begins to get inside the politics of the Republican Party. Not at first, but eventually he is, especially after emancipation, especially after his three meetings with Abraham Lincoln, it was almost a fourth. And Douglass becomes, by the end of the Civil War and certainly in the early years of Reconstruction, that fascinating example. At least I made this a major theme of my book. He is the old radical outsider who becomes a kind of political insider. But even when he got inside to some degree with Republicans during Reconstruction and in the wake of Reconstruction, and then when he even got three federal appointments, one as marshal of the District of Columbia, another as recorder of deeds for the District of Columbia, and third, as US minister to Haiti in 1889, he had relationships with every Republican president.
- [35:51]
Interviewer
I want to talk about those presidents. Let's dive into that. Let's start with Lincoln. In a chapter titled the Kindling Spirit of His Battle Cry, we learn about Douglass and Lincoln, a relationship you describe as difficult but eventually historic. How did they view one another initially?
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David Blight
Well, at arm's length, at least. In fact, Douglas was a ferocious critic of Lincoln in the first year, even year and a half of the Civil War until Lincoln finally came out publicly for emancipation with the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation in September of 1862. Douglas struggle the first year of the Civil War was whether to Trust the Republicans, whether they really were as antislavery as they seem to portray themselves. The Democrats are just pummeling the Republicans as the party of emancipation and doing pretty well at it. Lincoln invites Douglas as the, you know, principal spokesman of black America to the White House. They have probably a full hour meeting at which Lincoln asked. Douglas looked him in the eye and wanted him to be the chief agent of a scheme that would funnel as many slaves as possible out of the upper south into Union lines and into the Northern states and into some version of legal freedom before election day in case Lincoln wasn't re elected. And Douglas, I'm convinced, sat there and probably looked back at Lincoln and just was speechless. Probably didn't know what to say. He was being asked to organize some kind of John Brown style system to funnel slaves out of the South. Douglass didn't have a clue how he was supposed to do that. All he was told was, the War Department and the army will help you. He goes back to Rochester and for almost two weeks, he starts sending letters and telegrams to his friends and abolitionists and people who'd been recruiters of black troops. And here's what we're going to do. I don't know how, but here's what we're going to do. But he was saved. None of this ever happened because of what happened on the ground in the war. And Northern morale changed for the better. And Lincoln's reelection by September and into October looked much, much more likely. The last time they will meet is of course, right after the second inaugural address. Douglass was in the crowd. And after the speech, which Douglass thought was fantastic, he went on to Pennsylvania Avenue and he just walked all the way to the White House following the presidential carriage. He didn't have an invitation, but he just got in line. He put through his card, he said, I'd like to come into the reception. And they said, no, sir, you can't. And Douglass tells us that, he said, well, tell President Lincoln that Frederick Douglass is out here. Two minutes later, the police came back out and said, yeah, come on in. And in the East Room in a big reception, they spy each other. Lincoln comes over to Douglass and according to Douglass's recollection, Lincoln asked Douglass what he thought of the speech. And Douglass tells us that he told the president, no, sir, it doesn't matter what I think. Attend to all of your guests. And Lincoln said to Douglass, no, no, no, no, no, I want to know what you think. And Douglass tells us, he said, Mr. President, that was a sacred effort. Now that's a very good description of that speech. It's a very biblical speech. It's very Old Testament speech. And then, of course, Lincoln was assassinated one month later. But from that point on, Douglas will campaign for every Republican candidate for president the rest of his life. Grant twice, Hayes, Garfield, and Harrison, and so on and so on. He came a stalwart of the Republican party in the sense that he supported the Republican candidacies no matter who it was.
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Interviewer
Can we talk about Andrew Johnson for just a moment?
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David Blight
Sure.
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Interviewer
Douglass said of Johnson, whatever Andrew Johnson may be, he is no friend of our race. It's incredibly vivid in your book. A very public argument. I don't know what should we call that? A very public back and forth between the two men. What came of this fight?
- [40:34]
David Blight
Well, it was a terrible exchange, wasn't it? It's in February 1866. It's in the midst of the struggle in Congress to try to come up with a reconstruction plan. Douglass gets up a delegation of 12 black men, including his oldest son, Louis. They got an appointment at the White House to meet with the president, Andrew Johnson. And they went with various pleas and ideas they wanted to discuss, especially the right to vote. But they never even got to speak, really. Johnson held forth and preached at them in effect, for about 45 minutes. He told them, if it weren't for your people, this war wouldn't even exist. This can never be a country that's truly biracial. He even said things like, you know, I once owned some slaves, but, you know, I freed them, but even when I owned slaves, I was more their slave than they were of mine. And it got worse from there. And Douglas kept trying as the leader of the delegation. This is at the White House. Douglass kept kind of raising his hand, and he would say, But, Mr. President, may we? And Mr. President. And at one point, Johnson said, be quiet. I'm not finished. And it just deteriorated from there. Here was a President of the United States spewing this racism at a delegation of 12 black men who come to talk to him about their futures. And as they were leaving the room, Douglass got the delegation to stand up. They just realized, this isn't going anywhere. It's over. They're about to leave the room. And they all overheard Johnson say this because member of the press. And by the way, the press was there recording this. Johnson was overheard to say that Douglas, he's just like every other N word. He'd sooner cut your throat than not. Now, I have always had this imagination. I don't know exactly what Douglass was thinking, but Douglass must have turned around, and I'd have given anything to see his eyes meet Johnson's at that point. What we do know is they went back to a hotel, they wrote up a manifesto that was published the next day in a Washington, D.C. newspaper. And then Douglass went to his desk and he did what he always did. He wrote a new speech. He took it on the road for the next six months. And the title of that speech was the Perils of Our Republic. And he developed not just a critique of Andrew Johnson, he skewered Andrew Johnson as the great danger to the future of American democracy. And in that speech, he laid out a whole scheme of measures that he believes should be done to thwart and stop Andrew Johnson. And there's no question Andrew Johnson was the worst possible thing that ever happened to the potential of the future of black rights. He was above all, a virulent white supremacist. When the great dream of emancipation manifested in the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments, is being defeated by the white south and then kind of defeated again in the late 1870s and into the 1880s, Douglass is still trying to organize, as many others were, black conventions and black organizations and black protests up until 1883, when there was this devastating Supreme Court decision, the so called civil rights cases of 1883, which in effect neutered the 14th amendment or all but abolished the 14th amendment in terms of enforcement. So these were in some ways despairing years. And then Anna, his wife, died in 1882. There were many sorrows. There's Anna's death. But of their 21 grandchildren, I forget the number right now, about 13 of them died in their childhood. But then he remarried in what became scandalous, without a doubt the most scandalous marriage of the 19th century. I don't know what else you would compare it to, especially in terms of its press coverage. Anna dies in 82. He remarried in the winter of 1884, about a year and a half later, to a woman named Helen Pitts, who was about 20 years younger, very well educated, Mount Hoyo graduate, a woman who came from an abolitionist family in western New York. She had classic abolitionist credentials. She'd worked in a contraband camp in D.C. during the war. She even caught malaria there and, you know, had to go home. She almost died. But he married her after he had hired her as one of the clerks in the Recorder of Deeds office in Washington, D.C. and Helen Pitts worked at a desk right next to Douglas's daughter Rosetta. And they were almost the same exact age and one day Rosetta was sitting at her desk in late afternoon and in walked a reporter and said Ms. Douglas or Ms. Sprague was her last name. Do you realize your father just bought a marriage license down the hall here? It was in City hall district and Rosetta must have had a reaction. Something like what? It was a difficult thing for Douglass's family. He took a lot of heat from black Americans and white Americans, but he also had supporters on both sides of the racial line about this. But then in his old age now
- [46:25]
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