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All Of It with Alison Stewart
Fredrick Douglass Full Bio: "What To The Slave Is The 4th Of July?"
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- [00:00]
Alison Stewart
All of it is supported by Progressive Insurance. You chose to hit play on this podcast today. Smart Choice. Make another smart choice with Auto Quote Explorer to compare rates from multiple car insurance companies all at once. Try it@progressive.com Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates not available in all states or situations. Prices vary based on how you buy. This is all of it. I'm Alison Stewart. Thank you for spending part of your day with us. Whether you're listening on the radio, live streaming or on demand, I'm grateful you're here. On the show Today for the 4th of July, the man who asked the question what to the slave is the Fourth of July? The abolitionist Frederick Douglass. All day today you'll hear my full bio conversation with historian David Blight on author of the biography Frederick Douglass Prophet of Freedom, which won the 2018 Pulitzer Prize. We'll learn about Douglass early life, born into slavery in Maryland, his escape to the north, and how he became one of the most famous abolitionists of the 19th century. Plus we discussed Douglass relationship with President Lincoln and how he approached the politics of fighting for abolition and suffrage, as well as his final years before his death in 1895. So let's get this started with David Blight about the early life of Frederick Douglass. For his book, David Blight used primary source materials, Douglass own words plus new information drawn from private collections to produce an 829 page book that took more than a decade to write. We'll start with Frederick Douglass early life. He was born in February 1818 but was never sure of his birthday because he was born enslaved and didn't know his biological family well. As a child born into slavery, he was loaned out to different households, including some where he was beaten and whipped. But there was one Baltimore household where the mistress allowed him to learn his letters, which ultimately changed his whole life. Douglass became obsessed with words, eventually using that to his advantage when he escaped from Baltimore to the north at age 20 in 1838. I started the conversation by asking David Blight what slavery looked like on the Eastern Shore of Maryland as compared to the Deep South.
- [02:34]
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 Y 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 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, because that was when he was remembering his slavery days there.
- [03:39]
Alison Stewart
Slavery destroyed families. How did it destroy Fred Bailey's biological family?
- [03:46]
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 Douglas 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, 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.
- [06:29]
Alison Stewart
You write about a savage beating of his aunt. How did that change him?
- [06:35]
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 anti slavery propaganda about that beating. It's not the first and it's not the last beating he will see and 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 their minds.
- [08:14]
Alison Stewart
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.
- [08:39]
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 old son. His name was Tommy, and that's fine, but he was obviously a bright kid, this Fred was. And Sophia all 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 Huald 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.
- [10:15]
Alison Stewart
It was also, I mean, that was like anarchy for enslaved person to read.
- [10:24]
David Blight
Well, it wasn't as uncommon as we might think.
- [10:28]
Alison Stewart
It was illegal, though, right?
- [10:29]
David Blight
It was legal in most states, that's true, and it was indeed illegal in Maryland. But there's no question that some slaves not only learned to read and write, but were actually taught so, sometimes by ministers, sometimes by their owners and their mistresses. But obviously this is the most important skill Douglass ever achieved. It's one of the most important things about his life. It's also one of those mysteries that cannot be totally explained. Why did this 7, 8, 9 year old kid take to language so much, so eagerly? What was it about this kid who just couldn't get enough to read? He encounters his white playmates in the streets of Baltimore. He's only 9 and 10 years old, and he finds that all of them are carrying around a little. Well, it wasn't that little, but a school reader called the Columbian Order, and Douglass tells us he wanted one of those. He wondered why he couldn't have one of those. He didn't get to go to school like the white kids. But he did manage, by the time he was 11 at a bookstore in Thames street in Fells Point in Baltimore to in effect, barter for his own copy. And he got his own copy of the Columbian Order by the age of 11 and 12. And that book became a treasure. That's actually what Douglass called it, a treasure in his life. This book was not only a compilation. First published in 1797, it was a compilation of speeches over the years, some of them from classical times, like Demosthenes and Cicero, but most of them from the age of Enlightenment, British and American. And it included some dialogues that had been invented by the book's creator, a man named Caleb Bingham. One of the dialogues in the book was this imaginary moment when a young slave just convinces his owner to free him. Now, this book became so crucial to Douglass not just because of all these speeches he could eventually read, but most importantly, it was a manual of oratory. The introduction, the first 20 pages or more, is a manual. It's kind of a how to book of how to give a speech, how to gesture with your hands, how to modulate your voice, what you do with your shoulders. And then from the middle on, it's an analysis of how great oratory must have moral messages and so on. There was no more important possession to Frederick Bailey later Douglass while he was a slave than that book. And when he escaped from slavery at age 20, the only possessions he had on his body were the clothing where he was dressed in the disguise of a sailor, a hat, a wide brim, sailor's hat, a few dollars in one pocket and his Columbian order in the other pocket. In fact, one of my most, one of my favorite memories of all the years of doing research on Douglass is one of the times I was at Cedar Hill Douglass house in Washington D.C. which is a national park site now, and they have his original copy of the Columbian Orator. And they let me sit at his desk. I put on the white gloves. They let me hold that original edition in my own hands. It was like touching and feeling Douglass Holy Grail.
- [14:27]
Alison Stewart
This is all of it. I'm Alison Stewart and we're back with more of my conversation with David Blight. We pick up Frederick Douglass story with his plan to escape enslavement and start a new life in the north, where he ultimately settles in New Bedford, Massachusetts and gets a new name and a newfound obsession anti slavery writing. He had tried to escape and was caught. He tries again and is successful in 1838, around the age of 20. What was different about his successful attempt as opposed to early attempt?
- [15:02]
David Blight
Well, the earlier attempt had been a scheme with about four or five other slave teenagers and young men, which was a very bad plan. They were going to steal some canoes and boats and just sail up the Chesapeake or row their way up to Chesapeake somehow. And they got caught. And at that point Douglass was was jailed for two weeks where he didn't know if he'd be sold south or if he'd ever lived to tell it. But when he escaped out of Baltimore in late August of 1838, it was a well planned scheme. And it must be said here that if Douglass hadn't spent those years in Baltimore, we wouldn't know about him. 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.
- [18:21]
Alison Stewart
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.
- [18:41]
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'd 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 biggest, 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 silver for distinction. And that's how Douglass became Frederick Douglass. It was on the first morning in New Bedford, Massachusetts. He and Anna will live in New Bedford for the next three years. Their first three children will be born there. I'm sorry, first two children will be born there. Douglass worked in every kind of manual labor you can imagine in that great whaling port. He carried whale oil casts. He worked in a foundry. He did all kinds of odd jobs for people. But here's one of my favorite facts about Douglass, either in his first year or his second year, certainly by 1840, because there's a record. He walked to city hall, which is only two blocks from where they were living, and he registered to vote. And I found the record. It's right there. It says Frederick Douglass. It gives his address. He paid the $50 poll tax. Massachusetts had a poll tax. And by the way, it wasn't a poll tax that tried to prevent anybody from voting necessarily. It was a poll tax to try to pay for the electoral system. But what we do know is that by the time he was 21 or 22, the runaway slave, illegal immigrant, if you like, Frederick Douglass registered to vote.
- [21:57]
Alison Stewart
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?
- [22:19]
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 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 about 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. You didn't have to go to divinity school. He was actually technically ordained by them. And that's where he learned to a certain extent the principles of homiletics, of how you preach to the text of the Bible. Each week had its text. And it was while giving one of these sermons. He didn't preach there every week. He was one of the preachers. He's 21, probably, or 22 at the most, when he was first discovered there by some white abolitionists who dropped in to go to church that day or to see what was happening. And one thing led to another. And it was after that that he got invited first to a convention of abolitionists that met in New Bedford, and then especially by William Lloyd Garrison's organization, the Massachusetts Antislavery Society. 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. The stories we end up later reading about in his narrative. Stories about the Eastern Shore, stories about the Y plantation, stories about the olds in Baltimore and so on and so on. But there he was at age 23. Now he does tell us that he, you know, quaked in his boots that first time he had to get up on that big platform at the Athenaeum and speak to this August room full of white abolitionists. But he triumphed. He says he trembled when he first started, but he not only got through it, he wowed them. And Garrison then hired him to be an itinerant lecturer on the anti slavery circuit. And by September and October of that fall 1841, he was a slightly paid itinerant lecturer for the Massachusetts Anti Slavery Society. And it is the last time in Douglass's life that he would do manual labor for, for pay. He'd do manual labor again for his own home and his own homestead here and there. But the rest of Douglass's life from that day forward, he made a living with his voice and his pen. And he's one of the few people in the 19th century who could actually do that.
- [28:03]
Alison Stewart
This is all of it on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. Today is the 4th of July and on the show we're learning about the life of the famed abolitionist Frederick Douglass who gave a famous speech examining what freedom really means called what to the Slave is the fourth of July. You'll hear excerpts from my full bio conversation with historian David Blight, author of the 2018 Pulitzer Prize winning biography, Frederick Douglass, Prophet of Freedom. For this segment we pick up Frederick Douglass story as he becomes a well known public speaker. His words and delivery methods were bold and unusual for the time because of their personal nature. To get a sense of the power of his words, let's listen to a reading of one of his most famous speeches that he delivered on July 5, 1852 titled what to the Slave is the Fourth of July. Here's actor Philip Darius Wallace doing a dramatic reading of the speech for the U.S. national Archives.
- [28:53]
David Blight
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. 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.
- [29:56]
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?
- [30:26]
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. His, 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. I mean, the first speech for which we have a text comes from 1842. Then we get a few more text of speeches in the next year or so, and then eventually by the mid-1840s and into the late 1840s, we have lots of text of the speeches. Douglass delivered his own text and then sometimes those texts as recorded by journalists. This was now an orator who could do what the Colombian orator had taught him to do. And that is use your full body, use the fullness of your voice. Start low, but work toward crescendos. But above all, he was the orator who could take you somewhere. He was the orator who could tell you a story that you are suddenly embodying and you're coming along on a journey somewhere. And ultimately that journey is taking you to some deep moral message that probably will make you hurt. And last point about that, his first few years out on the circuit, in particular, 1841, 42, 43, 44, his most popular lecture, his most popular subject was what became known as the slaveholders sermon. This is where Douglass would get up and he'd start reading some of those passages in the Bible that are pro slavery. You know, slaves, be loyal to your masters, and so on and so on and so on. He'd read some of those passages and then he read something else from the Gospel that would be anti slavery. But mostly he would start mimicking a pro slavery preacher in the South. He'd prance around the stage, he'd go into his Southern accents. And it was so popular when he would do these that it got to the point out on the circuit that the way abolitionists ran their, their gatherings is they would have four or five speakers, they'd have a resolution. Each speaker was supposed to speak to or against the resolution. But often they'd be doing their resolutions and somebody in the audience would just shout out, I have a number of these examples. They'd say, hey, Fred, do the sermon.
- [34:37]
Alison Stewart
He, he'd say his greatest hits, if you will.
- [34:40]
David Blight
Yeah, do your greatest. Take us, the old song. And he'd just break into his slaveholders sermon and he'd have them laughing and weeping. And of course, the whole point of that slaveholder sermon was to just dig the irony out of the hypocrisy of slave, of pro slavery preachers. And this speech would be a staple for him whenever he needed it for years to follow. In fact, religious hypocrisy about slavery became, at least in his early life, Douglass, absolute favorite subject.
- [35:19]
Alison Stewart
As people wrote about him, they always seemed 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?
- [35:41]
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 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. But, you know, we're talking the 19th century here. We're talking the heyday of racial science and these. Look, it's still alive today. People wonder if you know somebody who's a mixed race. Well, they're more intelligent because they got one white parent or something. That's still embedded in people. It's still deep down, no matter how much we learn about how race is a social construction and how much the biology of race is essentially a fict in the 19th century, they didn't know that yet. 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 a lot from the people around him. He learned a lot from Garrison, for example, about how to use the Bible in his rhetoric and God, did he ever. That's a huge part of Douglass's oratory is particularly his uses of the Hebrew prophets, the Old Testament prophets. But what Douglass also learned along the way is how you, how to connect with audiences, what they cared about, what stories would grab them, how he could have them in his hands. And we're talking about speeches he would sometimes deliver for an hour, even two hours. Today you couldn't get away with that. Nobody had the attention span. But he became early on a master in this golden age of oratory. You got to remember, oratory in the middle of the 19th century was, you know, it was the only game in town. It was the only entertainment in town. 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.
- [39:08]
Alison Stewart
And they also didn't always agree with one another. There were different philosophies in the anti slavery movement. Where was Frederick Douglass early in his career?
- [39:19]
David Blight
Well, early on, he's a thoroughgoing Garrisonian, which simply means a follower of William Lloyd Garrison. That meant he was in those first five, six, seven years of his speaking career. A moral suasionist, that is, the effort was to change the hearts and minds of people and not so much to change the law or to change the political system. Garrison even taught that political parties were to be avoided. They were dirty. They were complicitous with slavery. Garrison also argued for a kind of radical anarchism of a kind. He called it disunionism. He said what northern abolitionists really should do is pull out from the Union, disunify with the south, don't not be complicitous with slavery. That one was hard to follow. Garrison was also a pacifist. Strict pacifists, they called it, non resistance. And Garrison advocated not voting. Now, some of these were easier for Frederick Douglass and some other black abolitionists to follow because they had such respect for Garrison, but some of them were not. Douglass, though, is a thoroughgoing Garrisonian until he writes that first narrative, 1845. He goes off to England between 1845, fall 1845 and the spring of 1847. And it was during that 19 month or so tour of Ireland, Scotland and England where Douglass just flowered. He encountered situations with far less racism than he encountered in America and sometimes no racism at all. He was embraced by the Irish abolitionists. The Scots loved him, and all over Britain he made permanent friends in the British reform circles and in the British anti slavery movement. A group of British abolitionists led by two sisters in Newcastle raised the money to purchase his freedom. So Douglass came back from England in 47amuch more independent young man. And now he's 29 years old and he's beginning to ideologically and even personally break with Garrison. Garrison had been, though, a genuine mentor, almost like a father figure, at least an older brother figure. And Douglass adored Garrison to some extent, but they will have a big, terrible ideological falling out. Of course.
- [42:10]
Alison Stewart
You write of that relationship between William Lloyd Garrison and Douglass in mythic terms. It was important and turbulent. When did the turbulence come in?
- [42:19]
David Blight
The turbulence began after 1847 and into 48 and 49. Because Douglass wants to be independent, he moves from Massachusetts. Lynn, Massachusetts is where they'd been living. He moved out to Rochester, New York, in western New York, a city now at the end of the Erie Canal, but a city that was known to be a kind of safe haven for abolitionists. And Garrison and his Garrisonians did not want Douglass to do this. He wanted to create his own independent newspaper. He wanted to go on his own. The Garrisonians wanted Douglass to stay within the fold, because he was, he was their star. Douglass and Garrison did their final lecture tour together in 1848. They traveled from Pennsylvania all out through Ohio. And they were supposed to, they were supposed to do the swing right back into the state of New York. They were operating with what was known as the Oberlin tent. This was a huge tent that had been created in Oberlin, Ohio, which was an anti slavery town with an anti slavery college. They claimed they could get at least 2,000 people into this tent. They would put that baby up out in a farmer's field or on the edge of some village or town. They'd take it down, put it in the wagon and take it to the next town. But at one point Garrison began to lose his voice and he got deathly sick. And Garrison went on up to Cleveland and was very, very ill with pneumonia and who knows what else and nearly died. Douglass stayed on the circuit, but that was the last time they ever really collaborated on anything. Because it was right after that that Douglass let Garrison know he was moving lock, stock and barrel to Rochester, New York and going to create his own newspaper. The real breakup though, comes in about 1850, 51, when Garrison and the Garrisonians condemned Douglass. And Douglass made a full ideological shift to the politics of abolitionism, to advocating the right to vote and even advocating in certain circumstances the uses of violence against slavery. And also there was, as you know from reading the book, that there was a scandal involved. And the scandal involved a white woman, an English woman named Julia Griffiths, whom Douglass had met in England. And Julia came to America in 1849, came out to Rochester, lived in the Douglass home for the following three years and then after that for three more years just up the road. And she became Douglass assistant editor. She became his chief fundraiser. She was an extremely close friend and confidant. She was his right hand person in running his newspaper and his anti slavery operation. The Garrisonians, though, so resented Douglass by 51 that they, the Garrison himself just announced that Douglass was having an affair, a sexual affair with Julia in his own home, under the eyes of his children and his wife. Now this was vehemently denied, of course, by, by Douglass and by Julia and by Anna, his wife. But it was the last straw. And Douglass and Garrison would never again be good friends. In fact, they wouldn't even appear in the same platform or the same room together again for another 10 years. Now, everyone's wondering, of course, is that story true? I doubt it. I doubt there was a sexual affair between Douglas and Julia Griffiths. We don't know for sure. What we do know is it was an extremely close friendship and an extraordinarily important friendship. Julia and her sister bought the mortgage on Douglas's house so he wouldn't lose the house. She raised a lot of money to keep his newspaper alive from well to do abolitionist in upstate New York. She was indeed an assistant editor. She kept that newspaper going at times when Douglass himself was either on the road or at times actually quite ill himself. In fact, I point out in the book that in 1851, for a period of time, Douglass by all appearances had a nervous breakdown. I think it's one of the true crucial turning points in his life. Here was the so called self made man who could barely make ends meet, who could barely put food on a table for his now family of five children. And he just came apart and he was, you know, trying to end slavery in the United States and there was no reason to believe you were ever going to be able to, to do that. And Julia sort of held the ship together at the printing office. And she also, from her letters, we know, would stay up late nights reading the psalms with Douglass, sometimes singing favorite hymns and sometimes also reciting favorite poems by Robert Burns. Douglass was a huge fan of Robert Burns and also, I should say Julia Griffiths was the original source of Douglass's now growing library. She helped purchase some of the first collections that Douglass owned. He would end up with a huge library later in life. Julia would be gone though by 1855 she moved back to England where she married a doctor named Crofts. But Douglass and Julia Griffith stayed correspondence the rest of their lives. And I should say that what this relationship meant to Douglass, among other things, is that he had a genuine intellectual comrade, whereas his wife Anna, though extremely important in his life and obviously the lives of the five children, remained a non reader, non writer all of her life.
- [49:12]
Alison Stewart
I've been speaking with historian David Blight about his Pulitzer Prize winning biography, Frederick Douglass, Prophet of Freedom. From our full bio conversation.
- [49:28]
David Blight
All day.
- [49:28]
Alison Stewart
Today for July 4th, we're discussing the life of a man who had a lot of thoughts about the significance of the holiday and what liberty means. Frederick Douglass. Our guest is David Blight, professor of history at Yale University and author of Frederick Douglass Prophet of Freedom. It won the Pulitzer Prize in 2018. We've arrived at the part of the story where we learn about Douglass family life which at times reads like a TV soap opera full of lawsuits, difficult marriages and sometimes tragedy. His longtime partner, his wife Anne Murray Douglas, had five children with Frederick, but only four survived into Adulthood. Douglass was also insistent that his sons fight in the Civil War and his daughter married a man who didn't like Douglass at all and even tried to publicly disgrace him. His wife Anne, never really relied on Douglass for comfort and company because he was barely home. He found intellectual companionship outside of his marriage with several women. Douglas was a man of letters, but Anna couldn't read and never learned. Yet still, their marriage lasted for more than 40 years. I asked David Blight about how Frederick Douglass met Anna and why they decided to get married.
- [50:34]
David Blight
Well, he meets Anna probably when he was about 18 in Baltimore. Could have met her even a bit before that. She was free. Although they were born out on the Eastern Shore, probably only three miles from each other. And you know, when they met, I've always, we don't know, but I've always imagined they must have just started telling stories from the Eastern Shore. They probably played as children at the same mill on the Tuckahoe River. But she, by then she was three years older than Douglas and she had a gig. She had a job working in the home of a well to do white family. She got paid enough to, well, sort of make a living. But they fell in love. He was a strapping 18 year old, brilliant young guy. They might have met at church, they might have met even at a debating society that Douglass participated in. And she was very involved, we know, in his plot of escape in 1838. And once they are out of Maryland and into New York and on up to New Bedford, as we've discussed here, was this young couple, you know, began having children and trying to make a home in this foreign world of the north and in a free black community. That they grew into very different people says something about their skills. Different skills. It says a lot about gender. I mean, what options did an Anna Murray have? People have always wondered why she never learned to read and write. And everyone should be careful with all the possible speculations about them. The truth is, we do not know why. What we do know is Douglas, their daughter Rosetta, who was their, their oldest, and Julia Griffiths for that matter, all tutored Anna. They tried everything they knew to teach her reading and writing and it just never worked. For whatever the real reason, at the end of the day, we do know that Anna kept the bank book. She was good with numbers, she kept the accounts. We know that from a reminiscence written by the daughter Rosetta. And of course, early on in this marriage, each other was all they had. So it was no doubt a deep and abiding bond. And then five children are born within the course of, well, about eight years. And the fifth one, Annie, Anna's namesake, would only live to be 11. She died of diphtheria in 1860 when Douglass was off in England escaping after John Brown's raid. So this is a family early, at least, that is going to have a lot of joy, but a lot of real hardship and then tragedy as well. But Ann is the one who kept the family together. She's married to this growing intellectual, this man who's trying to read everything he can find, this man who is editing a newspaper, this man who is writing books, books and essays and editorials and even one novella that the world is taking notice of. I mean, who knows what Anna must have thought about this, but by the middle of the 1850s, she's married to the most famous black man in the world.
- [54:16]
Alison Stewart
And he's on the road constantly. That's becomes very clear during the course of the book and course of their life. He is not physically present as a husband or a father. She's left on her own quite a bit. Did you get a sense from his letters or why being physically with his family wasn't a higher priority?
- [54:40]
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 a hundred 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 are 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. You know, 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 Parker, she made a very bad marriage to a Civil war veteran. Had seven babies with him in 12 years. That will, 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. And that's, that's both. That has some pleasure, but it has some peril as well. And he became eventually the sole financial supporter of most of this huge extended family. By the 1870s, only his oldest son, Louis, by my calculations, was able to really develop an independent life. Everybody else was dependent on him. And we know this because there are quite detailed account books, several of them, that show how much money Douglass is disbursing for this and for that. But it shows particularly how much money he is giving directly to his sons, his son in law and his daughter. And eventually even to his grandchildren.
- [59:17]
Alison Stewart
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.
- [59:49]
David Blight
It's Otelia Ossen.
- [59:51]
Alison Stewart
Otelje Ossining, 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?
- [60:03]
David Blight
Turbulent, mysterious and very difficult to explain. Of all the problems to solve in Douglass's biography, and there are several, it's trying to get to the bottom of and explain Otelia Assing. That was the most difficult of all. Atelier 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. But she came to America in the early 1850s as a journalist. 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 Douglas'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? And of course he said yes. And well, one thing led to another to another. But in effect, as you suggested, Allison, she tried never to leave. Now their relationship would be roughly about 22 years, years on and off, on and off. She lived in Hoboken, New Jersey, which was an enclave of German emigres, particularly emigre writers and artists and a couple of scientists. She made a living in part through her journalism, but in part as a teacher. She wrote for a journal in Germany called Der Morgenblatt, where she wrote regular essays and we have, we have all of those. But she would go out to Rochester where the Douglasses lived and spend summers as a sort of friend of the family. Now, we also know that Douglass visited Hoboken on his travels. If you traveled into New York City by train and then traveled south out of New York City, you went through Hoboken. It was a main train depot. Now, she lived in a boarding house. She operated her own salon. She called it her gang. This was a group of anywhere from 5 to 10, mostly German emigres, intellectuals. And they just thought Douglas was the coolest thing that ever happened. Here was this, you know, this dashing, kind of romantic black American radical. And all of them were trying to be now newly formed American radicals. And he would go, according to assing, and spend a night or two there in Hoboken at various times. The problem with this relationship, there are many, but one of them is a source problem. Everything we know about the relationship. Well, let's say no, 95% of what we know about it comes only from her. From her pen, from her letters to her sister that she wrote back to Europe. Her sister Lyudmila lived in various parts of Europe. And we have some of the letters she wrote to Douglass have survived. Not a single letter from him to her survived. That's interesting. She burned them all, we believe. Now, we do know she wrote to him a lot because she's always saying, got your letter. I'm glad you said this. What about that? Now, 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. It's a brilliant book. I highly recommend it. She doesn't believe it really was a sexual relationship. And we've had wonderful fawn arguments about all that. At the end of the day, it may not matter what Osing 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, Ossing, at least in these letters, resented anybody that got between her and Douglass. Son, daughter, wife, or anybody Else, for that matter. And even after Douglass moved to Washington, D.C. in 1872, after his house was burned in Rochester, Ossing still continued to visit in Washington. And she would come and visit for like three months at a time and live in the Douglass home.
- [65:59]
Alison Stewart
I've been speaking with historian David Blight about his biography, Frederick Douglass, Prophet of Freedom. This is all of it on wnyc. I'm Alison Stewart. All day on the show. Today, we're discussing the massive biography of Frederick Douglass, Prophet of Freedom, by David Blight, professor of history at Yale. For this segment, we'll look at Frederick Douglass, the politician. He was embraced by the Republican Party different than the one we know today, and campaigned for every Republican candidate for president after the Civil War. But that doesn't mean he and the party always saw eye to eye. For example, Douglas was a critic of Abraham Lincoln. Early on, he was concerned that the president didn't initially support black men fighting in the Civil War. And once they were allowed to fight, including two of Douglas's own sons, they were paid half of what white soldiers were being paid to fight. And to be clear, Lincoln wasn't an abolitionist, but rather was concerned with what would keep the Union together. Later in his life, Douglas became a bit of a regular figure in DC but by this time he was an elder and found himself publicly at odds with emerging black leaders like John Mercer Langston, one of the first African Americans to hold elected office in the United States, and Richard T. Greener, dean of Howard Law School and the first black graduate of Harvard. I asked David Blight about whether he considered Douglas a political figure leading up to and during the war.
- [67:25]
David Blight
Oh, yes, he's an enormously political figure. Politics, though, like for all of us, for Douglas, was a. Was a learned instinct. As we said earlier, 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, and Douglass, in the course of the 1850s in particular, learned to a degree, the craft of politics. But this is politics from outside of political circles, outside of political parties, by and large, and certainly outside of the government. But Douglass became, in the 1850s in his newspaper, an extraordinary, 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 running a newspaper up in Rochester, New York. 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. And that's a journey that we've seen other times in American history. Look at all the leaders of the modern civil rights movement who then got elected to office as mayors and as congressmen and, you know, and then there was this young guy named Obama who actually got elected president, for God's sake. You know what happens when you're inside of power? What deals do you have to make? What compromises do you have to make about principle? Douglass lives that story as kind. Kind of the prototype of that for the rest of American history. But he had tremendous political instincts. It took time to develop it, but he had an astute understanding of politics as power and finding ways to wield it and to bend it. His frustration was always, of course, that abolitionists had so little power. They were always on the outside, knocking on the doors to get inside. 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.
- [70:53]
Alison Stewart
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 Douglas and Lincoln, a relationship you describe as difficult, but eventually historic. How did they view one another initially?
- [71:10]
David Blight
Well, at arm's length, at least. In fact, Douglass 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. Douglass struggle the first year of the Civil War was whether to trust the Republicans, whether they really were as anti slavery as they seem to portray themselves. That relationship, though, took hold particularly in 1863, with their first meeting. August of 63, they meet in Washington. But that was at Douglass demand. He didn't have any invitation. He went, in effect, to protest discriminations against black soldiers in the army. They had, as they say in diplomatic Circles, they had a useful exchange of ideas. They didn't entirely agree. But Douglas did tell us after that first meeting with Lincoln at the White House in 63 that he was impressed with Lincoln as a person. In fact, I think he was awed by Lincoln because Lincoln at least took him seriously, sat and talked with him. In fact, Douglass walked away from there and wrote that he'd never been treated so straightforwardly and honestly by a white man with power as he had been by Lincoln. Their second meeting though, is the great one. It's a full year later. It's August of 64. The war is in a horrible stalemate. Lincoln believes he may not be re elected in the, you know, the election of 1864, and with good reason. 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 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. Douglas didn't have a clue how he's 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 had 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. Atlanta fell to Sherman first week of September. Even before that, Mobile Bay fell to Admiral Farragut. August 25th. Phil Sheridan's army began to move down the Shenandoah Valley right in the beginning of September. And the war changed 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. Douglas was in the crowd. Douglass went to Washington. He was going to be there. He was off to Lincoln's left down 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. 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. This is the great second inaugural. Every drop of blood shed by the last shall be paid with blood shed by the sword and so on. 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. Speech. It's very old testament speech. And then, of course, Lincoln was assassinated one month later or five weeks later. And the irony there is there are many. But Lincoln had invited Douglas to come have tea in late March at the soldiers home, which was this retreat where Lincoln and other presidents would go. And who knows, that might have been a much longer meeting, but Douglass had to turn it down because he had a speaking engagement and he couldn't go. And then Lincoln was killed, of course, April 14, and he was gone now. 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.
- [77:42]
Alison Stewart
Can we talk about Andrew Johnson for just a moment?
- [77:45]
David Blight
Sure.
- [77:45]
Alison Stewart
Douglass said of Johnson, whatever Andrew Johnson may be, he is no friend of our race. Yes, 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?
- [78:05]
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. Douglas gets up at 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 Douglass 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. 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 believed should be done to thwart and stop Andrew Johnson. But that was their only significant encounter. 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.
- [81:16]
Alison Stewart
That was part of my conversation with historian David blight. About his biography, Frederick Douglass, prophet of freedom. For our July 4th show today.
- [81:28]
David Blight
You.
- [81:29]
Alison Stewart
Are listening to all of it. I'm Alison Stewart. And for the final installment of our July 4th show on the life of Frederick Douglass, we're going to talk about his later years and how the world reacted to his death in 1895. At this time in his life, professionally, Douglass was a bit adrift. Although he was still on speaking tours, he was no longer publishing his newspaper. In his later life, he was given various appointments. Some went better than others. In the 1870s, he struggled as the president of the Freedmen Savings bank, which was created for newly freed slaves to secure assets safely. Things got so bad he had to prop up the bank with his own money. In the 1880s, he was named as the US minister to Haiti and spent a lot of time on the island, even during a time of intense political violence. But his version of how the US And Haiti should interact was different than the opinion of President Harrison's administration. In 1882, Douglass lost his wife of more than 40 years, Anna. He remarried two years later, which prompted a scandal. His new wife was named Helen Pitts, a much younger white woman. When Frederick Douglass died In February of 1895 at the age of 77, people across the country mourned his passing and thousands came to pay their respects at his funeral in Washington, D.C. i asked David Blight why Frederick Douglass started feeling adrift in his later years.
- [82:48]
David Blight
Well, he's adrift now because he can no longer be absolutely certain what his profession really is. He doesn't have a newspaper anymore. His reason to be for so many years was getting up with his newspaper. Sixteen years of the North Star and then Douglass monthly, and then two and a half years of the new national era there in D.C. in 1870-71. He now makes a living largely by the lecture circuit until he gets his first federal appointment from Rutherford B. Hayes in 1877 as the marshal of the District of Columbia. That brought a salary. That's the first time in Douglass's adult life that he had ever been paid something resembling a salary. And it was a decent salary. I think it was something like $8,000, which is real money in the 19th century, serious money. But he also gets involved in various business ventures. 1874, you mentioned the Freedmen's bank, which was a disaster. The Freedman's bank had been created right after the war, was one of the greatest ideas of research Reconstruction. But it was never fully capitalized. And when Douglass took it over, number one, he was not A banker number two. He did not fully understand the condition the bank was in. It was already failing. It had a board that didn't care about it anymore. And the bank in the summer of 1874 failed on his watch. And he will end up doing testimony before Congress on and off for the next eight years or so because of that bank failure. He did other ventures. There were ventures in real estate, some of which actually did succeed. He ends up buying homes and renting apartments in D.C. in Baltimore. He got his sons involved in that. So he's trying to make a living, but he's making that living primarily with his voice. Douglass would do lecture tours, especially in the winter of three months at a time, four months at a time, all across what we call the Midwest. He would lecture from upstate New York all the way out through Michigan, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, Iowa. In the dead of winter. He would speak every day, or at least every other day. He had a standard fee of $100. He would sometimes ask for for more and the expense of the train. So he would come back from one of these lecture trips with three or $4,000, which is in some ways the way his extended family was supported. He also made money off of his real estate investments and so on. But these were the aging years for Douglass. It is also the time in the 1870s when Reconstruction, falling apart, 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. And black protest 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. I have a chapter in the book, book called, I think it's the Joys and Sorrows at Cedar Hill. 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. They were always conducting funerals from Cedar Hill. One after another. Anna dies. 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 1880. Four, 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 hired her after he married her, after he had hired her as one of the clerks in the Recorder of Deeds office in Washington D.C. now, this needs to be understood. As Recorder of Deeds, he got eight appointments as clerks. This is to, you know, to process all the documents about real estate in the District of Columbia. The first four people he hired were his four adult children. And then he gets hammered in the press in Washington for nepotism. But he also hired this young woman named Helen Pitts. 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. And do you realize your father just bought a marriage license down the hall here? It was in City hall in the District. And Rosetta must have had a reaction, something like what? But sure enough, Helen and Frederick had been married that afternoon in the parlor of a black minister named Francis Grimke, a good friend of Douglass's. They had decided to not tell a soul. They didn't tell any of Douglass's children until after the fact. They decided to face the storm of this after instead of before. And there was a storm that went on for months in the press. But here again, he had a companion now who, I mean, they read books together, they now travel together. She was a public wife, they appeared together in public. And in 1886 and early 87, they did an 11 month tour of Europe and of the Mediterranean. That is just extraordinary. And he kept a diary. Happily, on much of that trip, she kept a small diary. But by all accounts, this marriage worked. You know, she was exactly the kind of computer companion he seemed to need. And perhaps he was for her as well. It was her first marriage, her only marriage. But it was a difficult thing for Douglass family. Douglass's children never really warmed up to Helen. That's putting it mildly. And they just never really took Helen in as their own. And she tried her best to taken them in, but the press went crazy over this. In fact, my favorite thing about press coverage was that the more and More. This went on for months of scandal in the newspapers. They kept making her younger and him older. Douglass was way in his. He was 66 and she was 46. But, man, by the time the press got finished with this, he was in his 70s, she was in her 30s. He was robbing the cradle. 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 this is the 1880s. The most famous black man in the country marries a white woman 20 years younger. I mean, that might even be, you know, that might even be newsworthy today, much less then. So. But you know what? They both handled it with a kind of, whatever you want to call it, grace. As they got attacked, they either just looked the other way or sometimes he would get up and answer and say, I will marry exactly who I please. So, but then in his old age, he kept. He would occasionally in letters say, okay, now I'm going to retire, whatever that means. But then he gets asked by President Harrison, the second President Harrison, to be the US minister to Haiti in 1889, a position he found he couldn't turn down. It wasn't a first. He was the third black American to be the U.S. ambassador to Haiti. But it was a remarkable experience for two years, and he got blindsided. In a sense. He probably should have done a little more homework about the history of Haiti, but he got caught up in Haiti trying to enforce an American policy for the State Department that he increasingly did not believe in, and that is that the United States was trying to annex part of Haiti.
- [92:42]
Alison Stewart
What was the reaction to Frederick Douglass death?
- [92:46]
David Blight
Well, when Douglass died, in the press reactions and the community reactions and a number of eulogies and memorials, one finds the degree, the scale of the kind of fame that he had achieved. He was this American story by then of the slave who became not only free, but. And not only the orator, but the writer. In fact, above all, I think if Douglass were ever here today to answer the question, what were you most proud of? It would be his writing. He wrote millions of words, 1200 pages of autobiography. Hundreds and hundreds of the short form political editorials, one novella and thousands of speeches. And by the way, Allison, all of his great speeches exist in a text. He didn't just give extemporaneous speech sermons off the top of his head. He wrote these speeches out. And people could quote from Douglass's autobiographies. They could just quote passages that had become part of a kind of a common language for lots of Americans. Not all Americans. But his death was acknowledged by, commented on by people all across the spectrum. It was acknowledged and noted in southern, you know, white supremacist newspapers. Douglass had become by then, this kind of iconic American figure. And his passing was, for African Americans in particular, the loss of an era. It was the end of a story. He really was almost the last surviving former slave who'd written a slave narrative, in his case, three of them, and lived to then become a spokesman of his people. And here's the final thing about that. It was the trajectory of his life, I think, that brought such attention. This is someone who was born out on the Eastern Shore, pre modernity, before the railroad, before the telegraph, before, before the rotary press, before all of these things that became so much a part of modernity in the middle of the 19th century, all of which he would use, of course. I mean, where would Douglass have been without the rotary press, the railroad, the telegraph and so on? Or for that matter, steamships. But he's going to live all the way until the middle of the 1890s, a whole new era of modernity when they had steamships that could cross the Atlantic in eight days, when they had something called electric light bulbs and they had something called the earliest telephones and they had something called the phonograph, which could record voices, although so far as we know, Douglass's voice was never recorded. So he lives from a kind of pre modern America all the way across the 19th century to a modernizing America. But look what he lived through.
- [96:04]
Alison Stewart
That was the final installment of my conversation with historian David Blight about his biography, Frederick Douglass, prophet of freedom. And that is all of it for July 4th. We'll be back tomorrow with some recommendations for the summer, like how to beat the heat, make refreshing cocktails, and where to get the best ice cream in the city. All of it is produced by Andrea Duncan Mao and Kate Hines, Jordan Loff, Simon Close, Zach Goddard Cohen, Elle Malik Anderson, Aki Camargo and Luke Green. Our intern this summer is Marissa Braswell. Megan Rine is the head of Live Radio. Our engineers are Juliana Fonda, Shana Sengstock and Jason Isaac. Luscious Jackson does our music. If you missed any segments of the live show, catch up by listening to our podcast, available on your podcast platform of choice. If you like what you hear, please leave us a great rating to help others find the show. I'm Alison Stewart. I appreciate you listening. I appreciate you and I will meet you back here next time.
- [96:58]
David Blight
This is Ira Flato, host of Science Friday for over 30 years, the science Friday team has been reporting high quality science and technology news, making science fun for curious people by covering everything from the outer reaches of space to the rapidly changing world of AI to the tiniest microbes in our bodies. Audiences trust our show because they know we're driven by a mission to inform and serve listeners first and foremost with important news they won't get anywhere else. And our sponsors benefit from that halo effect. For more information on becoming a sponsor, visit sponsorship.wnyc.org.