Introduction to Volume III by Robin L. Condon and Peter P. Hinks

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Introduction to Volume Three Robin L. Condon and Peter P. Hinks

By the time Frederick Douglass penned the first two parts of Life and Times that constituted its 1881 first edition, he had already published two successful autobiographies, served as editor of four newspapers, published thousands of editorials and articles in his own papers as well as in others, and advised several United States presidents- most notably Abraham Lincoln. Douglass entered civic life three years after his 1838 escape from slavery when he spoke before a predominantly white abolitionist audience in Nantucket, Massachusetts. This extemporaneous speech of 12 August 1841 led to Douglass 's seven years as a paid itinerant lecturer for the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, and later the American Anti-Slavery Society. His final autobiography integrates Douglass 's life as a slave with his later public career.

Born into slavery at Tuckahoe on the Eastern Shore of Maryland in February 1818, Douglass dedicated over two-thirds of his long life to human rights activism. On the morning of 20 February 1895 at the age of seventyseven, he attended a meeting of the Women's National Council in Washington, D.C. He returned to his home in Anacostia for a brief respite before a speech he was scheduled to deliver that evening at the Hillsdale African Church. As he waited for the carriage that was to convey him to the church, he collapsed and died.1New York Times, 21 February 1895. The third part added to his postbellum autobiography in 1892 was his final written construction of his identity, but Frederick Douglass's lifetime "labor of self-culture" did not end until the moment of his physical death.2James McCune Smith, "Introduction," in The Frederick Douglass Papers Series Two: Autobiographical Writings, ed. John W. Blassinggame et al., 3 vols. (New Haven, Conn., 1999-2011), 2:11 (hereafter cited as Douglass Papers).

The present edition of Life and Times contains Douglass's third and fourth returns to the story of his life. All of Douglass·s autobiographical writings departed from the same point—his birth into slavery—and all concluded with the experiences immediately anterior to the date of each book's completion. Each publication, Narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845), My Bondage and Freedom (1855), and Life and Times (1881; 1882; 1892) should therefore he considered an indepen-

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dent and complete work; the stories they relate, though similar, are not identical. The differences among the autobiographies reveal the development of Douglass's character, intellect, and thought during the forty-eight years he engaged in self-narrative. Douglass occasionally revised his earlier interpretations of certain life incidents in later books. For example, the young Douglass of the Narrative interpreted his abilities and unusual opportunities as evidence that he had been selected by Providence to transcend the circumstances of his birth. In his later life writings, Douglass attributed his successes to causes more mundane: the opportunities afforded him by members of his masters' families, his friendships with white boys during his sojourn in Baltimore, and the frequent unaccountable strokes of luck that allowed him the time and privacy to educate himself.3 In Life and Times, Douglass revealed for the first time the details of his harrowing escape from slavery in September 1838.

All of Douglass's autobiographical writings concluded with expressions of hope for future full freedom and racial equality for African Americans. None of the conclusions promised a sequel, although apparently Douglass could not resist adding a third part when he expanded and revised the 1882 second edition in 1892, explaining to his readers, "When the first part of this book was written, I was, as before intimated, already looking towards the sunset of human life and thinking that my children would probably finish the recital of my life, or that possibly some other persons outside of family ties to whom I am known might think it worth while to tell what he or she might know of the remainder of my story. I considered, as I have said, that my work was done. But friends and publishers concur in the opinion that the unity and completeness of the work require that it shall be finished by the hand by which it was begun" (377). Likely the former slave, who began authoring his own life a mere seven years after attaining freedom and who chose the name under which he published his autobiographies, felt considerable ambivalence about ceding the self he had created to other writers, even to his children or trusted friends. To the end, he embodied his oft-invoked character, the self-made man he so deeply respected.

Douglass wrote his first full autobiography at the age of twenty-seven. Published under the aegis of William Lloyd Garrison's American AntiSlavery Society, Douglass's Narrative authenticated his status as a fugitive slave for white audiences who doubted that the eloquent orator spent his first

33. Waldo E. Martin, Jr., points out, "His [Douglass's] ascension to the role [of race leader] betrayed the necessary conjunction of ability, ambition, and fortuitous circumstance." Waldo E. Martin, Jr., The Mind of Frederick Douglass (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1984), 55.

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twenty years in bondage. Douglass's Narrative enjoyed unprecedented success among slave narratives published prior to 1846. Appearing in May 1845, by September of that year it had sold over 4,500 copies, and by 1848 it had been translated into French, German, and Dutch. During its first two years in print, six new editions were published: two Irish and four English. A grand total of twenty-one editions had appeared in print a scant six years after Narrative's first publication. By 1853 approximately 30,000 copies of the book had been sold.

Garrison arranged for Douglass to tour the British Isles after the publication of his Narrative. There, the book sold well and provided Douglass with an oratorical platform from which to denounce the institution of slavery in the United States. The tour was also timed to protect Douglass from his former masters, whose identities (as well as his own slave identity) Douglass had revealed in the book. Experiencing widespread celebrity and presenting well-reasoned, persuasive, and eloquent arguments against the institution, Douglass converted a great many of his transatlantic readers and listeners to the belief that immediate uncompensated emancipation would be the best course for the United States. While Douglass was exhorting the British to support abolition in the United States, American southerners, and particularly those who had known Douglass as Frederick Bailey the slave, attacked the book's veracity. One of Douglass's most vitriolic critics was A. C. C. Thompson,4 whose father, a physician and slaveholder at St. Michaels, owned a farm not far from that of Edward Covey during the time of Douglass's work there. Denouncing Douglass's Narrative as a collection of lies, Thompson defended the character and actions of Thomas Auld in a public letter to the Delaware Republican calling Douglass "a recreant slave" and accusing him of perpetrating falsehoods about slaveholders in general.5 Thompson's public exchange of letters with Douglass confirmed the authenticity of events reported in the book and increased rather than diminished the book's popularity.

Although Douglass's British sojourn from 1845 to 1847 was in most ways a great success, it compromised his relationship with his Garrisonian mentors. Irish abolitionist Richard Webb, who published an edition of the Narrative, shared with Douglass a letter from Garrisonian Maria Weston Chapman, in which she warned Webb to watch Douglass for signs of defec-

44. Douglass Papers, ser. 3, 1:86n.

55. John W. Blassingame, "Introduction to Volume One," in Douglass Papers, ser. 2, l:xli; Douglass to William Lloyd Garrison, in The Frederick Douglass Papers, Series 3: Correspondence, ed. John R. McKivigan (New Haven, Conn., 2009), 1:81–88.

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tion to "The London Committee," namely the anti-Garrisonian British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society. Insulted by the tone of the letter, an angry Douglass replied to Chapman in March 1846, "I never gave you any just cause to distrust me, and if I am to be watched over for evel rather than for good, by my professed freinds I can say with propriety save me from my friends, and I will take care of my enemies!"6 Chapman's warning to Webb further soured Douglass's view of the manner in which the white leadership of the American Anti-Slavery Society treated him. Nonetheless, Douglass continued his work for the society while abroad, joining British Garrisonian George Thompson at public meetings across the British Isles to condemn the Free Church of Scotland's acceptance of donations from American slaveholders.7

By 1847 Douglass felt bound by duty to return to America, where his family remained, and where he could work for freedom alongside others of his race. His Narrative had increased his danger of rendition to his old masters once he landed in the United States, a reality that alarmed his British friends and motivated them to raise the capital to purchase Douglass's freedom. On 5 December 1846 the fugitive became a legally free man as a result of a financial transaction between his transatlantic supporters, led by British abolitionist Mrs. Henry Richardson, and the Auld family. The purchase of Douglass's freedom sparked controversy among some American abolitionists, who felt that Douglass's mode of obtaining his freedom condoned the trafficking in human beings and constituted "a violation of anti-slavery principles."8 Douglass answered his critics by comparing the exchange to "money extorted from a robber" or a "ransom" rather than an affirmation of any man's right of ownership of another.9

After securing his freedom and returning to the United States, Douglass announced his plan to start a newspaper dedicated to abolition and racial advancement. Garrison opposed the idea, arguing that Douglass was better suited as an orator and could contribute more to abolition in that role. The objections that Garrison voiced to Douglass did not reveal the scope of the former's opposition. Douglass had been the Garrisonians' most powerful orator, winning many to the abolitionist cause. In addition, Garrison was almost certainly concerned about the competition between Douglass's newspaper and his own, the Liberator. Douglass regretted losing the support of

66. Douglass Papers, ser. 3, 1:100.

77. Ibid., 101nn.

88. Ibid., ser. 2, 2:216.

99. Ibid.

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the Boston abolitionists, but he persevered in his intention, relocating to Rochester, New York. There he established the North Star, a newspaper initially funded with testimonials given him for that purpose while he was still in Britain. Its first issue appeared on 3 December 1847. As Garrison had predicted, Douglass's newspaper faced financial difficulties from the start, having a small list of subscribers and considerable weekly costs. Douglass mortgaged his house and accepted donations from the Garrisonians' Western New York Anti-Slavery Society. British abolitionist Julia Griffiths moved to Rochester temporarily in 1849 to organize the financial operations of the North Star. Initially Douglass's new paper espoused Garrisonian tenets: it condemned colonization schemes, proclaimed churches and the U.S. Constitution to be proslavery in nature, and advocated disunion. However, the North Star also included contributions by well-known blacks like Samuel R. Ward, Amos G. Beman, William J. Wilson, Henry Bibb, and James McCune Smith. While the paper's articles began to focus on the problem of northern racism and self-help, it also became more political as Douglass himself became more involved in the free black community in New York State.10 After meeting and corresponding with wealthy landowner and philanthropist Gerrit Smith, Douglass revised his abolitionist ideology in clearer distinction to that of the Garrisonians. In letters dating from 1849 published in the North Star, Smith and Douglass discussed the nature of the U.S. Constitution regarding slavery, concluding that one's method of interpreting the document was crucial. If the Constitution was read strictly by the letter, independently of the intentions of its framers, it could be read as an antislavery document, and one that conferred upon the federal government the power to end slavery in all its forms. If intent originating outside the letter or the document dictated its interpretation, then the Constitution was, as the Garrisonians held, proslavery, and disunion, rather than political abolition, would be the best agenda for abolition societies to recommend.11 Although Douglass did not openly declare his opposition to the Garrisonian interpretation of the Constitution until the spring of 1851, he had ceased to view it as a proslavery document by early 1849.12 The North Star would publish until June 1851, when, merging with the Syracuse Liberty Party Paper; it was renamed Frederick Douglass' Paper. Ideology, political visibility, and an

1010. For a full discussion of the North Star's early operations, see John R. McKivigan, "The Frederick Douglass Gerrit Smith Friendship," in Frederick Douglass: New Literary and Political Essays, ed. Eric J. Sundquist (1990; New York, 1993), 205–32.

1111. Douglass Papers, ser. 3, 1:374–78, 417–19, 438–54.

1212. Ibid., 448n.

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