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

xxviii INTRODUCTION TO VOLUME THREE

When a conflict between Thomas Auld and his brother resulted in Douglass's return to the former's home in Talbot County, he returned a literate and independent teenager whose formative experiences differed greatly from those of his fellow slaves who had remained at the Lloyd plantation, among whom numbered his own brother and sisters. Douglass, summoned back to Thomas Auld and his second wife Rowena Hambleton Auld—the beloved "Mrs. Lucretia" having died while he lived in Baltimore³³—was unaccustomed to the hard physical labor of a field hand and the typical deprivations of slavery. He grew angry and depressed as he adjusted to life at St. Michaels, and his attitude motivated Auld to hire him out to a neighboring farmer for a term of one year. Douglass wrote that he was worked to exhaustion and was beaten severely during his tenure on the farm of Edward Covey. Barely removed from poverty himself, Covey, a reputed "slave breaker," would become famous for his pivotal role in Douglass's struggle to assert his humanity and manhood. Douglass's crafting of his triumphant physical resistance to Covey's brutality in all of his autobiographies allowed him to emblematize the moment of seizing his selfhood; it also lent him public legitimacy within what must have been to whites a familiar typology of slave experience while downplaying the unusual privilege he had, in reality, enjoyed .

Douglass, in his third autobiography, could not honestly elide the privileges that were at least somewhat responsible for his achievements. Indeed, the author, as elder statesman, no longer had desire or reason to do so. Life and Times detailed his editorial work on his four newspapers, his relationship with John Brown and his dangerous flirtation with the Harpers Ferry insurrection, his discussions with Abraham Lincoln and other political leaders, his valiant but failed attempt to save the mismanaged Freedman's Savings Bank, and his political appointments. Proud of favor received, Douglass remained a stalwart Republican despite discouraging shifts in the party's priorities, particularly on issues of racial equality. In his later years Douglass stumped for the party's presidential candidates although he felt betrayed by Republicans' increasingly frequent compromises with unrepentant southern whites. A combination of self-interest and the pragmatism pervasive among postbellum blacks of all classes moved Douglass to iterate his belief that a continuing political alliance between Republicans and African Americans would ultimately benefit his race more than would alliances with the Democrats or less established parties. His party loyalty was rewarded, though never as handsomely as he had hoped; Douglass held

^{3333 . Lucretia Anthony Auld died in 1827. Ibid., 87–88.}

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several appointed offices: United States marshal for the District of Columbia, recorder of deeds for the District of Columbia, and minister resident and consul general to Haiti, as well as assistant secretary of the Santo Domingo Commission, president of the Freedman's Savings and Trust Bank, and District of Columbia commissioner. All these appointments engendered controversy along with the honor they bestowed. Much of the third part of Life and Times consists of defensive responses to many who denounced Douglass's actions during his official appointments, while the other sections justify Douglass's second marriage, eighteen months after the death of his first wife, Anna Murray Douglass, to the forty-seven-year-old Helen Pitts, an educated white woman from an old New England family. Pitts, twenty years her husband's junior, had served as Douglass 's secretary during his tenure as recorder of deeds. The "Third Part" also details Douglass's travels abroad with Helen. Still other portions of the final section lament the deaths of British and Irish abolitionists whom Douglass had met during his first tour of the British Isles following the 1845 publication of Narrative.

Life and Times's new material, added in 1892 as the "Third Part," discussed at length what was perhaps the most momentous episode in Douglass's life between 1881 and 1892 . In July 1889 he was appointed minister resident and consul general to Haiti. He served until August 1891 in a position that constituted his second experience with the diplomatic corps. Douglass assumed the office when the expanding U.S. Navy sought a secure coaling station in the Caribbean. The United States also wanted to limit stations available to European nations as Atlantic powers competed for the right to dig a canal through Central America. Since the Civil War and the U.S. government's formal recognition of Haiti in 1862, relations with the island nation had steadily improved. A series of eminent African Americans, of whom Douglass was the fourth, had been appointed to represent the United States in the black republic.³⁴ He arrived at Port-au-Prince as one of the frequent internecine conflicts on the island concluded. Florvil Hyppolite had emerged as the victor, largely because American warships had intervened to break a blockade against Hyppolite's forces in Môle Saint Nicolas, in the northwestern corner of the island. The Mole offered an excellent harbor, and the presiding naval commander, Admiral Bancroft Gherardi, led U.S. inter-

^{3434. Preceding Douglass in the political appointment of minister resident and consul to Haiti were African Americans Ebenezer D. Bassett (1869–77); John Mercer Langston (1877–85); George W. Williams, appointed in 1885 but never assumed the office; and John E. W. Thompson (1885–89). Rayford Whittingham Logan, The Diplomatic Relations of the United States with Haiti, 1776–1891 (1941; New York, 1969). 341, 370–80, 390, 392, 398, 423, 429.}

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vention in an attempt to leverage a long-term concession of the harbor for use by the United States. In addition, associates of Secretary of State James G. Blaine pressed for further concessions for their business interests in Haiti. Douglass was expected to be a key agent in securing these privileges. Although he did play a prominent role in the negotiations, his conflicts with Gherardi and others resulted in failure to secure any of the concessions. The American press covered these talks extensively and frequently blamed Douglass for their failure. This public attention on Douglass, however unfavorable, may have seemed to him an opportunity to address at length what he considered to be unjust criticisms leveled against him with an expanded edition of the 1881 autobiography.³⁵

Although Douglass devoted much of Part Three to defending his actions and decisions in later life, Life and Times in its expanded second edition never relinquishes Douglass's prime mission of promoting African American elevation. However, long before 1881, Douglass had become a phenomenon and a celebrity—considered by a majority of his contemporaries to be the preeminent voice representing the interests of American blacks among powerful whites. Although Douglass's continued political and personal prestige did not derail his dedication to social justice, it did isolate him from the majority of his race. His national renown and elite status, which in the years after the publication of Narrative had blinded him to the racism of Europeans and led him to exhort Americans to emulate their white exemplars abroad, later alienated him from many other black leaders in the nation. Douglass, living and working in the District of Columbia during Reconstruction and the period following its demise, expressed opinions that especially angered the southern black leaders who actively decried and fought the brutalities perpetrated against African Americans on state and local levels.

Douglass's apparent distance from the disturbing realities of bulldozing and nightriding occurring in the southern states allowed him to remain sanguine about the elevation of his race. His optimism ultimately rested on two abstract and interdependent beliefs: first, that the principles of the Declaration of Independence, broadly understood, were indisputably true and right; and, second, that the protean Constitution of the United States was capable of enforcing the spirit of the Declaration's contents.³⁶ Douglass believed that the federal government would protect the people it had emancipated. His confidence in the power of federal legislation laid the foundation for his

^{3535 . Ibid.; William S. McFeely, Frederick Douglass (New York, 1991), 334–58.}

^{3636. David W. Alight, Frederick Douglass' Civil War: Keeping Faith in Jubilee (Baton Rouge, La., 1989), 33–58.}

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unpopular positions about the plight of southern blacks. His distance—geographical, social, and intellectual—from the majority of his race seemed to have impaired his ability to form an accurate picture of the truly brutal conditions that the freed people of the South endured during and after the period sometimes referred to as southern Redemption. His contention that violent opposition to black suffrage and advancement in the South would eventually abate sparked criticism from other African American intellectuals. Douglass doubted that mass migrations to Liberia and Kansas would result in improved conditions for former slaves. Southern blacks who embraced the Exoduster movement, as the Kansas migration movement was known, sought peace, safety, and an opportunity to own land free of the debt structure that shackled their efforts to achieve economic self-sufficiency. Although the promise of prosperity in Kansas would prove to be largely illusory, many freed people at the South viewed migration as the only way to escape the violence they routinely faced, especially as they tried to exercise their newly granted franchise.³⁷ Douglass, meanwhile, delivered speeches urging southern blacks to stay at home and published excerpts from one of these in the third part of Life and Times.³⁸ He argued that blacks were best suited to the climate of the South and to working its land; the best way black citizens could contribute to the nation was to continue the work so crucial to the growth of the country's economy during slavery. Migration, for Douglass, constituted no less than an admission of defeat, and a refutation of the argument that blacks had returned the right of American citizenship by means of their previous uncompensated labor.

The issue of abolition had lent Douglass's antebellum narratives focus, clarity, and energy. That focus remained in the twice and thrice told portions of Life and Times and underscored the importance that the established African American statesman accorded to his origins in slavery. Nonetheless, this familiar foundation weakened the appeal of the third autobiography for contemporary readers, many of whom considered the memoir repetitive and self-indulgent. Not only did the author's rehearsal of earlier material render his final self-narrative lengthy to the point of unwieldiness, but, by choosing slavery as his starting point, Douglass unwittingly engendered distorted

^{3737. For extended discussions of postbellum black exodus from southern states and from the entire United States, see Robert G. Athearn, In Search of Canaan: Black Migration to Kansas, 1879–80 (Lawrence, Kans., 1978); Nell Irvin Painter, Exodusters: Black Migration to Kansas after Reconstruction (New York, 1971); J. Gus Liebenow, Liberia: The Quest for Democracy (Bloomington, Ind., 1987). 1–152.}

^{3838. Douglass Papers, ser. 1, 4:510–33.}

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reviews of the fullest and most mature statement of his life. Some reviewers who introduced the book to the public may have believed a thorough reading of its content unnecessary; in the public imagination, Douglass had long occupied a solid position. Several reviews praised points that appeared in Douglass's antebellum narratives or repeated what most Americans already knew about his singular life. Few reviews indicated more than minimal familiarity with material added after the publication of My Bondage and My Freedom in 1855—material that reflected more than half of Douglass's public activity. Two reviews compared Life and Times to Harriet Beecher Stowe's sentimental novel Uncle Tom's Cabin: one deemed Douglass's literary efforts equivalent to Stowe's as a weapon against slavery,³⁹ while another complimented the third autobiography as "hardly less interesting" than Stowe's sentimental portrayal of slavery.⁴⁰ Some reviews and announcements simply pronounced the autobiography "excellent" and correctly assumed readers' widespread familiarity with Douglass's illustrious career.⁴¹

Far fewer reviews indicated a more thorough reading of Life and Times. Heman Lincoln Wayland's positive account, though short, mentioned each of Douglass's political appointments and related a personal anecdote about the author.⁴² Another mostly positive review refuted the statement, made by George Ruffin in the introduction to the book, that Douglass had "surmounted the disadvantage of not having an university education" (7). The unidentified reviewer opined, "This disadvantage can be surmounted, if at all, only by men of genius belonging to an order far higher than that to which Mr. Douglass will aspire." This point notwithstanding, the review praised the content of the book for addressing "a most important period in the history of the Republic, and revealing in a peculiarly clear light some or those deeply hidden causes from which has sprung the present transition state or the nation."⁴³ Other reviews lauded the simplicity of Life and Times's style, although this tome, of all his autobiographical writings, is in form the most overwrought, replete with temporal digressions, frequent lengthy lists of persons and objects, and extracts from speeches and correspondence.

Two reviews in London publications offered more comprehensive read-

^{3939. Philadelphia Press, 26 December 1881, reprinted in Washington (D.C.) National Republican, 31 December 1881.}

^{4040. Cleveland Leader, [n.d.], reprinted in Trenton Sentinel, 21 January 1882, Washington (D.C.) People's Advocate, 25 February 1882.}

^{4141. Trenton Sentinel, 29 October 1881, 21 January 1882; Washington (D.C.) People's Advocate, 25 February 1882.}

^{4242. Philadelphia National Baptist, [n.d.]. Subject File, reel 10, 421, FD Papers, DLC.}

^{4343. Catholic World 35:285–87 (May 1882).}