It had given me a view of my wretched condition, without the remedy." Up to that year most of his life had been spent in obscurity. Douglass came to manhood in a reform-conscious age, from which he was not slow to take his cue. Douglass sailed back from England the following month, traveling through Canada to avoid detection. The book was written, as Douglass states in the closing sentence, in the hope that it would do something toward “hastening the glad day of deliverance to the millions of my brethren in bonds.”. When it became clear that Lincoln could not be rushed, Douglass’ criticisms became severe. ", Carson, Saul. On July 5, 1852, Douglass delivered an address to the ladies of the Rochester Anti-Slavery Sewing Society. “What I want to see before I die is a monument representing the negro, not couchant on his knees like a four-footed animal, but erect on his feet like a man.”[109], After the Civil War, Douglass continued to work for equality for African-Americans and women. Douglass, Frederick. It is an outrage upon the soul, a war upon the immortal spirit, and one for which you must give account at the bar of our common Father and Creator. [84] Indeed, I should esteem it a privilege, to set you an example as to how mankind ought to treat each other.”[72]. "[13] However, based on the extant records of Douglass's former owner, Aaron Anthony, historian Dickson J. Preston determined that Douglass was born in February 1818. Let it be said, too, that if slavery had a sunny side, it will not be found in the pages of the Narrative. They operated as "the military arm of the Democratic Party", turning out Republican officeholders and disrupting elections. The AME Church and North Star vigorously opposed the mostly white American Colonization Society and its proposal to send blacks back to Africa. Four of these Irish–English printings were editions of 2,000 and one was of 5,000 copies. During this tour, slavery supporters frequently accosted Douglass. He was nominated without his knowledge. I breathe, and lo! [9], Douglass was a firm believer in the equality of all peoples, be they white, black, female, Native American, or Chinese immigrants. Such an achievement furnished an object lesson; it hinted at the infinite potentialities of man in whatever station of life, suggesting powers to be elicited. ", Stewart, Roderick M. 1999. Grant believed annexation would help relieve the violent situation in the South allowing African Americans their own state. Favorably endowed in physique, Douglass had the initial advantage of looking like a person destined for prominence. Murray encouraged him and supported his efforts by aid and money.[38]. The fitful career of this party was then almost run, most of its followers having gone over to the Free Soil group. (1860) FREDERICK DOUGLASS, “THE CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES: IS IT PRO-SLAVERY OR ANTI-SLAVERY?”. "[101] Douglass conferred with President Abraham Lincoln in 1863 on the treatment of black soldiers,[102] and with President Andrew Johnson on the subject of black suffrage. Lincoln’s signing of the Emancipation Proclamation somewhat mollified Douglass, and he was nearly won over after exposure to Lincoln’s charm at two White House visits. [137], In 1892, Douglass constructed rental housing for blacks, now known as Douglass Place, in the Fells Point area of Baltimore. [34] The 16-year-old Douglass finally rebelled against the beatings, however, and fought back. The Episcopal Church (USA) remembers Douglass annually on its liturgical calendar for February 20, the anniversary of his death. Its central theme is struggle. Her family stopped speaking to her; his children considered the marriage a repudiation of their mother. It is always easy to stir up sympathy for people in bondage, and perhaps Douglass seemed to protest too much in making slavery out as a “soul-killing” institution. HUP’s 2009 edition of the Narrative, with a cover illustration by Robert Carter, and a new Introduction by Robert Stepto replacing that of Quarles. [35] Recounting his beatings at Covey's farm in Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Douglass described himself as "a man transformed into a brute! The two reformers were friends from that time on. But feminist Elizabeth Cady Stanton congratulated the couple. In this denial of the right to participate in government, not merely the degradation of woman and the perpetuation of a great injustice happens, but the maiming and repudiation of one-half of the moral and intellectual power of the government of the world. [79] Douglass assured the American women that at no time had he ever argued against women's right to vote.[80]. He was buried next to Anna in the Douglass family plot of Mount Hope Cemetery, and Helen joined them in 1903. These Douglass would have dismissed with a wave of the hand. Indeed, one reason that Douglass produced an autobiography was to refute the charge that he was an impostor, that he had never been a slave. I find myself regarded and treated at every turn with the kindness and deference paid to white people. Every white person mentioned at St. Michael’s in the Narrative is identifiable in some one of the county record books located at the Easton Court House: Talbot County Wills, 1832–1848; Land Index, 1818–1832 and 1833–1850; and Marriage Records for 1794–1825 and 1825–1840. He remarried in 1884, as mentioned above. Only one, a Mr. Butler, owner of a “ship-yard near the drawbridge,” is not readily identifiable. "The Claims of Frederick Douglass Philosophically Considered." Douglass continued, secretly, to teach himself how to read and write. In 1870, Douglass started his last newspaper, the New National Era, attempting to hold his country to its commitment to equality. ', 'It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men. An American periodical, Littell’s Living Age, pointing out that the autobiography had received many notices in the public press abroad, gave an estimate of its reach: “Taking all together, not less than one million of persons in Great Britain and Ireland have been excited by the book and its commentators” (April, May, June 1846). The championing of the cause of the downtrodden points toward Douglass’ major contribution to American democracy—that of holding a mirror up to it. With the North no longer obliged to return slaves to their owners in the South, Douglass fought for equality for his people. To honor Douglass, to remind ourselves of the political climate in America at the Civil War’s centennial in the 1960s, to now mark the passing of another half century, and to share our pride in having helped bring the book back into print all those years ago, we present here the full text of Benjamin Quarles’s original Introduction to the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave. New York 2018, p. 387, cf. In 1860 he was again one of the policy-makers of the Radical Abolitionists. To aid further in the destruction of slavery, Douglass in 1850 became a political abolitionist. Most of this output has been brought together in a massive four-volume work by Philip Foner, The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass (New York, 1950–55). Douglass believed that since African-American men were fighting for the Union in the American Civil War, they deserved the right to vote.[106]. He feared that linking the cause of women's suffrage to that of black men would result in failure for both. [117] Douglass then moved to Washington, D.C. His funeral was held at the Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church. It is written in simple and direct prose, free of literary allusions, and is almost without quoted passages, except for a stanza from “the slave’s poet, Whittier,” two lines from Hamlet, and one from Cowper. [43], Once Douglass had arrived, he sent for Murray to follow him north to New York. In it Douglass had to reduce the space given to his slavery experiences in order to narrate his Civil War and postwar activities. Actually Douglass took pains to be as accurate as his memory and his knowledge permitted. If life is more than breath, and the 'quick round of blood,' I lived more in one day than in a year of my slave life. But if Douglass emerged as the leading Negro among Negroes, this is not to say that the man was himself a racist, or that he glorified all things black. [8], Douglass wrote several autobiographies, notably describing his experiences as a slave in his Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845), which became a bestseller, and was influential in promoting the cause of abolition, as was his second book, My Bondage and My Freedom (1855).
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