Frederick Douglass

VI

The two years Douglass spent in Great Britain upon this visit were active and fruitful ones, and did much to bring him to that full measure of development scarcely possible for him in slave-ridden America. For while the English government had fostered slavery prior to the Revolution, and had only a few years before Douglass's visit abolished it in its own colonies, this wretched system had never fastened its clutches upon the home islands. Slaves had been brought to England, it is true, and carried away; but, when the right to remove them was questioned in court, Lord Chief Justice Mansfield, with an abundance of argument and precedent to support a position similar to that of Justice Taney in the Dred Scott case, had taken the contrary view, and declared that the air of England was free, and the slave who breathed it but once ceased thereby to be a slave. History and humanity have delivered their verdict on these two decisions, and time is not likely to disturb it.

A few days after landing at Liverpool, Douglass went to Ireland, where the agitation for the repeal of the union between Great Britain and Ireland was in full swing, under the leadership of Daniel O'Connell, the great Irish orator. O'Connell had denounced slavery in words of burning eloquence. The Garrisonian abolitionists advocated the separation of the free and slave States as the only means of securing some part of the United States to freedom. The American and Irish disunionists were united by a strong bond of sympathy. Douglass was soon referred to as "the black O'Connell," and lectured on slavery and on temperance to large and enthusiastic audiences. He was introduced to O'Connell, and exchanged compliments with him. A public breakfast was given him at Cork, and a soiree by Father Matthew, the eminent leader of the great temperance crusade which at that time shared with the repeal agitation the public interest of Ireland. A reception to Douglass and his friend Buffum was held in St. Patricks Temperance Hall, where they were greeted with a special song of welcome, written for the occasion. On January 6, 1846, a public breakfast was given Douglass at Belfast, at which the local branch of the British and Foreign Anti-slavery Society presented him with a Bible bound in gold.

After four months in Ireland, where he delivered more than fifty lectures, Douglass and his friend Buffum left Ireland, on January 10, 1846, for Scotland, where another important reform was in progress. It was an epoch of rebellion against the established order of things. The spirit of revolt was in the air. The disruption movement in the Established Church of Scotland, led by the famous Dr. Chalmers, had culminated in 1843 in the withdrawal of four hundred and seventy ministers, who gave up the shelter and security of the Establishment for the principle that a congregation should choose its own pastor, and organized themselves into the Free Protesting Church, commonly called the Free Kirk. An appeal had been issued to the Presbyterian churches of the world for aid to establish a sustentation fund for the use of the new church. Among the contributions from the United States was one from a Presbyterian church in Charleston, South Carolina. Just before this contribution arrived a South Carolina judge had condemned a Northern man to death for aiding the escape of a female slave. This incident had aroused horror and indignation throughout Great Britain. Lord Brougham had commented on it in the House of Lords, and Lord Chief Justice Denham had characterized it "in the name of all the judges of England" as a "horrible iniquity." O'Connell had rejected profferred contributions from the Southern States, and an effort was made in Scotland to have the South Carolina money sent back. The attempt failed ultimately; but the agitation on the subject was for a time very fierce, and gave Douglass and his friends the opportunity to strike many telling blows at slavery. He had never minced his words in the United States, and he now handled without gloves the government whose laws had driven him from its borders.

From Scotland Douglass went to England, where he found still another great reform movement nearing a triumphant conclusion. The Anti-corn Law League, after many years of labor, under the leadership of Richard Cobden and John Bright, for the abolition of the protective tariff on wheat and other kinds of grain for food, had brought its agitation to a successful issue; and on June 26, 1846, the Corn Laws were repealed. The generous enthusiasm for reform of one kind or another that pervaded the British Islands gave ready sympathy and support to the abolitionists in their mission. The abolition of slavery in the colonies had been decreed by Parliament in 1833, but the old leaders in that reform had not lost their zeal for liberty. George Thompson, who with Clarkson and Wilberforce had led the British abolitionists, invited Garrison over to help reorganize the anti-slavery sentiment of Great Britain against American slavery; and in August, 1846, Garrison went to England, in that year evidently a paradise of reformers.

During the week beginning May 17, 1846, Douglass addressed respectively the annual meeting of the British and Foreign Anti-slavery Society, a peace convention, a suffrage extension meeting, and a temperance convention, and spoke also at a reception where efforts were made to induce him to remain in England, and money subscribed to bring over his family. As will be seen hereafter, he chose the alternative of returning to the United States.

On August 7, 1846, Douglass addressed the World's Temperance Convention, held at Covent Garden Theatre, London. There were many speakers, and the time allotted to each was brief; but Douglass never lost an opportunity to attack slavery, and he did so on this occasion over the shoulder of temperance. He stated that he was not a delegate to the convention, because those whom he might have represented were placed beyond the pale of American temperance societies either by slavery or by an inveterate prejudice against their color. He referred to the mobbing of a procession of colored temperance societies in Philadelphia several years before, the burning of one of their churches, and the wrecking of their best temperance hall. These remarks brought out loud protests and calls for order from the American delegates present, who manifested the usual American sensitiveness to criticism, especially on the subject of slavery; but the house sustained Douglass, and demanded that he go on. Douglass was denounced for this in a letter to the New York papers by Rev. Dr. Cox, one of the American delegates.

Douglass's reply to this letter gave him the better of the controversy. He sometimes expressed the belief, founded on long experience, that doctors of divinity were, as a rule, among the most ardent supporters of slavery. Dr. Cox, who seems at least to have met the description, was also a delegate to the Evangelical Alliance, which met in London, August 19, 1846, with a membership of one thousand delegates from fifty different evangelical sects throughout the world. The question was raised in the convention whether or not fellowship should be held with slaveholders. Dr. Cox and the other Americans held that it should, and their views ultimately prevailed. Douglass made some telling speeches at Anti-slavery League meetings, in denunciation of the cowardice of the Alliance, and won a wide popularity.

Douglass remained in England two years. Not only did this visit give him a great opportunity to influence British public opinion against slavery, but the material benefits to himself were inestimable. He had left the United States a slave before the law, denied every civil right and every social privilege, literally a man without a country, and forced to cross the Atlantic among the cattle in the steerage of the steamboat. During his sojourn in Great Britain an English lady, Mrs. Ellen Richardson, of Newcastle, had raised seven hundred and fifty dollars, which was paid over to Hugh Auld, of Maryland, to secure Douglass's legal manumission; and, not content with this generous work, the same large-hearted lady had raised by subscription about two thousand five hundred dollars, which Douglass carried back to the United States as a free gift, and used to start his newspaper. He had met in Europe, as he said in a farewell speech, men quite as white as he had ever seen in the United States and of quite as noble exterior, and had seen in their faces no scorn of his complexion. He had travelled over the four kingdoms, and had encountered no sign of disrespect. He had been lionized in London, had spoken every night of his last month there, and had declined as many more invitations. He had shaken hands with the venerable Clarkson, and had breakfasted with the philosopher Combe, the author of The Constitution of Man. He had won the friendship of John Bright, had broken bread with Sir John Bowring, had been introduced to Lord Brougham, the brilliant leader of the Liberal party, and had listened to his wonderful eloquence. He had met Douglas Jerrold, the famous wit, and had been entertained by the poet William Howitt, who made a farewell speech in his honor. Everywhere he had denounced slavery, everywhere hospitable doors had opened wide to receive him, everywhere he had made friends for himself and his cause. A slave and an outcast at home, he had been made to feel himself a gentleman, had been the companion of great men and good women. Urged to remain in this land of freedom, and offered aid to establish himself in life there, his heart bled for his less fortunate brethren in captivity; and, with the God-speed of his English friends ringing in his ears, he went back to America,—to scorn, to obloquy, to ostracism, but after all to the work to which he had been ordained, and which he was so well qualified to perform.

VII

Douglass landed April 20, 1847. He returned to the United States with the intention of publishing the newspaper for which his English friends had so kindly furnished the means; but his plan meeting with opposition from his abolitionist friends, who thought the platform offered him a better field for usefulness, he deferred the enterprise until near the end of the year. In the mean time he plunged again into the thick of the anti-slavery agitation. We find him lecturing in May in the Broadway Tabernacle, New York, and writing letters to the anti-slavery papers. In June he was elected president of the New England Anti-slavery Convention. In August and September he went on a lecturing tour with Garrison and others through Pennsylvania and Ohio. On this tour the party attended the commencement exercises of Oberlin College, famous for its anti-slavery principles and practice, and spoke to immense meetings at various places in Ohio and New York. Their cause was growing in popular favor; and, in places where formerly they had spoken out of doors because of the difficulty of securing a place of meeting, they were now compelled to speak in the open air, because the churches and halls would not contain their audiences.

On December 3, 1847, the first number of the North Star appeared. Douglass's abolitionist friends had not yet become reconciled to this project, and his persistence in it resulted in a temporary coldness between them. They very naturally expected him to be guided by their advice. They had found him on the wharf at New Bedford, and given him his chance in life; and they may easily be pardoned for finding it presumptuous in him to disregard their advice and adopt a new line of conduct without consulting them. Mr. Garrison wrote in a letter to his wife from Cleveland, "It will also greatly surprise our friends in Boston to hear that in regard to his prospect of establishing a paper here, to be called the North Star, he never opened his lips to me on the subject nor asked my advice in any particular whatever." But Samuel May Jr., in a letter written to one of Douglass's English friends, in which he mentions this charge of Garrison, adds, "It is only common justice to Frederick Douglass to inform you that this is a mistake; that, on the contrary, he did speak to Mr. Garrison about it, just before he was taken ill at Cleveland." The probability is that Douglass had his mind made up, and did not seek advice, and that Mr. Garrison did not attach much importance to any casual remark Douglass may have made upon the subject. In a foot-note to the Life and Times of Garrison it is stated:—

"This enterprise was not regarded with favor by the leading abolitionists, who knew only too well the precarious support which a fifth anti-slavery paper, edited by a colored man, must have, and who appreciated to the full Douglass's unrivalled powers as a lecturer in the field … As anticipated, it nearly proved the ruin of its projector; but by extraordinary exertions it was kept alive, not, however, on the platform of Garrisonian abolitionism. The necessary support could only be secured by a change of principles in accordance with Mr. Douglass's immediate (political abolition) environment."

Douglass's own statement does not differ very widely from this, except that he does not admit the mercenary motive for his change of principles. It was in deference, however, to the feelings of his former associates that the North Star was established at Rochester instead of in the East, where the field for anti-slavery papers was already fully occupied. In Rochester, then as now the centre of a thrifty, liberal, and progressive population, Douglass gradually won the sympathy and support which such an enterprise demanded.

The North Star, in size, typography, and interest, compared favorably with the other weeklies of the day, and lived for seventeen years. It had, however, its "ups and downs." At one time the editor had mortgaged his house to pay the running expenses; but friends came to his aid, his debts were paid, and the circulation of the paper doubled. In My Bondage and My Freedom Douglass gives the names of numerous persons who helped him in these earlier years of editorial effort, among whom were a dozen of the most distinguished public men of his day. After the North Star had been in existence several years, its name was changed to Frederick Douglass's Paper, to give it a more distinctive designation, the newspaper firmament already scintillating with many other "Stars."

In later years Douglass speaks of this newspaper enterprise as one of the wisest things he ever undertook. To paraphrase Lord Bacon's famous maxim, much reading of life and of books had made him a full man, and much speaking had made him a ready man. The attempt to put facts and arguments into literary form tended to make him more logical in reasoning and more exact in statement. One of the effects of Douglass's editorial responsibility and the influences brought to bear upon him by reason of it, was a change in his political views. Until he began the publication of the North Star and for several years thereafter, he was, with the rest of the Garrisonians, a pronounced disunionist. He held to the Garrisonian doctrine that the pro-slavery Constitution of the United States was a "league with death and a covenant with hell," maintained that anti-slavery men should not vote under it, and advocated the separation of the free States as the only means of preventing the utter extinction of freedom by the ever-advancing encroachments of the slave power. In Rochester he found himself in the region where the Liberty party, under the leadership of James G. Birney, Salmon P. Chase, Gerrit Smith, and others, had its largest support. The Liberty party maintained that slavery could be fought best with political weapons, that by the power of the ballot slavery could be confined strictly within its constitutional limits and prevented from invading new territory, and that it could be extinguished by the respective States whenever the growth of public opinion demanded it. One wing of the party took the more extreme ground that slavery was contrary to the true intent and meaning of the Constitution, and demanded that the country should return to the principles of liberty upon which it was founded. Though the more radical abolitionists were for a time bitterly opposed to these views, yet the Liberty party was the natural outgrowth of the abolition agitation. Garrison and Phillips and Douglass and the rest had planted, Birney and Gerrit Smith and Chase and the rest watered, and the Union party, led by the great emancipator, garnered the grain after a bloody harvest.

Several influences must have co-operated to modify Douglass's political views. The moral support and occasional financial aid given his paper by members of the Liberty party undoubtedly predisposed him favorably to their opinions. His retirement as agent of the Anti-slavery Society and the coolness resulting therefrom had taken him out of the close personal contact with those fervent spirits who had led the van in the struggle for liberty. Their zeal had been more disinterested, perhaps, than Douglass's own; for, after all, they had no personal stake in the outcome, while to Douglass and his people the abolition of slavery was a matter of life and death. Serene in the high altitude of their convictions, the Garrisonians would accept no halfway measures, would compromise no principles, and, if their right arm offended them, would cut it off with sublime fortitude and cast it into the fire. They wanted a free country, where the fleeing victim of slavery could find a refuge. Douglass perceived the immense advantage these swarming millions would gain through being free in the States where they already were. He had always been minded to do the best thing possible. When a slave, he had postponed his escape until it seemed entirely feasible. When denied cabin passage on steamboats, he had gone in the steerage or on deck. When he had been refused accommodation in a hotel, he had sought it under any humble roof that offered. It would have been a fine thing in the abstract to refuse the half-loaf, but in that event we should have had no Frederick Douglass. It was this very vein of prudence, keeping always in view the object to be attained, and in a broad, non-Jesuitical sense subordinating the means to the end, that enabled Douglass to prolong his usefulness a generation after the abolition of slavery. Douglass in his Life and Times states his own case as follows:

"After a time, a careful reconsideration of the subject convinced me that there was no necessity for dissolving the union between the Northern and Southern States; that to seek this dissolution was no part of my duty as an abolitionist; that to abstain from voting was to refuse to exercise a legitimate and powerful means for abolishing slavery; and that the Constitution of the United States not only contained no guarantees in favor of slavery, but, on the contrary, was in its letter and spirit an anti-slavery instrument, demanding the abolition of slavery as a condition of its own existence, as the supreme law of the land."

This opinion was not exactly the opinion of the majority of the Liberty party, which did not question the constitutionality of slavery in the slave States. Neither was it the opinion of the Supreme Court, which in the Dred Scott case held that the Constitution guaranteed not only the right to hold slaves, but to hold them in free States. Nevertheless, entertaining the views he did, Douglass was able to support the measures which sought to oppose slavery through political action. In August, 1848, while his Garrisonian views were as yet unchanged, he had been present as a spectator at the Free Soil Convention at Buffalo. In his Life and Times he says of this gathering: "This Buffalo Convention of Free Soilers, however low their standard, did lay the foundation of a grand superstructure. It was a powerful link in the chain of events by which the slave system has been abolished, the slave emancipated, and the country saved from dismemberment." In 1851 Douglass announced that his sympathies were with the voting abolitionists, and thenceforth he supported by voice and pen Hale, Fremont, and Lincoln, the successive candidates of the new party.

Douglass's political defection very much intensified the feeling against him among his former coadjutors. The Garrisonians, with their usual plain speaking, did not hesitate to say what they thought of Douglass. Their three papers, the Liberator, the Standard, and the Freeman, assailed Douglass fiercely, and charged him with treachery, inconsistency, ingratitude, and all the other crimes so easily imputed to one who changes his opinions. Garrison and Phillips and others of his former associates denounced him as a deserter, and attributed his change of heart to mercenary motives. Douglass seems to have borne himself with rare dignity and moderation in this trying period. He realized perfectly well that he was on the defensive, and that the burden devolved upon him to justify his change of front. This he seems to have attempted vigorously, but by argument rather than invective. Even during the height of the indignation against him Douglass disclaimed any desire to antagonize his former associates. He simply realized that there was more than one way to fight slavery,—which knew a dozen ways to maintain itself,—and had concluded to select the one that seemed most practical. He was quite willing that his former friends should go their own way. "No personal assaults," he wrote to George Thompson, the English abolitionist, who wrote to him for an explanation of the charges made against him, "shall ever lead me to forget that some, who in America have often made me the subject of personal abuse, are in their own way earnestly working for the abolition of slavery."

In later years, when political action had resulted in abolition, some of these harsh judgments were modified, and Douglass and his earlier friends met in peace and harmony. The debt he owed to William Lloyd Garrison he ever delighted to acknowledge. His speech on the death of Garrison breathes in every word the love and honor in which he held him. In one of the last chapters of his Life and Times he makes a sweeping acknowledgment of his obligations to the men and women who rendered his career possible.

"It was my good fortune," he writes, "to get out of slavery at the right time, to be speedily brought in contact with that circle of highly cultivated men and women, banded together for the overthrow of slavery, of which William Lloyd Garrison was the acknowledged leader. To these friends, earnest, courageous, inflexible, ready to own me as a man and a brother, against all the scorn, contempt, and derision of a slavery-polluted atmosphere, I owe my success in life."

VIII

Events moved rapidly in the decade preceding the war. In 1850 the new Fugitive Slave Law brought discouragement to the hearts of the friends of liberty. Douglass's utterances during this period breathed the fiery indignation which he felt when the slave-driver's whip was heard cracking over the free States, and all citizens were ordered to aid in the enforcement of this inhuman statute when called upon. This law really defeated its own purpose. There were thousands of conservative Northern men, who, recognizing the constitutional guarantees of slavery and the difficulty of abolishing it unless the South should take the initiative, were content that it should be preserved intact so long as it remained a local institution. But when the attempt was made to make the North wash the South's dirty linen, and transform every man in the Northern States into a slave-catcher, it wrought a revulsion of feeling that aroused widespread sympathy for the slave and strengthened the cause of freedom amazingly. Thousands of escaped slaves were living in Northern communities. Some of them had acquired homes, had educated their children, and in some States had become citizens and voters. Already social pariahs, restricted generally to menial labor, bearing the burdens of poverty and prejudice, they now had thrust before them the spectre of the kidnapper, the slave-catcher with his affidavit, and the United States [Supreme] Court, which was made by this law the subservient tool of tyranny. This law gave Douglass and the other abolitionists a new text. It was a set-back to their cause; but they were not entirely disheartened, for they saw in it the desperate expedients by which it was sought to bolster up an institution already doomed by the advancing tide of civilization.