A Slave Became Our Prophet

Frederick Douglass, born a slave in 1818, escaped in 1838, and died a national and internationally renowned orator in 1895.  His was a life of daring, disappointment, and tenacity. 

Many regard him as a prophet.  Prophets, always bold and usually reviled, convey God’s alleged will and warnings with exceptional moral insight in advocating for a worthy cause.  His was the freeing and incorporating of dark-skinned persons into America’s community and promise. 

Such progress didn’t come easily, and it still isn’t complete. Our alleged president has declared an end to DEI efforts.  Diversity, equity, and inclusion are at the core of American faith and promise, yet Juneteenth and MLK Day are supposedly out. 

Trump, the epitome of an egotistic, selfish, wealthy white person, has decreed it over.  With king-like arrogance, he has ruled.  Masked men without badges but with guns jump out of unmarked vans to kidnap those he has decreed as criminals, only to be lost in prisons we cannot examine, put there without the due process protections supposedly guaranteed in our constitution.  He is an ignorant, arrogant enemy of our government, society, and environment.

But that conceited rascal and his fascistic supporters aren’t the end of Frederick Douglass’s effort and legacy; it’s a temporary resurgence of the mentality that drove slave holding, and later, lynching.  It’s the sort of racist horror and threat that resides in the kind of persons who would take over and impose their politics and religion.  We of European descent have been around such corners for millennia. 

Our country was founded on not letting such types take over.  Yet, for now, they have.

Federick was born to Harriet Bailey, possibly fathered by Aaron Anthony, his first owner.  Shortly after his birth, she was removed to another plantation twelve miles away.  He saw her only a few times when she would travel at night to visit him.  She died when he was seven years old.

When Aaron Anthony died, his son-in-law, Thomas Auld, took ownership of Frederick (also called Fredie), who was later transferred to Thomas’ brother, Hugh, in Baltimore, Maryland.  It was Hugh’s white wife, Sophia Auld, who became the first of a few women to aid him in his life.  She taught him to read before her husband banned that, him complaining that education ruins slaves.  Indeed. 

Federick would find scraps of newspapers to copy letters and words from, and he would trade his scarce food scraps with other white children to learn more. 

Neither Thomas nor Hugh Auld whipped Frederick directly, but Hugh inflicted his superiority on him with neglect and hypocritical, harsh religious teachings.  Hugh turned Frederick over to the slave-breaker, Edward Covey, who repeatedly whipped him until Frederick fought back in an epic two-hour battle.  It was a turning point in his life. 

At age twenty, he escaped to New York City.  Nathan Johnson, a freed black, suggested a new surname, Douglas, based on the hero of a Sir Walter Scott poem.  A free black woman, Anna Murray, gave him a sailor outfit, and another freed black man loaned him seaman protection papers so he could travel. 

He quickly married Anna.  They were married for forty-four years and had five children.  Though uneducated, she was his reliable home-keeper, tending her motherly duties while he often was gone on speaking tours.  He is buried near her. 

Frederick had heard a few preachers.  He saw how words can steer lives and history.  He began incorporating Bible lessons in his causes. He stood six feet tall.  He was handsome.  He learned how to inspire an audience, be it from a pulpit or lectern.  He must have had a powerful voice, for he would address thousands before the advent of amplification. 

Though identified as black, he was half white.  Though blacks rightly feel discriminated against by whites, it was often whites who funded and supported Douglass.  Those of the northern states and in England sent him money to speak and publish.  Being half white, and assisted all his life by them, Douglass never condemned whites in general for racism. 

Two important women supported Douglass intellectually and emotionally, even though they also strained his wife Anna’s tolerance for him and his work. 

Julia Griffiths, seven years older than Frederick, met him in England around 1845.  She was an educated, outspoken abolitionist.  She helped edit and publish his writings as well as raise funds.  She lived with Frederick and Anna off and on until 1855 despite inuendoes and tension with Anna. 

Even more tense and emotionally intriguing was his relationship with Ottilie Assing of German and Jewish descent.  The same age as Frederick, she was of a liberal, intellectual upbringing.  She came to New York to interview him in 1856 and returned to his and Anna’s household every summer, even teaching his children, for twenty-two years.  This roused tension with Anna and opened their family to accusations of infidelity.  Whether she (and Julia) were lovers with Frederick is unknown.  Like Julia, she provided Frederick with intellectual company and practical support.  She tried to convert him to atheism.  She yearned to marry him someday. 

Sadly, riddled with cancer, when Anna died in 1882 and Douglass married a younger Helen Pitts in 1884, distraught to lose who she had adulated and supported, Ottilie took her own life via potassium cyanide.  Frederick was the sole heir in her will.  If ever there was a romantic tragedy, her’s was it. 

Helen, his second wife, was the third white woman close to Frederick.  This roused up ridicule of Frederick, especially from blacks.  She was of an abolitionist family and had graduated from a female seminary.  Behind the scenes, they had a close relationship.  She finally helped preserve his legacy. 

A dynamic man needs engagement and comfort.  I don’t begrudge him his.  (I similarly speculate this regarding Thomas Jefferson relative to Sally Hemings, but that’s beyond this essay. See this text and/or video.)

Beyond these private lives, Douglass contended his whole life with the stubborn horror of slavery and vicious, even murderous, racism. 

No reading of this era can make sense unless one realizes the utterly switched nature of the Democratic and Republican political parties.  Loosely put, the Democrats were the Republicans of today, and the Republicans were the Democrats.  By that, I mean the Republicans were the liberals of the era, challenging entrenched power and privilege to include blacks as Americans.  The Democrats of then were the racists who tried to prevent that.  The Republicans of today are no “party of Lincoln.”  They’re all RINO (Republican in Name Only).

William Loyd Garrison, already an influential white abolitionist, helped Frederick take to the stage and the world of publishing.  They agreed on immediate emancipation, that the U.S. Constitution was fundamentally pro-slavery, and that moral suasion is the path to change these conditions.  Over the decades, their positions changed. 

Garrison eschewed political efforts and tried to keep emancipation a white-led movement.  Douglass needed to be more practical.  He had passionate ideals, but he was also loyally pragmatic. He began supporting the Republican Party towards emancipation and the right of blacks to vote.  He saw land ownership as crucial for blacks to have self-made success, including earning their own money.  He was leery of white employers replacing slavery with an only slightly improved version.  He even launched his own competing, black-run newspaper, The North Star, which split from Garrison’s authority and drained Douglass of much of his time and money. 

Douglass also differed with friends and other abolitionists over the issue of colonization.  The American Colonization Society had argued for blacks to emigrate to some potential land in Africa or the Caribbean since 1816.  Blacks could freely agree to leave, as they supposed.  Henry Clay (of the Whig Party) and his friend Horace Greeley favored this.  Douglass did not.  He saw it as inherently racist and defeatist. 

Similarly, Douglass detested the Fugitive Slave Act.  He called it “Blood-Houndism.”  He went beyond “blows to take as well as blows to make” to declare, “I do believe that two or three dead slaveholders will make this law a dead letter.”  Balance the violence of slavery with well-earned rebuke and rebellion. 

Dred Scott had been moved by his owners from Missouri, a slave-holding state, to Illinois and the Wisconsin Territory, free states, only to be returned and subjugated.  He sued, all the way to the Supreme Court, claiming he had been freed.  His hopes were dashed by what is considered the worst high court decision ever. 

(Our new Court’s rulings weakening the Voting Rights Act and shunting vast secret money into political campaigns, as if a form of “freedom of speech,” as in Citizens United, could compete. Speech should refer to the equality of persons’ voices, not vast wealth hiding behind obscure and elusive documents.) 

They ruled 7-2 against him.  Writing for the court, Chief Justice Taney decreed that people of African descent “are not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word ‘citizens’ in the Constitution …”  Specifically, African Americans were not entitled to “full liberty of speech … to hold public meetings … and to keep and carry arms …”

Douglass didn’t agree.  He never joined John Brown’s armed rebellion, but neither was he a pacifist.  He saw the impending Civil War as God’s judgment on slavery.  He wasn’t yet privy to the eventual 13^th, 14^th, and 15^th Amendments banning slavery, granting citizenship to anyone born in the country, and preventing racial discrimination in voting.    

Both the South and the North had invested in the cotton industry.  In 1829, only a few hundred slaves lived in Texas when Mexico banned slavery there.  In 1836, when Texas declared independence from Mexico, that had risen to 3,000 to 5,000.  By the time Texas joined the Confederacy, 30,000 slaves lived there.  On the eve of the Civil War, about thirty percent of the population was slaves, numbering 182,000.   

In 1836, Texas had legalized slavery and banned emancipation.  The $400 to $800 cost of an adult male slave rose to $800 to $1500 by the 1850s.  Of the $191 million of goods exported from the U.S., about $112 million was for cotton (about $4 billion in today’s dollars), about 60 percent of total exports, supplying about 75 percent of the world’s need.  New England and the Mid-Atlantic ports shipped it largely to Britain and France.  New York banks financed it all. 

Britain and France never recognized the Confederacy and shifted their purchases to India and Egypt.  Jefferson Davis’s bet that “cotton is king” suddenly weakened.  The Mexican-American War of 1846 to 1848 led to more territory and to more stubbornness regarding slavery, especially in 1861 when Texas seceded from the Union and joined the Confederacy.  Texas’s Declaration of Secession stated: “We hold as undeniable truths that the African race is an inferior and dependent race… and the servitude of the African race… is mutually beneficial.” 

Douglass had lobbied President Lincoln many times, arguing to use black soldiers as a tactical matter and a way for them to show patriotism.  He helped recruit them into the army, and two of his sons served.  When Lincoln was assassinated, blacks were barred from participating in the funeral procession in New York City.  Later, Mrs. Lincoln gave Douglas her husband’s walking stick.

It took over two years for the news of abolition to reach Texas.  Hence, Juneteenth.

“The work does not end with the abolition of slavery,” said Douglass, “but only begins.”  He lobbied Congress and the Republican Party hard to help pass the 15^th Amendment, which granted blacks their right to vote.  He also advocated for a redistribution of land to help recompense the disadvantage of slavery, and he believed in universal education so that blacks could rise via learning and hard work, as he often stressed in his speeches.  Reconstruction should complete the process, though by the latter 19^th Century, whites were losing their empathy and fairness. 

Voting rights were not guaranteed and lynching spread, especially fueled by accusations of black men raping white women.  Lynchings lasted into the 20th Century.  Victims were burned alive, hanged, mutilated, and shot, sometimes as public spectacles, warnings not to vote or even rest securely.  Between 1865 and 1950, some 4,400 blacks and sometimes whites (often in labor disputes) were killed without evidence or trials.  Most of this was in the southern states, and often, law enforcement witnessed the mobs.  He viewed this as state-sponsored terrorism. 

No anti-lynching laws were passed during Douglass’s lifetime.  It wouldn’t be until 2022 that a federal anti-lynching law was passed: the Emmett Till Antilynching Act.

In later years, Douglass had taken various government jobs, partly to quit living on the road while lecturing and partly to help support various members of his family who had become dependent.  They often came to him with requests for government jobs and/or loans. He was appointed Recorder of Deeds for the District of Columbia, named president of the Freedman’s Savings and Trust Company, and appointed US Marshall of the District of Columbia.

Most difficult was President Benjamin Harrison’s appointing him as Consul General to Haiti.  The hope was that his blackness would earn him favor in that troubled place.  He tried to do right for them, but was snookered into an expansionist plot that he couldn’t undo, and yet was blamed for it.

In 1877, Frederick travelled to Baltimore to visit Thomas, the son of his former owner, Hugh Auld.  Though Hugh had loaned Frederick to Edward Covey, the slave breaker who scarred him, he had also prevented Frederick from being sold into the deep South.  Douglass made it clear he opposed the system of slavery, not necessarily those involved in it. 

He wrote to Thomas, “I have since seen many old masters, and though I believe them guilty of the sin of slavery, I do not hate them. It was slavery — not the slaveholder — that I hated. I desire now to bury the past, to forget it, and to be at peace.”  He sought truth-telling, understanding, and even forgiveness, not vengeance.  Respectful and civil, he didn’t advocate forgetting the hatreds of the past, but he did seek the healing of such endless cycles between the races. 

Just as he was two races stuck together, so is our country.  Despite ample challenges and setbacks, he had faith in divine moral progress.

Frederick Douglass died suddenly at his Cedar Hill home on February 20^th, 1895.  He was seventy-seven years old.  He had just returned from speaking at the National Council of Women.  Civil rights in general, including gender equality, were also his causes for much of his life. 

Frederick was the only black and the only man to speak at the seminal Seneca Falls Convention of 1848.  Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Sojourner Truth, and Lucretia Mott all appealed to him, though he sometimes saw their cause as not as urgent as that of ending slavery.  His first wife, Anna, and his two crucial assistants, Julia Griffiths and Ottilie Assing, all deepened his respect for women as equals.  He appreciated the intersectionality of their causes. 

As we endure the insults, embarrassments, and dangers of our current racist, sexist president, we could succumb to the gloom of his cheap yet cunning attack on our negroes, women, and rights.  All civil and spiritual progress seems tripped up and reversed.  It is the worst moment in America’s story.

But not all is lost.  Some five million citizens of all sorts and stripes recently made their disgust clear. 

I think back in my lifetime to the racial progress in our culture and in my family.  I remember with gladness especially black entertainers – Ella Fitzgerald, Nat King Cole, Harry Belafonte, Ray Charles, and Beyoncé. 

I wonder how Frederick would have marveled to hear James Brown sing, “Say it loud – I’m black and I’m proud!”

I close this essay by quoting our American prophet,

“The life of the nation is secure

only while the nation is honest, truthful, and virtuous.”

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(My appreciation to David W. Blight’s “Frederick Douglass Prophet of Freedom” for most of this information, plus some from Chat GPT and Wikipedia.)