So much of what we know of Douglass is from his own words. Available free online is Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave which needs to be required reading in every school across America, and is available in numerous translations for school children worldwide.

As Frederick Douglass writes in the last paragraph of this autobiography, in 1841 he became an orator for the Anti-Slavery Society. By 1845 he had become well-known for his performances at abolitionist rallies, but he was so articulate and intelligent that many people had begun to doubt he had ever actually been a slave. He wrote his Narrative both to “prove” his identity, and to bring his eloquent indictment of slavery to a wider audience. It was probably the best-selling of all the fugitive slave narratives: 5000 copies were sold within four months of its first printing, and 6 new editions were published between 1845 and 1849. Douglass published two later versions of his autobiography: My Bondage and My Freedom (1855) and The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881).

One of the details of Douglass’ life that we tend to forget because he is such a towering historic figure is that he was not a free man, even after his escape from enslavement in 1838. He was a fugitive.

By 1841 Douglass began to travel about the North, speaking for the anti-slavery society. These speaking tours—like this trip to Indiana—were not always met with peace and love. He was traveling with white abolitionists George Bradburn and William A. White:

Douglass and a group composed of both blacks and whites came to eastern Indiana in 1843. Their reception, however, was less than cordial. “At our first meeting,” Douglass wrote later of their stop in Richmond, “we were mobbed, and some of us got our good clothes spoiled by evil-smelling eggs.”

In Frederick Douglass by William S. McFeely, we learn just how dangerous it was for him.

In a few moments we heard a shout, and saw the mob coming through the woods, thirty or more in number, two by two, armed with stones and eggs,” and led by a man in a coonskin cap. The audience rose for a hasty exit, but White pleaded with them to sit down again. A few of the men and all of the women did. The cry from under the coonskin cap was “Surround them,” and the thirty circled the audience, some stationing themselves at the foot of the speakers’ stand. Stones were thrown at the speakers, but did no real damage. Old eggs were hurled and splattered on the speakers’ faces; the three endured the drip and stink in stoical silence. The audience too was quiet, and the stymied hecklers were at a loss as to what to do next. The peacemaker of the day before tried again, but as he spoke, one man called out to the speakers, asking why they didn’t go down south with their message. Bradburn replied: his challenger, James Jackson, offered a rebuttal; and White invited him up onto the platform to continue the debate. Jackson rose to the bait and made, said the Harvard man, “a most ridiculous spectacle, interlarding his speech with copious oaths, and ending off by saying he could not talk, but he could fight—that he had too much good blood in his veins to let us go on.” At this point, another man jumped up onto the platform, saying that he saw that nothing would be done unless he did it, and seized hold of the table, overturned it, and began to pull the stand to pieces. His buddies now all joined in the wrenching of timbers, pushing protesting members of the audience out of the way.

Douglass was sandwiched between two antislavery people concerned for his safety, but thinking White was in danger, he ran into the midst of the pulling and prying and grabbed a piece of lumber to use as a club. In doing so, he violated not only the Garrisonian insistence on nonviolence, but also white America’s stern law that black men were not to raise weapons except against other black men. There were screams: “Kill the nigger, kill the damn nigger.” Furious men pursued Douglass, who ran for his life. White, not injured (and with his hat still on his head), followed in pursuit. The swing of one club broke Douglass’s right hand. Running up, White was able to grab and slow another piece of lumber as it was swung with lethal force; it could have killed the downed black man. A stone hit White on the head; deflected by his hat, it nevertheless opened a gash that bled profusely.

There is a historical marker in Indiana commemorating this event, titled “Abolitionists mobbed.”

Douglass later wrote a letter to William White, recalling their shared, harrowing experience:

I dreamed last night that you would not be angry at receiving a letter from your friend Frederick Douglass. It may be all a dream, yet for once I feel like acting under the direction of a dream. I have thought of you a thousand times since I left the U.S. and have as often promised myself the pleasure of writing to you—but somehow or other, I have managed to postpone it until now I am prompted by a dream. That you may the more readily excuse me for presuming to dream of you I will mention that I went to bed thinking about Pendleton Indianna [sic]. You may remember such a place, and also certain events which transpired in that region in the summer of 1843. All dreams aside I shall never forget those days and I may add those nights. I shall never forget how like two very brothers we were ready to dare, do, and even die for each other. Tragic awfully so—yet I laugh always when I think how comic I must have looked when running before the mob, darkening the air with the mud from my feet. How I looked running you can best describe but how you looked bleeding—I shall always remember. You had left home and a life of ease and even luxury that you might do something toward breaking the fetters of the Slave and elevating the despised black man. And this too against the wishes of your father and many of your friends. When I thought I did indeed wish to bleed in your stead. Such a noble blood—so warm so generous—was too holy to be poured out by the rough hand of that infernal mob.

Dear William, from that hour you have been loved by Frederick Douglass.

In 1845, the same year he published his autobiography, he was forced to leave the U.S. The final negotiations for his freedom took place during 1846, and in December of that year he was freed:

Aboard the Cambria he left the country and sought refuge in England to avoid being recaptured as a fugitive slave. He toured England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales. Ellen Richardson and Henry Richardson raised funds to buy Douglass’ freedom from Captain Auld. They paid Auld 150 sterling pounds, about $710 for his manumission which gave him immunity against the fugitive slave law of 1793 and 1850.

Here are some observations from his speaking tour.

The speaking tour began in Ireland, and Douglass was horrified at Irish poverty, which was worse than anything he had experienced. At a gathering of some 20,000 people, he shared the lecture platform with Daniel O’Connell, the legendary orator for Irish emancipation. He was moved when Irishmen dubbed him the Black O’Connell of the United States. Douglass realized that blacks weren’t the only ones struggling to be free. One million Irish died of starvation following the failure of the potato crop that year, and Douglass joined cool-headed free trade agitator Richard Cobden and his compatriot John Bright, a passionate speaker. The threesome traveled from town to town, demanding immediate repeal of the corn laws (grain tariffs), so desperate people could buy cheap food.

This was Douglass’ first international experience, but it would not be his last.

After Reconstruction, Douglass served as assistant secretary of the Santo Domingo Commission (1871) and in the District of Columbia he was marshal (1877–81) and recorder of deeds (1881–86); finally, he was appointed U.S. minister and consul general to Haiti (1889–91).

Douglass’ contributions to the American body politic have been so broad that he has merited his own encyclopedia. 

 

 

From the preface:

This reference work, The Frederick Douglass Encyclopedia, seeks to place the achievements, contributions, and the lifelong body of work of the leading African American activist and abolitionist of the nineteenth century before contemporary students, scholars, and the general public. It is a work six years in the making and represents the efforts of over a hundred scholars committed to highlighting Douglass’s career as well as the wide range of individuals, groups, and public issues with which he associated. This book presents a lifetime (1817–1895) of serious work and efforts in the human struggle to fight the injustices of American slavery, racism, and discrimination against women, free blacks, and Native Americans.

…

The poet Robert Hayden (1913–1980) reminds us in the lines from his poem, “Frederick Douglass”:

When it is finally ours, this freedom, this liberty, this
beautiful and terrible
thing,
needful to man as air…

Douglass is central to the collective struggle and story of the
black freedom movement in the nineteenth century. It is the
hope of the editors and contributors to this reference work
that contemporary students will find this volume an especially
useful tool in understanding Frederick Douglass’s place in
African American and American history. Douglass’s status is
secure as a prominent internationally-known human rights
advocate based on his decades-long work advancing the
human experience from one generation to the next. Indeed,
his body of work challenges contemporary students and the
lay public alike to reach out and promote freedom, justice,
and equality in this twenty-first century. 

 Here is Robert Hayden, reading his tribute to Douglass.

 (text of the poem here)

Perhaps some of the best known words spoken by Douglass come from his “West India Emancipation” speech at Canandaigua, New York, in 1857.

“If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”

Other speeches by Douglass have also been a major part of our collective heritage, like his July 4, 1852 oration, documented here on Daily Kos more than once by Meteor Blades.

I have always honored Douglass the feminist. Many of us are aware that his impassioned speech at the Seneca Falls Women’s Rights Convention in 1848 helped turn the tide for the adoption of the women’s suffrage resolution. He stated:

“At any rate, seeing that the male government of the world have failed, it can do no harm to try the experiment of a government by man and woman united…”

“I have never yet been able to find one consideration, one argument, or suggestion in favor of man’s right to participate in civil government which did not equally apply to the right of woman…” 

I chuckled the first time I read Douglass’ admonitions to men about womens’ right to speak for themselves. We still face these challenges today.

When I look around on this assembly, and see the many able and eloquent women, full of the subject, ready to speak, and who only need the opportunity to impress this audience with their views and thrill them with “thoughts that breathe and words that burn,” I do not feel like taking up more than a very small space of your time and attention, and shall not. I would not, even now, presume to speak, but for the circumstance of my early connection with the cause, and of having been called upon to do so by one whose voice in this Council we all gladly obey.

 

Men have very little business here as speakers, anyhow; and if they come here at all they should take back benches and wrap themselves in silence. For this is an International Council, not of men, but of women, and woman should have all the say in it. This is her day in court. I do not mean to exalt the intellect of woman above man’s; but I have heard many men speak on this subject, some of them the most eloquent to be found anywhere in the country; and I believe no man, however gifted with thought and speech, can voice the wrongs and present the demands of women with the skill and effect, with the power and authority of woman herself. The man struck is the man to cry out. Woman knows and feels her wrongs as man cannot know and feel them, and she also knows as well as he can know, what measures are needed to redress them. I grant all the claims at this point. She is her own best representative. We can neither speak for her, nor vote for her, nor act for her, nor be responsible for her; and the thing for men to do in the premises is just to get out of her way and give her the fullest opportunity to exercise all the powers inherent in her individual personality, and allow her to do it as she herself shall elect to exercise them. Her right to be and to do is as full, complete and perfect as the right of any man on earth. I say of her, as I say of the colored people, “Give her fair play, and hands off.”

 

There was a time when, perhaps, we men could help a little. It was when this woman suffrage cause was in its cradle, when it was not big enough to go alone, when it had to be taken in the arms of its mother from Seneca Falls, N.Y., to Rochester, N.Y., for baptism. I then went along with it and offered my services to help it, for then it needed help; but now it can afford to dispense with me and all of my sex. Then its friends were few—now its friends are many. Then it was wrapped in obscurity—now it is lifted in sight of the whole civilized world, and people of all lands and languages give it their hearty support. Truly the change is vast and wonderful.

Douglass’ heirs are many. The Rev. Dr. William Barber, leader and architect of the Moral Mondays Movement in North Carolina, pays tribute to him when he teaches and preaches. He opened last year’s March on Raleigh with Douglass’ words about no struggle, no progress.

Let us continue to move forward in the struggle, guided by the words of Frederick Douglass—inscribed in our hearts, nourishing our souls, and inspiring us to fight for freedoms still not won.