IPPH Defining Fathers Legacy Series: Frederick Douglass on September 14, 2024

 Just when you think the 15 minutes of fame is long over, you get an e-mail that you don't think is supposed to be for you, but it is. You also have a wonderful talk with one of the planners.

On September 14, 2024, the Institute of Politics, Policy, and History will hold the next in its "Defining Fathers Legacy Series" focusing on Frederick Douglass at the Frederick Dogulass National Historic Site starting at 11:30. The panel will include former D.C. Mayor Sharon Pratt (a Democrat) and Michael Steele (a never-Trump former head of the Republican Party) asking quetions of Pulitzer Prize-wining Yale historian David Blight (who has always been a good friend to me) and little ole me. 

Alas, I do beleive that they are sold out, now -- or would be "sold" if the tickets weren't free. 

 

It should be fascinating because of the other panelists and fun for me. Also, the event includes another chance to tour Douglass's house, which is always a treat.

A Curiosity From the Baltimore Sun, June 6, 1843

AN OUTRAGE -- The Boston Post says that George Latimer and Frederick Douglass, formerly slaves, and Charles Lennox Redmond, a negro citizen of Salem, are on the committee appointed to wait on President Tyler, during his visit to Boston, to request him to emancipate his slaves. It is to be hoped that the Bostonians will allow no such outrage to be perpetrated.

This is not a particularly interesting news item. George Latimer and Frederick Douglass were, indeed formerly slaves. In fact, by law, Douglass himself was still a slave since the U.S. Constitution protected masters' ownership in their slave property through the Fugitive Slave Clause. Charles Lennox Remond -- not "Redmond" -- was probably more famous than Douglass at this point, being the premier black abolitionist speaker. Tyler did not bring any of his slaves to Boston in order to avoid just such a confrontation.

Note the date of the item: June 6, 1843. Note also the location of the publication: Baltimore, Maryland. Douglass had run away from that city only four years and nine months earlier (almost to the day). He did not published his Narrative, in which he identified details of his life as a slave, until May 1845, almost two years after this item appeared in the Sun. Do you think that the editors of the Sun yet knew that he had been Frederick Bailey, the enslaved caulker living in ship carpenter Hugh Auld's house?

Not an important point, but a curiosity that I came across in my research nonetheless.

Frederick Douglass on Ireland

I have traveled almost from the Hill of Howth...

...to the Giant's Causeway...

...and from the Giant's Causeway to Cape Clear.*

During these travels, I have met with much in the character and condition of the people to approve, and much to condemn; much that has thrilled me with pleasure, and very much that has filled me with pain.... I can truly say, I have spent some of the happiest moments of my life since landing in this country. I seem to have undergone a transformation. I live a new life.

-- Frederick Douglass to William Lloyd Garrison, Belfast, Ireland, 1 January 1846, published in Liberator, 30 January 1846, republished in My Bondage and My Freedom (1855).

-----
*Kinsale's harbor stands in for Cape Clear, here. At this time of year, Cape Clear is a bit dangerous.

More Source Creep

First, my apologies to Contingent Cassandra and John for not noticing that your comments were sucked up by the comment moderator. I've let them through and, with any luck, they will recognize you in the future.

Onward to the post:

Back when I was an editor at the Frederick Douglass Papers publishing project at IUPUI, I did a significant amount of detailed research into all sorts of other details in order to annotate the correspondence that Yale University Press eventually published as Volume I. In annotating the first letter that Douglass wrote to Julia Griffiths, I did everything I could to find out what I could about her background using primarily Interlibrary Loan. Young folks, I know this is hard to imagine, but in that world of the early 2000s, Google was new and we didn't have Ancestry.com (I cannot stop loving Ancestry.com, and a subscription is well worth the price for any scholar). So I had to follow some of the leads of secondary sources and, well, I've discussed some of the pitfalls of that path.

The case in point here has to do with the city in which Julia Griffiths lived and met Frederick Douglass. Here is what the first biographer who mentions the location has to say: "Miss Griffiths had met Douglass at Newcastle –upon—Tyne." (p. 87) That was Benjamin Quarrels, who wrote the first academic biography of Douglass in 1948. Two years later, Philip Foner, in his biography of Douglass, wrote, "Miss Griffiths, a daughter of a close friend of Wilberforce, the British Abolitionist, had met Douglass at Newcastle-upon-Tyne during his tour abroad and they had become fast friends at once." (p. 87 -- yes, also p. 87) Over thirty years later, in his Mind of Frederick Douglass (1984) Waldo E. Martin, Jr., wrote, "Douglass and Julia Griffiths, and English abolitionist, first met in her hometown of Newcastle-upon-Tyne during his initial tour of the British Isles (1845-1847)." (Not page 87 this time, p. 40) William McFeely, in his 1991 biography, getting a little creative, wrote, “He spent Christmas 1846 in Newcastle upon Tyne with the Richardsons; there he met another articulate, intelligent antislavery worker, Julia Griffiths, and talked to her of his plan for starting a newspaper on his return to America." (p. 145) Finally, Maria Diedrich, in the deeply flawed Love Across Color Lines (1999) wrote, "Then, when Julia Griffiths, a British abolitionist from Newcastle-on-Tyne, followed Douglass to Rochester to live with his family and help him with his paper, it seemed clear to many of his friends that a rupture in the Douglass marriage was final, and the Garrisonians spread rumors about the alleged affair in an attempt to ruin the ‘defector’s’ reputation." (p. 86. We shall save the completely ludicrous statement about the Douglass marriage for another time.)

Not a single one of these volumes cites any source for this information. Now, I can guess that all of the biographers after Quarrels simply relied upon him or the prior biographer for their information. McFeely, as he does elsewhere in his biography, illustrates some of the dangers of attempting to dramatize an event for which there is no documentation. I myself, in an effort to find the source of Julia's origins in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, drove myself and the IUPUI interlibrary loan staff to distraction in searching microfilm of city directories and census records. All to no avail. "Why on earth would he place her there?" I kept asking myself.

I think he did so because John Estlin, an abolitionist in Bristol, England, wrote to Samuel May, an abolitionist in Boston, that Griffiths "is a great friend of Mrs. Richardson’s." (John Estlin to Samuel May, Bristol, England, 30 January 1849, Samuel May Papers, Anti-Slavery Collection, Rare Books and Manuscripts Department, Boston Public Library.) As Quarrels said, the Richardsons lived in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. He must have assumed that Griffiths, as a friend, lived nearby.

Unfortunately, other documentation did not bear this out, which made me very frustrated as I tried to track her down. On an 1848 circular for a bazaar to raise funds for Douglass's paper contained this information about the organizers: "Misses Griffiths, Beckenham, Kent, and 5 Charles Square, London." Also living at 5 Charles Square was T. Powis Griffiths, who was listed as someone collecting subscriptions for Douglass's newspaper the North Star at the same time. The miracle that is Ancestry.com then let me to census and birth records that all show Julia Griffiths as having been born and -- I am assuming this part -- raised in London. All of my efforts to locate her in Newcastle-upon-Tyne came to naught because she never lived there. Yet, because these biographers have all cited someone who did not cite his own source, she has been described as meeting Douglass in a place that she most likely never visited.

Oddly, for these biographers, that one source that said she was a friend of Mrs. Richardson outweighed the three others in the same collection from the same period that all place her in the company of Mary Howitt, one of the editors of Howitt's Journal. Where did Mary Howitt live and edit said journal? London, England. The Devil is really in the details, isn't it?

Of course, many would say that this is all simple hair-splitting. What does it matter if she met Douglass in Newcastle-upon-Tyne or in London? Well, the point isn't so much in the detail as in the point that most of these biographers were not curious enough about Griffiths to investigate her life. They could describe her contact with Douglass, based upon prior biographers and upon his own descriptions in his autobiographies, fleshed out by some of the gossip in those ever bitchy Garrisonians' letters, but not a one has ever actually investigated and analyzed her life. As a result, she has been sorely underestimated.

Thank goodness for that! Their oversight opens up a place for a pedantic little voyeur like myself (and to British scholars who have written as yet unpublished articles on Julia alone, not in relation to Douglass -- more on them as their research comes out) to add a little bit to the scholarship.

Caught Between a Cliche and Some Jargon

This started out as a couple of postings and comments on Facebook.

Let's play a game. Translate the passage: "The theoretical problem in enjoining the phenomenology of daily life with the political history that periodizes the past and macro social structures is that it requires a structural analysis, yet one which while not being deterministic retains the activity and intentionality of women as a historical subject." (from "The New Historical Syntheses: Women's Biography," a 1990 article in the Journal of Women's History, by Kathleen Barry)

I honestly don't mean to be bitchy -- ok, not too bitchy -- because this is an interesting study in an attempt to convey a complex idea. You want specific language in order to explain this idea, but you also want to actually communicate that idea to other people. People who went to more theoretically based graduate programs than mine -- or who didn't curl up into the fetal position and whimper at their own inadequacies when faced with such passages -- might have no problem understanding this. Me? I had to pretty much sound this out, and I think it comes down to saying that the biographer should attempt to explain how their subject understood their own life in the context of the Big Picture events of their time without assuming that all women responded in the same way to something like, for example, the suffrage movement or abolition, simply because they were all women. In other words, all women are not from Venus, all women do not like shopping, nor have a shoe fetish, nor are dying to get married and have babies.

This is related to a problem that I am puzzling through with Douglass. I struggle in comprehending the emotional lives of my subjects in order to explain those lives in a way that a modern audience will understand without falling into cliché or platitudes. The moment a cliché or platitude appears in the work, you know a writer has hit the limit of their ability to express a particular idea. I’m trying very hard not to do that. The clichés and platitudes are of the same sort of creature as the highly academic language, except that clichés overgeneralize while the academic language attempts to be overly specific. They still end up saying very little to most people because they are overly general or are understandable to only a select few who are willing to put in the work of reading past the first paragraph. Even then, I'm not certain that the actual idea is still being expressed with any clarity, even to those steeped in the language (and I wouldn't be surprised if people who write like that are still frustrated at their inability to completely explain exactly what they mean).

To be more specific about some of the writing problems that I am having, I am working on Chapter 1, which deals with Douglass's mother, grandmother, and slave mistresses. In the absence of documentation from the hand of any of these women, I have to piece together their lives relying upon plantation and state records, and Douglass's accounts, which were written at a remove of over a decade for a predominantly northern, white, middle class audience. In other words, I have to muck through a lot of contingencies to get to the real woman.

Now, an easy way to get around some of the problems that I am facing with these women would be to say something like, "well, all women would love their babies, so Harriet Bailey loved hers." What if those babies were conceived in rape? What if she hated their father? What if she loved them but knowing that they would be taken away from her meant that she had to steel herself against any affection? What if she was just a nasty person like the "Aunt Katy" whom Douglass despised and who attacked her own son with a knife?

Yet, I am also highly aware that, in going into the meaner, harder possibilities, as a white woman I can also run into my own unexamined racism. I don't want to sound like I am going to the other extreme by saying that "all enslaved women rejected their children" or "black women cannot be good mothers" because that is not it at all. I am trying to understand the behavior of Harriet Bailey, mother of Frederick, who probably had some complicated and conflicting emotions about her children that defy the stereotypes of good or bad mothers.

I think Douglass himself was guilty, although perhaps intentionally guilty, of using the stereotypes of a good mother about his own and about the women that appear in my chapter. Not really knowing his mother, wanting to portray her to this audience who still had much unexamined racism in their midst, and perhaps also wanting to understand his own abandonment, he relied upon stock characters of mothers. The same with Sophia Auld, his "tender-hearted" mistress, before she turned on him.

What I think I'm getting at here is that, as I read and re-read and ultimately Zapruder things written about Douglass's life, I become frustrated at this assumption that emotions have always been the same across time (tell tale by such phrases as "as any child would" or "typical of any young man"); and I am struggling to write around that place in the story in the absence of declarations. I fear that I am stripping my story of its emotional component, which is dishonest, but not as dishonest as relying upon a sort of flattening of all experience into some sort of ahistorical Hallmark card.

As I struggle to write around the emotions, I also struggle with the words. What words are best and in what order to explain something so slippery and ephemeral as the emotional life of a stranger in a different time and in circumstances that are wholly alien to myself? What words are original and also comprehensible and will in some way convey as precisely as possible the place in the world that these women occupied?

Alas, that is probably why that passage from that article preoccupied me.

A Random Paragraph about Douglass and his Mother

I have this paragraph that I really like but am afraid may be sliced up in revision. I'm posting it here so I can return and admire it from time to time:

The impossibility of answering these questions [about his mother] haunted Douglass and, in writing his autobiographies, he attempted to reconcile what he did know with what he hoped was true. Historians find themselves in sympathy with Douglass both in the absence of answers and the absence of his mother. In the face of the void, they accept his version with little question. The methods of the historical craft require that they do. In this case, at least, a conclusion of questions may be of greater service in understanding this world that shaped him from his birth. Unanswerable questions allow historians to understand the uncertainty that drove Douglass’s invention of his identity and that informed his responses to other people, particularly those with whom he was most intimate. This uncertainty also serves as a reminder that he was stripped of a network of family, which he attempted to reconstruct and defend through his own marriage and after the Civil War. Finally, these questions allow us not to know Harriet Bailey, but to consider her life with greater nuance in the absence of further evidence.

From the First Draft of My Paper about Harriet Bailey, Douglass's Mother

This is from my first draft of my paper about Harriet Bailey, and an example of some of both my own limitations in sources at this particular time as well as an example of the way I'm trying to use questions to suggest a range of behavior without making up a conclusion in the absence of evidence:

Because Anthony seems a likely candidate for Douglass's father, and because so many both in Douglass’s time and since have accepted him as such, it is worth pondering what his fathering seven of his own slaves meant to the women in his household, especially Harriet Bailey.

How, for instance, did the white women in his own family react? These women included his sister, Elinor Malony, who hired Harriet during three of these pregnancies, and his daughter, Lucretia Auld, who was charmed by the child Frederick and made him her particular pet. Did Anthony impregnate his slave three times under the roof of his sister’s house? Did she approve, or turn a blind eye, or proselytize, or attack Harriet? Was this the reason that Harriet went to Holme Hill Farm rather than stay on with Malony? Similarly, did Lucretia Auld know that the little boy singing outside of her window in hopes of a little bread and butter was her half-brother? Did this explain her favor to the child, as some historians argue? Did she favor the other siblings, too? Was she wholly ignorant and Frederick’s natural charm alone captivated her? Did she not let herself know? Did she deny the veracity of rumors about her father, the ones that Frederick himself heard? Did she know but choose to respond kindly to the child who courted her favor? As Douglass himself pointed out, and hosts of historians who study slaveowning women have shown, the white mistresses very often hated and abused the children of their husbands. Ann Anthony, Aaron’s wife, did not figure into this story, living as she did, far from Harriet and her children and dying in 1818. The wives, however, had a different relationship to the master-father than his sister or daughter, so their reactions might vary. At the same time, their reactions also profoundly shapes the world of their enslaved nieces, nephews, half-brothers, half-sisters, and the woman who, in addition to being the victim of rape received the brunt of the white women’s wrath, the mother of these children.

With Anthony’s wife either on the far side of the county or gone, Lucretia Auld also on the far side, and Malony removed as her supervisor once she moved to Holme Hill farm, the question of ill-treatment by the white women of the Anthony family was rendered moot for Bailey. Still, she could not escape Anthony himself. What, then, was her range of choices in regard to his advances and her experience in bearing his children? His behavior toward another slave whom he also may have raped provides a clue. In his autobiographies, Douglass related a terrifying story of his aunt, Hester, Harriet’s younger sister, who was born in 1810, making just over two years older than Harriet’s oldest child. Douglass could not fix a date for this event; but, it took place during his two years at Wye House when Hester was between 14 and 16 years old. Hester and Edward “Ned” Roberts, one of the slaves belonging to Edward Lloyd, had taken an interest in one another and begun courting. Anthony forbid Hester to see Roberts and, when Hester defied Anthony, he beat her to a bloody pulp. In relating the story, Douglass intimated, “Why master was so careful of her, may be safely left to conjecture.”
Contemporaries, historians, and literary scholars alike have used this incident as evidence of Anthony’s brutality. Dickson Preston, who studied this period of Douglass’s life in greatest detail, believed that the beating demonstrate mental illness or dementia. None, however, questioned the sexual dimension of the story, including Douglass himself. “When the motives of this brutal castigation are considered,” he wrote in 1855, “language has no power to convey a just sense of its awful criminality.” In 1882, he added that Anthony’s motives were “as abhorrent as they were contemptible,” and robbed his victim of any means “of the honourable perpetuation of the race.” In other words, Anthony had claimed Hester as his concubine and would not allow her a choice of husband for herself.

This incident suggests two points. First, if Anthony was the father of Harriet’s children, then these children were probably the product of serial rape, with beating as the penalty for resistance and, unlike the case of Sally Hemings, no discernable reward for submission. There is also no evidence to suggest that she could turn to another white man, as did Harriet Jacobs. While Douglass tactfully does not speculate specifically on his mother’s sexual treatment at the hands of their master, his inclusion of this event serves not only as a graphic example of both physical and sexual violence under slavery, but also as a way of shifting what he would not imagine about his mother’s experience onto her sister. That is not to say that the event did not take place and for the reasons stated. To also accept this story as fact leads to the second suggested point. This incident took place within the same period of time that Harriet gave birth to her last child and died. With his wife dead and his concubine dying, Anthony may have settled on Hester as her sister’s replacement. Jenny, Harriet’s next younger sister, was married and escaped north in 1825. Betty already had three children. Maryann was sold south in 1825, leaving Hester as the remaining sexually mature woman who was not already married or producing children. Anthony did not necessarily have to respect the bonds of marriage, such as they stood with slaves, but if one of his enslaved women were already producing children, thereby increasing his property, he had no reason to alter the arrangement if another woman were available. In Hester’s case, that other woman had no desire to take on the role.

Douglass and "Johnny Come Down to Hilo"

In one of the three versions of Fredericka Douglass Sprague Perry's reminiscences about her grandfather, Frederick Douglass, she wrote about one of the games that Douglass played with the grandchildren when they were young. He would lead them into the dining room at Cedar Hill to the music of his violin, then teach them "songs of the rollicking slave urchins he had learned as a slave boy." She transcribed two of them, and one of them seemed surprisingly familiar to me, hearkening back to my days at Mystic Seaport:

Oh John Low! Johnny went down the hi-lo!
Oh John Low! Johnny went down the hi-lo!
Went down the hi-lo to get some gin,
Johnny went down the hi lo!
Drank so much he tumbled in,
Johnnie went down the hi-lo!

This actually sounds very much like an old sea shanty, work song, that has been transcribed this way:

Never seen the like since I been born
An Arkansas farmer with his sea boots on
Johnny come down to Hilo, poor old man
Wake her, shake her
Wake that gal with the blue dress on
Johnny come down to Hilo, poor old man

I got gal across the sea
She's a Badian beauty and she says to me…
Johnny come down to Hilo, poor old man
Wake her, shake her
Wake that gal with the blue dress on
Johnny come down to Hilo, poor old man

Sally's in the garden picking peas
The hair on her head hanging down to her knees
Johnny come down to Hilo, poor old man
Wake her, shake her
Wake that gal with the blue dress on
Johnny come down to Hilo, poor old man

My wife she died in Tennessee
And they sent her jawbone back to me
Johnny come down to Hilo, poor old man
Wake her, shake her
Wake that gal with the blue dress on
Johnny come down to Hilo, poor old man 

I put that jawbone on the fence
And I ain't heard nothing but the jawbone since
Johnny come down to Hilo, poor old man
Wake her, shake her
Wake that gal with the blue dress on
Johnny come down to Hilo, poor old man

So hand me down my riding cane
I'm off to see Ms. Sarah Jane
Johnny come down to Hilo, poor old man
Wake her, shake her
Wake that gal with the blue dress on
Johnny come down to Hilo, poor old man

Of course, you have to rearrange Perry's lyrics, remembered approximately fifty years later, to:

Went down the hi-lo to get some gin,
Drank so much he tumbled in,
Johnny went down the hi-lo!Oh John Low!
Johnny went down the hi-lo!Oh John Low!

This was a work song that that could go on and on as long as the leader, who set the pace, could make up verses or as long as the task took. It has an upbeat rhythm and was good for fast moving jobs. So, the song wasn't so much a "slave urchin" song as it was a maritime working class song. The musicologist at Mystic Seaport said that it can be traced to the south, most specifically the Mississippi River, but such things did not stay in one place very long on the water, and white Marylanders did much nefarious slave trading down that way.

I imagine that Douglass learned this song on the docks and in the shipyards in Baltimore. His de facto master there owned and worked in shipyards; and before Douglass himself learned the caulking trade, he himself lived on and roamed the streets down by the wharves in Fells Point.

Douglass's daughter, Rosetta, mother of Fredericka, however, did not appreciate this song and looked on in "great disgust." For Douglass, this was one of the few things that he brought from slavery, and he actually seemed to have loved all music, regardless of its origins. For Rosetta, however, this song (even if the "shake her" part were omitted) was undignified, with shameful and low-class connections from which she seemed to have wanted to distance herself. For the grandchildren, it was a rollicking song taught to them by their grandfather and they, two generations removed from slavery, saw no degradation in it.

For your enjoyment, and to illustrate the song, here is a video of shantymen Fisherman's Friends singing:



I'd be curious to know if the other song that Perry transcribed sounds familiar to anyone:

Oh Suckey Susan lend me a string
Oh lend me a string to tie my shoe,
A cotton string – it will not do,
A cotton string is like miss Lou (an aunt of ours)
A cotton string will break in two
A cotton string – a cotton string –
Oh do, oh do, oh do Mr. Babcock do!

Source: Box 28-4, Folder 88: Sprague, Rosetta Douglass, Notebook 1886, Frederick Douglass Collection, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Founders' Library, Howard Univeristy, Washington, D.C.

Clements Library

For the past week, I have been researching in the Clements Library at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. The collection that I'm visiting is the Rochester Ladies' Anti-Slavery Society Papers. I originally thought that this collection was in Rochester at the Rush Rhees Library, where I have been for the greater part of the past month. The reason I was under this mistaken impression? Well, a biographer listed it as being there in a bibliography. Fortunately, another bibliography in another book cleared that all up, and here I am.

Much of my research these days has not turned up much meat. Most of the letters to or from Douglass have been published. Many of the letters about Douglass are fairly well known. Most of the current work has more to do with finding more clues to more clues, but also filling out the stories of the women beyond their interaction with Douglass, placing them within a community and thereby opening up the context of Douglass's story. I'm trying to say more in this book than simply, "Douglass did this -- and these were the women there -- and Douglass did that -- and these were the women there." That's boring. That's note taking. I want to expand this story about the gender interactions within the abolitionist movement both in public and in private. Or something like that. It will sound more eloquent in the book.

Which reminds me: The scholarship around the public/private division of "separate spheres" has been slowly erasing that line, showing how that was not the way most women lived their lives. I think the divide was much more a male experience, if any one experienced it at all. In what I am studying, Anna Murray Douglass (the first Mrs. Douglass) was probably the most exemplary of a fully private life, with several caveats, of course. Douglass seemed to prefer as public a life as possible. Much of what he did, he did for an audience, and when he was at home, he tried to keep that locked up tightly. At least, that's what the documentation seems to say at this point. As usual, I have much more secondary work to do.

To get back to this collection, I wasn't entirely certain of what I expected it to contain,  but I didn't expect it to be this interesting. The majority of this past week, Box 1, full of correspondence, occupied my attention, and gave me an idea of the way that these women conceived of their antislavery work and some of the ways that the work extended into Reconstruction.

A fascinating series of letters came from Julia A. Wilbur, a woman -- I can't say "young" or not, but she identifies herself as a "spinster" -- who took on the task of going down to Washington, D.C., to aid the "Contraband," in 1863. Eventually, Harriet Jacobs joined her, and the two of them fought government bureaucrats, Union officers, a military governor, and ordained ministers to make sure that the "contraband" had decent living conditions, education and medical attention. The narrative of the letters is itself fascinating; but more interesting is the way that she starts out calling the freed people "contraband" and "poor creatures" and attempting to impose her ideas of "civilization" on them, to calling them "the people" and listening to their needs as articulated by "the people" themselves and both responding to and advocating for them.

Box 1 also includes some notes about aiding fugitives. I use the term "notes" because clearly someone at Douglass's office carried them to the sender. In once case, the writer, William Watkins, identified the messenger as Douglass's oldest son, Lewis. These letters show just how "upper ground" the Underground Railroad actually was in western New York. They all clearly identify the sender, the recipient, and that the fugitives with the sender need money. The sender is generally in the Frederick Douglass' Paper office, and the recipient is usually Maria G. Porter (who I mentioned in the posts on the Porter family graves), treasurer of the Rochester Ladies' Anti-Slavery Society.

I finished Box 1 on Thursday, and moved on to Box 2, thinking that there would not be much in it, and that I might be able to move this show on down to Oberlin to look up Rosetta Douglass in their archives. After all, how much can you find in an account book?

Clearly I forgot Watergate Deep Throat's dictum, "follow the money." One of the aspects of the antislavery movement that often gets lost in the ideology and action is the importance of money. There were only so many antislavery dollars out there to go around, and there seems to have been huge competition for them, which became tangled in the ideology and action. Much of what the women in the movement did, too, involved raising funds. Speakers needed salaries and expenses paid, lectures required advertisements, fugitives needed aid, rendition cases has court costs, Beecher's Bibles were not cheap, and every newspaper published struggled. Activism is not cheap!

All of this is to say that I found an amazing amount of data in this second box, which contains the Society's annual reports and account book. I'm in the account book, which, incidentally, required me to figure out how account books work (if you know me in the physical world, then you know that I am famed for my inability to understand numbers). The account book shows speakers' fees, the cost of renting a hall for the speakers, the amounts taken in at fairs both from foreign and from domestic goods (which will figure in with my analysis of Julia Griffiths, if I can round it all out with the same from the American Anti-Slavery Society), and the amounts given to fugitives or to bury fugitives who died.

Between the account book and the correspondence, however, you can see that these women saw their primary task as aiding not Frederick Douglass but enslaved -- or formerly enslaved - people themselves. They deployed the same networks and methods as emancipation advanced, sending an agent into the South, as they had when they provided railroad tickets, clothing and funerals to those running North. I have to dive back into the secondary literature -- fast becoming my greatest weakness -- in order to see how this fits into the larger pattern of women in the antislavery movement, and the ways that they differed or modeled themselves on other women.

What I am seeing is that there is a distinct difference in the way that they conceive of their activism and the way that Douglass sees his activism, and that, sometimes, the women believe that their work is, in fact, morally superior to his. Furthermore, the more that Douglass becomes famous and moves into party politics, the less feminine his world becomes. For Douglass -- and this is just a hypothesis at this moment -- the abolition movement was much more female or, at the very least, integrated by gender. The Civil War took him into a world in which men and masculine citizenship and political action dominated his work. He was a connection and a wedge for the women and their work, and, at the moment, the number of women working with him in reform seems to decrease or their activism and organizations seem separate from him in some way that made their relationship different than before the Civil War.

Here, too, I must sort out politics, activism, and reform.

After Michigan, I'm back to Syracuse, then off to D.C. to close shop there. Then, off to Ireland until May.

The Fourth of July

Douglass gave this speech to the Rochester Ladies' Anti-Slavery Society on July 5, 1852.





Partial text.

He was thirty-four years old at the time.

By the way, Julia Griffiths thought the speech was "great!"

Second Funniest Thing Found In the Garrison Family Papers

In the Garrison Family Papers at the Sophia Smith Collection at Smith College, I found a special issue of the British journal Anti-Caste.  This issue had been published in the spring of 1895 in memorial to Frederick Douglass, who had died in February. In this issue,  the editor, Catherine Impey, reprinted "Extracts from the Editor's Diary of a Visit to 'Cedar Hill,'" the visit in question having taken place in September 1892.

At one point in her week long visit, Impey described an excursion to the Art Gallery with Douglass; his wife, Helen Douglass; Helen's sister, Eva Pitts; Helen's friend, Miss Foy; and Douglass's granddaughters, Annie and Estella Sprague. "F.Douglass and six ladies," Impey parenthetically reported. Parenthetically, I am  surprised that she did not include an exclamation mark. Furthermore, on the way to the Art Gallery, they met with two other women, "a Mrs. Lee and her daughter, from Chicago (coloured)." Now, the party consisted of F. Douglass and eight ladies.

Understand that, in 1892, Douglass was 74 years old. Yet, he still had the physique to command this description from Impey as she, from her guest room window,  saw him strolling in the yard below. "What a grand majestic figure it is," she wrote. "Fine features, with a crown of white hair like the Egyptian monarchs of old." The magnetism of his youth was still present as he aged.

Yet, what struck me in this description, as in other indications of his life from the earliest accounts, including his own, was that he was surrounded by women and seemed most at ease among them. The only men who appear in this description of Impey's week at Cedar Hill were the carriage driver and Douglass's grandson, Joseph Douglass,who only appear to escort ladies off-stage. He is most jovial,  most relaxed, and most compliant around the ladies, and I am wondering why. Could this be his conservative or patriarchal streak? They are not a threat to him and generally in service (or thrall) to him; but is there something else there, something that carries me into the realm of "psychohistory"?

Happy "Birthday," Frederick Douglass

Found online:

The caption says it all. The image links to the photographer's Flickr page.

Douglass estimated -- or guesstimated -- his birthday to be in February. There is no documentation for this, and he, in fact, also guesstimated his birth year to have been 1817 when documentation has shown he was born in 1818. Of course, this was one of his point in his autobiographies. He did not know when he was born, nor did any other slaves, because the system of slavery was designed to keep slaves ignorant of everything, including the circumstances of their own births. Like many other features of his life, the date of his birth became part of Douglass's self-invention. He claimed a name, an education, a career, the right to formulate his own ideas, his freedom, and his own date of birth. As he portrayed himself, he symbolically gave birth to himself.

"As he portrayed himself": What really happened? Well, that's where things get interesting!

2nd Marriage

On this day, January 24, in 1884, Frederick Douglass married his second wife, Helen Pitts. The two went to work at the Recorder of Deeds office, where he was Recorder and she was a secretary working, at one point, under the supervision of Rosetta Douglass, Frederick's daughter. At the end of the day, they proceeded to the 15th Street Presbyterian Church in Washington, D.C., where they were married by the Rev. Francis Grimke' (the black nephew, incidentally, of the white sisters Sarah and Angelina Grimke'). Outrage issued from both black and white corners, including both of their families; and he seems not to have been entirely forgiven for this to this day. As for her, in the lawsuit-ridden aftermath of his death, I've notice a struggle for the position of the real Mrs. Douglass in the efforts to commemorate Douglass. More on that as I research it.

Interesting tidbits from the newspapers in the wake of their wedding:

• The New York Globe reported that Helen wore a "garnet velvet and silk" dress -- yes, red! -- while "the groom wore a full suit of black." 
• The Washington D.C. Grit headlined the wedding announcement as "The Mistake of His Life," saying "It is not only a surprise, but a national calamity," adding, "But he suited himself; so we leave him in his glory (?)."
• Columnist Africanus in the Cleveland Gazette accused Douglass of attempting to "bleach out the race" through miscegenation.
• The Louisiana Standard exaggerated their age difference, saying "We must say that marriages between septuagenarians and young ladies in their thirties are not according to our idea of the fitness of things." Still, the editors, "wish the venerable old man a happy evening of his eventful life." Douglass was on the eve of his 66th birthday. Helen Pitts was forty-six.
• Not in a newspaper, but Elizabeth Cady Stanton turned a congratulatory letter into a plea for woman's suffrage.

On Trusting Secondary Sources

How do you trust your secondary sources when you check their primary source and discover that the primary source does not say what the secondary source purports it to say? In fact, the primary source doesn't even touch on the subject.

I keep coming across this problem. An interesting "fact" crops up in a secondary source, one that seems less well-known or that I haven't heard of before. Interested in the primary source for that (and hoping that the primary source will be something new that will give me greater insight into my own inquiries), I check the notes. The notes cite another secondary source. So, I go to that secondary source. That secondary source often cites and another, which cites another, and I end up on a scavenger hunt to find this elusive primary source. Then, when I finally find a reference to a primary source, I look at the primary source and that alleged fact is nowhere in that primary source.

Thus far, I have found this sort of problem consistently with much having to do with Douglass's youth in Maryland, with much surrounding Anna Douglass, and with anything connected to the Underground Railroad (which is a whole other messy area in which what happened and what people wanted to happen get all mixed up and repeated as fact). Right now, I'm tangling with sources that describe bits about Frederick and Anna's meeting and her influence upon him during their early relationship for which I cannot find primary sources -- and I really really want those primary sources!

The first bit has to do with the free black East Baltimore Mental Improvement Society, which Douglass mentions in passing in his autobiographies. He is, in fact, the only primary source for that organization, and he will probably always be that only primary source. The little group of free black men and their one slave member may have passed into obscurity had it not been for that one slave member writing about their contributions to his development and then going on to be the most famous black man of the nineteenth century.

The second bit has to do with Douglass and the violin. Two secondary sources say that Anna encouraged Frederick to learn to play the violin and that they purchased sheet music together in Baltimore. Secondary source A cites secondary source B, and secondary source B cites My Bondage and My Freedom, which says nothing of the sort. Secondary source A, in fact, goes so far as to say that Anne herself played the violin. Secondary source A again cites secondary source B as well as another secondary source on the first mention of Anna's purported skill, then cites a 19th century secondary source on the second mention. I confess that I haven't seen the 19th century source as yet, and am grateful for the notation, so that bit of information may develop further. Nevertheless, I've now come across yet another 19th century source that says that Douglass took up the violin in England. I know from his own hand that he did know how to play at least one song by the time he was in England -- "Camels a'Comin'" -- in 1846. Was that actually something that he had just learned in the previous year while also making speech after speech in town after town? Was he so beloved that his hosts never mentioned the screetching of a beginning violinist?

In any case, what does this matter? Back at the Douglass Papers, these sorts of trivial-seeming research questions and tasks (all of which I loved because they were like detective work) all resulted in annotations. In fact, this sort of research led me to the questions that produced this book project. Annotations, however, are a very different creature than an oblique biography. An oblique biography demands that the details support some purpose.

In the case of the violin, I'm not entirely sure what a confirmation of that fact will tell, but it will go in the pile of evidence about Anna's life that will ultimately produce a more complicated picture of her or, at the very least, add to the set of questions about her life that seem to define the -- to use an artistic term -- negative space around the image of her and might go toward explaining more about the arc of the Douglass courtship and marriage. Certainly his ability to play the violin created a point of connection with his second wife, Helen. What role, if any, did it play in his life with Anna? What, in fact, did skill on the violin mean to them, other than a night's entertainment?

In any case, in portraying Anna, I'm finding that I am portraying a set of possibilities rather than a set of facts or even a testable theory. I want to be very clear about that in my text (or, depending upon the editor's choice, in my notes) because I want readers to be able to trust my assertions or at least test me by going to the primary source.

Image: Frederick Douglass's violin, located at Cedar Hill, his home in Anacostia, D.C., now part of the National Parks Service.

1880 Census, Nellie Grant, and the Douglass Granddaughters

As I read through Radical Passions to find references to Anna Douglass -- "Border State" to the fabulously caustic Ottilia Assing -- I came across a reference to "Nellie Grant." "I am very sorry about your difficulties with Nellie Grant," she writes, "as much as on your account as on her own, since she will hardly be treated as tenderly by any other owner as she has been treated by you." Never one to edit herself or to let an opportunity to express her opinion pass by, she added, "I apprehended some mischief from the first, although I could not tell which, since you got her through Nathan, who will always take even greater advantage of you than of anybody else, because he knows that he can do so with impunity." (361) Nathan, by the way, was Douglass's son-in-law, married to his daughter, Rosetta. He has been, shall we say, much maligned.

Obviously, this couldn't be Nellie Grant, the daughter of Ulysses S. Grant, president at the time. The note for Nellie Grant says, "Douglass had taken into his already crowded household a needy young woman." Assing uses some strange language if that is true. Why would she use the term "owner" to a former slave in the aftermath of emancipation? Did people refer to good hospitality as "treated tenderly"? Didn't they usually say something like "cordial" or "kind"? Maybe this is one of those things that happen with non-native speakers of a language? Assing, after all, spoke German first.

Since Christopher Lohman's main source for the notes is Maria Diedrich's Love Across the Color Lines, I took a look. No mention; but then, people are always making these sorts of sweeping statements, and Douglass did take into his household people like Harriet Bailey (aka Harriet Adams, Mrs. Perry F. Adams, Ruth Adams, Ruth Cox -- but she's another story all wrapped up in revise and resubmit territory) and Louisa Sprague and his brother Perry Downs and Julia Griffiths and Assing herself.

Notice how they are predominantly women?

In any case, wondering more about this, I took a look at the 1880 Census for Washington, D.C. There was Douglass: F.W. (for Frederick Washington), his wife Anna, and his three granddaughters, Annie and Hattie Sprague and Julia Douglass. Louisa Sprague is also listed as his granddaughter, but at age 29, she was more likely Nathan's sister. "Granddaughter" might have been an easier way to explain the relationship in one word to the census taker. Next door lived Perry Downs and Kitty Barret, Douglass's siblings, and Perry Downs's nephew H.F. Wilson, along with Martha Wilson, identified as a servant in the column for her relationship to the head of household. What we have here, then, is a complex family arrangement. What we don't have here is anyone named Nellie Grant.

Then, I wondered why Rosetta Sprague's children were living with their grandparents. So, I went to find Nathan Sprague's household. There they were: Nathan, his wife Rosetta D., and their six children, Annie R, Harriette B, Estelle J., Fredericka D., Herbert D, and Rosa M. (ranging in age from 3 to 15, incidentally), along with Maria Pongee, a black servant.  The Douglasses were recorded on June 1, 1880, and the Spragues on the 12th. Were Hattie and Annie visiting grandma and grandpa on the day the census taker showed up and just ended up in the records as living there?

Meanwhile, what about that Nellie Grant? I browsed back through Ottilia's letters. The letter mentioning her, cited above, was written in April 1879. The previous December, Assing had written this at the end of a letter: "My Maca [her dog] sends his best thanks to Mrs. Douglass for the walnuts and is passionately fond of them. He was silent all the time I was absent and has been talking charmingly from the moment I came back. He is convinced that I belong to him exclusively; what do you think of it? My love to my fourlegged good daughter, Rock and Nellie Grant!" (349)

Is Nellie Grant, perhaps, a hound?