Where Was Douglass Between 1826 and 1827?

In spring 1826, Frederick sailed to Baltimore to live with Hugh and Sophia Auld as a babysitter or nanny to their two-year-old son Thomas. In the fall, Aaron Anthony, Lucretia's father and Frederick's master, died at Lucretia and Thomas Auld’s home in Hillsboro, Talbot County, not too far from where Douglass had lived as a very small child.

Between Anthony’s death in November and the inventory of his estate in December, Frederick returned to Talbot County for appraisal as part of Anthony’s estate. The list showing the valuation of Frederick and his family, the people owned by Anthony, bears the date 26 December 1826. The list demonstrating the division of the people to the three heirs bears the date 27 Sept 1827. In July 1827, Lucretia died.

In his accounts, Douglass wrote that he learned of Lucretia’s death only after he returned to Baltimore. His most recent biographers express perplexity as to the reason he would not have known of her death, since, they presume, he would have been there in the county at the time. William McFeely posits that no one told Frederick about Lucretia's death until later, clearly assuming that Frederick did not see her at all during his time back in the country. All appear to believe that Douglass arrived in Talbot County shortly before the valuation document was created and left after the division document was drawn up.

Douglass himself did not clearly depict what happened during this process. He told of returning to Talbot County. He explained the valuation and, on the heels of that explanation, told of his family’s fears of the division. In reading his autobiographies, an audience could imagine that all of the slaves were, as William McFeely described in Frederick Douglass, gathered in one place on one day, lined up, appraised like livestock, and then separated into various groups and led off to their new masters.

The dates of the documents, however, suggest that both took place at vastly different times, nearly a year apart. Douglass revealed very little about what actually happened at the valuation and division. For instance, although he worried about his grandmother’s fate, he wrote nothing of seeing her. The only relative he specifically noted as encountering was his older brother Perry. He also said nothing specifically of meeting his potential masters or mistress, with the exception of Andrew Anthony, whom he described as beating and kicking Perry in the head then threatening to do the same to Frederick.* The autobiographies served as abolitionist propaganda, meant to describe the violence done to slave bodies, families, and communities, so his description of this episode steps away from the strictly personal to describe a process in general. So, his depiction eliminated the intimacy of his experience in order to focus upon the reduction of humans to property and the violation of kinship ties as a result.

What actually happened, then? My hypothesis is this. Anthony died and his executors called all of his slave property to Talbot County for appraisal. Most of Frederick’s kin seems to have lived within the county on Anthony’s farms or hired out, so the appraisers could go to see them easily and estimate their price on the slave market. Baltimore was probably too far, so they called him back. Once the estate managers had fixed his dollar value -- $110 in 1826, or $2092.15 in 2010 – they had no reason to keep him about since the division itself would first take place on paper and the new masters would decide where to move their new property, if they so chose.

Furthermore, if any cash changed hands for Frederick’s services in Baltimore, he seems to have been oblivious to the transaction; but, if his work brought his master an income, then whether or not he became the property of Thomas Auld or one of Lucretia’s brothers, any time he spent away from Baltimore or not working in some capacity was lost income for the estate. If he was not earning his master an income, he at least was not eating his master’s food or costing his master anything for his upkeep, all of which fell to Hugh Auld, as far as seems reasonable. Therefore, keeping Frederick in the country, doing nothing in particular that he mentioned, was not a prudent financial decision.

More likely, Frederick arrived in Talbot County, was appraised, and then was sent back, all lasting a total of a few weeks – which he stated was the length of the duration of his trip. Even if the trip lasted as long as the six months that he said it felt, he would have returned in May or June, before Lucretia’s death in July. Thus, he actually did only learn of her death after the fact.

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*Perry, incidentally, was probably inherited by Andrew since he was later inherited by Andrew’s son, Joseph. When I checked on this bit of information for this post, I realized that Perry did not appear on the division list, nor did one or two other men listed in the valuation list. Now, I have some questions for those documents, and will have to analyze them a bit more rigorously. On first glance, they seem to include only the women, older men, and children; but I may be wrong. In any case, why isn't Perry on that list?

Image: Illustration from My Bondage and My Freedom (1855): http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/douglass55/ill1.html

Lucretia Auld and Frederick Bailey/Douglass

Douglass treated Lucretia Auld very well in his autobiographies. When a cousin wounded him in the forehead, leaving the permanent scar above the bridge of his nose that added to the intensity of his gaze in photographs, Lucretia bound him up. When he grew hungry, he discovered that, if he sang under her window, she would give him bread. She gave him his first pair of pants for his trip to Baltimore to stay with her in-laws, Hugh and Sophia Auld. He contrasted Lucretia with Aunt Katy, the cook in the kitchen, who was his grandmother's niece. Katy, roughly his own mothers age (and mistakenly referred to as "Katy Emblem" in some secondary sources), he described as starving and otherwise abusing him.

Some historians have overblown Lucretia's kindness by misunderstanding Douglass's account. They portray Lucretia as interceding for little Frederick. Yet, Frederick never specifically said that she did that. She just bound his bleeding head once, and gave him bread when he entertained her. Sending him to Baltimore had little to do with saving him from Katy or anyone else.

Historians also make much of his alleged special treatment at her hands, but they fail to take into account that he described his own experiences without the context of the other children around him. They attribute this alleged special treatment to their alleged kinship as half-siblings and to Frederick's supposed obvious exceptionalism. No evidence exists to suggest that the kinship would have made her treat him specially, especially if she did not treat his siblings -- who would also have been her half-siblings -- with the same consideration. In fact, he himself suggested that kinship might mean worse treatment when he told the tale of the planter Edward Lloyd's enslaved son whose white brother send him to the auction block. The exceptionalism too comes from Douglass's portrayal of himself in isolation and from biographers' tendency to see backward in time, attempting to pinpoint brilliance at an early age in order to explain the genius as an adult.

Frederick's "special" treatment may simply have been a result of being in the right place at the right time. Sure, he was smart in figuring out a way to manipulate Lucretia to feed him, but she probably just thought he was cute and amusing. When her sister-in-law, expecting a new baby, wanted a young boy to keep watch on her two-year-old son, Lucretia looked out her window and saw an older boy, who had a little cultivation through his association with David Lloyd (another white son of the planter Edward Lloyd), could entertain, and was approaching the age in which he would be sent somewhere for some purpose. Why not send him? Frederick's cousin Henny was probably sent to Baltimore a few years later for the same purpose. Her story did not end so well, but that is for another time.

Meanwhile, Lucretia, from her mother's death, oversaw the home in which both Frederick and Aunt Katy lived. Katy seemed to have had charge of the children sent to live in the kitchen, all between the ages of six and nine, but Lucretia was in charge of Katy. That would mean that the rations given to Katy to feed the children came from Lucretia. Lucretia, as mistress of the house, had the power to intercede and ensure that the children were fed more, if she so chose. She did not.

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Illustration from Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1882) depicting Harriet Bailey, his mother, defending him against Aunt Katy.

Obituary for Thomas Auld in the Baltimore Sun, Feb. 12, 1880

Funeral of an Old Marylander -- The funeral of Capt. Thomas Auld, who died near St. Michael's on Sunday last, as stated in t THE SUN, took place yesterday. he was buried by the side of his first wife, who was a Miss Anthony, and in whose right Capt. Auld was some time the owner of Frederick Douglass. Several of the grandchildren of Capt. Auld, daughters of Mr. John L. Sayers, who live in this city, attended the funeral. Capt. Auld was 84 years old, a native of Talbot county, and for many years commanded the Easton packet-boat, running between that place and Baltimore city.. Subsequently he was engaged in farming, and at the time of his death resided with his son-in-law, Mr. John C. Harper. Captain Auld leaves also a daughter living in Texas, Mrs. Wm. Bruff. He was married four times and survived all of his wives, whose maiden names were Miss Lucretia Anthony, Miss Hamilton, Miss Annie Harper and Miss Lucretia Thompson. When he married his last wife Captain Auld was over seventy years of age. He also has a nephew in this city, Lieut. B.F. Auld, of the Baltimore police force. The father of Lieut. Auld, Mr. Hugh Auld, held a bill of sale from his brother, Capt. Auld, for Fred. Douglass, (or Bailey, as he was named when owned by that family,) and when the purchase money was paid for the freedom of Douglass, some time after his escape, it was sheared equally between the two brothers. The father of Capt. Auld was in command of the American troops in Talbot county during the war of 1812, and when the British forces went to land at Bayside, the two youths, Thomas and Hugh, were employed to give intelligence of their movements. Capt. Auld was widely known and greatly respected throughout the county in which he lived.

Thomas Auld may be one of the few former slaveholders whose obituary named one of his former slaves and indicates that he, the owner, was renowned for owning that particular slave.

In 1826, Lucretia Auld inherited part of the extended Bailey family upon the death of her father, Aaron Anthony. The part of the family included Frederick, his older sister Eliza, his aunts Milly and Hester, several cousins, and a baby who was probably his youngest sister, Harriet, only about a year old. Their value totaled $935.00 -- that's $17,783.30 in 2010 dollar amounts. Lucretia died in July 1827. Her husband, Thomas Auld, inherited her property and thereby became the master. In 1828, he married Rowena Hambleton -- not "Hamilton." Both Lucretia and Rowena appeared in his autobiographies, one very favorably and one less so.

Lieutenant B.F. Auld was Benjamin Franklin Auld, son of Hugh and Sophia Auld. He did not appear in Douglass's autobiographies but was born in 1828, during the time that Douglass lived in the Auld household in Baltimore. He and Douglass corresponded in later decades, Douglass asking him for details of the Aulds' fates and of his own childhood.

Mr. John L. Sears -- not "Sayers" -- married Arianna Amanda Auld, daughter of Lucretia and Thomas Auld. Douglass visited Arianna Sears in 1859 when she lived in Philadelphia, just before he learned of the failure of John Brown's raid at Harpers Ferry, which forced him to leave a bit early and much more clandestinely than planned for an English tour. He also visited her again on her deathbed. Neither seemed to have cared for Rowena Auld, who died in the 1840s.

Mrs. William Bruff, as far as I can tell, was Louisa Auld Bruff, the daughter of Thomas and Rowena. In the 1880s, she offered to sell her St. Michael's home to Douglass for a somewhat inflated price. He seems to have declined the offer. Instead, he later bought a summer home in the black middle class community, Highland Beach.

The father of Hugh and Thomas -- and Arian, Edward, Zepporah, Willison, Washington, Sarah and Haddaway -- was Hugh Auld, Sr. He was in the militia in Talbot County during the War of 1812. He also appears to have owned slaves for a period of time in the first decade of the 1800s, but did not keep them. Dickson Preston says that he freed them, but gave no source for that information.  He also says that the land owned by the Auld, Sr., was sold by him to Thomas Kemp (no relation to my grandfather, as far as I know, whose ancestors were in southern Mississippi at the time), but the documents that he cites near that statement say that the property was sold at a Sheriff's Sale on the order of Auld's creditors.  The Aulds with which I am concerned, both Hughs and Thomas, as well as an Edward (probably the brother of the older Hugh), were all involved in maritime trade on the Chesapeake -- the packets from Baltimore to Talbot County -- and in shipbuilding.

I've been trying to piece all of this together in the past week because there is more to Lucretia, Sophia, and Rowena Auld than Douglass himself let on or his biographers have investigated.

Image of Thomas Auld from

Dickson J. Preston,Young Frederick Douglass, the Maryland Years

(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), 109.

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.

The Story of Jenny and Noah

Jenny and Noah ran away in August 1825. Jenny was Frederick Douglass's aunt, the sister of his mother, Harriet. Noah was her husband. Aaron Anthony, Douglass's master, owned them all. Douglass, who was approximately seven years old at the time, heard about their escape and the news affected him profoundly. This was, he later wrote, the first time that he had heard that there was such a thing as free states and that, if a slave could get to them, the slave would be free. (Legally speaking, that was not true, but that was not how enslaved people perceived or even lived the situation.)

The story, however, had more parts to it than Douglass may have known at the time or found useful for his autobiographies. Eleven days after their flight, Jenny and Noah’s children also left Maryland, but they went in the other direction. Anthony sold Mary and Isaac, ages 7 and 6 respectively, along with their first cousin, fourteen year old Betty, and their aunt, nineteen year old Maryann, to slave traders in September 1825. If my theory about childrearing under Anthony’s ownership is true, then Douglass knew the two children and the two children, like him, did not know their mother.

From what I can surmise, Anthony allowed the women he enslaved to keep their children with them for about two years. Then, the babies went to live with their grandmother, Betsy. Betsy kept her own youngest children as well as these grandchildren until they reached about the age of five or six. Douglass, for instance, wrote that he had been taken from his mother before he could remember her and that his grandmother kept him until he was approximately six years old. When they reached that age, Betsy did what Anthony ordered, and took the child – be it her own or her grandchild – to Anthony’s house on the Lloyd plantation on the far side of the county. In 1825, Douglass himself was seven, the same age as Mary, and had been at Wye house for a year. That would mean that he, Mary, and Isaac had been kept together at Betsy’s cabin, and that the two were either still there or also at Wye House with him.

Jenny and Noah, however, lived elsewhere. According to Dickson Preston, author of Young Frederick Douglass, the Maryland Years, they worked at one of Anthony’s Tuckahoe plantations. In fact, Preston last mentions the specific location of Jenny’s employment as being in the Hillsboro home of Elinor Maloney, Anthony’s elderly widowed sister, where Douglass’s mother Harriet had also worked for a time. In other words, Jenny and Noah had been separated from their children for several years; and if their children had already been sent to Wye House, then the distance of the separation had grown further.

This is not to say that Jenny and Noah callously ran away and abandoned their children. In fact, this is the difficult part of writing about enslaved people and attempting to explain their situation to a twenty first century, American audience. Enslaved people faced choices that are alien to our experience today, and historians have to convey the logic of those choice with sympathy and without judgement. Thus, when Jenny and Noah ran away, thereby abandoning their children, they did so for specific reasons that might seem callous, but made the most sense to their particular situation.

So, what options did Jenny and Noah have? They had already lost a child who had died in infancy in 1821, when Mary was three and probably just removed to Betsy’s cabin, and when Isaac as two and on his way there, too. Thus, three babies had been taken from them in as many years, one forever. Since most of Jenny’s sisters and her mother had children approximately every two years, Jenny could have lost others to miscarriages or still births between 1821 and 1825, or she may have found out that she was pregnant about the time that she and Noah ran away. The separation from their children may have been the impetus for their flight. Their “Sophie’s Choice” decision may have followed a logic in which they thought, “these two children are lost for now – we can come back for them, we might buy them, we can get them, but the next ones will be ours to have and to raise.”

Then came the sale. Preston suspected that Jenny and Noah’s flight was a response to the impending sale, a logical conclusion if they suspected that they themselves would be sold. Would they do the same if they suspected that their children faced the auction block, or would they have know that the situation was desperate and had the same conversation about which I have speculated above? Perhaps, because of their children’s youth, they assumed that they would be immune from sale. In 1825, young women like Maryann and Betty, or their male counterparts, would get a higher price than two children.

The sale of the children, however, strikes me as retaliation. In the ad that Anthony posted in a Baltimore paper on the day before the sale, he wrote that he had planned to give Jenny and Noah their freedom. Given that he had already slated at least two young women for sale, and threw in two more children, he was hardly in the mood to let two grown, healthy, slaves, one bearing children, get away for free. The next day, he sold their children.

I wish I knew what happened to Jenny and Noah, to Mary and Isaac, to Maryann and Betty. So many others on the Lloyd and Anthony farms probably did, too.

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Image from Dickson J. Preson, Young Frederick Douglass, the Maryland Years (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), 66.

Sources:
Preston, Young Frederic Douglass, 64-66.
Aaron Anthony Return Books, Lloyd Family Papers, Maryland Historical Society, Baltimore, Maryland.

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).

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

Trying to Tell Harriet Bailey's Life

Alas! As I have written before, sometimes you fall in love with your own writing but must sacrifice it to the greater cause of a better chapter. My first chapter, about Douglass's mother, grandmother, and slave mistresses, is growing out of a quite long paper about his mother. The shift in focus means that much of the introduction and conclusion must be revised into something else and often out of existence. Hence, I have this blog to preserve those earlier versions for posterity (and also in the hopes that, if I am WAY off on anything, someone can point it out, or offer suggestions).

This is a companion paragraph to an earlier one that is suffering the same fate. I hope I haven't posted it, or a version of it, before.:

The real woman Harriet Bailey existed somewhere between the records of her as Aaron Anthony’s property and her son’s use of his little information about her in explaining the ways that a slave society attacked African American families and intelligence. In attempting to understand her lived experience, more questions arise than answers and often any attempt to answer those questions leads to more questions. What evidence exists to support one interpretation of the few facts over another is not strong enough to allow any interpretation to stand unchallenged – again, by more questions. Such is the problem in attempting to recover the lives of the historically mute or to understand what happens in the blind spots of the historical record. Yet, since so few questions at all have been asked about Harriet Bailey a set of questions rather than conclusions brings historians closer to understanding the options and conditions in which she moved more specifically than a general study of slave mistresses or slave women, even if modified by “Eastern Shore” or “Baltimore.” Certainly a set of questions is more honest than ignoring her, dismissing her, or providing a set of weak or near fictional conclusions.

Frederick Douglass on RTE

UPDATE: Colleen Dube of the Fulbright Commission has let me know that it wasn't just the funding for the conference that was cut (as I initially thought), but their entire budget. She wrote, "State Dept has cut our entire budget by 5% not just the conference which has ramifications for all our awards and activities this year. With the currency exchange in real terms the cut amounts to 10%."  Needless to say, that is pretty drastic and affects employment and opportunities for scholars and staff.
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Some months ago -- probably a year on their end of the planning -- the Fulbright Commission in Ireland and University College Cork planned a small, two day conference on Frederick Douglass. The idea is not as far-fetched as you may think, since Douglass spent a lovely three weeks in Cork during October 1845. For this conference, I was asked to give a paper on Douglass, and planned to present "Dirty, Sexy, Abolition: The Frederick Douglass - Julia Griffiths Scandal," which I had presented at the BrANCH conference at Cambridge last fall.

About two weeks ago, the State Department, under which the Fulbright Commission falls, cut the funding for the conference, much to everyone's chagrin. As an alternative, Colleen Dube, who runs the Fulbright office here in Dublin (which must be an unenviable task), passed on my name to Bernadette Comerford and Myles Dungan, producer and presenter of the History Show on RTE1, the national radio station in Ireland. Bernadette contacted me, I sent her my paper, and -- long story short -- Myles interviewed me about Douglass and Julia Griffiths for a segment of the show that aired this past Sunday, February 25, 2012. They even brought in African American actor Hope Brown to read selections of Douglass's work.

Isn't that cool? The whole experience was quite fun, and Bernadette and Myles were wonderful hosts.

This is the link to a podcast of the radio show. My segment begins at about 19:25, although the graveyard segment before and Percy Shelley segment after are quite fascinating, too.: http://www.rte.ie/radio1/podcast/podcast_thehistoryshow.xml

Me and Myles Dungan in the studio:

(In the spirit of ladies' antislavery societies in Ireland, I am wearing a scarf that I myself knitted out of Aran wool.)

Douglas Egerton will also appear on the show later in the month to discuss African American service in the Civil War, which he had also planned to present at the conference and which is the subject of his upcoming book on African Americans during Reconstruction.

Maria Weston Chapman, "Raving Maniac"

It's been a long time, hasn't it? Sometimes time on the book takes precedent.  Also, again my apologies to Contingent Cassandra and John for my overly active moderation feature. Maybe I should just turn that puppy off?

Anyway.....

Generally, diagnosing your subjects with some sort of disease or condition is not a good practice as either a medical doctor or a historian. This is especially true of psychological conditions like depression or a learning disability or post-traumatic stress disorder. First of all, you don't have the subject sitting in front of you to answer questions about their symptoms, you just have the documentation of either the subject or observers describing the symptoms. They describe the symptoms using the language and understanding of "madness" or disability of their times; and, as I've been pondering in regard to emotion, people today cannot assume people of the past had the same emotional or psychological experiences that we do here in the 21st century.  In an excellent post at the Women's History Network blog, Katie Barclay, who is writing about the history of emotions and their impact upon law, points out that, "there is increasing awareness of the malleability of the physical body." "We have come to understand that the body is not a ‘universal’, identical across time and space," she writes, "but a product of cultures"

Nonetheless, when presented with a set of symptoms and circumstances, the temptation to diagnose can be overwhelming. Right now, I'm writing about Maria Weston Chapman in the aftermath of a riot at Pennsylvania Hall in 1838. Chapman had lived through an earlier riot in Boston in 1835, when a mob attacked a meeting of the Boston Female Antislavery Society, chased William Lloyd Garrison through the streets, and threatened to attack her house.  In the aftermath, her sisters described her as With the mob roiling just outside the door of the Anti-Slavery Office, she supposedly declared, “If this is the last bulwark of freedom, we may as well die here as anywhere.” Such a remark was more likely the stuff of legend, but her sisters all remarked in the aftermath that Chapman noted that remained “very calm & composed but very resolved.” Not twenty-four hours after the attack, she called on her sister, Deborah, “& said that she had never had such a delightful time in her life.” “Maria continues to be in a state of great enjoyment,” Anne Weston wrote a week later. “She receives such glory she can hardly bear it.” A month later, English writer Harriet Martineau, with barely concealed infatuation, described Chapman as “vivified by courage, and so strengthened by upright conviction, as to appear the very embodiment of heroism” as she “threw up her golden hair under her bonnet” and prepared to face yet another disruption at the BFASS’s November meeting.

Three years later, she had a much different response. During a convention of Anti-Slavery Women, a mob surrounded Pennsylvania Hall, where the meeting took place, throwing bricks and stones. Garrison even mentioned the presence of "bowie-knives." Chapman, who seldom spoke in public and never to so large a crowd as the one in Pennsylvania Hall, gave a ten minute introduction to the next speakers while the mob roared outside and pelted the building with their missiles. A few days later, the numbers outside growing and becoming more threatening, the women had to link arms and force their way through the crowd to leave the hall. The mayor, placing his faith in the mob to keep the peace, sanctioned what happened next. The crowd broke into the hall, turned on the gas, and set fire to the building, gutting it within hours. Then, it turned on black Philadelphians, their churches, and a black orphan asylum.

Chapman and her sisters escaped by train; but when the train got to Stonington, Connecticut, Chapman could go no further. In the parlance of the day, she suffered a fit of “brain fever,” which, in Garrison’s words, left her “a raving maniac.” Garrison, of course, was not in Stonington, so he, to made a questionable diagnosis. Still, this is the part of the story that makes playing historical psychologist so tempting: her symptoms resembled more those of someone who had survived a traumatic event, such as a violent crime, disaster, or battle. The smallest of tasks exhausted her. For instance, she told her sister Caroline, “that to plan & execute getting off the bed is now a great intellectual effort.” She could not bear company for very long, and while “she was glad very to see Henry [her husband] but could not have him stay in the room more than a few moments.” Even letters “get her worked up.” She displayed a marked sensitivity to sounds, starting at noises, Caroline reported, as “the faculty of hearing seems wonderfully increased in power.” Furthermore, “Her appetite does not come,” “she does not sleep,” and she “begins to be rather uneasy to get home.” Another lodger at their stopping place told Caroline that she had seen similar conditions; and, while she said Chapman might recover in time, Caroline should be wary of relapse.

Caroline felt a heightened sense of anxiety herself. She was not distressed enough to require the prescriptions of Valerian [herbal Valium], anodyne [a pain killer], “Dovers powder,” “Oil,” [I have no idea about either, but the oil may have been a purgative] and leeching, and shorn hair endured by her sister. Yet, “I bear about with me a sense of unsafeness,” she wrote, “& a weight oppresses my spirits that I am obliged to throw off by an effort.”  Given that both had just survived a form of street warfare, an attack upon themselves and their friends for no other reason than opposing slavery, you can see how easily I could say that they suffered from PTSD.

Yet, as philosopher Edgar Jones pointed out in an article on “Historical Approaches to Post-Combat Disorders,” , “Because of changes to the meaning of words and the ways that emotions were conceptualized, it is difficult to know what clinical phenomena were being described by military physicians any earlier than in the mid-nineteenth century.” Jones also described the symptoms of World War I shellshock as differing in some respects from PTSD, particularly with the experience of fatigue, which makes Chapman's experience closer to those in the aftermath of war in the early 20th century. That seems logical, since she lived in a world more like theirs than like ours.

Still,  I know about as much about PTSD as I do about Chapman's actual experience, so I don't like imposing this diagnosis; and I keep taking it out and putting it back into the manuscript. At the same time, I don't want to just let her experience slide, just passing along the information that she, tragically, had "brain fever." Nor do I want to suggest that the episode indicated any mental weakness on her part. More seems to be going on there. If I were writing a biography of her (and she really should have a more recent one because she was such a powerhouse), I would delve into this further. Right now, I have to figure out the way that her experiences affected her ideology and her style of management in the organizations to which she belonged. I'm trying to explain her view of the world within the abolitionist movement because that is the source of her conflicts with Douglass.  So, the big question her is: how did this "breakdown" this bout of anxiety in the aftermath of a violent experience, affect her perception of abolitionist activism and her behavior toward dissent within the movement -- like that coming from Douglass.

Douglass, by the way, was still in slavery in Baltimore, negotiating a quasi-free arrangment with his de facto master that eventually led to his escape. He, too, had his own traumas.

Chapman seemed to have recovered from this episode by the summer of 1838, and I haven't yet found any  mention of anyone tiptoeing around her because they considered her "fragile." Indeed, if they tiptoed around her, they tiptoed from fear and admiration at her formidability, not because they worried for her mental health.

Sources:
Katie Barclay, "Women's History: Approaches from the History of Emotion," Women's History Network Blog, http://womenshistorynetwork.org/blog/?p=977 (viewed 11 Feb 2011).
Post Traumatic Stress Disorder,” National Institute of Mental Health, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, http://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/publications/post-traumatic-stress-disorder-ptsd/who-gets-ptsd.shtml (viewed 10 Feb 2012)
Caroline Weston to Deborah Weston, Stonington, Conn, “Sunday afternoon” [27 May 1838], Weston Sisters Papers, Anti-Slavery Collection, Rare Books and Manuscripts Department, Boston Public Library.
Caroline Weston to Mary Chapman, Stonington, Conn, “Monday evening” [28 May 1838], Weston Sisters Papers, Anti-Slavery Collection, Rare Books and Manuscripts Department, Boston Public Library.
Caroline Weston to Mary Chapman, Stonington, Conn, “Monday evening” [28 May 1838], Weston Sisters Papers, Anti-Slavery Collection, Rare Books and Manuscripts Department, Boston Public Library.
Caroline Weston to Deborah Weston, [Stonington, Conn], “Wednesday evng” [23 May 1838], Weston Sisters Papers, Anti-Slavery Collection, Rare Books and Manuscripts Department, Boston Public Library.
WLG to George Benson, Boston, Mass, 25 May 1838, William Lloyd Garrison Papers, Anti-Slavery Collection, Rare Books and Manuscripts Department, Boston Public Library.
[Samuel Webb, ed.] History of Pennsylvania Hall,Philadelphia, 1838.
Edgar Jones, “Historical Approaches to Post-Combat Disorders,” Philosophical Tra

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.