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.
---------------
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.

How Should You Use Generalizations? Or Should You Avoid Them?

When you are studying a subject or person -- especially a person -- in depth, you start to notice things that make you say, "oh, he was always doing that sort of thing." I do it, for instance, when I say such things, as I did in an earlier post about Douglass, as  "He writes like this a lot to people." That was in a blog post, however; and, if I were to put something like that in my manuscript, I would add a couple of examples in either the text or a discursive end note. Am I being to picky or overly cautious about such things?

I am thinking about this because of some of the generalizations made in the book I love to hate to love to Zapruder, Diedrich's Love Across Color Lines. In one instance, she writes, "Several manuscripts in Assing’s handwriting in the Douglass Papers show that she sometimes served as his secretary, and it is possible that she even drafted letters, speeches, and editorials for him." [p. 193] Since Diedrich also makes the claim that Assing wrote Douglass's editorials in the New National Era, a claim I find troubling and that is based only on a letter from Assing to her sister (an interaction that renders the claim unreliable), that I cannot check right now because it is written in German 19th century script, and that I have no idea of verifying independent of Assing, I thought I should at least check similar claims that might strengthen or weaken that assertion. This seemed to be one.

Fortunately, there is a footnote for this sentence that refers readers to "Drafts of letters to George T. Downing on Ebenezer Bassett’s appointment as minister to Haiti (FD to G.T. Downing. Undated but 1869. FDP. LC) and to Senator Henry Wilson of Massachusetts (FD to H. Wilson. 12 September 1866. FDP. LC) are in Assing’s handwriting.”

You can see both of those letters online, as well as a sample of Assing's handwriting. They match.  So, yes, Assing seems to have sometimes written drafts of letters for Douglass. At least, she did so on two occasions during a three year period. Does the rest of Diedrich's assertion, then, follow from this citation? Did Assing also write "speeches and editorials for him"? Does this mean that she "served as his secretary"? Do these two examples -- and I have found no others in the two years in question, and I am looking for other examples, including among the other types of documents in the Douglass Papers at the Library of Congress -- even merit the adjective "several"?

Am I being too strict here? How do you convey something common that you have observed in your research that might earn "several" or "usual" or any such other sort of descriptor without entering every single instance in your notes? Should you enter every single instance, to CYA? Would a better note in this particular example have given citations of not only letters, but speeches and editorials, and given citations over a broader period of time? Would a better way to have handled this have been to write the sentence differently to narrow down the period of time or type of document? Was this an awkward use of these two letters, which may have served another argument better, if at all?

I'm also resisting the urge to say that Diedrich does this frequently. I feel as if I should give more examples to prove "frequently." Perhaps this should serve as another. The example in that post says that "Douglass hinted at marital problems in letters to friends, describing himself in 1848, for example, as a 'most unhappy man.'" In that post, I pointed out the problems with that citation, which I think might disqualify it from being an example for that particular point. Yet, no other examples appear in that citation. You can find evidence for marital problems -- this example just is not among them -- and you can find at least one example from Douglass himself from a rather shocking letter from 1857. Can, however, this be described  in the way that Diedrich does here? Is this just an example of a poorly argued point that might have been rewritten with better use of the sources? Should you avoid the use of generalizations at all?

This troubles me because the framing of the story in this way -- that this or that sort of thing was constantly happening, without defining when and under what conditions and without enough evidence to back up the assertion of continual behavior -- is the way that dubious information enters into the message creep syndrome. I have, in the past six months, heard repeated both the "fact" that Anna Murray was pregnant before she got married to Douglass and that the scene in Douglass's autobiographies in which a black man in Manhattan helped him find David Ruggles was a gay pickup. The first "fact" comes from William McFeely's biography, in which he asserts his claim in the face of evidence to the contrary, and the second comes from John Stauffer's book Giants, in which he throws in that interpretation into his narrative -- absent any queer theory or secondary literature about the history of homosexuality -- in order to have some sort of parallel with the oft-questioned belief that Lincoln was gay. In both instances, the ideas are intriguing, but the evidence weak if non-existant. Yet, the ideas are being repeated without examination of the source.

In other words, this troubles me because this is the way that myth gets made, not history.

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.

Research Links

Over to the right side of the screen, you will see a new feature, this list:

Douglass and Women Research Resources
(these are not linked -- you have to go over to the side bar for the link!)

• "A Partnership in the Abolition Movement," University of Rochester Library Bulletin
• Amy Kirby Papers, Clements Library, University of Michigan
• Anti-Slavery Literature Project
• Black Abolitionist Archive
• Boston Public Library Antislavery Collection
• Dccumenting the American South
• Epitaph, Friends of Mount Hope (cemetery) Newsletter
• Frederick Douglass National Historic Site (Cedar Hill), Anacostia, D.C.
• Frederick Douglass National Historic Site, Virtual Museum Exhibit
• Frederick Douglass Papers, Library of Congress, American Memory
• Frederick Douglass Project, University of Rochester
• Frederick Douglass, Maryland State Archives
• Garrison Family Papers, Sophia Smith Collection
• Howard Coles Collection, Rochester Museum and Science Center
• Lynn (Mass.) Museum and Historical Society
• Porter Family Papers, University of Rochester
• Post Family Papers, University of Rochester
• Rochester History (journal) Index
• Rochester Ladies' Anti-Slavery Society Papers, Clements Library, University of Michigan
• Samuel J. May Antislavery Collection
• Women's Rights National Historic Park, Seneca Falls
• WorldCat (global library catalog)

The list links to various websites relating to Frederick Douglass and Women that you might find interesting for yourself or, if you are a teacher, your students. Some are finding aids for archival collections, which describe the collection and sometimes tell you specific items that are in the collection. Others take you to websites for museums and historic sites connected to Douglass. Some will take you to actual sources, both journal articles and scanned images of historic documents.

Many people are interested in the last because seeing the document, the thing written in the person's hand, is the real thrill of history research. If you want to see documents written by and to Douglass, take a look at Frederick Douglass Papers, Library of Congress, American Memory; Frederick Douglass Project, University of Rochester; and Boston Public Library Antislavery Collection. These are the ones that I use the most online. The Library of Congress site contains the bulk of Douglass's papers, preserved by his second wife, Helen [Pitts] Douglass at Cedar Hill. The project at the University of Rochester has images of letters and some transcriptions of the correspondence to and from Frederick Douglass that are contained in the Post and Porter Family Papers. The Boston Public Library collection has, as of now, the Weston Sisters Papers and good chunks of the William Lloyd Garrison Papers, as well as some Samuel May Papers. Their site is very sophisticated, being more recent and plugged into archive.org. Not only can you see scanned images, but they have included summaries of the letters (to varying degrees of quality) and the letters are indexed for key words.

In fact, if you want a night of history nerd fun, go to the BPL collection and read letters to or from Richard D. Webb, John B. Estlin, and Maria Weston Chapman. They were the living embodiment of Alice Roosevelt Longworth's (often misattributed to the equally scathing Dorothy Parker) recommendation, "if you don't have anything nice to say, come sit next to me."

The National Parks Service at Cedar Hill also has some terrific images of Douglass, his family, the objects in the house, historic images of the house, and a virtual tour of the house.

I will gradually add to the list; but, if you know of any other online resources, feel free to add them in the comments section!

Shameless Bragging

Last Wednesday, I delivered a paper on "The Feminine World of Frederick Douglass" here at Queens College in Belfast, Northern Ireland.:

The Queens faculty who had invited me, Anthony Stanonis, Brian Kelly, and most especially, Catherine Clinton (who must be one of the most supportive historians for junior colleagues in the history of historians), all welcomed me and ensured that I had a packed room, coffee beforehand, and drinks and dinner afterward. They also made this cool poster to publicize the event.:

Great choice of picture! Also, note how they publicized my other two books there at the bottom?

Everyone was friendly and polite. Audiences on this side of the ocean either pay attention very well, or do an impressive, Tony Award winning performance of faking it. I tend to believe the former.

So, my gratitude to all!

Also, thank you to Angela Murphy for passing this along.:

Thank you also to Ann "Historiann" Little, who herself is an incredibly supportive historian. We have met at the Little Berks conference and she is an amazing, funny, smart person. With luck, her influence will drive this humble blog's readership up from an average of 15 readers per week (five of whom are me)!