Summer Touring Schedule (such as it is)

The book tour, such as it is, continues. Now is the season of summer schools and institutes, which are always fantastic no matter how you participate in them.

Last week, the lovely and brilliant Douglas Egerton and I drove down to Lawrenceville Academy in Princeton, New Jersey, to speak to historian Erik Chaput's summer school class on Frederick Douglass. The class is on Frederick Douglass, that is. Doug spoke about black abolition and I used Anna Murray to guide them through methods of research and ways to alert themselves to questions that they should be asking when they confront different types of information in documents. I had a great time, and I hope that they did, too. I forgot that they were high school seniors because they acted and thought like college seniors.

Only the book in the center is mine. 

The rest are only a fraction of Doug's output.

Erik took the picture.

Next up will be Graham Hodges' NEH Seminar for teachers on Abolition and the Underground Railroad at Colgate University, followed by Carol Berkin's on American Women at War in New York City, then on to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to chair a panel on abolition at the Society of Historians of the Early American Republic's annual meeting, followed by the Chittenango Boat Landing at the beginning of August. That last one is open to the public.

Fall will take this show overseas again, this time to Newcastle-upon-Tyne for Newcastle University's INSIGHTS series of lectures (this is last year's program). Newcastle was the home of the Richardsons, who began the campaign to purchase Douglass's freedom and provide the seed money for the North Star. Guess what my talk will be about?

Meanwhile, (among other things like two book proposals, one submitted) I'm writing an essay for an anthology, Frederick Douglass in Context, edited by Michael Roy, who was part of that conference in Paris last year. My essay is about Douglass and family, and I don't want to retread what I have already said nor do I want to tread on what I know of Ezra Greenspan's upcoming work (as if I could ever be as good!). Looking back on something that you've gone over a million times to see something new can be a challenge because you have to step away from your own patterns and ruts of thinking when you sometimes aren't even aware that you have them. I also have a problem figuring out when I'm saying something original because I'm too aware of where I picked up so many ideas and then I've lived with my own configuration of them for so long. Knowing what you have can sometimes be a different thing from stepping back and re-asking, "what do I have?"

Quibbling With Details: Helen Pitts Seems Not To Have Worked at Hampton

Helen Pitts had a career long before she took advantage of the patronage system and went to work for her uncle's neighbor in the Recorder of Deeds office. Like many genteel and educated young ladies, both black and white, she became a teacher. The advent of the Civil War allowed her to put both her education and her reform impulse to work by joining the American Missionary Association in educating newly freed African Americans in the south.

All primary sources -- that is, the AMA records and her alumna file at Mt. Holyoke College -- say that she went to Norfolk, Virginia, in 1863 and remained there until 1864. Disease ran rampant, and she fell to typhoid or some similar infection. She convalesced through the following year back at her home in Honeoye, New York, south of Rochester.

If you look in Douglass's biographies, you find very little written about her until the past 20 years. In the more recent books, you find her mentioned, but, outside of a quite good and well-documented 1995 Shippensburg dissertation by Julie R. Nelson, most Douglass biographers have expressed little curiosity about her as a living person and an actor in Douglass's life. (This was one of the factors that led me to conceive of this book in the first place.) Lack of curiosity often leads to the repetition of unverified information, and I came across this in piecing together Pitts's life.

As an aside to the uninitiated: historians will look at secondary sources -- books written by other historians -- in order to see what those other historians say about a subject, to gain some insight into the subject, and to find clues pointing toward primary sources -- contemporary records documenting the events in question. As a rule, it is best to cite the secondary sources in matters of interpretation and only the primary sources for points of fact. Otherwise, you must place trust in someone else's reading of those primary documents and that is not always the wisest thing to do. This is a case in point.

William McFeely, in his well-written but weakly-researched biography Frederick Douglass, wrote, "In the 1860s, following the Civil War, Helen Pitts taught at Hampton Institute, later Booker T. Washington's alma mater. Ill-health, perhaps coupled with discouragement, sent her back to Honeoye, where she remained for several years." [p. 310] Maria Diedrich, in her extremely flawed Love Across Color Lines, wrote, "She was a well-educated woman who had graduated from Mount Holyoke Seminary in 1857 and had taught at Hampton Institute." (Actually, Pitts began in 1857 and graduated in 1859 -- but that's not the detail about which I am quibbling right now.) Diedrich cites MeFeely for that information, as does about every website mentioning Pitts, and McFeely has no source. That alone should be cause for consternation.

Hampton Institute was formed by the American Missionary Association, for whom Pitts did work as a teacher; but the Institute did not open until 1868, four years after she left Virginia. I don't have clear documentation for Helen's whereabouts between 1866 and her arrival in Washington, D.C., a decade later, so I wondered if this were true. McFeely's narrative resembles that of her experience in Norfolk, and he fails to mention Norfolk at all, so maybe he got his sources mixed up, or maybe he thought that, because she worked for the AMA and the AMA opened Hampton, then she must have taught at Hampton (hence his avoidance of specific dates). Maybe she worked in Norfolk, but after she recovered and after the war, she went back into the classroom, this time at Hampton. That could be an interesting layer to the story, and certainly Hampton might like that connection, as well.

So, I contacted Hampton University's archives. They responded with great efficiency. Not only did the school not open until after the period in which Pitts taught for the AMA, but the school has no record of her attending or teaching at the school. So, no connection with Hampton.

Still, her story will be fascinating to write because, aside from Nelson, Pitts only appears in conjunction with the death of Anna Douglass, the suicide of Ottilie Assing (the fallacy of the last is for another post), and the controversy that her interracial marriage caused. Like I said, no one but Nelson has attempted to understand her and she held a complicated place in Douglass's life, both while he was living and in commemorating him after he had died.

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Image source: National Parks Service, http://www.cr.nps.gov/museum/exhibits/douglass/exb/homeinWashington/FRDO318_helenDouglass.html

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.

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.

Source Message Creep

Here is an object lesson on the reasons that you should avoid "as quoted in" in your own citations.

In Love Across the Color Lines, Maria Deidrich wrote of Ottilia Assing's interpretation of her relationship with Frederick Douglass and that Assing "believed that the Douglass marriage had been over long before she entered the scene, and in a way she was right." As evidence, Diedrich wrote, "Douglass hinted at marital problems in letters to friends, describing himself in 1848, for example, as a 'most unhappy man.'" [Diedrich, 175] The argument here, then, is that Ottilia Assing had a twentieth century understanding of a marriage being "over." This is based on Douglass saying one time, eight years before he even met Assing, that he was "most unhappy." The implication being that Douglass was unhappy in his marriage and, extrapolating from that unhappiness in 1848, his marriage was probably headed for divorce by 1856. I say "headed for divorce" because, it is clear through the rest of the book, Diedrich thinks Assing thinks this.

The source for this "unhappy" quote is this: "FD to Abigail and Lydia Mott, 21 February 1848, quoted in mcFeely, FD, p. 154." O.k. Let's take a look at McFeely, p. 154. McFeely wrote:

Late in February, Douglass wrote the Mott sisters that he was a "most unhappy man." His "house hunting had not been successful and "Anna has not been well--or very good humored since we came here. She," he added, a bit less gloomily, "however looks better." In April, things looked up. [McFeely, 154]

Has anyone ever been in Rochester in February? Imagine it without central heating. His mood improved, according to McFeely, because he had found a house in which to live. Now, perhaps you could infer that his unhappiness had to do with his wife's mood, but also he had to find a home in a new city while also trying to start up a new business. Nothing here says anything that might indicate that the marriage itself was unhappy or in anyway on the path to being "over."

The source for McFeely was "Douglass to Abigail and Lydia Mott, Feb. 21, 1848." No repository because "Except where otherwise noted, citations of letters to or from Frederick Douglass are from the photostatic copies of his correspondence in the Yale University Frederick Douglass Papers." [McFeely, 387] Not to sound catty -- but to be totally catty -- would it have been too much trouble to find the actual source in the actual repository, not a photocopy in a project's office that might not exist ten or fifteen years down the road given the funding of such projects and the fate of some of the project papers? At least he was honest and did not try to claim that he did research at places where he did not.

So, alas, that is his source, and his source is no longer at Yale. His source is at the Frederick Douglass Papers project at IUPUI in Indianapolis. The actual source, the letter itself, is located in the Ida Husted Harper Papers at the Huntington Library, so I can forgive using the Douglass Papers project. It would have been rather a needle in a haystack in the pre-internet days.

Guess where I used to work? I even did some of the annotation for that letter. Those Mott ladies were a pain to track down, let me tell ya! You can find it in the first volume of the project's Correspondence Series on pages 296-7. Here is what the relevant part of the letter says (I'm leaving out the two post scripts that actually run about as long as the letter itself):

The mail of this moment is a most welcome one. Friendship like every other good thing -- needs constant cultivation. Kind words which are so cheap and yet so useful -- and blissful. Why should we ever be sparing of them? -- I have been -- oh! What a weak confession a most unhappy man -- and simply because I have not been able to make all my arrangements for the last completely square with my wishes. What weak -- foolish and discontented creatures we are. I half think had you been near in my gloomy moments, and could have poured into my ear, those words and sentiments of love and sympathy with which your full hearts abound, my troubled spirit would have soon freed itself from its burden -- leaped up like a tired camel from its load. I have been house hunting ever since we arrived -- and have not yet secured a suitable location. Anne has not been well -- or very good humoured since we came here. She however looks better -- as I feel better to day. We are a weak set of mortals. I have many things I should like to say but hurry prevents.

I emphasized the quote.

First of all, he was sorta flirting with them. He writes like this a lot to people like Amy Post, women whom he liked and whom he was friendly with on a personal basis. These two women are caring for his daughter, so he is of course going to be solicitous and flattering.

Second, he was poking a bit of fun at his own self-pity with all of the hyperbole. He even seems to be quoting something although, even now with Google, I can't seem to find the quote. While he may have been "kidding on the square" -- that is, stating a fact but phrasing it as if he were not serious about the statement -- and suffering from the pressures of finding that new home and starting that new business and having a sick wife and three small children, all while trying to, you know, fight the system of slavery...well, you can see that he might be referring to things other than his marriage.

That is to say, the context of the quote in this letter does not indicate that his marriage was on its way to being "over" or that he was in any way unhappy with the marriage. Yet, that is what it has become between the document itself and Diedrich's use of the "most unhappy man" quotation.

So, let that be a lesson: check the primary source before you use "as quoted in," especially if that quote is your sole piece of evidence for what will ultimately be a speculative claim about a long-dead couple's marriage. "As quoted in" may be obscuring the context of the quotation and then you get it all wrong.

A Snag in Chapter One

I get trapped in my periodization sometimes. Originally, Chapter 1 broke down neatly into mothers and mistresses, with little overlap. Douglass's mother, the near non-entity he struggled to know as he wrote his autobiographies, is followed by his grandmother, whom he knew better and longer for the first few years of his memory. Then, he moved under the supervision of Lucretia Auld, then Sophia Auld, then Rowena Auld, then Sophia Auld again, then he ran away.

As I begin to get deeper into the story, this arrangement, which is a good skeleton, is far too simple. The mother and grandmother overlap; and, in the telling, the grandmother comes second, not first. At the Anthony house, where Lucretia moves to the front of the story, her counterpoint in the kitchen, Aunt Katy, begins to demand space (and she was quite the demanding woman in Douglass's version of events). Rowena Auld is little more than a guard dog of the pantry, and Douglass spent few months under her supervision for her to merit too much attention. During those months, however, it seems that his sister Eliza has some small role that he suggested but upon which he did not elaborate. His cousin Henny also pushes her way into the story. Yet, in this particular series of episodes in which he lived in Talbot County as a teenager, he carefully constructed and described a male-dominated world. Sophia he knew the longest and most intimately, and she appeared and re-appeared three times in his life. She will take up a good chunk of the chapter, and she will also reappear in a later chapter.

My initial divisions, too, have not taken into account the women scattered throughout his autobiographies who suffered brutal beatings and, he implied, rape. In fact, I’m pretty sure that, while he spoke in general terms of men being beaten, he described specific instances of beatings as happening to women (and one elderly man). I can buy that he saw few black women when he was hired out as a field hand in his teens in Talbot County, but in Baltimore, where he spent over half of his life until his escape, black women were in the majority. He only mentioned two, and they were beaten by a neighbor. As for free black women, he mentioned Sandy’s wife only. Otherwise, you would never know that black women could be free in Fells Point until you get to his marriage in New York to Baltimorean Anna Murray who, by the way, he mentioned in a footnote in the Narrative, was free.

As I organized this chapter, I had overlooked women who were not the primary caretakers of Douglass. Since this chapter has to do with his formative experiences with women and, by extension, his formative experiences with race, I cannot omit these women and the function that they served in creating the world in which he grew up. I also cannot omit the fact that he uses their stories in making his own point and that those stories only told what he saw and could use. He was not maliciously appropriating their lives, he seemed to be trying to speak for them when they could not, but he did not know or relate much more of their story than the beating, and they might have told the story in a different way. These often unnamed women haunt this chapter in a way that I have not yet fully incorporated and I have to do something with the absence of the free black women from his autobiographies.

The Problem With Assing

I've debated about writing this post since it comes off as a review of Maria Diedrich's Love Across Color Lines: Ottilie Assing and Frederick Douglass (New York: Hill and Wang, 1999) and I don't intend to review it. This is considered a pretty important book, and, as they say on The Wire, when you go after the king, you best not miss. I'm not sure that I won't miss just yet. I don't have all of the evidence to make the necessary conclusions about it or about Assing and Douglass. I am just having problems with the book as I re-read it while trying to place Assing in my own work; and in reading the book yet again I am finding that I question the premise of the work, the methods and interpretations of the research, and -- most importantly -- the overall significance of Assing herself.

This is a dazzling book. By “dazzling” I mean that it raises a very provocative prospect that can distract the reader from some very significant problems in the work. As you read the book, you think, "wow! I didn't know this! This is fascinating!" As you read the book again, you think, "wait a minute. Something is not quite right about that." At least I did. The biggest problem that is "not quite right" is that the book takes as a foregone conclusion that Douglass and Assing were “soul mates” [p. 288] constantly in search of “new beginnings” [passim – with quotes] away from the United States. The author doesn't show her work in how she got to the conclusion that this affair was a sexual affair, she doesn't discuss how she deduced that and interrogated that deduction and then come to that conclusion. The conclusion is just there as an accepted fact that guides everything afterward.

Thus, everything that Assing and Douglass say or do is motivated by or interpreted only as furthering that relationship. Thus, Assing moves from New York City to Hoboken, NJ, to have a place to meet with Douglass, not because she is quite poor at that point and a boarding house Hoboken might be a less expensive place to live. She moves from Hoboken to Washington, D.C., during Reconstruction again to be near Douglass, not to (or not also to)be near the center of political action as a political journalist.

Such real, practical considerations are ignored elsewhere, too, and with greater implications. If this affair went on for two decades, at least half of which were before Assing entered an age for menopause, and during which she stayed with the Douglasses for months on end, why did she not get pregnant? Where, in fact, did they have sex? Under the same roof as Douglass’s wife and children – and later in laws and grandchildren? Under the boarding house roof where her landlady and landlords were raising children? Why was it not brought up in Louisa and Nathan Sprague’s lawsuit against Douglass – or by anyone at all? The Garrisonians who made such gossip of Julia Griffths only a year before Assing showed up make no mention of Assing at all (and they were as gossipy as a clique of 12-year-olds). No alternate explanations are explored nor practicalities considered. All the reader receives are contradictory dismissals that the landlady and landlords were German and liberal, and therefore exempt from American middle class sensibilities, that the Douglass family – in laws included – were forced to accept whatever Douglass imposed on them (likely, but still not satisfying), and that no one talked about the affair because everyone wanted to protect the movement as a whole and, besides, no one ever visited the Douglasses anyway.

Part of the problem in questioning this interpretation has to do with the primary source for the relationship, which is the correspondence between Assing and her sister Ludmilla. These letters are written in German and held by a Polish repository. Since most American scholars who would be interested in these documents would most likely not have either the language skills or the means to read these letters, they must rely upon the author’s interpretation of them, including the quotations in the text. Yet, the most provocative statements receive no quotations nor citations.

For instance, at the end of the Civil War, “No longer observed and watched, he [Douglass] kwould finally be empowered to solve his domestic problems, and her [Assing’s] letters to her sister Ludmilla document that there was not the slightest doubt in Assing that this could only mean separation from Anna Murray and legalization of their liaison. Frederick Douglass had liberated his race; it was time for him to liberate himself – for Ottilie Assing and their love.” (p. 255) Why not show an example that documents this certainty? Why not cite a source for the entire paragraph in which this appears – or the paragraph before, or the paragraph after? Are the statements about Douglass being “empowered to solve his domestic problems” a projection or summation of Assing’s attitude or the author’s interpretation of the situation? If the latter, then that is patently untrue, and the author even shows how untrue in the next chapter.

That passage also is an example of another problem in the use of sources. Assing’s is the only description of this relationship. There are, of course, clear reasons that Douglass’s family might excise her from his and their own records, but she appears in no one else’s correspondence, including Douglass’s enemies. Furthermore, the most telling descriptions – of which there are very few quoted – appear in her correspondence specifically with her sister Ludmilla, with whom she had a frequently acrimonious rivalry. The quotation about her near marital relationship with Douglass, “The last seventeen years being not married and still lining in a union of the deepest mutual affection, more firmly found than many who are married, without the faintest hope that it might be different, and kept apart by being incapable of valuing or giving love” came in a letter after Ludmilla’s marriage and can be read as part of sisterly competition (“You’re getting married? Ah, well, I would but I can’t because of the cruel world, and our relationship has lasted sooo much longer than any of yours”).Ottilie, after all, fancied herself a libertine, but Ludmilla was; Ottilie seemed to want marriage, but her sister got it. Then, when Ludmilla’s marriage fell apart, Assing wrote, “if one stands in so intimate a relationship with a man as I do with Douglass one comes to know facets of the whole world, of men and women, which otherwise remain closed, especially if it is a man who had seen so much of the world and whom so many women have loved,” which perhaps could be gloating (“oh, poor thing, I’m so happy that my very desirable man – who I’ve been with longer than you ever have with a man – is faithful”).

Assing’s bragging about her own influence over Douglass’s work, even insisting that she wrote his columns that were read throughout Washington, are in the context of Ludmilla’s greater success as a writer. One long quoted passage that opens a chapter, shows Assing bragging that she has converted Douglass to atheism, and yet that was patently untrue and Assing was either lying to her correspondent or fooling herself. In other words, Assing is not a particularly reliable source, and the question of her reliability is not fully analyzed. In fact, her version of events is fully and wholly accepted, then also projected onto Douglass, without questioning that Douglass’s behavior clearly does not align entirely with Assing’s own interpretation. His ambivalence is explained by his commitment to his cause, not to a perhaps less flattering – for either her or for him – explanation.

Which brings me to my real problem that cannot be solved by reading this book: what is going on in this relationship? I originally thought that I could rely upon this book. My careful reading of it came from my need to examine the pieces of her argument to see how this one relationship fit in with the rest, and to find the sources that might help me see other dimensions in this relationship that would help me with the whole project. Instead, what I found was serious problems with this book as a whole, and that I almost need to follow in the author’s footsteps to see what is really in those sources. In fact, I need to follow in Assing’s footsteps – Douglass’s as well – in order to measure her reliability. So, I’m contacting the archive with her papers to get copies or make a trip, and will have to muddle through the script and translation.

What I am thinking here is that Assing was very deeply taken with Douglass, but him not so much with her. I think he got something out of the relationship with her – she was a journalist, he was an editor, she had connections on the European continent, perhaps she was a kind listener, clearly she would have been a willing booty-call (or “friends with benefits” as the young folks say – and if they did that sort of thing in those days – and again, what kind of birth control was she using?) – but he wasn’t deeply in love with her and certainly wasn’t going to follow her to Europe or leave his wife, or really go out of his way for her. That, right now, is my hypothesis that I have to test through rigorous research in the documents.

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.

Frederick Douglass's Parents

I'm working on a paper about Douglass's mother, Harriet Bailey. I confess that I'm at a slight disadvantage in that Dublin is not exactly the best place to get your hands on the secondary literature about American history. Nor is it the best place to get microfilmed versions of some of the documents that you need. Nonetheless, I soldier on, and will worry less about this when I'm focused solely on the shitty first draft of the book and not on papers that will pave the way to fall flat on my face in front of a learned audience.

In the case of Douglass's mother, one of the first steps toward an original interpretation of her life is to take what people know about her in relation to Douglass and turn it about. What does her life look like when she is at the center and not a supporting character or symbol in Douglass's work? One of the first things that I've discovered is that she gave birth at a fairly steady pace. Take a look at this list of her children and their birth dates (adapted from Dickson J. Preston, Young Frederick Douglass, p. 206):

Perry - b. January 1813
Sarah - b. August 1814
Eliza - b. March 1816
Frederick - b. February 1818
Kitty - b. March 1820
Arianna - b. October 1822
Harriet (Jr.) - b. c. 1825

She gave birth roughly every two years, with an average of 23.5 (or thereabouts -- my math ain't so good) between children. If you saw this list, not knowing that these children were slaves but knowing that they were siblings, you might suspect that they all had the same mother and father since this is the regular childbearing that you find in most nineteenth century families.

Most of Douglass's biographers just assume that he had a different father from his siblings. One even refers to his siblings as his "half" siblings; but, from the looks of this he fits right in as if he had the same father as those sisters before and after, who fit right in as if they had the same father as their brother and sisters before and after themselves. In other words, if Aaron Anthony, their master, was Douglass's father, then he was also their father.

That also shifts our perspective on the life of his mother, whoever the father might have been. He could have been another slave belonging to another master. He could have been a free black man. He could have been a white man other than her master; or, he could have been Aaron Anthony. Whoever he was, by either consent or force, he had access to her body from 1812 until she died in 1825 or 1826. That rules out Perry Ward Steward, the overseer on one of the farms where she worked; James Nabb and John Malony, to whom she was hired out during her teens; and Thomas Auld ( a theory of William McFeely, which holds no water for logistical reasons, too), Douglass's second master. Because of age or death, none of these men had access to her for the entire period of her childbearing years.

For a while, I was suspicious of claiming Anthony as Douglass's father. So many have, but without any thought beyond Douglass's word in the Narrative alone. Then, he said that it was mere rumor. In he second autobiography, My Bondage and My Freedom, he said that he had reason to believe that his master was not his father. He completely dismissed the matter in all versions of his final autobiography, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass. The whole discussion of his parentage, too, is shaded by the propagandist purpose of each version of his life. Much of what he says is true, but spun for a variety of reasons at a particular point in time, and maybe not true in quite the way that he thinks it is.

In any case, I still will not say certainly that Anthony was his father, but I'm seeing a stronger case for Anthony. Not only was he Harriet's master, which meant that he could do as he pleased with her body; but, at the time she became pregnant with her first three children, she worked for his much older sister. She worked on his farm during the conception and birth of the rest of her children. I also have another piece to consider in regard to Harriet's sister, Hester, but will save that for another time. Yet, even without that piece, Anthony cannot be ruled out entirely.

If Anthony was the father, then, what sort of interaction produced these children? (I mean, besides from the obvious.) At the most basic level, these children were always the products of rape because Harriet did not have the power or right to refuse Anthony. Yet, as Annette Gordon-Reed demonstrated, the Hemings women also did not have the power or right to refuse the Jefferson, Wayles, Randolph and other men who went after them. Still, they were able to leverage whatever influence they had over these men into improved conditions for themselves, their families, and the children of these encounters. Was Harriet able to do the same? I'm not discerning any advantage that she earned from giving birth to these seven children.

So, was her interaction with Anthony more brutal? He beat the living daylights out of Harriet's sister Hester because Hester preferred a black man to him (again, more on that story later). Did Harriet experience a similar beating or expect a similar beating if she herself refused? If the latter was the case, might that explain her absence from so much of Douglass's childhood before her death? Douglass said that he did not remember seeing his mother the entire time that he lived at his grandmother's cabin when he was between 2 and 6 or 7 years old. He explained his mother's absence by the restrictions of slavery that prevented his mother from travelling the long distances to visit him; but that long distance of twelve miles to which he referred only separated them for two years, when he was between 7 and 9. For those other years, she lived less than a mile away.

The unspoken question  in his autobiographies, as he attempted to comprehend his mother's absence, is "why did she not visit me?" accompanied by the insistence that the single visit that he did recall in detail was proof of "a bright gleam of a mother's love, and the earnestness of a mother's care" (Bondage and Freedom, Yale edition, p. 32).  Mothers of children who resulted from rape respond to those children in a million different ways, so might Harriet have found a visit to her children too painful in too many complicated ways to endure? This is not to question her love for her children, but to consider the range of emotions that she may have felt as she contemplated these reminders of the violence done to her body. These reminders being small children who had no way of understanding these conditions of her life.

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.

Chapter 2 Has Left the Building!

The "shitty first draft" of my first completed chapter of Frederick Douglass's Women is now finished!

Yes, the title of this post says "Chapter 2," and it is the second chapter of the overall manuscript. No one says you have to write the thing in order, right?

When I wrote the public talk that I gave at Le Moyne and Montgomery Colleges, I had envisioned the first near half of it as being "Chapter 2: Anna Murray, Mrs. Frederick Douglass." Then I agreed to submit the paper for a workshop at SUNY-Binghamton. As I revised the colloquial language out and added more detail in, I found that the first chunk grew longer and longer and longer. "This is becoming a chapter as I write," I thought. So, I lopped off the last part, and committed to the chapter. 

Now, it's done and ready to enter the workshop ring this Friday!

Even better, parts of other chapters are written, as well.

"Anna Murray, Mrs. Frederick Douglass," at Le Moyne College, Feb. 10th

I will be giving a talk at Le Moyne College, Syracuse, New York, on Thursday, February 10, 2011, at 7:00 pm in the college's Grewen Auditorium.

The talk will be "Anna Murray, Mrs. Frederick Douglass," in which I will outline Anna Murray Douglass's life, address the way historians have portrayed her, and discuss the limited evidence that we have in reconstructing her life. Then -- may my powers be up to the task at this point -- I will bring it all home and explain how this relationship is important in understanding Frederick Douglass and the lives of free black women such as Anna.

Aside from presenting what I hope will be an awesome paper to an undergraduate audience, I am hammering out what will become essentially 1 1/2 - 2 chapters in the book.

Method to My Madness

The book itself is what I'm taking to calling a "sideways" or "oblique" biography. That is, I'm approaching Douglass through the women with whom he lived and associated, both public and private and at the intersection of both.

Other historians have used this method more frequently in recent years. The most famous would be, of course, Annette Gordon-Reed's acclaimed The Hemings of Monticello. Although she focuses on the Hemings family, I couldn't help but feel as if I were reading a biography of Jefferson, too. Not a full-blown, traditional biography, but a biography of him as a slaveholder, and the master of this particular family. Similarly, both John Kukla in Mr. Jefferson's Women (Random House, 2008) and Virginia Scharff in The Women Jefferson Loved (Harper Collins 2010) consider the ways that Jefferson interacted with women. Kukla focuses on Jefferson's romantic liaisons, while Scharff explores the connections of responsibility between Jefferson and the women closest to him. At the risk of drawing ire at those who dislike Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate Portrait, I'll venture that Fawn Brodie also observed Jefferson from the vantage point of women, as well. Then, beyond Jefferson scholarship, you can find Jane Glover's Mozart's Women: His Family, His Friends, His Music (Harper Collins, 2005) and Germaine Greer's (did you know that she was originally a Shakespeare scholar?) Shakespeare's Wife (Harper Collins, 2008). I'm sure other examples are out there. I could swear I saw a book about Elizabeth I and her women in the bookstore at the airport last month.*

From these oblique biographies emerges a pattern for this method of examining the Great Man (or, I suppose, Great Woman) from the point of view of a particular group of people in his life -- women, in most of these examples and in my own work. First, the author must reconstruct the lives of the women in question.The biography of the Great Man, then, also becomes a series of biographies about the women. In some cases, reconstructing a woman's life will be less difficult because she had the privilege that allowed her to leave the sorts of records that historians use for biography. In others, she become a hole in the narrative. The author must reconstruct everything around the woman in as much detail as possible in order to get some idea of who she could have been, always with the awareness that this portrayal is an educated guess.

Oddly enough, in my experience, I've had a more difficult time reconstructing Anna Murray's life as a free black woman than I have with Harriet or Betsy Bailey, Douglass's enslaved mother and grandmother. Enslaved women appear in a record because they had value to their masters as property. Free black women? They made their own way, hidden in other people's homes, their names changed in marriages that were often not recorded because their husbands were enslaved, and moving about frequently in order to find work. You might be able to reconstruct their lives as a group, but as individuals they prove quite elusive.

Getting back to the method, if the first order of business is to reconstruct the women's lives, the second is also to address the ways that other scholars have interpreted those lives -- if at all. Since the women in the lives of most Great Men, including their wives, appear as supporting characters, the women's historian who has begun reconstructing the women's lives often finds that historians have relied upon other historians who have relied upon yet other historians in order to form their own interpretation. The women's historian may also discover a new interpretation to the same stories simply by looking at the events from the women's point of view.

For instance, Scharff takes the romanticized tale of the Jefferson honeymoon and considers what the newlywed Martha Jefferson might have experienced riding up the mountain, soaked and shivering from the snowstorm, only to find a construction site, no fire and no food. In my case, I continually come across interpretations of the first Douglass marriage that describe him as disappointed. While that may be true, could she not have been disappointed herself? One you begin to tease out that thread, you begin to see the Great Man in a slightly different light.

Which leads to the third and most important part of the method: what do these relationships say about the Great Man himself? What new insight does the study offer into his life, his ideas, his work, and the events that he shapes? What, too, does that insight tell us about gender relationships at that period of time, and the lives of women?

This,  then, is my method for the moment. I'm trying to reconstruct the lives of these various women by looking at what they wrote (if they wrote), what they did, what others wrote about them, and how other women in similar circumstances lived. I'm also looking at the ways that other historians have written about these women and their relationships to Douglass in order to see if I can synthesize and add to the conversation. Finally, I must figure out what it all means.

Then, of course, I must write it all out in an engaging and eloquent narrative for the audience's enjoyment!

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*I won't discuss the novel Douglass's Women here for a variety of reasons, but mostly because it is, in fact, a novel and not history.