Pioneer Profiles: Frederick Douglass

Let’s talk about that! Series one, Article 4: Pioneer profiles

Kristopher Hinz
Sep 5, 2018 · 5 min read

A freed slave, Frederick Douglass overcome significant obstacles to become one of the leading lights in the abolitionist movement to end slavery. Douglass penned four eloquent autobiographical works, which is all the more remarkable when one remembers that he taught himself how to read as an adult. Douglass is relatively little known outside of the US, and earlier this year, when asked to comment, Donald Trump wasn’t sure whether he was alive or not.

Douglass was unsure of his birth date, but it is thought to be around 1818, in Maryland . This seems strange, but it makes unnerving sense when one considers that Africans and indeed slaves were thought to be subhuman and thus their data on births and deaths wasn’t required. His mother was a Black and Native American slave and it is believed his father was Black and European, so Douglass was born directly into slavery. Douglass never knew his father.

Douglass was working as a slave at only 8, although for some slaves this was actually a late start. Douglass bought himself the book The Colombian Orator at 12, and was keenly aware of the importance literacy held in the emancipation of his people. Slaves were barred from learning to read for this very reason, but Douglass taught himself the 4 or 5 letters of the alphabet on the blackboards of the shipyard in Baltimore, and then engaged in games with the schoolboys there to learn the rest of the alphabet (Loscocco, 2018). He wrote:

“When I met with a boy who I knew could write, I would tell him I could write as well as he. The next word would be “I don’t believe you. Let me see you try it.”

“I would then make the letters which I had been so fortunate to learn, and ask him to beat that. In this way I got a good many lessons in writing, which is quite possible that I should never have gotten any other way.”

Shortly thereafter, Douglass was hired out to William Freeland and it was there that Douglass began to teach a Sunday School class where he and fellow slaves would attempt to read the Bible. This early understanding of the Bible later led him to comment on America’s relationship to slavery and faith, saying:

“I love the pure, peaceable and impartial Christianity of Christ. I therefore hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping cradle-plundering partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land. Indeed, I can see no reason, but the most deceitful one, for calling the religion of this land Christianity. I look upon it as the climax of misnomers, the boldest of all frauds and the grossest of all libels.”

Douglass and his Bible study were discovered and there were some serious repercussions, with Douglass later writing that a group of men:

“Came upon us with sticks and other missiles, drove us off and forbade us to meet again.“ (Loscocco, 2018).

Douglass was soon sent to a “slave breaker” named Edward Covey. Owners sent their recalcitrant slaves to slavebreakers to punish them and ensure they did not fall out of line again. Douglass was only temporarily broken by Covey, but he said that the torture made him feel almost animalistic:

“My intellect languished, the disposition to read departed… And behold, a man transformed into a brute!”

Douglass’s spirit remained undeterred by the slavebreaker and even by an unsuccessful escape. In 1938, he tried again, and with the help of his soon to be wife Anna Murray (who bought him the ticket), he disguised himself and boarded a train bound for the free Northern state of New York. Stunningly, he made it. He described the euphoric feeling of freedom:

“I have often been asked, how I felt when I first found myself on free soil… There is scarcely anything in my experience which I could not give a more satisfactory answer. A new world had opened upon me. If life is more than breath, and the “quick round of blood” I lived more in one day than in a year of my slave life. It was a time of joyous excitement which words can but tamely describe”

Once a free man, Douglass found work as a renowned speaker on the evils of slavery, including as a member of the American Antislavery Society in 1843.. His first-hand experience of the brutality of the slave industry allowed him to generate an empathy that his fellow white abolitionists could not.

Douglass travelled to Great Britain and Ireland in 1845, spending a year and a half on a speaking tour. The most controversial and indeed stirring moment of the tour came in Scotland. The Free Church had just been formed by Dr. Thomas Chalmers and was in the process of fundraising. The fundraisers had accepted £3000 from Southern slave owners, which according to a inflation calculator I used, amounts to a none too insignificant £372,204.

Douglass was understandably adamant that the money should not be accepted and the slaveowners be unequivocally boycotted. He thundered from the pulpits:

“Tell them to send back to America that blood stained money!”

Douglass was well received in the rest of the UK and Ireland and he was stunned about the relatively racism-free welcome he received. He was so loved that UK audiences raised the money to buy his freedom for when he returned to the South.

After returning to America, Douglass continued his work as a speaker, including advocating for the right of women to vote. Douglass served as an advisor to Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War, and gave his most famous speech regarding the twisted and hypocritical nature of Independence Day from an African American viewpoint:

“What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim.”

After the Civil War, Douglass reconciled with his first slave owner, Thomas Auld, in 1877. Eleven years later he ran for President of the United States and received one vote, but the nomination was given to Benjamin Harrison. He served as Harrison’s consul general to Haiti. Douglass advocated for greater freedom for the Haitian people at a time they were struggling with overinfluence from America. Douglass died of a heart attack while coming home from a women’s right’s meeting in Washington D.C in 1895.

To conclude here though, I would like to quote Douglass on the power of his indomitable spirit while he was facing the darkest depths of racism:

“From my earliest recollection, I date the entertainment of a deep conviction that slavery would not always be able to hold me within its foul embrace; and in the darkest hours of my career in slavery, this living word of faith and spirit of hope departed not from me, but remained like ministering angels to cheer me through the gloom.”

Douglass’s story shows the sheer folly of the racism of slavery. His remarkable rise, which all began with just the ability to learn to read, makes one wonder how many others may have achieved what he did if only they had been armed with the same literacy and tools for success. It shows us today that despite the rhetoric of our leaders in the US and conservative Europe, that if those on the bottom rung of the social ladder are given a chance to flourish, they can.

Kristopher Hinz

Written by

Sports Journalism student La Trobe

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