Introduction to Volume One (Series Three)
Introduction to Volume One
John R. McKivigan
The first volume of the Correspondence Series covers Frederick Douglass’s life through the end of 1852. Douglass Papers staff located 822 letters for this period, and 227, or nearly 28 percent, of them were selected for publication. The remaining letters are summarized in the volume’s calendar.
Of the 822 letters, the best available sources for 170 were autograph letters (AL), recovered from twenty-one repositories in the United States and Great Britain. A total of 126, or nearly three-fourths of these letters, were found in four libraries: the Syracuse University Library, the University of Rochester Library, the Boston Public Library, and the Library of Congress. The project has selected and reproduced 97 of these autograph letters, from sixteen different repositories, in this volume.
Of the remaining 652 letters, the closest known sources to all but one of the original manuscript letters are texts printed in contemporary newspapers. The one exception is a letter from Wendell Phillips to Douglass published in the foreword to Douglass’s first autobiography, the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. Douglass letters were discovered in sixteen different newspapers, but 586, or nearly 90 percent, were first published in one of the two edited by Douglass himself, the North Star and Frederick Douglass’ Paper. The Douglass Papers reproduced 130, or slightly less than 20 percent, of the letters that have survived only in an earlier printed form.
Of the 227 letters selected for publication in this volume, 147 were written by Douglass and 80 were to him. This approximate two-to-one ratio reverses the proportion of letters to and from Douglass surviving in the entire body of his letters located for these years. It reflects the fact that many of the letters listed in the calendar were written to Douglass as a newspaper editor and were either less substantive in content than the letters selected for publication or were repetitive in expressing an opinion or reporting an event.
In the letters for this period, Douglass’s correspondents represent not only many of the leading names in the antislavery movement on both sides of the Atlantic, but many less well-remembered figures in a variety of reform movements. Likewise significant numbers of both females and African Americans are numbered among the correspondents.
By 1842, the year of composition of the earliest known surviving Douglass letter, he had already endured twenty years as a slave both on Maryland’s eastern shore and in Baltimore. He successfully escaped slavery in September 1838 and soon thereafter settled in New Bedford, Massachusetts. Also by that time he had married Anna Murray, a free black house servant living in Baltimore, who had encouraged his escape and then rendezvoused with him in the North. Although he was a trained ship caulker, Douglass could find only jobs as a day laborer on the wharves of New Bedford.
In August 1841 Douglass attended a regional convention of the followers of the abolitionist leader William Lloyd Garrison. The Garrisonians favored a coalition of abolitionists with other reformers pursuing such goals as women’s rights, temperance, and pacifism. Inspired to speak, Douglass briefly told the audience about some of his own experiences as a slave. His novice performance convinced the Garrisonians to recruit Douglass to become one of their traveling lecturers. Initially he only described his personal experiences to curious northern audiences, always remaining careful not to disclose details that would reveal his true identity. In a short time, however, Douglass deployed the abolitionists’ full arsenal of arguments against slavery in his speeches. Most of Douglass’s oldest surviving letters recount details from the initial phase of his public career.
Within a few years, Douglass’s orations became so erudite that critics of the abolitionists charged that he could never have been born a slave as he claimed. To defend his credibility, Douglass in 1845 published the first of three autobiographies, the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, which provided all the details of his birth, ownership, and life in Maryland. His identity as a fugitive slave now public, Douglass’s friends warned him that his recapture and return to slavery were real possibilities. For his personal safety, Douglass fled to Great Britain in August 1845.
For nearly two years Douglass toured the British Isles lecturing on behalf of the abolitionist cause. His correspondence from this period includes exchanges with new acquaintances among British and Irish reformers in addition to colleagues back in the United States. Douglass’s letters from Ireland took note of the devastation of the famine as well as the evils of heavy drinking. In Scotland he created considerable controversy by his vehement attacks on clergy there who had solicited contributions from American slaveholders. His letters from the British Isles chronicle his success in drawing audiences large and small as he won many converts to the antislavery cause. They also reveal that Douglass’s enthusiastic reception in Great Britain greatly elevated his self-confidence. In late 1846 English abolitionist sympathizers purchased his freedom from his owner, Hugh Auld,
and gave Douglass funds to return to the United States and to start his own newspaper.
After briefly lecturing again for the Garrisonians, Douglass settled in Rochester, New York, and founded the weekly North Star in late 1847. There Douglass printed many of the letters written to him as editor as well as some of those that he wrote. These letters address many of the key tactical debates within the abolitionist movement, especially those surrounding Garrisonian tenets that the Constitution was a proslavery document and that political activity such as voting lent moral sanction to slavery. While Douglass strictly followed the Garrisonian line, he detected signs that many white Garrisonians disapproved of his more elevated and independent role in the movement as a newspaper editor. Clues that Douglass was offended by what he viewed as paternalism and that his loyalties were wavering appear in his correspondence.
Located in upstate New York, far from the Garrisonian center of strength in New England, Douglass sought out new friends and allies. Douglass’ s correspondence in the early 1850s documents his growing contacts with the political abolitionists of his new home region. Their leader, the wealthy landowner Gerrit Smith, impressed Douglass by his lack of racial condescension. The largest body of Douglass’s correspondence from this era is with Smith. In 1851 Douglass merged his financially struggling newspaper with a Liberty party periodical underwritten by Smith. The move marked Douglassss defection from the Garrisonian to the political antislavery camp.
Also during the years after Douglass relocated to Rochester, he expanded his leadership in the northern free black community. His letters recount a varied range of activities on behalf of his race. He attended major conventions of free blacks and strongly advocated both self-help and civil rights. Douglass often resisted segregation policies in hotels and on ships and railroad cars at the risk of physical injury. At this time, Douglass was an active conductor on the Underground Railroad. He hid runaway slaves in his own house until he was able to assist them in reaching Canada, where they would be safe from recapture by their masters.
In addition to the correspondence that addresses Douglass’s various public roles, a small number of letters that illuminate his interaction with family and personal friends are reproduced in this volume. They describe with touching detail the obstacles that all black Americans encountered in the hostile racial climate of antebellum America. They allow this volume to round out its portrayal of a man rightly described as the preeminent African American of the nineteenth century.