Introduction to Series Three: Correspondence Volumes
Most modern Americans, regardless of race, recognize the name Frederick Douglass as that of the most influential black man of the nineteenth century. This Maryland-born slave rose to become one of the nation’s greatest reformers, fighting not only for the freedom of blacks but also for the rights of women. Self-educated, he was a popular orator and widely read journalist and autobiographer. He advised presidents and held important appointed government offices. Most of all, he was the personification of African American achievement in the face of enormous obstacles, or, as he would say, a “self-made man.” Yet despite his renown, historians have been handicapped in their efforts to evaluate Douglass and his role in many aspects of nineteenth-century American life because there has been to date no reliable scholarly edition of his papers.
To remedy this deficiency, John W. Blassingame, a professor of history and African American studies, following consultation with the staff of the National Historical Publications and Records Commission and the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, founded the Frederick Douglass Papers at Yale University in 1973. For the next twenty years, Blassingame’s staff at Yale collected copies of all documents to and from Frederick Douglass, an effort supported by grants from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Ford Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation.
Early in the project, Blassingame made a crucial decision to divide Douglass’s documents into four separate series, each chronologically organized: Speeches, Debates, and Interviews; Autobiographical Writings; Correspondence; and Essays, Editorials, and Other Writings. The first series to be published was the five-volume Speeches, Debates, and Interviews.1John W. Blassingame and John R. McKivigan, eds., The Frederick Douglass Papers, Series 1: Speeches, Debates, and Interviews, 5 vols. (New Haven, 1979–92); John R. McKivigan, “Capturing the Oral Event: Editing the Speeches of Frederick Douglass,” Documentary Editing, 10:1–5 (March 1988). These volumes were well received by the academic community; among leading scholarly periodicals, the Journal of American History called the
series “an important resource for Douglass scholars as well as all those interested in unraveling the intricate web of nineteenth-century reform.”2Journal of American History, 67:681–83 (December 1980); see also Journal of Southern History, 46:433–35 (August 1980), 60:420–21 (May 1994). In 1994 Blassingame turned over direction of the project to his longtime collaborator, John R. McKivigan. Under McKivigan’s direction, the project edited the volumes of the Autobiographical Writings Series. These works were likewise praised by scholars; for example, the first autobiography, the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, was hailed as “the most authoritative modern edition” by the Journal of the Early Republic.3Journal of the Early Republic, 24:712–15 (Winter 2004). As this series neared completion, the staff focused its efforts on editing Douglass’s correspondence.
Douglass’s correspondence opens many new facets of his life not covered in the previous two series. It illuminates experiences, opinions, and expectations that he shared and debated with others—black and white, male and female—who labored in such diverse arenas as social reform, journalism, diplomacy, and politics. The surviving letters to and from Douglass reveal him in a multitude of roles—runaway slave, abolitionist, newspaper editor, autobiographer, military recruiter, bank president, women’s rights advocate, politician, federal government bureaucrat, diplomat, temperance reformer, and lyceum lecturer.
Douglass's correspondence also illustrates many otherwise unrecorded aspects of his personal life. The letters reveal the dimensions and depth of Douglass's friendships, some of which endured for half a century. Also potentially exciting to scholars of social history are numerous letters between Douglass and his immediate and extended family, providing fascinating evidence about black family life in the decades immediately before and after emancipation.
Apparently, nearly all the antebellum and wartime correspondence to Douglass was destroyed in an 1872 fire at his house in Rochester, New York. By that time Douglass had in effect relocated his residence to the District of Columbia, where he first edited a weekly newspaper, the New National Era, and then held a series of federal government appointments. Two years after the 1882 death of his first wife, Anna Murray Douglass, Douglass married Helen Pitts, a younger white woman, who had once been his secretary.
Following Douglass’s death in February 1895, Helen Pitts Douglass
zealously guarded what remained of Douglass’s personal papers in their Cedar Hill home in the Anacostia neighborhood of Washington, D.C. To advance her goal of preserving the artifacts as well as the memory of her husband, Helen Douglass organized the Frederick Douglass Memorial and Historical Association in 1900, three years before her own death. Beginning in 1916, the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs assisted the small association in keeping Cedar Hill open to the public. Douglass’s first scholarly biographers, Benjamin Quarles and Phillip Foner, attested to the value of access to the Cedar Hill collection to their research.4Philip S. Foner, ed., The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass, 5 vols. (New York, 1950–75), 5:ix–xi; Benjamin Quarles, Frederick Douglass (Washington, D.C., 1948), xv.
In 1962 the National Park Service purchased Cedar Hill and came into possession of the collection of over 5,000 letters, pamphlets, books, speeches, and miscellaneous documents. A decade later these items were transferred to the Library of Congress, where they were organized, inventoried, microfilmed, and made available to the public.5Foner, Life and Writings, 5:x–xii. Other federal agencies and Douglass descendants added to this collection in later years. As a consequence, the Library of Congress possesses the largest single collection of Douglass’ s correspondence. Originally microfilmed, the Library of Congress’s collection of Douglass’s items was electronically scanned and placed on the Internet as part of the National Digital Library Program implemented in 1994. This mammoth collection of more than 74,000 items includes photographs, wills, newspaper clippings, speech manuscripts, and diaries, as well as more than 3,000 letters to and from Douglass.6Beverly Brannan and David E. Mathison, Frederick Douglass: A Register of His Papers in the Library of Congress (Washington, D.C., 1997).
Another important repository for Douglass’s surviving correspondence is the National Archives. After the Civil War Douglass held a number of positions in the federal government, including assistant secretary to the Santo Domingo Commission (1871), United States marshal of the District of Columbia (1877–81), recorder of deeds of the District of Columbia ( 1881–85), and United States minister resident and commissioner plenipotentiary to the Republic of Haiti (1889–91). He also held two positions tied to federal service as a civilian recruiter for the Union Army (1863–64) and as president of the Freedman’s Savings and Trust Company (1874). In addition, Douglass corresponded with officials of every federal administration from that of Abraham Lincoln to that of Benjamin Harrison. The National
Archives possesses more than 300 letters written to or by Douglass, the majority from his diplomatic tenure in Haiti.
Douglass himself made the first concerted effort to publish his own correspondence. Each of his autobiographies reproduces letters to and from Douglass in part or in their entirety.7John W. Blassingame, John R. McKivigan, and Peter P. Hinks, eds., Frederick Douglass Papers, Series 2: Autobiographical Writings, 1:10–12, 156–60, 2:5–6, 218; Frederick Douglass, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (Hartford, Conn., 1881), 247–49, 291–95, 315–17, 348–60, 429–31. He also printed important letters written by himself or to him in the various newspapers he published, as well as letters intended for publication to many other newspapers. Letters found in these nineteenth-century periodicals and other published works are the second-largest source of surviving Douglass letters and the most important one for his antebellum correspondence. In accordance with the editorial standards of his era, when publishing his own letters Douglass excised portions of a purely personal nature. No letters between Douglass and members of his family made their way into his own publications.
Two book-length biographies of Douglass appeared before his death in 1895. Douglass cooperated with both of the authors, Frederic May Holland (1891) and James M. Gregory (1893), but apparently granted neither access to his correspondence.8Frederic May Holland, Frederick Douglass: The Colored Orator (New York, 1891); James M. Gregory, Frederick Douglass, the Orator (New York, 1893). Likewise neither of Douglass’s earliest posthumous biographers, Charles W. Chestnutt (1899) and Booker T. Washington (1907), made use of Douglass’s correspondence.9Charles W. Chestnutt, Frederick Douglass (Boston, 1899); Booker T. Washington, Frederick Douglass (Philadelphia, 1907). It was not until the mid-1920s, when Carter G. Woodson oversaw an effort by the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History to collect the correspondence of antebellum free blacks and publish them in the Journal of Negro History, that the first scholarly selection of Douglass’s correspondence was published. In 1921 Woodson successfully appealed to the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial for funding to gather and publish such documents.10Carter G. Woodson, “Ten Years of Collecting and Publishing the Records of the Negro,” JNH, 10:598–606 (October 1925). In three issues of that journal in 1925 and 1926, Woodson printed thirty-one letters from, and one to, Douglass, most of them originally published in the abolitionist press. The association reprinted these letters along with hundreds of other documents gathered by Woodson in the 1926 vol-
ume The Mind of the Negro as Reflected in Letters Written during the Crisis, 1800–1860.11Carter G. Woodson, ed., The Mind of the Negro as Reflected in Letters Written during the Crisis, 1800–1860 (Washington, D.C., 1926). Thirty of these letters were reproduced from the Liberator and the National Anti-Slavery Standard, one was from the manuscripts collection of the New York Historical Society, and the final one had been reprinted in Douglass’s third autobiography. The one letter written to Douglass was from abolitionist Henry C. Wright. See JNH, 10:386–97 (July 1925), 10: 598–606, 648–772 (October 1925), 1 1:204–10 (January 1926).
Prior to the project launched by Blassingame, the only attempt at a full-scale collection of Douglass’s papers was Philip S. Foner’s five-volume work, The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass (1950–75). Though valuable, Foner’s edition has several weaknesses. Limitations of both time and money forced Foner to publish a very select edition of Douglass’ s documents. Attempting to combine Douglass’s speeches, editorials, essays, and letters into one chronologically organized collection, Foner devoted considerably less than half of his volumes to reproducing Douglass’s correspondence. Of the 413 documents found in Foner’s collection, only 164 are letters.12 This represents less than 3 percent of the surviving correspondence ultimately located by the Frederick Douglass Papers.
There are significant deficiencies in Foner’s selection of Douglass’s correspondence. Although Foner was a zealous and resourceful collector, he was unable to examine all of Douglass’s voluminous correspondence; many of the letters are in private hands, and others are scattered through hundreds of manuscript collections in the United States, Canada, and Europe.13Foner describes his extensive labors in the introductions to his first and supplementary (fifth) volumes. Foner, Life and Writings, 1:12–14, 5:x–xi. As a consequence, nearly half of the letters in Foner’ s collection (79 of 164 items) come from the Library of Congress, the National Archives, and a few newspapers. Foner, and most of Douglass’s biographers who have relied upon him, have completely ignored Douglass’s substantial body of foreign correspondence. All the letters published in Foner’s volumes are written by Douglass and none to him. Foner’s collection also fails to represent the wide diversity of backgrounds among Douglass’s correspondents. His volumes contain letters to only ten blacks and ten women, if we count Harriet Tubman in both categories. Foner’s collection also is seriously deficient in editorial apparatus to assist readers in understanding its contents; only 48 pages of annotation accompany 1,496 pages of documents. As these statistics make clear, Foner’s Life and Writings of Fred-
erick Douglass did not relieve the need for a full-scale scholarly edition of Douglass's correspondence.14Several highly selective collections of Douglass's writings include a small sampling of his correspondence. See e.g., Milton Meltzer, ed., Frederick Douglass, In His Own Words (San Diego, 1995); William L. Andrews, ed., The Oxford Frederick Douglass Reader (New York, 1996); and John R. McKivigan, ed., Frederick Douglass (San Diego, 2004)
In 1977 Norma Brown published A Black Diplomat in Haiti: The Diplomatic Correspondence of U.S. Minister Frederick Douglass from Haiti, 1889–1891, a two-volume facimile edition of selections from Douglass's diplomatic dispatches and related documents.15Norma Brown, A Black Diplomat in Haiti: The Diplomatic Correspondence of U.S. Minister Frederick Douglass from Haiti, 1889–1891, 2 vols. (Salisbury, N.C., 1977) This edition unfortunately provides no annotation and contains only a brief introduction and a calendar of unpublished documents as editorial apparatus. Because the collection was published in a limited edition of 200 copies, it is unavailable in most research libraries. Though of some use to scholars interested in Douglass's diplomatic career, Brown's volumes are no substitute for a scholarly edition of his correspondence.
To supply this need, the Douglass Papers staff in the 1970s and 1980s undertook a search that resulted in the identification of over 4,000 letters to and from Douglass, nearly double the number found in the Library of Congress. The project contacted over 1,000 repositories worldwide with requests for seraches for Douglass material in more than 2,500 manuscript collections. In particular, the project located large holdings of Douglass's letters in the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New University, the Boston Public Library, the University of Rochester's Rush Rhees Library, and Syracuse University's Special Collections Research Center. A project consultant in the United Kingdom inspected more than 400 manuscript collections for Douglass items in the late 1990s project staff again surveyed the principle manuscript repositories in the United States and Great Britain located over 100 additional Douglass letters. The project uncovered noteworthy new sourees of correspondence at Cedar Hill, now maintained by the U.S. Park Service and at the Women’s Rights National Historical Park in Seneca Falls, New York. Other documentary editing projects, particularly the papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony and the Black Abolitionist Papers, also generously shared their discoveries of Douglass correspondence with this project.
The Douglass Papers staff systematically read all surviving issues of
each of the four periodicals edited by Douglass, the North Star, Frederick Douglass’ Paper, Douglass’ Monthly, and the New National Era, to identify and reproduce letters to and from Douglass. Project staff also conducted a search of leading black, abolitionist, and reform journals from the antebellum and Civil War eras, including the Liberator, the National Anti-Slavery Standard, the Anti-Slavery Bugle, the Philanthropist, the Non-Slave-holder, the Emancipator and Republican, the National Era, the New York Evangelist, the Christian Citizen, the Advocate of Peace, the Anglo-African, and the Voice of the Fugitive. This phase of research enabled Blassingame and his staff to edit the Antislavery Newspaper Index, a five-volume reference work.16John W. Blassingame, Mae G. Kenderson, and Jessica M. Dunn, eds., Antislavery Newspapers and Periodicals, 5 vols. (Boston, 1980–84). For the postbellum years, project staff read the twelve reels of microfilm of miscellaneous short-run black newspapers, prepared in 1947 by the Library of Congress for the American Council of Learned Societies, and longer runs (average of five years) of fifty other journals. These searches yielded approximately 1,000 additional letters to and from Douglass.
As a result of this both extensive and intensive search, the Douglass Papers obtained reproductions of over 5,000 letters by and to Douglass. The breadth of his correspondence is unmatched by any other African American of his generation, and as such provides both the serious researcher and the casual reader a portrait of American life in the nineteenth century—especially interracial relations—lacking in any other collection of correspondence. The correspondents resided in almost every state in the Union, as well as England, Scotland, Haiti, Nicaragua, France, Ireland, Canada, Italy, Switzerland, and Denmark; they included slaveholders and fugitive slaves, poets and politicians, and hundreds of relatively obscure blacks and whites. Douglass’s correspondents came from every walk of life, from presidents to former slaves, from wealthy planters and men and women of letters to New York farmers and unschooled urban laborers. The list of Douglass’s correspondents reads like a “Who’s Who” of nineteenth-century American and European political, literary, and reform circles. In addition, the collected correspondence contains thousands of letters from lesser-known individuals that chronicle the life of black Americans and their relations with white Americans as well as with each other from the 1840s to the 1890s. Douglass received hundreds of letters from people he never met personally, but who were moved to inform him of their admiration or sup-
port, of their need for assistance, or simply of the conditions under which they lived.
The surviving Douglass correspondence located by this project spans the years from 1841 to 1895. The letters written by Douglass account for slightly less than one-quarter of more than 5,000 surviving pieces of his correspondence. This imbalance is particularly pronounced during the years 1848-1863, when Douglass reprinted many letters he received in his abolitionist newspapers, and the years from his remarriage in 1884 to his death in 1895, when his second wife acted as his personal secretary and preserved numerous letters written to him. Only during his early career, while he was an itinerant abolitionist lecturer in the free states and in the British Isles, do surviving letters written by Douglass outnumber those written to him.
A critical decision made early in the project was to reproduce letters both to and from Douglass in order to illuminate the history of the African American community as well as its relations with white Americans during Douglass’s lifetime. The sheer volume of letters to and from Douglass amassed as a result has necessitated selectiveness in the items reproduced and edited. The Frederick Douglass Papers intends to reproduce and edit approximately 200 to 250 letters in each of four chronologically organized volumes. Letters not reproduced will be identified and summarized in a calendar accompanying each volume.
Letters selected for publication reflect the development of Douglass’s ideas, his interactions with his family and other individuals, and his debates with other reformers or opponents of reform. Items excluded from publication include ephemera such as form letters, invitations, fan letters, office memoranda, bills of sale, requests for autographs, confirmations of speaking engagements, and other documents that do not add dimension to Douglass’s life or intellectual growth. The remaining letters were then screened and chosen with regard to the correspondent’s relationship to Douglass, their relationship to documents in other series of the Frederick Douglass Papers, specific or sustained exchanges of correspondence, and the biographical information contained within each document.
As editor of a series of newspapers, Douglass received many “letters to the editor” and wrote and published many “dear reader” items. Of the letters written to Douglass in his capacity as newspaper editor, only those in which the writers engaged Douglass in debate by addressing his opinions or activities are included; letters in which the writers merely expressed their own opinions, without reference to Douglass’s, have been excluded. Numerous columns written by Douglass and addressed to his readers, or to
the individual left in charge of the newspaper's office during one of his many absences, possess many of the characteristics of regular correspondence, such as place and date of composition, salutation, complimentary close, and signature. These items, however, more closely resemble editorials, in that they contain announcements of changes in the newspapers' content and office procedures, or relate to Douglass's recent reform activities. The Frederick Douglass Papers will include such documents in its fourth series, Essays, Editorials, and Other Writings.