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 GarrisonGarrison, William Lloyd

William Lloyd Garrison (1805-79) was the foremost white abolitionist of the nineteenth century and was credited with the discovery of Douglass as a speaker at an antislavery meeting in Nantucket in 1841. He began his career as an apprentice printer on the Newburyport (Mass.) Herald at the age of thirteen. Garrison became editor of the Newburyport Free Press in 1826, but the paper closed within a year. He was then associated with a series of periodicals in Boston that advocated reform before Benjamin Lundy offered the young journalist the opportunity to write for his antislavery newspaper. Garrison joined Lundy in editing the Genius of Universal Emancipation in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1829, during the last year of the paper's 1821-1830 run. In 1830 a libel suit against the editors forced the paper to close and landed Garrison in jail. After his release, he courted the wealthy merchants of New York and Boston in order to start the Liberator (1831-65), a weekly journal based in Boston in which he advocated an immediate end to slavery. Garrison's brand of abolition condemned any institution that would tolerate the existence of slavery, including churches, political parties. and even the United States itself and any scheme aimed at removing black people from the country. Instead, Garrison hoped to raise the public's awareness that slavery was morally wrong and thereby force its end in an almost millennial moment of emancipation. His approach appealed to both white and black antislavery advocates but earned him many enemies among those only moderately opposed to slavery and slaveholders alike. Seeing the need for greater action and organization beyond the pages of the Liberator; Garrison joined with other abolitionists to form the New England Anti-Slavery Society in 1831. Two years later he helped found the larger American Anti-Slavery Society. In 1833 he established ties with English abolitionists after a trip to Great Britain, and he later brought the noted and notorious speaker George Thompson to the United States for a tour. Garrison also dedicated himself to women's rights, encouraging women to enter the public sphere by inviting them, via the Liberator, to form female antislavery societies. In addition to the thirty-three women's antislavery societies that flourished by 1838, Garrison's American Anti-Slavery Society welcomed women as well as blacks into its ranks. However, female delegates were excluded from the World's Anti-Slavery Convention of 1840 in London. The issue of women's participation in the antislavery movement and Garrison's absolute refusal to turn to politics to end slavery caused a division in the American Anti-Slavery Society. Brothers Lewis and Arthur Tappan, who opposed women's acting as speakers and who hoped to use politics toward abolition, broke with Garrison's American Anti-Slavery Society, forming the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, or the "New Organization" in 1841. Garrison's ideas were so closely associated with the "Old Organization" that the American Anti-Slavery Society became known simply as the "Garrisonians." With the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865, Garrison believed that he had accomplished his life's work and that of the antislavery movement. He then resigned from the presidency of the American Anti-Slavery Society and closed the Liberator. Wendell Phillips Garrison and Francis Jackson Garrison, William Lloyd Garrison, 1805-1879: The Story of His Life Told by His Children, 4 vols. (New York, 188589); Henry Mayer, All on Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition of Slavery (New York, 1998); James Brewer Stewart, William Lloyd Garrison and the Challenge of Emancipation (Arlington Heights, Ill., 1992); John L. Thomas, The Liberator: William Lloyd Garrison (Boston, 1963); Dictionary of American Biography, 20 vols. (New York, 1928-36), 7:168-72. . 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 SmithSmith, Gerrit

Gerrit Smith (1797– 1874), a New York businessman and land speculator, became best known for his philanthropic work for such reform causes as temperance and abolition. Between 1828 and 1835, he donated large sums of money to the American Colonization Society, but abandoned that movement in 1835 when his sympathies shifted to the immediate abolitionists. In the 1840s, he gave approximately 140,000 acres of land in upstate New York to three thousand black settlers, thus qualifying them to vote. Smith was a founder and frequent candidate of the Liberty party, running for governor of New York on that ticket in 1840 and winning a seat in Congress in 1852. When the Free Soil merger with moderate antislavery Democrats and Whigs lured away many Liberty party supporters, Smith helped bankroll that organization until 1860. Smith befriended Douglass when the latter moved to Rochester, and Smith frequently helped finance Frederick Douglass’ Paper. Like Douglass, Smith supported John Brown, but psychological stress caused by the failure at Harpers Ferry brought on the first of a series of bipolar episodes that greatly reduced his subsequent reform activities. Ralph Volney Harlow, Gerrit Smith: Philanthropist and Reformer (1939; New York, 1972); Gerald Sorin, The New York Abolitionists: A Case Study of Political Radicalism (Westport, Conn., 1971), 269– 87; Lewis Perry, Radical Abolitionism: Anarchy and the Government of God in Antislavery Thought (Ithaca, N.Y., 1973), 170– 80; John R. McKivigan and Madeleine Leveille, “The ‘Black Dream’ of Gerrit Smith, New York Abolitionist,” Syracuse University Library Associates Courier, 20:61– 76 (Fall 1985); NCAB , 2:322– 23; DAB, 17:270– 71. , 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.