Frederick Douglass

Maryland, and the book that had to prove itself

He was born Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey in Talbot County, Maryland, in February 1818, into slavery, and never knew the date; in adult life he chose Valentine's Day for it. On 3 September 1838, dressed as a sailor and carrying a borrowed ticket, he boarded a northbound train and was in New York City within a day. He took the name Douglass, married Anna Murray, and began speaking for the abolitionist movement — the campaign to end American slavery — with such fluency that audiences doubted he had ever been enslaved at all.

The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, published in 1845, was his answer to the doubters: names, places and dates, printed at the risk of identifying him to the man who legally owned him. Under the law of the time an escaped slave remained his owner's property anywhere in the United States, so publishing the book made recapture a real danger. Douglass sailed for the British Isles and spent almost two years lecturing and selling it in England, Ireland and Scotland. While he was there, two English Quakers, Anna Richardson and her sister-in-law Ellen Richardson — the Quakers being a Protestant church that had led the British campaign against slavery — raised seven hundred and fifty dollars, paid the man who owned him and bought his freedom outright, and he came home legally free. He met both women again forty years later, in their eighties, on the 1886 tour.

The passport America would not give him

In 1859 Douglass was in England again, and not by choice. He was suspected of complicity in John Brown's raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, in Virginia — Brown was a white abolitionist, and the raid was his failed attempt to seize the government's guns and arm an uprising of enslaved people. Douglass left the country ahead of arrest. The governor of Virginia, the state where the raid had happened and where Brown was tried and hanged, announced that if a ship could overtake the one carrying Douglass he would have him taken off its deck at any cost. Douglass crossed in fourteen days of foul weather and landed at Liverpool, the English port, a wanted man.

He had wanted to see France for years, and from England it was a short crossing. So he wrote to George M. Dallas, the American minister at the British court — the United States's senior diplomat in London, and the only official who could issue him a passport — and asked for one. Dallas refused, on the ground that Douglass was not a citizen of the United States. That was not a remark about Douglass's paperwork. It was the law of the country as the courts then read it: a Black American, free or enslaved, was not a citizen and could hold none of a citizen's rights. Douglass set the refusal down to the politics of the minister's party, to the slaveholding policy of his country, to a recent decision of the Supreme Court — the Dred Scott judgment of 1857, which had ruled that people of African descent could never be citizens of the United States — and, he added, perhaps to the petty meanness of the man's own nature.

I did not beg or remonstrate with this dignitary further, but simply addressed a note to the French minister in London asking for a permit to visit France, and that paper came without delay.

A foreign government put in writing the permission his own government refused: he wrote to the French minister in London — France's senior diplomat in Britain — and the permit to enter France came back at once. He never used it. News arrived from home that his young daughter Annie had died, and he took the first outgoing steamer for Portland, Maine — seventeen days, back into the reach of the men hunting him. He called the refusal a galling disappointment, and wrote that he mentioned it not to belittle his country but because it was part of the story of his life.

The North Star, Lincoln, and the offices

The American career the refusal interrupted was already large and got larger. He had bought a printing press and moved to Rochester, New York, to run his own newspaper, The North Star — named for the star by which people escaping slavery steered north — on the principle that Black Americans should argue their own case in their own pages rather than have it argued for them. During the Civil War, fought from 1861 to 1865 between the slaveholding southern states and the northern states of the Union, he recruited Black soldiers for the Union army — two of his sons served in the 54th Massachusetts Infantry, one of the first Black regiments raised in the North — and met President Abraham Lincoln to press him on the unequal pay and treatment those soldiers received.

After the war the government that had once refused him a passport gave him its offices. He was United States Marshal for the District of Columbia — the chief federal law officer for the capital district — from 1877 to 1881, and Recorder of Deeds for the District, the official responsible for its register of property, from 1881 to 1886. Anna Murray Douglass, his wife of more than forty years, died in 1882. In 1884 he married Helen Pitts, an activist and the daughter of an abolitionist, who was white and twenty years younger; a marriage between a Black man and a white woman was a scandal to both communities in 1884, and this one was attacked from every direction. They left the country together two years later.

September 1886: the continent at last

"September, 1886, was quite a milestone in my experience and journey of life," he wrote. He had twice been to England, but never to the continent of Europe, and this time he had his wife with him. In London he sat in the House of Commons, the elected chamber of the British Parliament, and heard William Ewart Gladstone — leader of the Liberal Party and three times prime minister — argue for the indefinite postponement of a coercion bill for Ireland, one of the emergency laws that suspended ordinary legal rights there to put down resistance to British rule. Douglass watched the old man point straight at the government benches and demand to know what they were fighting for. Almost everyone he had met in Parliament forty years earlier, on his first lecture tour of Britain, was dead.

Then France — the country his own government had refused to let him enter twenty-seven years before. He is careful in Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, the last and fullest of his three autobiographies, to say that he will not attempt a full account of the travels — the shelves were crowded with such books already — and what he keeps of Paris is short and physical: that he was permitted to visit France and see something of life in Paris, to walk the streets of that splendid city, and to spend days and weeks in her charming art galleries. He puts the sentence next to the story of Dallas's refusal on purpose. The word that matters in it is permitted: this time nobody stopped him.

Leaving Paris, the Douglasses passed the grounds of Fontainebleau — the royal palace south of the city, which the French Republic, the elected government that had replaced the monarchy, had taken over from the princes and kept in excellent order, its trees clipped to straight lines by what he called a remorseless plummet and pruning-hook, meaning the plumb line and the shears. They went down through the provincial cities of Dijon and Lyons to Avignon, where the popes lived for some seventy years in the fourteenth century instead of in Rome, and to the Roman amphitheatre at Arles, a stone arena two thousand years old and still standing, and reached Marseilles, the great French port on the Mediterranean, in midwinter to find the sea blue. On the road he noticed something he had been told was proof of Black inferiority — the carrying of burdens on the head — being done all over the south of France by white peasants, and wrote that it might as well be welcomed as proof of a common brotherhood instead.

Paris interviews, Egypt, and the road home

The Douglasses were not the only famous Americans in Paris in the course of that year. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the veteran campaigner for women's suffrage — the right of women to vote, which no American woman then had — spent from the spring to October of 1887 in the city with her son Theodore Stanton, an American journalist settled there, and held receptions on Wednesday afternoons all through the stay. She and Douglass had known each other since the first women's rights convention held in the United States, at Seneca Falls, New York, in July 1848, where her resolution demanding the vote for women was the one demand the meeting nearly struck out: it passed, she wrote, "with the help of Frederick Douglass, and after a heated discussion," and when the national press turned on the convention he defended it both in the hall and in his newspaper. Thirty-nine years later, in her Paris drawing room, the whole record of their meeting is one line of her diary — "several pleasant interviews with Frederick Douglass and his wife" — and it is the closest thing we have to a record of the Douglasses at their ease in the city.

The tour ran on far past France — Nice, then the Italian cities of Genoa, Pisa, Rome and Naples, then a ship from Naples to Port Said, the Egyptian harbour at the mouth of the Suez Canal, and into Egypt, where he climbed the Great Pyramid and sailed the Nile; then Greece and the Acropolis, the ancient temple citadel above Athens; then back to Rome, and to Florence, where the first thing he and Helen did on arrival was visit the graves of Theodore Parker, the Boston preacher who had spoken for the slave when the pulpits around him were silent, and of the English poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who lie near each other there. He came home in 1887 after a year abroad.

He set the whole tour against the Maryland farm on Chesapeake Bay where, as an enslaved boy, he had spent his Sundays watching the sails go out to sea, and thought the contrast was the point: that a man once a slave on the eastern shore of Maryland was now enjoying what the wisest and best of the world have bestowed for the wisest and best to enjoy. He served from 1889 to 1891 as Minister Resident and Consul General to Haiti — the senior American diplomat in the Caribbean republic that enslaved people had founded by revolution — and died at Cedar Hill, his house in Washington, on 20 February 1895, aged seventy-seven.

Paris became a destination for Black American writers in the century after him, and for reasons he would have recognized: the novelist Richard Wright moved there in 1946 and the essayist James Baldwin followed in 1948, both of them leaving a country whose treatment of them they had stopped expecting to change. Douglass had no such option and never sought one. He went abroad for a single year at the end of a long life, spent weeks of it in Paris, looked at the pictures, and came home to the argument.