Douglass, who was to become “the most famous black man in the world,” was born a slave in Maryland in 1818. A handsome, light-colored youngster, he never knew his white father and was neglected by his mother. He endured some of the traditional horrors of slavery, but his master’s wife taught him to read, and with a book of speeches he managed to buy, young Frederick taught other slaves to read. At the same time, he trained his voice - he intended to sound like his masters - to become “one of the great instruments of the nineteenth century.” After an abortive attempt at escape, Douglass managed to make his way to freedom by train and boat. He was 20 years old. A year later, in Rhode Island, he made his first speech, describing the grimness of slavery. William Lloyd Garrison, the most famous of white abolitionists, noted the occasion in The Liberator; the young man was on his way to fame.
For years, Douglass traveled from Nantucket to Indiana as a paid agent of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society. With a voice that was said to rival Daniel Webster’s in richness, he lectured a hundred times a year on the evils of slavery and the necessity of emancipation. He wrote his autobiography three times, each time revising the facts to support his moralizing vision. Douglass’s vision was simple: racism, he said, was the result of slavery; abolish the latter and the former would disappear. Nevertheless, northern racism infected even the abolitionists. “Black antislavery speakers,” McFeely writes, “were always treated as visiting artists in a production of which the white Bostonians never dreamed of losing the direction.” Blacks were not expected “to challenge their betters in public.”
This frustration, combined with his quick temper and extreme sensitivity to slights, prompted Douglass to break with most of his supporters. Garrison had opposed political action to free blacks; Douglass promoted it. When the Civil War broke out, Douglass urged that it become a war to liberate slaves; he urged that blacks fight on the Union side and recruited them to the cause. After the war he combined with the feminists to obtain the vote for both blacks and women. This union was short-lived: Susan B. Anthony made the mistake of suggesting that women were more intelligent than black men. Douglass replied with his customary eloquence: “While the negro is mobbed, beaten, shot, stabbed, hanged, burnt. his claims may be preferred by me without exposing in any wise myself to the imputation of narrowness or meanness towards the cause of woman.”
It was for him a typical construction: everything came back to Douglass himself. He had been obliged, since his escape to freedom, to appear more noble than other men. An impossible task: his good looks and his ability to seduce an audience increased his sexual magnetism. Two white women became his longtime companions; a third became his second wife. As times changed, Douglass did not. He never yielded his belief that every black man might be his own Moses, that black unions and black schools were to be opposed. He found it difficult to balance his commitment to his race with his desire to be part of the larger white community. In time, McFeely says, compassion failed him, as did his intellectual grasp of the new post-Reconstruction problems that black people faced.
“In the end,” McFeely writes, “it did matter that he had no formal education.” A strong charge: Douglass’s education in life could not accommodate the ordeals that his people had still to endure. Yet McFeely is so adept a biographer that his charge seems as apt as the final chorus of a play by Aeschylus. That McFeely can find the worm in Douglass’s apple, or Grant’s, does not tarnish that apple’s gloss; McFeely’s sense of Douglass’s achievement, of his importance, is in no way diminished by his recognition of his vulnerability.
The sunlight that brought life and healing to you has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth of July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn.
Frederick Douglass Independence Day Address (1852).
