A Library colloquium examined the writing, life and place in American history of Frederick Douglass, who escaped slavery to become one of the most influential African American spokespersons of his day.
Douglass was a 19th century statesman, journalist and man of American letters, according to three scholars who presented papers at the Library to mark the 100th anniversary of his Feb. 20, 1895, death.
Presenting their views were David Blight, associate professor of history and black studies at Amherst College; William McFeely, a Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer and humanities professor at the University of Georgia; and Waldo Martin, professor of history at the University of California at Berkeley.
Among sponsors of the March 30 symposium were the Library; the Caring Institute, which manages the Frederick Douglass Museum and Hall of Fame for Caring Americans, located in Douglass's first home in Washington on A Street; and the National Park Service of the National Capital Region, which oversees the Frederick Douglass National Historic Site at Cedar Hill, his second home in Washington.
Prosser Gifford, director of Scholarly Programs, welcomed the gathering on behalf of Dr. Billington and thanked the District of Columbia Humanities Council for providing financial support for the symposium.
Born in 1818 on Maryland's Eastern Shore, Douglass wrote three autobiographies: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself (1845), My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), and the Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881, 1892).
In his lecture titled "Several Lives in One: Frederick Douglass's Autobiographical Art," Dr. Blight said that in Narrative and My Bondage and My Freedom, Douglass's two pre-Civil War autobiographies, the author understood the ramifications of slavery for individuals and for the nation.
"His overriding theme was the meaning of freedom, freedom as idea, and as reality, freedom of mind and of body; and of the consequences of freedom's denial," Dr. Blight said. "Douglass's wonderful story of the slave, who would struggle out of his past to some kind of safe landing in the present ... had much to do with why the Narrative became a best- seller," said Dr. Blight, editor of the St. Martin's Press 1993 edition of Douglass's Narrative and author of Frederick Douglass' Civil War: Keeping Faith in Jubilee (1989).
"My Bondage and My Freedom may read at times like a melodramatic novel, but it is also a commentary for all time on the idea of resistance," said Dr. Blight.
He noted that Douglass's antebellum autobiographies were popular in his day because of the mid-19th century literary conventions he employed: tributes to abolitionism, escape and captivity narratives, tales of self-made men and spiritual autobiography. "Douglass dearly needed to escape his past, but he also never stopped probing and reshaping, ascending from it, and looking for himself in that past," said Dr. Blight.
Dr. Blight said Douglass's third autobiography, the Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, is a storehouse of information about the author's associations, contributions to events, travels and ideas about the great issues of the Civil War, Reconstruction and the Gilded Age.
During a question-and-answer period, Dr. Blight acknowledged criticism of Douglass, who omitted detail about his relationships. Dr. Blight noted that not even in the monumental Life and Times did Douglass mention Anna Murray Douglass, a free black woman from Maryland whom he married within days of his escape to the North and lived with for 44 years, until her death in 1882. He did not mention their five children, nor did he mention his controversial marriage to his second wife, Helen Pitts Douglass, a white woman 20 years his junior who was his secretary when he was recorder of deeds for the District of Columbia and his neighbor at Cedar Hill.
Douglass at Cedar Hill
In a lecture titled "Frederick Douglass at Cedar Hill," Dr. McFeely provided a slide tour of the home where Douglass lived the last 17 years of his life. In 1877, Douglass had moved his family from its relatively small A Street house across the Anacostia River to Uniontown, now called Anacostia. "There, high on a sweet little hill, was the house he called Cedar Hill," said Dr. McFeely, whose Frederick Douglass (1991) garnered a Lincoln Prize and a Christopher Award. "As you enter the Douglass home," he continued, "you know at once that you surely are not in a humble dwelling, neither are you in a grand mansion. Instead, you are in as fine an example of an upper-middle-class American house as existed in this country," said Dr. McFeely. "There is silverplate as opposed to sterling, cut glass rather than crystal, pretty china, not grand china. This is a house of almost limitless comfort."
Dr. McFeely noted that a violin on the piano in the west parlor, where family and friends visited informally, belonged to Douglass's grandson, Joseph Douglass, a concert violinist. Other objects in the house include a bust of Wendell Phillips, a portrait of Sen. Blanche Bruce of Mississippi, and a large picture of Elizabeth Cady Stanton. The home also contains a portrait of Abraham Lincoln, and one of Gen. Florvil Hyppolite of Haiti, who was establishing his rule while Douglass was minister to that country from 1889 to 1891.
One reminder of Douglass's private life is a German clock in a corner, a gift from Ottilia Assing, a German Jewish reformer who came to the United States in 1856 to meet Douglass, whose My Bondage and My Freedom she admired. She gave Douglass the clock, elaborately carved from black walnut, as a memento of their friendship, which Dr. McFeely believes was romantic.
Dr. McFeely noted that the kitchen area is a reminder that the family who lived at Cedar Hill, like other middle-class families similarly situated economically, had servants. That Douglass never mentioned his servants suggested "that by the time he had moved to Cedar Hill, he had moved into a class of Americans for [whom] one of the luxuries was being served by an invisible class," Dr. McFeely said. "If I could fault Frederick Douglass on any realm, it is for his insensitivity in this area," Dr. McFeely said. "If we are candid, we will recognize that while Frederick Douglass, who so magnificently portrayed the plight of one class, the slaves, did not, after slavery ended, permit himself to fully comprehend the plight of a still larger percentage of Americans. These people, an inordinate number of whom were black and not nearly as lucky as he, lived lives of great toil and [in] fear of poverty," Dr. McFeely said.
According to Dr. McFeely, the most important room at Cedar Hill is Douglass's library, with more than 2,000 books. Just published is Bibliography of the Frederick Douglass Library at Cedar Hill by William Petrie and Douglas Stover. The collection includes books that belonged to his second wife, who was a Mount Holyoke graduate. It also contains government publications that Douglass probably acquired as deposit copies during his three terms on the public payroll: as a recorder of deeds and marshall for the District of Columbia and as minister to Haiti. Dr. McFeely said there is much to learn about Douglass's intellectual interests from his library, which included collections of music, cultural anthropology and literature.
Douglass as Journalist
Dr. Martin, author of The Mind of Frederick Douglass (1984), focused on Douglass's career as a journalist. In his lecture, "The Enduring Legacy of Frederick Douglass," Dr. Martin said that although Douglass was not the first African American to edit a newspaper, he quickly assumed a preeminent role. Douglass published a newspaper from 1847 to 1863 in Rochester, N.Y. He changed its name from North Star to Frederick Douglass Paper to the Douglass Monthly. He published the New National Era from 1870 to 1874 in Washington.
"African American newspapers provided an institutional framework from which to further, actively, the ongoing black liberation struggle ... to end not simply slavery, but also race prejudice and discrimination. The black press was a vital institution in this ongoing offensive," Dr. Martin said.
"By the 1850s, Douglass was the foremost African American spokesperson, and his work as a journalist was vital to his position as a self-described leader, a public gadfly, an African American Jeremiah, a voice of progress and human betterment," said Dr. Martin.
"Although Douglass worked within a particular framework -- his own people's liberation -- he saw himself as part of the working out of the American experience. ... His enduring legacy forces us to think anew about the centrality of this historic tension between identities of race and nation," Dr. Martin said. "Douglass pointedly rejected the concept of the United States as a white or racially exclusive nation. He envisioned a broadly inclusive America which transcended narrow and divisive boundaries like race."
