Life and Times of Frederick Douglass

Freedom brings “joyous excitement which words can but tamely describe” (167). Frederick’s euphoria subsides, however, when he learns that he has not yet traveled beyond the reach of slaveholders and their minions. Through a chance encounter with a fugitive slave named William Dixon, whom he knew in Baltimore as “Allender’s Jake,” Frederick discovers that neither the docks nor “colored” boarding houses are safe places for runaways. Luckily, Frederick soon meets a sailor named Stuart, who introduces him to David Ruggles, an “officer” on the famed-yet-secret Underground Railroad (169).

Upon learning that Frederick knows the calking trade, Ruggles dispatches him to New Bedford, Massachusetts, where the fortunate fugitive finds not only his new home but a new name as well, for in New Bedford he meets another abolitionist, Nathan Johnson, who suggests that Frederick adopt the surname “Douglass,” inspired by a Scottish protagonist from Sir Walter Scott’s poem “Lady of the Lake.” In affluent New Bedford, Douglass sees “the nearest approach to freedom and equality” (172), albeit tinged with periodic manifestations of racial prejudice. For the first time, he also hears a speech by William Lloyd Garrison, editor of The Liberator newspaper and at that time perhaps the nation’s most famous abolitionist.

In 1841, Douglass delivers his first public oration when he precedes William Lloyd Garrison as a speaker at a Nantucket anti-slavery convention. Afterward, John A. Collins of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society encourages Douglass to join the cause. From that moment, Douglass becomes a committed abolitionist and frequent lecturer on slavery’s injustices.

As a speaker, however, Douglass encounters a problem. He appears too polished, too eloquent to ever have been a slave. To counter this prejudice, Douglass wrote the narrative of his life as a slave, published in 1845, which silenced his northern critics but also, when made known in Maryland, exposed him to the dangers of federal fugitive slave laws.

In 1841, shortly after his first anti-slavery speech, Douglass joins a group of abolitionists in opposing Rhode Island’s proposed “Dorr” constitution. Led by Thomas Dorr, the state’s pro-constitution party tried to liberalize the old colonial charter by discarding the property requirement for the elective franchise. The liberalization, however, would have extended voting rights only to white men, so the abolitionists joined the conservative party in opposition and paved the way, in time, for a state constitution free from color prejudice.

Alas, on his travels in Rhode Island, Douglass does not always experience that same freedom from prejudice. Even in free states, he often feels slavery’s “proscriptive and persecuting spirit, especially upon its railways, steamboats, and in its public houses” (185). He always appreciates when his white compatriots volunteer to share in his ostracism by refusing to travel, dine, or sleep where Douglass is not also welcome: “Wendell Phillips, James Monroe, and William White, were always dear to me for their nice feeling at this point” (186).

In 1843, the New England Anti-Slavery Society organizes conventions in New Hampshire, Vermont, New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana. These were all free states, and most had been so since the late 18th century. Though the people of those states feel hostile toward slavery, they feel scarcely less so toward abolitionists, whom many view as troublemakers pushing dreaded racial equality.

At first, things do not go smoothly. In Syracuse, New York, John A. Collins, the man who recruited Douglass to the Society two years earlier, tries to shift the discussions from abolitionism to communism, prompting a rebuke from Douglass, who regards the blending of “anti-slavery” with “anti-property” as “imposing an additional burden of unpopularity on our cause” as well as “an act of bad faith” (190).

After Syracuse, the situation improves. Rochester, New York, Douglass’s future home, welcomes the abolitionists, as does Buffalo, where Douglass speaks to an audience of up to $5,000 people. Thousands more welcome him in Clinton County, Ohio. Warm feelings, however, do not prevail everywhere. In Pendleton, Indiana, an armed “mob of about sixty of the roughest characters I ever looked upon” attack the abolitionists, leaving Douglass and several of his colleagues bloodied and beaten (191). Neal Harby and his wife, Quakers who live three miles from Pendleton, bandage their wounds and care for them while they heal.