Facing Frederick Read online

  FOR THE

  Frederick Douglass National Historic Site

  Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for and may be obtained from the Library of Congress.

  ISBN 978-1-4197-2546-3

  eISBN 978-1-68335-117-7

  Text copyright © 2017 Tonya Bolden

  Book design by Sara Corbett

  For image credits, see this page.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material: On this page, “Frederick Douglass,” copyright © 1966 by Robert Hayden, from Collected Poems of Robert Hayden by Robert Hayden, edited by Frederick Glaysher. Used by permission of Liveright Publishing Corporation.

  Print edition: The design elements used throughout this book are sampled from original printed material created during Frederick Douglass’s lifetime (1818–1895). The typefaces in this book are taken from or inspired by that time period as well. They include Grecian Expanded, which was introduced in 1846 and revived by Jordan Davies; Obsidian, which evokes the engraved typography of the 1800s and was designed by Jonathan Hoefler and Andy Clymer; and Surveyor, which recalls the engraved type on old maps and was designed by Tobias Frere-Jones.

  Published in 2017 by Abrams Books for Young Readers, an imprint of ABRAMS. All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher.

  Abrams Books for Young Readers are available at special discounts when purchased in quantity for premiums and promotions as well as fundraising or educational use. Special editions can also be created to specification. For details, contact [email protected] or the address below.

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  FREDERICK DOUGLASS

  was in love with photography. . . .

  He frequented photographers’ studios

  and sat for his portrait whenever he

  could. As a result of his passion, he

  also became the most photographed

  American of the nineteenth century.

  —JOHN STAUFFER et al.,

  Picturing Frederick Douglass

  Frederick facing right from c. 1858 daguerreotype.

  Contents

  A NOTE ON EARLY PHOTOGRAPHY

  1 A Soul to Aspire

  2 One the World Over

  3 Ships upon a Stormy Sea

  4 The Voice of Inspiration

  5 No Time for Us to Leave the Country

  6 We Are All Liberated

  7 A New World

  8 Promises in Your Constitution

  9 Leaf from a Living Tree

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  “FREDERICK DOUGLASS” BY ROBERT HAYDEN

  TIME LINE

  NOTES

  SELECTED SOURCES

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  IMAGE CREDITS

  INDEX OF SEARCHABLE TERMS

  A NOTE ON

  Early Photography

  Frederick Douglass, a master at managing his image, loved photography for the same reason scores of other people in the nineteenth century did: it was democratizing. Photography allowed those who couldn’t afford to have their portraits painted to have images of themselves. Frederick also believed that photographs satisfied “a deep-seated want” in people—namely, to “see themselves as others see them, and as they will be seen by those [who] shall come after them.”

  Frederick called Louis Daguerre, one of the fathers of photography, “the great discoverer of modern times.” Daguerre’s process, perfected in 1839, about a year after Frederick escaped slavery, involved polishing a silver-plated copper sheet to a mirror shine, then treating that sheet with mercury vapor that rendered a light-sensitive surface onto which an image was directly exposed. The end result, a daguerreotype (da·guerre·o·type), was a one-of-a-kind image with incredibly sharp details. Because it is fragile (and silver is prone to tarnish), a daguerreotype was sealed under glass and placed in a protective case. So was the ambrotype (am·bro·type, from a Greek word for “immortal”) introduced in early 1850s. Producing an ambrotype involved exposing images onto thin sheets of glass.

  Often cased but not so fragile was the tintype, an image printed on blackened iron. The tintype was developed in the mid-1850s, as was the carte de visite (or cdv or calling card). This 2½-by-4-inch photograph was produced by placing a negative onto a paper coated with an albumen (al·bu·men, or egg white) and salt emulsion. The image was affixed to card stock. The cabinet card (usually an albumen print) was mounted on larger card stock, generally 6¼ by 4¼ inches.

  In Facing Frederick, as you learn of a legend’s life, you will encounter more than a dozen photographs of the man who so loved photography and who was photographed many, many times. These photographs (with specifics provided in captions) include one taken when Douglass was in his early twenties and one taken not long before he died at the age of seventy-seven.

  The earliest known photograph of Frederick (daguerreotype, c. 1841).

  CHAPTER 1

  A Soul to Aspire

  Frederick faced a dilemma in mid-1846. He could sit tight and not rock the boat, or he could captain his own ship.

  Nearly eight years had passed since he’d made his great escape. Nearly five since he’d begun his rise from obscure laborer to renowned warrior for the “sacred cause.”

  But what if his new venture failed despite his fame? A blow, yes, but would it defeat someone who had triumphed over slavery as he had? And after that, Frederick’s early days of freedom in the whaling town of New Bedford, Massachusetts, had not been easy.

  One day sawing wood, another digging a cellar. Now driving a carriage or shoveling coal. Now being a chimney sweep or hoisting casks of whale oil down at the docks. Odd job after odd job, with him scrimping to keep food on the table along with a place to call home, at the start two small rooms on Elm Street facing Buzzards Bay.

  Detail from South-Eastern View of New Bedford, Mass. (c. 1839). When this hand-colored engraving appeared, Frederick, a Southerner, was probably still adjusting to New England culture.

  A few months after he settled in New Bedford, the Liberator came into Frederick’s life. He scrimped even more to afford a yearly subscription ($2.50) to this leading antislavery newspaper. The four-page weekly became “my meat and my drink. My soul was set all on fire. Its sympathy for my brethren in bonds—its scathing denunciations of slaveholders—its faithful exposures of slavery . . . sent a thrill of joy through my soul, such as I had never felt before!”

  Soul on fire, Frederick frequented local antislavery meetings. Early on just a listener, then gradually speaking up, orating. Growing bolder and more engaged, he went to meetings in other towns. The life-changing trip came on Tuesday, August 10, 1841, when he boarded the paddle-wheel steamer Telegraph bound for nearby Nantucket, site of a Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society (MASS) convention.

  Frederick wasn’t the only black person at the three-day event held in Nantucket’s library, the elegant Athenaeum. His friend Jeremiah B. Sanderson, a barber, and more than a dozen other New Bedford blacks made the journey. Residents of the island’s black section of town also turned out to listen to an array of speakers. One was flinty William Lloyd Garrison, editor of the Liberator, Frederick’s meat and drink. Garrison, like a god to Frederick, was a MASS founder and its driving force.

  William Lloyd Garrison (daguerreotype, c. 1850). Garrison—apprenticed at age fourteen to the editor of his hometown paper, the Newburyport Herald—was in his mid-twenties when he launched the Liberator in January 1831. In January 1832 he cofounded the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society (originally the New England Anti-Slavery Society).

  When Frederick boarded the Telegraph he had no plans for any speechmaking. After J. B. Sanderson addressed the crowd on day two, Frederick still remained an observer. But then that evening a white man who had heard him speak in New Bedford urged him to say a few words.

  As Frederick faced the overwhelmingly white crowd of five hundred, his tongue was tied; there were shackles on his mind. “I felt myself a slave.” In a speech lost to history, he ultimately stopped stammering, trembling, found his voice, his way, his roar. With his entrancing baritone voice, he soared.

  When Frederick finished, William Lloyd Garrison sprang to his feet and led the crowd in an impromptu call-and-response.

  GARRISON: “Have we been listening to a thing, a piece of property, or to a man?”

  THE CROWD: “A man! A man!”

  GARRISON: “And should such a man be held a slave in a republican and Christian land?”

  THE CROWD: “No, no! Never, never!”

  GARRISON: “Shall such a man ever be sent back to slavery from the soil of old Massachusetts?”

  In his book Acts of the Anti-Slavery Apostles, white minister Parker Pillsbury said this is what happened next: “Almost the whole assembly sprang with one accord to their feet and the walls and the roof of the Athenaeum seemed to shudder with the ‘No, no!’”

  Frederick spoke again the next day, and before the convention was over, MASS invited him to join its roster of lecturers. What’s more, with MASS’s help, he soon moved into a cottage of his own in the small town of Lynn. This future shoe capital of the world was about ten miles north of downtown Boston, where the Liberator and MASS were headquartered at 25 Cornhill Street.

  A roll of thunder, a holy won
der, lionlike Frederick became MASS’s most in-demand black speaker. In his mission to win souls to the sacred cause of ending slavery and to rouse converts to higher heights of activism, he delivered over a hundred speeches a year.

  New England was his main stomping ground, but Frederick also spoke in New York and Pennsylvania, and as far west as Indiana. Sometimes he journeyed solo—by train, by stagecoach, on horseback. At other times with Garrison, Boston aristocrat Wendell Phillips, and other white abolitionists, as well as black ones, such as the freeborn Salem dandy Charles Remond, a barber by trade. For a time Frederick was MASS’s only black speaker born enslaved.

  This is an extraordinary man.

  He was cut out for a hero.

  —N. P. ROGERS, a white abolitionist and newspaperman in Concord, New Hampshire

  When addressing a crowd of twenty, fifty, hundreds, in a barn or church, town hall or tavern—and often without notes—Frederick captivated audiences with accounts of cruelties suffered and seen. He tore to shreds Southern propaganda that enslaved people were content and well cared for. He stressed that slavery degraded both the enslaved and the enslaver. He denounced churches that failed to support the sacred cause and damned those with slaveholders in their pulpits and pews. The idea of a Christian slaveholder was ludicrous, argued Frederick, who was by no means irreligious. He became a Christian as an adolescent; as a man, a lay preacher at New Bedford’s African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Zion church. And this preacher man spoke just as eloquently, just as forcefully, on the undue burdens borne by free blacks in the North as he did on slavery.

  Detail from Charles Lenox Remond (daguerreotype, c. 1851). Remond, MASS’s first black lecturer, was the son of successful entrepreneurs (barbering, hairdressing, catering). Remond, who was about eight years older than Frederick, no doubt had much to teach him when the two began lecturing together.

  By and large blacks in the North were limited to the lowest-paying jobs. The right to serve on a jury, the right to sue over being wronged—generally none of that was allowed. At a time when only men had the right to vote, usually the only black men who had it, too, were those who owned a certain amount of property. What’s more, free blacks frequently had to contend with physical assaults from whites—even children making their way to school—for some perceived slight. Or simply because they were black.

  He was more than six feet in height, and his majestic form, as he rose to speak, straight as an arrow, muscular, yet lithe and graceful, his flashing eye, and more than all, his voice, that rivaled [statesman Daniel] Webster’s in its richness, and in the depth and sonorousness of its cadences, made up such an ideal of an orator as the listeners never forgot.

  —DAVID NEWHALL JOHNSON, a white resident of Lynn

  To a crowd in Plymouth, Massachusetts, Frederick charged that for the most part white Northerners could only tolerate blacks “in their proper place!” (underfoot). Such people “will not allow that we have a head to think, and a heart to feel, and a soul to aspire. They treat us not as men, but as dogs . . . and expect us to run and do their bidding.” Racism put blacks in a double bind. “You degrade us, and then ask why we are degraded—you shut our mouths, and then ask why we don’t speak—you close your colleges and seminaries against us, and then ask why we don’t know more.”

  “Twin-monsters of darkness”—that’s what Frederick called slavery and racism. And when it came to racism, as with slavery, he spoke from experience.

  Early on in New Bedford (population about 3,000), Frederick had worked odd jobs instead of plying his trade as a caulker at a shipyard, because white caulkers threatened to quit if he was hired. So instead of earning two dollars a day, he earned about one. (Thankfully, he eventually found steady work at a candleworks and oil refinery, then at a brass foundry, where he often nailed a newspaper to a post near his bellows so that he could read as he worked.)

  Later, while he was out lecturing, time and again train conductors ordered Frederick into the car for black people (usually the freight car). He sometimes resisted but then relented. More than once, when he stood his ground, he was roughed up and thrown off the train.

  For a trip to Pittsfield, New Hampshire, Frederick was denied a seat inside the stagecoach and forced to ride on its roof with the driver. During the break between lectures in Pittsfield’s church, he sat on a gravestone in its cemetery for a while. Alone. In the rain. With nothing to eat, while others lunched in their homes or at the tavern, which had turned Frederick away. (Ironically, it was proslavery politician Moses Norris Jr., not an abolitionist, who welcomed him into his house.)

  In Pendleton, Indiana, in the summer of 1843, the racism was near deadly. Ruffians attacked Frederick and two white colleagues as he addressed a crowd on a platform in the woods.

  Big sticks and stones. Fists and feet. Frederick defended himself as best he could but was knocked unconscious and left with a broken right hand. Because the bones were not set properly, that hand plagued him for the rest of his life. After Pendleton, it was no easy thing for Frederick to write.

  But write he must! He was tired of talk that he was a fake. Though he was known to show audiences his whip-scarred back, some people doubted that he had been enslaved.

  Someone so dignified?

  Someone so well-spoken?

  A fugitive slave? How could that be?

  Frederick hoped his autobiography would put an end to all that. In the winter of 1844 he picked up his pen.

  Frederick’s writing wasn’t flawless. When he put pen to paper, “immediately” sometimes came out as “emmeadiately,” “enemies” as “eneimeis” and “wrote” as “worte.” Any one of his colleagues could edit his prose, but only he could tell his story. And after several years on the lecture circuit, Frederick knew how to hold people’s attention.

  The book began simply, straightforward: “I was born in Tuckahoe, near Hillsborough, and about twelve miles from Easton, in Talbot County, Maryland.” The narrative moved on to reveal a life that was tangled, tortured.

  Frederick wrote of seeing his mother only a few times. Shortly after he was born, she was sent to work on a farm twelve miles away; then she died when he was about eight.

  Frederick wrote of never knowing which white man was his father and of knowing nothing about the circumstances under which he was conceived.

  Frederick wrote of having at one point a closet floor for a bed.

  He wrote of days of howling hunger, of feet cracked from the cold, of facing down suicidal thoughts with “the hope of being free.” And there were summer Sundays spent standing on the banks of Chesapeake Bay, “with saddened heart and tearful eye,” yearning to be free as he watched ship after ship move “off to the mighty ocean.”

  More than once young Frederick saw his aunt Hester whipped upon her naked back until her blood pooled on the floor. Later he faced physical and psychological abuse from Edward Covey, wheat farmer and notorious slave breaker. At Covey’s place, sixteen-year-old Frederick worked in the fields—binding blades of grain, hauling them to the fan for winnowing—sometimes sunup to past dark, sometimes under an August sun’s relentless rays, sometimes to the point of passing out. And there were beatings meant to crush his spirit, reduce him to a brute, but never succeeding. At least not for long. And never after the day he fought Covey back and beat him badly, so badly the man never again laid a hand on him.

  Frederick wrote, too, of his 1836 New Year’s resolution, shortly before he turned eighteen: to get free! With a handful of friends he devised a plan, but then the authorities found out about it and he landed in jail, gripped by fear of being sold into a Deep South state like Georgia, where slavery was generally more brutal, where he knew not a soul.

  With pathos and passion Frederick wrote of being treated like a thing, passed around on a white person’s wish or whim or because of a change in the wind.

  Now, from babyhood, living with his grandparents on a farm in Tuckahoe.