The Mind of Frederick Douglass

Waldo E. Martin Jr.

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2000
• ISBN:
  9780807864289
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

Frederick Douglass was unquestionably the foremost black American of the nineteenth century. The extraordinary life of this former slave turned abolitionist orator, newspaper editor, social reformer, race leader, and Republican party advocate has inspired many biographies over the years. This, however, is the first full-scale study of the origins, contours, development, and significance of Douglass's thought. Brilliant and to a large degree self-taught, Douglass personified intellectual activism; he possessed a sincere concern for the uses and consequences of ideas. Both his people's struggle for liberation and his individual experiences, which he envisioned as symbolizing that struggle, provided the basis and structure for his intellectual maturation. As a representative American, he internalized and, thus, reflected major currents in the contemporary American mind. As a representative Afro-American, he revealed in his thinking the deep-seated influence of race on Euro-American, Afro-American, or, broadly conceived, American consciousness. He sought to resolve in his thinking the dynamic tension between his identities as a black and as an American. Martin assesses not only how Douglass dealt with this enduring conflict, but also the extent of his success. An inveterate belief in a universal and egalitarian humanism unified Douglass's thought. This grand organizing principle reflected his intellectual roots in the three major traditions of mid-nineteenth-century American thought: Protestant Christianity, the Enlightenment, and romanticism. Together, these influences buttressed his characteristic optimism. Although nineteenth-century Afro-American intellectual history derived its central premises and outlook from concurrent American intellectual history, it offered a searching critique of the latter and its ramifications. How to square America's rhetoric of freedom, equality, and justice with the reality of slavery and racial prejudice was the difficulty that confronted such Afro-American thinkers as Douglass.

Part One
The Shape of a Life

In the great struggle now progressing for the freedom and elevation of our people, we should be found at work with all our might, resolved that no man, or set of men shall be more abundant in labors, according to the measure of our ability, than ourselves.
—Douglass, “West India Emancipation,” 4 August 1857

I do now and always have attached more importance to manhood than to mere kinship or identity with one variety of the human family. Race, in the popular sense, is narrow; humanity is broad. The one is special, the other is universal. The one is transient, the other permanent.
—Douglass, Speech at dedication of Manassas (Virginia) Industrial School, 3 September 1894

I have seen dark hours in my life, and I have seen the darkness gradually disappearing, and the light gradually increasing. One by one, I have seen obstacles removed, errors corrected, prejudices softened, proscriptions relinquished, and my people advancing in all the elements that make up the sum of general welfare. I remember that God reigns in eternity, and that, whatever delays, disappointments and discouragements may come, truth, justice, liberty and humanity will prevail.
—Douglass, 7 December 1890

1. The Formative Years and Beyond

Frederick Douglass’s racial identity, especially its roots and development, was central to his life and thought. His family, extended family, religious beliefs, and “education” as a slave and free man helped to shape his aspirations as well as his search for identity. As a Negro and a mulatto, in a white racist society, his responses to the omnipresent issue of race were complex and revealing. These responses revealed deep-seated attitudes that reflected not only how he felt about blacks and whites, but also, most important, how he felt about himself. Indeed, it is impossible to understand Douglass without understanding his intricate racial world view. An undercurrent of racial ambivalence, symbolized by his mulatto identity, complicated this racial teleology. Douglass’s expanding racial awareness demonstrated an increasingly sophisticated perception of self-identity, collective identity, and their mutual dependence. Clearly, the essential aim of his life was to resolve the problem of race.

Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey was born in February 1818 on an unknown day. The process of racial self-discovery began early. As an inquisitive and intelligent young slave in a society where blacks were primarily slaves and whites were free, he soon sensed the oppressive reality of racial proscription. Quite early, for instance, he perceived that most slaves, unlike whites, did not know their birthdays. This haunted him personally throughout his life. He wrote in 1845 that it “was a source of unhappiness to me even during childhood. The white children could tell their ages. I could not tell why I ought to be deprived of the same privilege.” He concluded that “it is the wish of most masters within my knowledge to keep their slaves thus ignorant.” Similarly, as his master deemed the question of a slave’s birthday, like most inquiries by slaves, “improper ... impertinent, and evidence of a restless spirit,” young Frederick certainly could not discover his birthday by asking his master.¹

Frederick’s subsequent discovery that Aaron Anthony, his master, was probably his father complicated his developing sense of identity. Harriet Bailey, his mother, was, like Frederick and the rest of his family, a slave in Tuckahoe, Maryland. They belonged to Aaron Anthony, who served as general plantation superintendent for Colonel Edward Lloyd, the largest slaveholder and landowner as well as the wealthiest man in the area. Frederick’s relationship with his father-master was virtually nil, yet psychologically significant. “Slavery,” he would later observe, “does away with fathers, as it does away with families.” While Anthony typically ignored him, Frederick remembered having been occasionally whipped but never mistreated by him. He also recalled instances where Anthony patted him on his head and called him his “little Indian boy.” Notwithstanding these passing paternal touches, the primary images of Anthony in Frederick’s mind painted him as very troubled, sadistic, and sexually and physically abusive toward his female slaves, notably Frederick’s Aunt Hester, whom he desired but who herself was in love with a fellow slave. Their love infuriated Anthony who, unable to stop their furtive meetings, persisted in his vicious beatings of her. A sensitive young lad, Frederick, who witnessed several of these beatings, clearly could not identify with the perpetrator of such brutality.²

The “penalty for having a white father,” he recalled, was very heavy. “A man who will enslave his own blood,” he observed, “may not be safely relied on for magnanimity.” The mulatto slave child represented “a standing accusation against him who is master and father to the child.” For the master-father, that child signified a sin which he preferred to ignore.³ For the child, the results of this paternal rejection were often painful. In Frederick’s case, his nonrelationship with his white master-father reinforced both his Negro identity and his sense of racial ambivalence as a mulatto. It also heightened his ambivalence toward whites in general and white paternal figures such as William Lloyd Garrison, his major abolitionist mentor, in particular.

Although the young Frederick saw his mother only a few times at night before her death, he still retained vivid impressions of her throughout his life. Because she had been hired out as a field slave on a neighboring plantation some twelve miles away, just to see her son required a long night journey by foot. As she invariably had to return to work the next day, the physical and emotional strain was incalculable. Frederick later maintained that “the pains she took, and the toil she endured, to see me, tells me that a true mother’s heart was hers, and that slavery had difficulty in paralyzing it with unmotherly indifference.” Once, when Aunt Katy, the cook, as usual refused to feed young Frederick as punishment for some alleged offense, his mother happened to visit. She scolded Aunt Katy, “the sable virago,” and threatened to report to the master Aunt Katy’s abuse of her son. Frederick remembered: “That night I learned the fact, that I was not only a child, but somebody’s child.... I was victorious, and well off for the moment; prouder, on my mother’s knee, than a King upon his throne.”⁴

Whereas Frederick experienced difficulty identifying with his white ancestry, principally his father, he intimately identified with his Negro ancestry and mother. While his father always remained a shadowy figure, he later observed:

My knowledge of my mother is very scanty, but very distinct. Her personal appearance and bearing are ineffaceably stamped upon my memory. She was tall, and finely proportioned; of deep black, glossy complexion; had regular features, and, among the other slaves, was remarkably sedate in her manners. There is in Prichard’s Natural History of Man, the head of a figure—on page 157—the features of which so resemble those of my mother, that I often recur to it with something of the feeling which I suppose others experience when looking upon the pictures of dear departed ones.

Ironically, the picture in Prichard’s authoritative ethnological text was of an Egyptian prince characterized as Indian, Hindu and light skinned rather than dark skinned. Perhaps because Frederick later identified so closely with Egypt, he fancied his mother as akin to Egyptian royalty. The selection of this picture may have been significant in other ways as well. It could have suggested, on one level, the subconscious power of his racial ambivalence. On another, that the figure was actually masculine, though ambiguously so, might have reflected the genderless dimension of his catholic vision of a common humanity transcending sex as well as race.⁵

Frederick’s mother became ill and soon died shortly after the dispute between her and Aunt Katy over his care. Notwithstanding his subsequently graphic though slender memory of his mother, at the time of her death he felt “no strong emotions of sorrow for her, and ... very little regret for myself on account of her loss.” For him, their separation dulled the trauma of her death. “I had to learn the value of my mother,” he lamented, “long after her death ... by witnessing the devotion of other mothers to their children.” He would later acknowledge that “it has been a life-long, standing grief to me, that I knew so little of my mother; and that I was so early separated from her.”⁶ Like his lost patrimony, the loss of his mother had crucial ramifications for his psyche and racial outlook. An orphaned mulatto, he was psychologically poised between two worlds; a Negro slave, he had no choice but to live in his mother’s world.

Frederick would later learn that his mother had been the only slave in Tuckahoe who could read. To him, the news came as a revelation and he rejoiced. Besides ascribing to her “an earnest love of knowledge,” he claimed to have inherited his own “love of letters” from her instead of his white father.⁷ Of necessity, this compensatory argument for the inheritance of intelligence from his Negro mother, by extension an argument for black equality, had to exclude his lost white patrimony.

Slavery, Frederick often emphasized, had deprived him as a child of a traditional familial environment. He declared that “there is not, beneath the sky, an enemy to filial affection so destructive as slavery. It had made my brothers and sisters strangers to me; it converted the mother that bore me, into a myth; it shrouded my father in mystery, and left me without an intelligible beginning in the world.” Fortunately for the young Frederick, however, he found a surrogate family with Isaac and Betsey Bailey, his maternal grandparents, “the greatest people in the world to me.” Of grandfather Bailey, Frederick merely mentioned that he was free. But of grandmother Bailey, he recalled that “her gentle hand and kind deportment” had engaged his “infantile understanding.” Her “love stood in place of my mother’s.” Although old and gray, she remained “a woman of power and spirit. She was remarkably straight in figure, and elastic and muscular in movement.”⁸

Young Frederick lived with his grandparents in their hut, where his grandmother took care of her various daughters’ children while her daughters worked as hired hands on neighboring plantations. Unaware at first of his enslavement, he led a carefree childhood. He recalled the joys of exploring the hut, watching squirrels, drawing water from the well, observing the “mill and the turning of its ponderous wheel,” and fishing “with my pin-hook and threadline” in the mill-pond where “I could get amusing nibbles if I could catch no fish.”⁹ The comfort and tranquility of life with his grandparents were soon shattered, however, by his removal to Colonel Lloyd’s plantation. In accordance with tradition, grandmother Betsey brought him, like her other grandchildren, to the “Big House” when he was around six years old. The shock of the separation proved severe. “I had never been deceived before and something of resentment mingled with my grief at parting with my grandmother.” He stressed subsequently that while the incident might seem trivial to others he could not “withhold a circumstance which at the time affected me so deeply, and which I still remember so vividly. Besides, this was my first introduction to the realities of the slave system.”¹⁰

The trauma of Frederick’s separation from his grandmother was pivotal to his comprehension of his enslavement, his increasing desire to be free, and his eventual decision to run to freedom. His maturation enhanced, yet eventually eased, the burden of both his emotional loss and the perception of his grandmother’s related powerlessness and degradation. Similarly, he eventually gained a deeper awareness of both the deeply buried, though inescapable, emotional loss which his mother’s death entailed for him and her own related powerlessness and degradation. Frederick’s commitment to feminism, therefore, might have represented in part his lifelong attempt to grapple with his stunted maternal tie. It might also have represented to a degree his attempts to grapple with the relationship between sexism and racism. The deep-seated emotional influence of the separations from his mother and grandmother thus probably contributed to his dedication to racial and feminist liberation specifically and social reform generally.

When Frederick was eight years old, he was sent to live in Baltimore with Hugh Auld (the brother of Aaron Anthony’s son-in-law, Thomas Auld), Sophia, his wife, and Thomas, their son. Approximately the same age as young Thomas, Frederick was to be his playmate and guardian. In this setting, several key events transpired. At first, Frederick again experienced something of a sense of family, notably in his relationships with Sophia, his mistress, and little Tommy. Sophia “was naturally of an excellent disposition—kind, gentle, and cheerful.” Never having owned any slaves herself, she lacked the “supercilious contempt for the rights and feelings of others, and the petulance and bad humor which generally characterized slaveholding ladies.” Consequently, he “soon came to regard her as something more akin to a mother than a slaveholding mistress.” She made him feel like Tommy’s half-brother. He sensed that “though motherless, he was not friendless.”¹¹

The kindness of Sophia toward young Frederick showed him that whites could express a common humanity. As a child, he was always struck by demonstrations of kindness toward him by whites. Even at Colonel Lloyd’s plantation, where he early witnessed and experienced some of the worst horrors of slavery, he also experienced touching acts of kindness at the hands of whites. He remembered Miss Lucretia, Colonel Lloyd’s daughter, giving him bread for singing outside her window. This simple benevolence, he claimed, was “the first kindness I ever experienced from one of a complexion different from my own.” That “Mas’ Daniel,” Colonel Lloyd’s son, often protected him from the big boys likewise deeply impressed the young Frederick. These “sunbeams of humane treatment,” he maintained, “seem all the brighter from the general darkness into which they penetrate.”¹² Such incidents contributed to Frederick’s burgeoning awareness of human oneness and the inhumanity of oppression. As a result, these instances of kindness fueled his disdain for slavery.

Hearing Mistress Sophia, a pious Christian, read the Bible aloud sparked Frederick’s desire to learn how to read. When he asked her to teach him how to read, she gladly assented. Thrilled by his rapid progress, she shared her joy with her husband. Appalled, Master Hugh demanded that she desist at once from her unlawful efforts to teach Frederick how to read. “If you give a nigger an inch,” he further explained to his wife, “he will take an ell. Learning will spoil the best nigger in the world. If he learns to read the Bible it will forever unfit him to be a slave. He should know nothing but the will of his master, and learn to obey it.... If you teach him how to read, he’ll want to know how to write, and this accomplished, he’ll be running away with himself.” Frederick recollected that Master Hugh’s “discourse was the first decidedly anti-slavery lecture to which it had been my lot to listen.”¹³

The abrupt about-face in Sophia’s attitude toward teaching Frederick how to read distinctly evidenced the blight of slavery on human character. She soon became more adamantly opposed to his learning how to read than her husband. Much later, as a former slave turned abolitionist and ethnologist, Frederick often referred to the baneful influence of slavery on persons like Sophia Auld as cogent proof of the argument that environment constituted a primary determinant of human personality and action. “Nature never intended that men and women should be either slaves or slaveholders,” he argued, “and nothing but rigid training long persisted in, can perfect the character of the one or the other.” Speaking of Sophia, he concluded: “Nature made us friends, but slavery made us enemies.”¹⁴

Having been whetted, Frederick’s appetite for knowledge accelerated. Master Hugh had been right: “Teaching me the alphabet had been the ‘inch’ given. I was now waiting only for the opportunity to ‘take the ell.’” To further his reading and writing instruction, the resourceful young Frederick employed several tactics. He would carry a Webster’s Spelling-Book while running errands or playing and would prevail upon his white playmates to share their spelling skills with him. As many of these children were poor and often hungry, he carried along some bread as an enticement. Later, he learned how to write by observing carpenters initial shipbuilding timber to designate where it would be used. Mastering those letters, he engaged his playmates in games to see if they could best his writing skills. Another device he used was to copy from Webster’s Spelling-Book until he could make the letters without looking at the book. In the same vei...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• The Mind of Frederick Douglass
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Part One The Shape of a Life
• Part Two Social Reform
• Part Three National Identity, Culture, and Science
• Part Four The Autobiographical Douglass
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index