American Experience; The Abolitionists; Interview with David William Blight, part 1 of 6

So we'll start at the beginning in Tukko. So in his autobiography, Douglas mentions that he was separated from his mother as an infant and it was customary to do so. Why would that be customary? Well, Douglas was separated from his mother, Harriet Bailey, in part because she and he were owned by many Marin Anthony, loaned three farms and dozens and dozens of slaves. His mother had five children, of course of about eight years. His mother worked as far as we can tell probably as much as ten and twelve miles from where Douglas lived, or Frederick Bailey lived as a child which was in and around his grandmother's cabin.

In his autobiography, he really has very little vivid recollection of his mother except for two or three episodes. And his mother becomes a bit of a blur in his memory to the extent that he, in effect, in vencer, reinvencer in fact in the subsequent autobiographies. He imagines her beauty as much as he would have known it as a five-year-old. He eventually even sees a picture of an Egyptian pharaoh, Ramses, a male figure, a profile that is so beautiful that he imagines that's what his mother looked like. It was as though into a child, a mother might not really have a gender, a mother was mother. And he remembers her or imagines her as beautiful and he later learns that she was also literate. At least that's what he tells us.

That his mother had attained some literacy on the eastern shore of Maryland in her circumstances is quite extraordinary if that indeed was true. His most vivid memory of his mother though is when she showed up at the White Plantation, he's about seven years old, six or seven years old. And he's under the care or authority of an Aunt Katie, who runs the kitchen at the White House. And Aunt Katie was a tyrant and really abused some of the children. And under Frederick, his soda put in the closet and one day his mother just showed up. She would come visit him. She may have even visited him more than he remembered. But she showed up, he says, at a particularly difficult moment when Aunt Katie was about to take a switch to him and he's six, seven years old, misbehaving probably.

And his mother, he said, read the riot act to Aunt Katie. You want to touch that child again, etc., etc., and brought him a heart-shaped cake. It may have been valentines. We can't tell, there's some evidence it was winter, it could have been February, valentines day did exist. But he claimed it was a heart-shaped cake from his mother. And that was probably his single most vivid memory of the mother who then basically vanishes from his life. And indeed died when he was seven or eight years old. So he has to, in effect, almost invent her in his imagination. And of course, he never knew whose father was either. And that becomes a process of imagination and invention as well. He spent really the rest of his life trying to figure out his paternity.

And to his dying day never was certain. He knew his father was white, everyone told him that. There are two principal candidates for who Douglass's father was. It was likely either Aaron Anthony or Thomas Oll, both of whom owned Douglass. My own speculation, my own best guess in the reasons for this is that it probably was Aaron Anthony. But we don't know, it could even have been one of Aaron Anthony's two sons who were 19 and 20 when Douglass was born. And his mother was about 22. So this is a young man. I mean, it's a very important fact of Douglass's life and his development and how he ends up writing about himself. I mean, he becomes a master autobiographer. But a principal fact to keep in mind about Frederick Douglass is that he was an orphan. He knew he was an orphan.

His parents, if you will, were but pieces of imagined imagination. And so in his life he will search again and again and again for not only authority figures or parental figures, but particularly I think certain kinds of mother figures and father figures. And that's an important aspect of who he is. He grows up as a slave, seeing and experiencing really almost all of the ravages that slavery could bring. But also a certain degree of caring and even tenderness around the edges of the people and the families who loaned him. But he's always and forever an orphan trying to understand who am I in this world and where am I actually from?

I don't want to constrain you too much, but we'll gap particularly. Sure. What's he looking for and you mentioned he's looking for a father and mother in some sense that how did that manifest itself? So for example, Thomas Old, who ends up his owner after her and Anthony's death. His wife, Lucretia, gets complicated. These people are all related on the Eastern Shore, but was very kind to him. Very kind to him. And she would let him stand outside her window and sing to her. She would give him special cakes and muffins and so forth.

And she may have been the first female figure that he looked to as a sort of adult woman who might mother him a little. Although he had a good deal of mothering from his grandmother, but his grandmother was taken care of as many as 20 children at a time who were his sister's brothers, cousins and so on. Then it manifests again, of course, when he goes to Baltimore. And he is the playmate of Tommy Old, Hugh Old's son, and Hugh Old is married to Sophia Old. Now Sophia Old became without question a genuine mother figure for a while. She is the one in Baltimore when he's about eight, nine, and ten years old. He teaches him his alphabet, his first letters, reads with him, at least for the first year or so. I read the Bible with him at length, taught him his letters. And she was angelic.

He used his phrases, words like that. She was this image of a woman who cared for him, loved him, treated him almost like a son. You know, Hugh Old, the husband discovers the slave boy is learning to read. It's kind of a classic moment in slave narratives, and it's another slave narrative as well. But the moment when Douglas is a master at that point forbids him from reading or learning to write. And then Sophia Old, this angelic woman who became his source of learning to read and write, which was in many ways, became, of course, the principal weapon of Douglas's life. She turns on him too. She becomes almost a devil overnight. His descriptions of her go from angelic to devil like. And he begins in those years as a child to be, you know, he is seeking these parental figures.

At the same time, he's learning how to manage, how to strategically manipulate this master slave relationship. And he's beginning to learn, of course, that even the best of slave owners, and he experiences the entire range of slave owners, even the best, the most human of slaveholders are still slaveholders. And that's a learning process he goes through. So this mother figure in Sophia Old becomes a whole series of lessons to him. He develops friendships as a slave with other older slaves. And it's not quite a bit older, and some only three and four years older, brother-like figures, father-like figures. I mean, one doesn't want to overly psychologist all of this.

But Frederick Douglass, because he wrote such a lyrical and beautiful series of autobiographies, becomes our very best example of our very best source of understanding what can best be called, I think, the psychology of growing up a slave. But it's interesting, because he, one of the reasons he's a little bit more difficult than other characters is because he is from one sphere to another, one mentor to another, one circle to another. It's not that he doesn't form close attachments, but he doesn't form lasting attachment. So it's, you know, he's far more pragmatic and with the change that garrison it is. Do you think that, as you say, we don't have overly psychologist, but there is a difference there?

Well, there is. I mean, I'm pretty well convinced that Douglass's youth, the 20 years he's a slave, is one kind of betrayal after another for him in terms of basic human relationships, even though he has many lucky breaks, at least of which is when Thomas all sent him back to Baltimore as a 17, 16-year-old instead of selling himself after his escape plan was betrayed and discovered. So on the one hand, he has a lot of good fortunes as a young slave. He wants to read and write, he has both very humane owners and not-so-humane owners. He has relationships that last for a while, but nothing very abiding. By the time he escapes at age 20 and finds himself in New York City and then onto New Bedford, Massachusetts and then on finally into a black church and then among the garrisonians,

this is a young man, a very young man, he's 20, 21, 22, 23, who has really experienced. It's easy to forget this. Now, we want to hurry and get Frederick Douglass into the great man, you know, who's speaking all over the world by the 1850s. We need to remember, this is a man who spent 20 years as a slave and went through extraordinary trauma as a slave. And I think he had a very difficult time in the rest of his life developing close abiding friendships, especially with men, frankly, especially with men. Now, he does eventually develop a very close tie to William Lloyd Garrison, very close tie. It's not in friendship. There certainly was to some degree a father-like figure in Garrison for Douglass and a mentor without no, a mentor about public speaking, a mentor about how to think about anti-slavery

strategy, a mentor even about oratory, and also an organization. I mean, Garrison's Masters as anti-slavery society became Douglass's home and became almost an extended family for him for a while. But in a not very long period of time, of course, Garrison, in a sense, also betrayed their relationship falls apart rather publicly by the early 1850s, and it was a pretty ugly breakup, and their breakup lasted for a very long time after that. So Douglass is this young man who, finally, when he gets out of slavery, is brilliant and literate, but is still very ill-formed and trying to find his place in the world and trying to find his place in the world as a fugitive slave who could be captured and sent back

to slavery at any minute. So he is desperate for relationships of safety and security and hope. And that's what the Garrisonians gave him. They gave him a kind of secular church in which he could belong to and then find his voice. And ultimately, I think probably the greatest aspect of Frederick Douglass, the thing we will always remember longest, is that voice, the voice on the page and the voice in public, the voice of the writer and the voice of the orator. There was no one else like him. And that actually began developing even while he was a slave. I get to head of a slender man. Yeah, sure, but I wonder if you double back a couple of great things. If you just go back to the betrayals, just in a nutshell, it's 20 years of betrayal

fight. Well, by betrayals, I mean, he almost never knew anyone in his 20 years as a slave that he could truly trust. He did meet Anna Murray in Baltimore when he was about 19, and he clearly trusted her. She was intimately involved in his escape plot, and of course, they married within 12 days of his escape, and so on. There were some other slaves. He developed what he called his band of brothers, the Freeland Farm when he was a teenager. The Harris brothers and I was a slave named Bailey, and he would take him out in the woods and he would practice oratory from the Colombian orator with him, and he would read the Bible. He was the one literate among them.

And they were truly deep friends. He writes about those friendships as though these were the most important friendships he had ever developed during slavery. And then they planned an escape plot, and Douglass was the leader of it. He was the youngest among them, interestingly enough, but obviously they're ringleader. And the plot was to steal a long canoe and just row it out in the Chesapeake and try to get themselves up to Baltimore and then up to Pennsylvania. And they were betrayed by one of, well, one of their group was a slave named Sandy Jenkins, somewhat older slave, who opted out of their plan toward the end, and they were caught. They were jailed. A truly important turning point in the young Douglass' life, the two weeks he spends, one of those weeks in solitary confinement in the Eastern Maryland jail, fully expecting he was about to be sold to Alabama or Georgia, sold south.

And if he had been, we wouldn't be talking about him, we'd never heard of him again. But Sandy Jenkins was probably their betrayer, turned them in. So who could he trust? So if he all teaches him his alphabet and yet she turns on him, he couldn't trust her. Thomas Old, his own master, who on the one hand was his owner, and could control his fate at any minute. But nevertheless, and Douglass actually pays him a tribute. Nevertheless, decided not to sell this smart teenage slave to the south that sends him back to Baltimore and says, go learn a trade, I promise I'll free you when you're 25 years old. Douglass, in effect, thanked him in his autobiography for doing that at the same time he says, I couldn't trust that. And of course, he escaped when he was 20 and didn't wait for his 25th birthday to perhaps fulfill that promise.

Along the way, there were a number of people he names in his autobiographies, whether it's at the White Plantation or it's in Baltimore, we'll take, for example, when he's a boy between 8 and 10 and 11, 12 years old and the streets of Baltimore, he meets all these young white boys. These street urchins, he calls them, they become like a game, and he writes beautifully about this. He says, you know, until about the age of 12, no one quite knows how to be a slaveholder. Or in effect, he's saying, they didn't seem to understand their racism until they became about 12. They were just boys, and they ran the streets together, and they were a little bound to brothers, too, and he learns from them, that's how he learns about the Colombian order, this book that will change his life, and then he goes and barters for his own copy of it, but those boys grew up, and he remembers them by name, and they changed, of course, inevitably they changed, and he in the long run knew he couldn't fully trust them, and eventually

in his teens, when he's back in Baltimore, there's a group of street thugs who beam up. So his buddies in the streets of Baltimore weren't lasting for him either. So who could a slave trust, even the most intelligent literate of slaves, almost no one? Why would he jump in your head? Why would he consider a garrison to retreat and play garrison? Well the breakup Douglas has with William Lloyd Garrison has to do, I think, with essentially two things. One was Douglas's break for kind of personal independence. The story is, of course, Douglas publishes his narrative in the spring of 1845. He had spent the past four years under Garrison's tutelage as a tenor and speaker for the

Garrisonians and Messier's anti-Slavery Society had traveled the circuit with Garrison himself, they had become very close. Then he sets down and writes it up, writes up his story, publishes it, and then heads off to Britain, and while in Britain for more than two years, he really phoned his voice. And yet he was under the suspicions, he was under the purview of various garrisonians who not only kept an eye on them, they were financing him to a degree. They helped publish the narrative and they helped republish the narrative, so he was dependent on them to a degree. But he started to speak with an independent voice. He started to speak about more than simply his own story of growing up as a slave. He started to speak about American racism. He got off the plan, if you will. He got off the script of the Garrisonians and he was lionized in England.

He was speaking to huge crowds. He became the most seemingly overnight. He became the star of American abolitionism. There was a degree of jealousy, a degree of resentment among Garrison's circle, perhaps from Garrison himself. And when Douglas comes back to the States in 1847, he's struck him on his own. He moved out to Rochester, New York, he founded his own newspaper, The North Star, which would then compete with Garrison's liberator. That was the first element of their breakup. But the second element, of course, is that he made many British friends and among them was a woman named Julia Griffiths from Newcastle on time. And Julia came to the United States in 1850 and came to Rochester, lived in the Douglas home with Douglas Anna and their growing family.

And she became an in effect his assistant editor on his newspaper, On The North Star. She was not only his assistant editor, she was his confidant, she was his fundraiser. She sprung a lot of money out of Garrett Smith, back down the road in Peterborough, who was the financier of the abolitionist. And rumors began to spread that perhaps they were having a relationship. And this was scandalous, if true. And Garrison decided to believe it and publicly, in his view, exposed it, accused Douglas in print of having an affair with this white British woman living within his own household right under his wife's eyes. Now we don't know for sure, in this case, whether Douglas actually had a sexual relationship with Julia Griffiths.

What we do know is they were very close confidence. We have letters from her, how she would stay up late at night reading the Psalms with him, or even singing his favorite hymns. This was a very difficult period in Douglas's life. In the early 1850s, he could barely feed his family. The North Star was barely surviving. It could not survive on its subscription alone. It was surviving only because Garrett Smith was underwriting it. And Julia was crucial in getting that money. She also helped him edit the paper, and even probably had a hand in writing some editorials. She then moved out of the Douglas House into her own apartment for a while and eventually left in 1852 and went back to England. But Garrison's accusations in public in his own newspaper, that Douglas was having this affair, wound to Douglas to the bone. He went in very deeply.

Douglas didn't come out and just announced denial, denial, denial, as you might expect in our own modern times. He wouldn't give dignity to the accusation at that time. And as I said, we don't know for sure that that was a sexual relationship. What we do know is that it was a deep and abiding friendship. Douglas then broke with Garrison, both ideologically and strategically, about the anti-slavery movement, and he broke personally with him. And the ideological break is very important because this is the moment in Douglas's life, apart from this alleged affair with Julia Griffiths. In the early 1850s, Douglas is moving more toward the Garrett Smith view of abolitionism, the political abolitionist who were saying, no, we must affect political power. We must affect political parties. We must engage with Congress. We have to change laws as well as minds and hearts. And the Garrisonians, of course, were still deeply committed to a kind of moral, swatianist

approach to slavery. So what you've got with Douglas and Garrison is a bitter, or other ugly, personal breakup, but also a strategic ideological breakup. And for Douglas, it hurt to the bone, I think, so much because Garrison truly was so important in his life. He didn't have a career without Garrison early on. Garrison and the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society funded him, supported him, helped him, published that great narrative in 1845, even helped support his growing family. While he was off for over two years in England, and Anna's back in Lynn, Massachusetts taking in people's laundry and once in a while getting a check from the Garrisonian. So this is a deep tie with loyalty at stake, but also a lot of debt kind of at stake. But when that breakup occurred, it was a breakup.

Garrison and Douglas only rarely spoke with one another for the next decade or so. And in a sense, we could also say, you can't measure how it hurt the abolition movement, per se. Some would argue that when Douglas finally gains his independence from the Garrisonians, he became a much greater abolitionist and much more important and powerful figure and so on. But I think personally for him, it was a huge blow. And yet another form of betrayal. And I wouldn't put all of this blame necessarily at the feet of Garrison himself, although I don't think there's any doubt Garrison possessed a good deal of jealousy. And if I could doubt this, was this brilliant, extraordinarily articulate, genius with language and no one could contain him.

You couldn't contain his pen and you couldn't contain his voice. He wasn't going to stick to anybody's script. And he was already out cavorting with free soilers with a free so party, and pretty soon even with Republicans. He was already becoming this kind of political pragmatist, radical political pragmatist, willing to now do almost anything that would work to affect the crisis over slavery. Garrison was still holding to his old tenants, moral suasion alone. So you could say their breakup was inevitable ideologically, but it had personal costs. Okay, good.