Becoming Frederick Douglass (2022) - full transcript
In the summer of 1841,
a grand anti-slavery convention
was held in Nantucket.
I was induced to express the
feelings inspired by
the occasion and the fresh
recollection of the seams
through which I had passed as a slave.
The abolitionists that were there
knew that they had this fugitive
slave in the audience
and they asked Frederick,
"Will you just stand up?
Will you tell the audience what
it was like to be enslaved?"
What shall I say of this experience?
I have seen the cruelty
and brutality of slavery,
and I had been subjected to
the depths of slave life.
I was a graduate from this
peculiar institution,
with my diploma written on my back.
And the abolitionists
couldn't believe their eyes.
He was eloquent.
He was charismatic.
He was theatrical.
And they understood that they
had this star on their hands.
Frederick was a survivor of
this institution that could
communicate the inhumanity of
slavery in a way
that nobody before him had ever done.
All that the American people needed,
I thought, was light.
Could they know slavery as I knew it,
they would hasten to the work
of its extinction.
More Americans heard Douglass speak
than any other American
in the 19th century,
with the possible exception of Mark Twain.
And it was significant that
a former slave was famous.
Frederick Douglass
understood the power of his
literature as a tactic of liberation.
A man born enslaved who rose
to become a man of growth,
of self-mastery.
That arc of a life, it means
that anything is possible.
Douglass was becoming
various things across his life.
He was becoming free and
figuring out how to make himself
a person who was not enslaved.
He was becoming literate and
becoming a person who had
cultivated all sorts of
knowledge that he could use in
his politics.
And what's most interesting is
that he was becoming a person
who could change what the nation
was and help to eliminate
the institution of slavery.
Frederick Douglass has
a very clear idea of what becoming means.
He is becoming an orator.
He's becoming a world leader.
He's becoming a statesman and for him,
becoming is a ever unfolding
process that he sees as
self-creation.
♪ Go to sleepy little baby ♪
♪ 'fore the booger man
catch you ♪
♪ go to sleep you little baby ♪
♪ Mama ran away and
she told me to stay ♪
♪ and take good care
of this baby ♪
♪ Go to sleep, ♪
♪ go to sleep... ♪
I was born in Tuckahoe,
in Talbot County, Maryland.
On the Chesapeake Bay.
I had no accurate knowledge of my age.
By far, the larger part of the slaves
know as little of their ages
as horses know of theirs;
and it is the wish of most Masters
to keep their slaves thus ignorant.
Frederick Douglass's childhood
was one of constant disruption,
separation, violence,
and threats of violence.
He never knew who his father was.
He did not know his mother very well,
and that was common for enslaved people.
He only saw his mother a handful of times
his whole life.
And that's because she lived
on a plantation
that was 12 miles away.
But he did have someone early in
his life that showed him
some love, and nurturing, and care.
And that was his grandmother, Betsy.
Douglass spent the first six years
of his childhood living with
his grandmother.
Not on the plantation of
the Colonel Lloyd family,
but quite a distance from it;
12 miles away.
Frederick Douglass's grandmother
meant a tremendous amount
to him.
And her love of him made
a tremendous impact on him.
As I grew larger and older,
I learned by degrees the
sad fact that the little hut,
and Grandmother herself,
belonged to some person
who lived a great distance off,
and who was called
by Grandmother,
"Old Master."
When he was around five or six years old,
his grandmother said, "We're going to go on
a long journey."
Because it was time.
The time finally came when his grandmother
would have to take him to
the Great House plantation,
and his real life
of enslavement would begin.
That 12 mile walk to the main plantation
took a long time.
He was scared and clinging to her skirt.
And they enter a dark wood.
And Douglass started to see
monsters in there.
I could see their legs, eyes, and ears,
or I could see something like
eyes, legs, and ears;
till I got close enough to them
to see that the eyes were nuts,
washed white with rain and
the legs were broken limbs.
Thus, early I learned that the
point from which a thing
is viewed is of some importance.
Frederick sees this home is bigger than
anything he'd ever seen before.
He wanders off to look for something to eat
and to check out his surroundings,
and when he turns back to
look for his grandmother,
she's gone.
After his grandmother left him,
that's when he had what he called his
"initiation into slavery."
When he began to see
how... uh...
cruel the system was.
I have often
been awakened at the dawn of day
by the most heart-rending
shrieks of atrocious cruelty.
My master's savage barbarity
was equaled only by
the consummate coolness with
which he committed the grossest
and most savage deeds upon
the slaves under his charge.
One of the first things that he saw
was the whipping of his own aunt.
The louder she screamed,
the harder he whipped.
It was the blood-stained gate,
the entrance to the Hell of slavery,
through which I was about to pass.
This is the turning point in his life,
when Douglass sees his condition.
In that moment, where little
Frederick Douglass
is in a closet watching
the brutal beating of his aunt,
he's learning this is what
it means to be enslaved.
Frederick Douglass is chosen from among
all of the children on the plantation
on the Eastern Shore of Maryland
to go to Baltimore
to be the house servant
for his master's family.
And he described this event as
divine providence in his favor.
There were a number of slave children
that might have been sent from
the plantation to Baltimore.
I was chosen from among them all.
We arrived at Baltimore
early on Sunday morning.
Mr. and Mrs. Auld
were both at home,
and met me at the door with
their little son, Thomas,
to take care of whom I had been given.
Enslaved children in many ways
mirrored the activities
of the adults around them.
Children were responsible for
caring for children
not much older- or even
a few years younger than them.
And so, in this process,
they were being groomed
for that position in society.
And Frederick Douglass experienced that
throughout his childhood.
Mrs. Hugh Auld doesn't
really understand that
to keep someone enslaved,
you have to treat them
as a non-human being.
Because they've never had a slave before.
They're new to slavery.
So, she starts teaching
Douglass how to read.
And Hugh Auld catches him and is incensed.
And he says, "If you teach him how to read,
he will no longer be fit
for enslavement."
And Frederick heard
that message loud and clear.
And he looked at his
enslaver and he thought,
"Hmm, if you don't want me to have this,
I'm going to do everything in
my power to gain it."
Wise as Mr. Auld was,
he evidently underrated
my comprehension.
And the very determination which
he expressed to keep me in
ignorance only rendered me
the more resolute
in seeking intelligence.
He lived in a neighborhood in Baltimore
with a number of comparatively
poor immigrant boys.
And Sophia Auld would make biscuits, uh,
and he would... he would fill
his pockets with biscuits
and trade biscuits for words,
asking the boys
who were learning how to read
what they meant.
And from them, he learned how to read.
He learned how to write.
He took some chalk and would
practice his handwriting
on the streets of Baltimore.
And that's how he learned
how to read and write.
Literacy became a kind of gateway
uh an inflection point for him, right?
Learning to read was about
access to literally
reading words on the page, but
it was also access to knowledge.
So, one of the books
he mentions, again and again,
is "The Columbian Orator."
The two main books that Douglass read were,
one, the Bible.
The other book that he read
was "The Columbian Orator",
which is a collection of
speeches designed for young boys
who didn't have the privilege of
formal education to help them
become effective speakers and writers.
In that text,
he encounters a dialogue between
an enslaved person and his enslaver,
where he sees this enslaved
person reason with the enslaver,
and point by point,
dismantle all the justifications
for enslavement.
The master was vanquished at every turn
in the argument;
and he generously and meekly
emancipates the slave with his
best wishes for his prosperity.
And I could not help feeling
that the day might come,
when the well-directed answers
made by the slave to the master
would find their counterpart in myself.
He notes that when they worked him
from sunup to sundown so that
he was too exhausted to think,
those were the times when he
couldn't actually process
his condition.
But the minute he has a moment to reflect,
a moment to read or to stare out
on the Chesapeake
those are the moments when
Douglass sees his condition,
and recognizes, "I'm not just enslaved.
I'm a slave for life."
What does that mean?
And he would just look at the tall ships
coming and going,
and their sails looked like
angels or ghosts
floating in the air.
And he would just ask hisself,
"Why am I a slave?
Why am I in this hot Hell when
the gallant ships go all over
the habitable globe,
and I'm here in this bondage?
Oh, if I was free,
if I could fly, if I could swim,
I'd run away.
Just 100 miles north, I'd be free.
I'd get on a boat and I'll set it adrift,
and this bay shall yet bear me
to freedom."
♪ I'll be so glad when
the sun goes down ♪
♪ when the sun go down ♪
♪ I'll be so glad when
the sun goes down ♪
♪ when the sun go down ♪
There was, in the Bay Side,
a man named Edward Covey,
who enjoyed the execrated
reputation of being
a first-rate hand at breaking
young Negroes.
If at any one time of my life
I was made to drink the
bitterest dregs of slavery,
that time was during my stay
with Mr. Covey.
Douglass's time with Edward Covey
is a turning point in his life.
He gets sent to Covey, the famed
breaker of enslaved people
because he's gotten a bit
of a reputation as unruly,
uncontrolled.
He's been reading, he's been
holding Sunday Schools,
he's tried to escape.
He's done all this,
and so it's the last straw.
"We're gonna finally break you."
EDWARD BAPTIST: Individuals who
were suspected of being
potential troublemakers, they
were sent to slave breakers.
And his job was to get them in
the habit of submitting to
the demands of slavery.
Mr. Covey found
a particular niche
in the economy for himself.
That is to say not only did he
have slaves himself,
but he found a niche in the
sense that he was able to
create a reputation for himself
as being able to discipline.
Douglass sees Covey's task as one of
transforming him into a brute,
and a brute, in that context,
is a farm animal.
It's something below human.
Edward Covey would
give you scantiest of allowances
and clothing, and work you
endlessly, endlessly, endlessly.
And the whole idea was just
to break a person in body,
and that would break them in spirit.
I had brought my mind to a firm resolve
to obey every order, however unreasonable.
And if Mr. Covey should
then undertake to beat me,
I would defend and protect
myself to the best
of my ability.
For those several months,
Covey gave Douglass his full attention.
So, whenever Douglass was
working in the field,
Covey found some fault with his
work and would harass him
and shout at him and on
multiple occasions, beat him.
After six months
of taking these brutal beatings,
Frederick had enough.
He and Covey had this epic two-hour battle
that was more of a wrestling
match than a fisticuffs,
because Frederick understood
that he needed to use his mind
and be strategic.
His intention was not
to defeat and punish Covey
to the greatest extent possible.
It was simply to draw a line and say,
"If you... if you try to
come after me physically,
you're... this is what you are
going to get."
Covey himself was
in a bit of a precarious spot.
He had the reputation as the slave breaker.
And so, to retaliate in a way
that was visible, as in,
"I could not break Douglass,
therefore I had to kill him,"
was against Covey's best interest.
This battle
with Mr. Covey
was the turning point
in my life as a slave.
It rekindled in my breast the
smoldering embers of liberty.
I was nothing before.
I was a man now.
After that incident, there was a great deal
of discussion among his owners
about possibly selling him
down to Alabama or Mississippi,
to the cotton states
to sort of get him off their plate.
Enslaved people in Maryland
lived with the constant fear
that they or a family member
could be sold down into the Deep South,
and so that daily fear was
always with them,
even as they're looking north
and seeing Pennsylvania
not that far in the distance.
It was still a very dangerous,
very scary proposition to flee.
But Pennsylvania was not as far
away for them as it was for,
say, Mississippi.
Douglass and some fellow slaves,
tried to run away.
They tried to escape up to free soil.
They were caught.
And other planters on the
Eastern Shore told Thomas Auld
that Douglass was trouble
and that they wanted to
kill Douglass, essentially.
From Thomas Auld's perspective,
Douglass is property.
To protect his property, he had Douglass...
he sent Douglass back to Baltimore.
♪ I'm gonna sail like a ship
mmm... on that ocean ♪
♪ I'm gonna sail like a ship
on that ocean ♪
Once he got to Baltimore,
which was a thriving shipbuilding point,
Fells Point in Baltimore,
he would see people of color
from all around coming into
Fells Point not only
to get their boats repaired but
bringing in cargo.
♪ Well, I'm gonna sail till
I see my dear old mother, ♪
In a few weeks after I went to Baltimore,
Master Hugh hired me to
Mr. William Gardner,
and extensive ship builder on Fells Point.
I was put there to learn how to caulk.
The Caulkers are a high-skilled position
to help repair wooden vessels.
And Frederick Douglass became
very skilled in that craft
as well as many other African Americans
in Baltimore's Fells Point.
In Baltimore, you have a really robust
free Black population with AME Church.
The AME Church was central
in not only creating a space for
African Americans to worship,
but creating a network of
support for African Americans
who were committed to anti-slavery.
The church made possible a lot
of Frederick Douglass's life,
it made it possible for him
to meet Anna Murray and meeting
Anna Murray was really
what made it possible for
Douglass to get free.
There would be no Frederick Douglass
without Anna.
They met in Baltimore when
Frederick was a teenager,
enslaved.
As they started thinking about
a life together,
Anna was one of the first people
to plant the seed of thought
in his mind that,
"Frederick, you're not meant
to be a slave for life.
It doesn't matter what your
enslaver says to you."
And as they're starting to think
about a life together, she said,
"Frederick, I don't want
our children's father
to be a slave."
The only way that they can get married,
and have a family and live
the way that they wanna live
is for him to escape and, and
her to meet him in the north.
The problem is, the steamboats,
the railroads,
the road crossings into Pennsylvania,
all of these are guarded.
African American individuals had
to carry their free papers
in order to get through those
different checkpoints.
So, it's quite a quandary,
but they come up with
a plan to pass him off
as a free Black sailor.
The U.S. Navy had more
people of color in their ranks
than any other branch of service.
There was a brotherhood
of people of the sea.
It didn't matter whether you
were Black or White,
if you had your seamen's papers.
What Anna does is get
him, a suit of sailor's clothes.
They borrow a set of,
of papers that sailors carried
when they travel to different
ports so they wouldn't be,
arrested.
And so, this is his disguise.
So, Frederick Douglass took the train up
to the Susquehanna River.
They were so used to seeing
the blue jackets
and the gold buttons with the eagles on it.
That wasn't news.
This is how he is able to board a train,
board a steamer, and ultimately,
make it across
the Mason Dixon line,
first to Philadelphia,
and Delaware, and then on to New York,
where he meets up with Anna again,
he gets married to her.
Had she not sold her personal belongings
to help finance his escape,
who knows if he would've had
the courage or the wherewithal to escape.
And had that not happened,
we would be a very different
country sitting here today.
It was suggested that Frederick and Anna
go to New Bedford so he could get work.
Once, initiated
into my new life of freedom,
a comparatively unimportant
question arose as to a name
by which I should be known thereafter.
Between Baltimore and New Bedford,
the better to conceal myself
from the slave hunters,
I had parted with Bailey and called myself
"Frederick Douglass."
Even though he changes his last name
and becomes Frederick Douglass,
he holds on to the "Frederick."
That's a... a sort of an
essential part of his identity.
He feels some connection to that name,
a name that was likely or
possibly given to him
by his mother,
and he doesn't want to abandon
that entire sense of who he is,
even as he is building
a new life for himself.
♪ I am an abolitionist,
I glory in thy name, ♪
♪ though now my slavery's
minions hiss'd ♪
♪ and covered o'er
with shame. ♪
♪ It is a spell of
light and power, ♪
♪ the watchword
of the free ♪
New Bedford had a lot of things
going for her, for one there was
a Black community there,
and Douglass became exposed to
the abolitionist movement
that was really hot in Massachusetts,
led by William Lloyd Garrison.
♪ A nobler strife
the world never saw ♪
♪ Th'enslaved to disenthral ♪
William Lloyd Garrison
was one of the most prominent
abolitionists in the country,
the editor of the Liberator,
a weekly newspaper,
which was fervently anti-slavery
and for the rights
of African Americans.
I love this paper and its editor.
He was never loud and noisy,
but calm and serene
as a summer sky and as pure.
And his paper took a place in my
heart second only to the Bible.
Garrison was fighting for justice,
and he was fighting for equality.
And Frederick knew what
injustice felt like.
He knew what inequality felt like,
and that's when Frederick
really began to speak out
about his enslavement.
In the 19th Century,
oratory was a huge deal.
Going to an oration, going to a debate
was the equivalent of going to the movies.
For the next several
years Douglass traveled
throughout the North and what's
now the Upper-Midwest,
speaking out against slavery.
Douglass in a sense was
so eloquent and elegant
as a speaker that some whites
started to accuse him of being
a fraud.
People doubt that I had ever been
a slave.
They said, "I did not talk like a slave,
look like a slave nor act like
a slave."
Thus, I was in a pretty fair way
to be denounced as an imposter.
And so, in order to prove
he was who he claimed to be, he wrote...
"Narrative of the Life
of Frederick Douglass,
An American Slave."
The sort of concluding piece of the title
is "written by himself."
Those words were really powerful
and challenging to a lot
of what White Americans thought
was possible.
It was published in 1845.
It sold 4500 copies in three months.
You know, he was a star.
And now, he had another problem.
Once he publishes the narrative,
he's probably the most famous
Black person in the world
at that point.
But he, in the narrative,
has outed himself as a fugitive.
The writing of my pamphlet in the spring
of 1845 endangered my liberty
and led me to seek a refuge
from republican slavery in
monarchical England.
Douglass goes to the UK,
in part to seek refuge but also
in part to continue to boost
his political profile.
And when he goes there,
he is incredibly well-received.
When Frederick Douglass arrives
in the UK, he is celebrated
as the moral and social
and political voice of
the anti-slavery movement.
He becomes a global figure that
represents the brutality
of slavery and the possibility of freedom.
When Douglass goes to England,
he is embraced by a community
of radical-thinking people.
And he is allowed to become,
even more of who
he already is because of
the community there
that embraces him.
People start saying to him,
"We can raise money to... uh,
buy you out of slavery.
We can offer... er... your slave
master a sum of money
that basically he can't refuse."
The Garrisonians thought,
"No, you can't do that."
Because to allow yourself to be
bought out of slavery
tacitly accepted the principle
that slavery was legal.
By our standards today,
we would think it's ridiculous
that abolitionists
would not embrace Douglass
securing his freedom.
But I think that for many of them,
they also understood that
Douglass was a political tool.
And I think Douglass never saw
himself as that.
He saw himself as a person seeking freedom.
I think, the very best thing was done,
in letting Master Hugh have
the 150 pounds sterling,
and leaving me free to return to
my appropriate field of labor.
I could have easily remained in
England, for the same friends,
who had so generously purchased my freedom,
would have assisted me
in establishing myself
in that country.
But I felt that I had a duty
to perform - and that was,
to labor and suffer with the
oppressed in my native land.
After returning from the UK,
Douglass became increasingly
sure about his capacity
to sort of act as an independent
political figure.
But he also was developing
into a person who was more
comfortable with his own political ideas.
You know, at first,
Frederick was Garrison's protégé,
and so Garrison said to Frederick,
"You just tell your story and,
and leave the thinking to us."
"Tell your story Frederick,"
would whisper my revered friend
Mr. Garrison,
as I stepped upon the platform.
I could not always follow the injunction.
It did not entirely satisfy
me to narrate wrongs.
I felt like denouncing them."
White abolitionists think there is only
one point of view.
But Douglass wants a role that's
much wider than this,
a scripted role of someone who
simply opposed to slavery,
Douglass is someone who is now
prepared to contest
a... a more widespread system
of injustices.
And this was one of the reasons
why he wanted to start
The North Star, his newspaper.
For Frederick Douglass,
starting the North Star was
critical to create
a Black voice of abolition.
There were other abolitionist newspapers,
but very few spoke to the
question of the end of slavery
from the perspective of Black people.
Right is of no sex, truth is of no color,
God is the father of us all
and all we are brethren.
Editors rule the day.
The editors of the newspaper
really shaped who saw what,
where and when.
And so, to have a newspaper
was to be the shaper
of public opinion.
Founding the newspaper is sort
of like Douglass's declaration
of intellectual and activist independence.
The North Star was published weekly,
and averaged circulation of
3000 subscribers.
I had an audience to speak to every week.
Douglass had this capacity to be
a great editor,
to be a great political leader,
but his vision was different
from Garrison's,
and Garrison couldn't roll with that.
William Lloyd Garrison was
not only disagreeing
with the political strategy but
also objecting or felt kind
of offended that Douglass
was splitting from him.
He even recommended that
his followers not read
Douglass's newspaper.
Douglass says, "I am no longer going to be
dependent on your infrastructure
to give me voice,
I'm going to take my own voice."
And that's the point where
Douglass is in a seat of power.
And so, when you read something like,
"What to the Slave is the Fourth of July"
you get a sense that Douglass
saw words as battleaxes.
What, to the American slave,
is your fourth of July?
I answer a day that reveals to
him more than all of the days
in the year the gross injustice
and cruelty to which
he is the constant victim.
To him, your celebration is a sham,
your boasted liberty and unholy license,
your national greatness, swelling vanity,
your sounds of rejoicing
are empty and heartless,
your denunciation of tyrants,
brass fronted impudence,
your shouts of liberty and equality,
hollow mockery, your prayers, and hymns,
your sermons, and thanksgivings
with all your religious parade
and solemnity are to him mere
bombast, fraud, deception,
impiety and hypocrisy.
A thin veil to cover up crimes
which would disgrace a nation
of savages.
There is not a nation on the
earth guilty of practices
more shocking and bloody
than are the people
of the United States at this very hour.
This Fourth of July is yours, not mine.
Why am I called upon to speak here today?
What have I, or those I represent,
to do with your national independence?
In speeches and essays Douglass talks about
the daguerreotype, developed in 1840s
as one of the central modern
marvels of the day.
As important as... say,
the telegraph for its ability
to capture a reality, unfiltered.
And so, Douglass saw in photography,
a way to show African descended
people as they were,
in all their beauty.
Douglass recognized the degree to which
representation itself could
be a powerful mechanism
for ending slavery,
for achieving universal freedom
and equality.
And throughout his life,
Douglass recognized
the power of the image.
We now understand that Frederick Douglass
is the most photographed American man
in the 19th century,
not African American man,
but American man.
He consciously put himself
in front of the camera
because he understood the
democratic power of that new
technological medium.
Frederick Douglass
was obsessed with the way
that Black people were stereotyped;
that they were made to look stupid,
they were made to look savage.
So, he became preoccupied
with how he looked.
And you look at the images
themselves and you see
that he's up to something.
It's, presenting himself
in this particular way.
He is serious, he's engaged,
he's really smart.
He understood the way
in which his embodied form
self-possessed, dignified, masterful,
could create a weapon to counter
the sea of racist stereotypes
that surrounded Douglass and everyone
in the dis-United States at that time.
Frederick said, "When you look
at a photograph of me,
you're never going to deny
that I'm a man worthy of freedom
and citizenship.
You're going to look me in the
eye and see my humanity."
You can see in his gaze
that he's not afraid
of the camera.
He's able to go toe-to-toe with the camera,
he's able to hold his gaze.
He commands your attention.
And Douglass is extraordinarily
handsome no matter what, uh,
vantage point you want to use.
Whatever standard of beauty you've got,
Douglass gives it to you.
Douglass was meticulous in how he himself
photographed.
He was always dressed to the hilt.
He was always intent on his particular,
sort of how he would be posed.
The head-on daguerreotype of Douglass,
with that piercing gaze,
right... was important.
The central question of the day
for Frederick Douglass was,
"By what right does anyone
have to own another human
being?"
So when you're looking at
Frederick Douglass
in a photograph, you are seeing
insistent self-possession.
You're seeing a refutation of
the very idea that slavery
could even be possible.
♪ It makes a long,
long-time man oh feel bad ♪
♪ It makes a long,
long-time man feel bad... ♪
"Runaway from the subscriber in Albemarle,
a mulatto slave called Sandy,
about 35 years of age,
his stature is rather low,
inclining to corpulence
and his complexion, light.
Whoever conveys the said
slave to me in Albemarle,
shall have a 40 shillings reward
if taken up within the county.
And ten pounds, if in any other Colony.
From Thomas Jefferson."
♪ He was a long
Oh driving man ♪
♪ Yes, he was
What got him done ♪
♪ He worked hard ♪
What's remarkable about this is that
it's not remarkable.
It's Thomas Jefferson,
so we find it significant,
but enslavers were placing these
kinds of ads in every state
or territory where slavery existed.
Between the ratification
of the Constitution 1789 and 1850,
there's increasing conflict
over the rendition
of fugitives from slavery.
And so, the southern-most
states: North Carolina,
South Carolina, Georgia, make a demand
which is that they will
be able to claim anybody
who escapes from slavery
in the slave states
to the free states.
And this immediately puts
the freedom of every single
African American in the north at
a much greater level of threat.
The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850
was the last ditch effort of
those slaveholder's
who wanted to hold on to the
bondage and greed of slavery.
The 1850 Fugitive Slave Act
created enforcement mechanisms
that forced and required
the federal government to get in
the business of sending back
to slavery those who ran away.
Now, the federal government
was going to go after
those who had fled to northern states.
This hadn't happened before.
What we saw were these slaveholders
who were very politically
connected and very wealthy,
and they lobbied the Congress
to have a fugitive slave act
that not only meant that their
escaped property
would be brought back,
but anyone, Black or White,
involved in assisting that
person to escape slavery
would also have criminal consequences.
The hardships imposed by this atrocious,
and shameless law were cruel, and shocking.
Although, I was now myself free,
I was not without apprehension.
Even colored people who had
been free all their lives
felt themselves very insecure
in their freedom.
Douglass argued in 1850 in the wake
of the Fugitive Slave Law being
passed that Blacks had the right
to use violence to resist
fugitive slave catchers.
It can never be wrong for the imbrued
and whip-scared slaves or their
friends to hunt, harass,
and even strike down the
traffickers in human flesh.
That was a radical position,
using violence as a way to a way
to challenge slave catchers.
And he says, "That the best way
to make the Fugitive Slave Act
a dead letter is to make two
or three dead kidnappers."
And he says, "That this is
a thing that's justifiable."
After the Fugitive Slave Act,
Frederick Douglass knew that
it would come to war.
He realized just how deeply
entrenched as Southerners
and many others were in this
institution of bondage.
They were not going to willingly
give up slavery.
Lincoln was running for president
as a anti-slavery Republican in 1860.
On the one hand, Douglass said,
"Look, this guy is not an abolitionist.
We are abolitionists.
We're demanding immediate end to slavery.
That's not Lincoln.
On the other hand,
Lincoln is a major step forward
in the struggle against
slavery."
Abraham Lincoln proposed his grand
historic doctrine of the power and duty
of the national government to
prevent the spread
and perpetuity of slavery.
Into this contest, I threw
myself with firmer faith
and more ardent hope than ever before.
And what I could do by pen or
voice was done with a will.
When Lincoln was elected,
he was the first openly
anti-slavery president
in the United States, the first president
for whom anti-slavery was a central theme.
Na... it's the first time.
It was Mr. Lincoln
who told the American people
that the Union could not long
endure half-slave and half-free,
that they must be all one or the other,
that the public mind could
find no resting place
but in the belief in the
ultimate extinction of slavery.
Slavery is not safe under the rule
of anti-slavery people.
We're going to pick up our
marbles and go and set up
a new country, the Confederate
States of America.
Leaving, walking out, seceding,
it was always the trump card
of Southerners.
And when Lincoln gives us
his inaugural address,
seven states have seceded.
The Confederacy's already been formed.
Douglass was actually,
cautiously very optimistic
about secession, because he recognized this
as a golden opportunity to destroy slavery.
I confess to strongly favoring the prospect
of a conflict between
the North and the South.
Standing outside the pale
of American humanity,
denied citizenship, unable to call the land
of my birth my country,
and longing for the end
of the bondage of my people,
I was ready for any
political upheaval which
should bring about a change
in the existing condition of things.
Frederick Douglass knew
how deeply invested these Southerners
were in their free labor.
Free labor.
The cotton and other products
that came from slavery
were bought and sold on the
New York Stock Exchange.
This was not just a Southern endeavor,
and they were not going to
let it go, but for war.
And so, he had to become
an advocate for something
that he did not want -
and that was for one person
to have to kill another in order
to break the bonds of slavery.
When the war breaks out,
Lincoln says, you know,
very explicitly,
"This is a war about the Union.
We are fighting to save the Union.
It is not about slavery.
We are not going to threaten
the institution of slavery."
And Douglass criticizes Lincoln
very harshly for not fighting
an anti-slavery war, fighting
a war for the Union.
My paramount object in this struggle
is to save the Union,
and is not either to save
or to destroy slavery.
If I could save the Union
without freeing any slave,
I would do it, and if I could
save it by freeing
all the slaves, I would do it.
What I do about slavery
and the colored race,
I do because I believe it
helps to save the Union.
Douglass, from the beginning,
emphasizes that a war to preserve the Union
is inseparable from a war to end
slavery because he understands
that the four million slaves
in the South constitute
a potent source of Black power.
So, Douglass emphasizes right away,
"Free slaves and arm them,
and this war will... will,
we will win the war and it will
end it fairly quickly."
In 1861 and 1862,
Douglass was a fierce critic
of Lincoln for refusing to
allow African Americans
to enlist in the Union military.
Douglass said from the
beginnings of the war
that this war between slave
owners in the United States,
that it would have to be a war
that would end slavery.
But Lincoln was hesitant to do
that and... and Douglass
was basically saying, "You are,
you're not doing your job.
You are... ah... failing in this
project of... of running
this war because you're trying
to fight it with one arm
tied behind your back."
I have implored the imperiled nation
to unchain against her foes
her powerful Black hand.
The day dawns, the morning star
is bright upon the horizon,
the iron gates of our prison
stands half-open.
One gallant rush from the North
will fling it wide open,
while four millions of our
brothers and sisters
shall march out into liberty.
The chance is now given
you to end, in a day,
the bondage of centuries.
Lincoln was a politician,
so he was truly on the fence,
and it would take somebody
like Frederick Douglass,
who I think Lincoln
had great respect for,
to say "Mr. President,
we can't wait."
The Emancipation Proclamation authorizes,
formally and publicly, the
arming of Blacks as soldiers.
They know the Southern landscape in a way
that Union soldiers don't.
They end up becoming essentially
almost a special force
for the army.
And Douglass eagerly supports
the recruitment of Blacks
as soldiers.
And he recruits his two sons,
Charles and Lewis,
for the first Northern Black regiment,
the Massachusetts 54th regiment.
I now, for the first time during this war,
feel of liberty to call
and counsel you to arms.
I urge you to fly to arms and
smite with death the power
that would bury the government
and your liberty in the same
hopeless grave.
The tide of the war changes -
with the fall of Atlanta,
with Lincoln's eventual victory
in early November, 1864.
His re-election has guaranteed
that he's going to now bring
this war to a close and slavery
will end across the board.
The fact that a radical fugitive slave
has the ear of the president
means that, ultimately,
that president became a very smart person.
It is to his credit that
he learned to listen
to Frederick Douglass.
I think, it also says
something about the crises
in which Lincoln found himself,
that he had to listen to
and then was willing to listen
to voices that would have
seemed outside, that seemed radical.
That... that's the lesson of
a Lincoln presidency
and a lesson of the possibilities
of transformative change.
You don't get transformative
change by not listening
to the radicalness of a Douglass.
To all appearance, we were on the eve
of a restoration of the Union,
and a solid and lasting peace.
A country redeemed and
regenerated from the foulest
crime against human nature
that ever saw the sun.
What a bright vision of peace,
prosperity, and happiness.
After the Civil War,
Frederick believed that it was
a new founding of our country.
He had hope through the
Amendments - the 13th, 14th,
and 15th Amendment - that his people
would be making progress.
The whole history of
the progress of human liberty
shows that all concessions yet
made to her august claims
have been born of earnest struggle.
The conflict has been exciting,
agitating, all-absorbing,
and for the time being, putting
all other tumults to silence.
It must do this, or it does nothing.
If there is no struggle,
there is no progress.
It's hard to pinpoint a moment in Douglass'
life when he wasn't a danger,
especially to structures
of white supremacy and enslavement.
Douglass, through and through,
was a revolutionary.
You want a handbook of how to
be successful in this world?
You want a handbook on how to
advocate for Black rights,
for justice, how to navigate
really thorny moral,
spiritual, political, legal issues?
Read Douglass' life.
He walks you through how he does that.
Frederick Douglass was a Renaissance man.
He was the first African American nominated
for Vice President of the United States,
first African American
U.S. Marshal,
first African American Ambassador
and Consul General in Haiti,
and people would ask him,
you know, "Frederick,
where did you go to school?
Where did you get your
education?"
And he would take a line from
his anti-slavery lecture circuit
days and say, "My degree
is written on my back."
Frederick Douglass helps us understand
the history of American freedom
in a really complicated way.
The fact that he was born
a slave in this country
that was supposedly defined
by liberty reflects
the limitations of freedom as
a real experience.
But it also shows us the
possibilities of... of freedom
as... as a tool to advocate
for not only liberty,
but also justice.
Frederick Douglass
moved from being a mirror
to hold up to the nation about
its failures to becoming a lens
for future generations to
understand their own
public service, to understand their own
commitment to justice,
to understand why bravery
is so important.
And so, Frederick Douglass
challenges us to become
the fullest expression of
ourselves and our ideals.
Douglass is one of
the most complicated people
in our history, and just when you think,
you know him is an invitation
to come and know him more.
And he's one of the few Black Americans
or Americans of any race who
left so much for us
to read and engage so that
he's still, in some ways,
directing us... uh... as we... as
we try to learn more about him.
I have lived several lives in one:
the life of slavery; the life of
a fugitive from slavery;
the life of comparative freedom;
the life of conflict and battle;
and, the life of victory.
I am impressed with a sense
of completeness,
a sort of rounding up of the
arch to the point
where the keystone may be inserted,
the scaffolding removed, and the work,
with all its perfections or faults,
left to speak for itself.
To order Becoming Frederick Douglass on DVD
Also available with PBS Passport
and on Amazon Prime Video.
a grand anti-slavery convention
was held in Nantucket.
I was induced to express the
feelings inspired by
the occasion and the fresh
recollection of the seams
through which I had passed as a slave.
The abolitionists that were there
knew that they had this fugitive
slave in the audience
and they asked Frederick,
"Will you just stand up?
Will you tell the audience what
it was like to be enslaved?"
What shall I say of this experience?
I have seen the cruelty
and brutality of slavery,
and I had been subjected to
the depths of slave life.
I was a graduate from this
peculiar institution,
with my diploma written on my back.
And the abolitionists
couldn't believe their eyes.
He was eloquent.
He was charismatic.
He was theatrical.
And they understood that they
had this star on their hands.
Frederick was a survivor of
this institution that could
communicate the inhumanity of
slavery in a way
that nobody before him had ever done.
All that the American people needed,
I thought, was light.
Could they know slavery as I knew it,
they would hasten to the work
of its extinction.
More Americans heard Douglass speak
than any other American
in the 19th century,
with the possible exception of Mark Twain.
And it was significant that
a former slave was famous.
Frederick Douglass
understood the power of his
literature as a tactic of liberation.
A man born enslaved who rose
to become a man of growth,
of self-mastery.
That arc of a life, it means
that anything is possible.
Douglass was becoming
various things across his life.
He was becoming free and
figuring out how to make himself
a person who was not enslaved.
He was becoming literate and
becoming a person who had
cultivated all sorts of
knowledge that he could use in
his politics.
And what's most interesting is
that he was becoming a person
who could change what the nation
was and help to eliminate
the institution of slavery.
Frederick Douglass has
a very clear idea of what becoming means.
He is becoming an orator.
He's becoming a world leader.
He's becoming a statesman and for him,
becoming is a ever unfolding
process that he sees as
self-creation.
♪ Go to sleepy little baby ♪
♪ 'fore the booger man
catch you ♪
♪ go to sleep you little baby ♪
♪ Mama ran away and
she told me to stay ♪
♪ and take good care
of this baby ♪
♪ Go to sleep, ♪
♪ go to sleep... ♪
I was born in Tuckahoe,
in Talbot County, Maryland.
On the Chesapeake Bay.
I had no accurate knowledge of my age.
By far, the larger part of the slaves
know as little of their ages
as horses know of theirs;
and it is the wish of most Masters
to keep their slaves thus ignorant.
Frederick Douglass's childhood
was one of constant disruption,
separation, violence,
and threats of violence.
He never knew who his father was.
He did not know his mother very well,
and that was common for enslaved people.
He only saw his mother a handful of times
his whole life.
And that's because she lived
on a plantation
that was 12 miles away.
But he did have someone early in
his life that showed him
some love, and nurturing, and care.
And that was his grandmother, Betsy.
Douglass spent the first six years
of his childhood living with
his grandmother.
Not on the plantation of
the Colonel Lloyd family,
but quite a distance from it;
12 miles away.
Frederick Douglass's grandmother
meant a tremendous amount
to him.
And her love of him made
a tremendous impact on him.
As I grew larger and older,
I learned by degrees the
sad fact that the little hut,
and Grandmother herself,
belonged to some person
who lived a great distance off,
and who was called
by Grandmother,
"Old Master."
When he was around five or six years old,
his grandmother said, "We're going to go on
a long journey."
Because it was time.
The time finally came when his grandmother
would have to take him to
the Great House plantation,
and his real life
of enslavement would begin.
That 12 mile walk to the main plantation
took a long time.
He was scared and clinging to her skirt.
And they enter a dark wood.
And Douglass started to see
monsters in there.
I could see their legs, eyes, and ears,
or I could see something like
eyes, legs, and ears;
till I got close enough to them
to see that the eyes were nuts,
washed white with rain and
the legs were broken limbs.
Thus, early I learned that the
point from which a thing
is viewed is of some importance.
Frederick sees this home is bigger than
anything he'd ever seen before.
He wanders off to look for something to eat
and to check out his surroundings,
and when he turns back to
look for his grandmother,
she's gone.
After his grandmother left him,
that's when he had what he called his
"initiation into slavery."
When he began to see
how... uh...
cruel the system was.
I have often
been awakened at the dawn of day
by the most heart-rending
shrieks of atrocious cruelty.
My master's savage barbarity
was equaled only by
the consummate coolness with
which he committed the grossest
and most savage deeds upon
the slaves under his charge.
One of the first things that he saw
was the whipping of his own aunt.
The louder she screamed,
the harder he whipped.
It was the blood-stained gate,
the entrance to the Hell of slavery,
through which I was about to pass.
This is the turning point in his life,
when Douglass sees his condition.
In that moment, where little
Frederick Douglass
is in a closet watching
the brutal beating of his aunt,
he's learning this is what
it means to be enslaved.
Frederick Douglass is chosen from among
all of the children on the plantation
on the Eastern Shore of Maryland
to go to Baltimore
to be the house servant
for his master's family.
And he described this event as
divine providence in his favor.
There were a number of slave children
that might have been sent from
the plantation to Baltimore.
I was chosen from among them all.
We arrived at Baltimore
early on Sunday morning.
Mr. and Mrs. Auld
were both at home,
and met me at the door with
their little son, Thomas,
to take care of whom I had been given.
Enslaved children in many ways
mirrored the activities
of the adults around them.
Children were responsible for
caring for children
not much older- or even
a few years younger than them.
And so, in this process,
they were being groomed
for that position in society.
And Frederick Douglass experienced that
throughout his childhood.
Mrs. Hugh Auld doesn't
really understand that
to keep someone enslaved,
you have to treat them
as a non-human being.
Because they've never had a slave before.
They're new to slavery.
So, she starts teaching
Douglass how to read.
And Hugh Auld catches him and is incensed.
And he says, "If you teach him how to read,
he will no longer be fit
for enslavement."
And Frederick heard
that message loud and clear.
And he looked at his
enslaver and he thought,
"Hmm, if you don't want me to have this,
I'm going to do everything in
my power to gain it."
Wise as Mr. Auld was,
he evidently underrated
my comprehension.
And the very determination which
he expressed to keep me in
ignorance only rendered me
the more resolute
in seeking intelligence.
He lived in a neighborhood in Baltimore
with a number of comparatively
poor immigrant boys.
And Sophia Auld would make biscuits, uh,
and he would... he would fill
his pockets with biscuits
and trade biscuits for words,
asking the boys
who were learning how to read
what they meant.
And from them, he learned how to read.
He learned how to write.
He took some chalk and would
practice his handwriting
on the streets of Baltimore.
And that's how he learned
how to read and write.
Literacy became a kind of gateway
uh an inflection point for him, right?
Learning to read was about
access to literally
reading words on the page, but
it was also access to knowledge.
So, one of the books
he mentions, again and again,
is "The Columbian Orator."
The two main books that Douglass read were,
one, the Bible.
The other book that he read
was "The Columbian Orator",
which is a collection of
speeches designed for young boys
who didn't have the privilege of
formal education to help them
become effective speakers and writers.
In that text,
he encounters a dialogue between
an enslaved person and his enslaver,
where he sees this enslaved
person reason with the enslaver,
and point by point,
dismantle all the justifications
for enslavement.
The master was vanquished at every turn
in the argument;
and he generously and meekly
emancipates the slave with his
best wishes for his prosperity.
And I could not help feeling
that the day might come,
when the well-directed answers
made by the slave to the master
would find their counterpart in myself.
He notes that when they worked him
from sunup to sundown so that
he was too exhausted to think,
those were the times when he
couldn't actually process
his condition.
But the minute he has a moment to reflect,
a moment to read or to stare out
on the Chesapeake
those are the moments when
Douglass sees his condition,
and recognizes, "I'm not just enslaved.
I'm a slave for life."
What does that mean?
And he would just look at the tall ships
coming and going,
and their sails looked like
angels or ghosts
floating in the air.
And he would just ask hisself,
"Why am I a slave?
Why am I in this hot Hell when
the gallant ships go all over
the habitable globe,
and I'm here in this bondage?
Oh, if I was free,
if I could fly, if I could swim,
I'd run away.
Just 100 miles north, I'd be free.
I'd get on a boat and I'll set it adrift,
and this bay shall yet bear me
to freedom."
♪ I'll be so glad when
the sun goes down ♪
♪ when the sun go down ♪
♪ I'll be so glad when
the sun goes down ♪
♪ when the sun go down ♪
There was, in the Bay Side,
a man named Edward Covey,
who enjoyed the execrated
reputation of being
a first-rate hand at breaking
young Negroes.
If at any one time of my life
I was made to drink the
bitterest dregs of slavery,
that time was during my stay
with Mr. Covey.
Douglass's time with Edward Covey
is a turning point in his life.
He gets sent to Covey, the famed
breaker of enslaved people
because he's gotten a bit
of a reputation as unruly,
uncontrolled.
He's been reading, he's been
holding Sunday Schools,
he's tried to escape.
He's done all this,
and so it's the last straw.
"We're gonna finally break you."
EDWARD BAPTIST: Individuals who
were suspected of being
potential troublemakers, they
were sent to slave breakers.
And his job was to get them in
the habit of submitting to
the demands of slavery.
Mr. Covey found
a particular niche
in the economy for himself.
That is to say not only did he
have slaves himself,
but he found a niche in the
sense that he was able to
create a reputation for himself
as being able to discipline.
Douglass sees Covey's task as one of
transforming him into a brute,
and a brute, in that context,
is a farm animal.
It's something below human.
Edward Covey would
give you scantiest of allowances
and clothing, and work you
endlessly, endlessly, endlessly.
And the whole idea was just
to break a person in body,
and that would break them in spirit.
I had brought my mind to a firm resolve
to obey every order, however unreasonable.
And if Mr. Covey should
then undertake to beat me,
I would defend and protect
myself to the best
of my ability.
For those several months,
Covey gave Douglass his full attention.
So, whenever Douglass was
working in the field,
Covey found some fault with his
work and would harass him
and shout at him and on
multiple occasions, beat him.
After six months
of taking these brutal beatings,
Frederick had enough.
He and Covey had this epic two-hour battle
that was more of a wrestling
match than a fisticuffs,
because Frederick understood
that he needed to use his mind
and be strategic.
His intention was not
to defeat and punish Covey
to the greatest extent possible.
It was simply to draw a line and say,
"If you... if you try to
come after me physically,
you're... this is what you are
going to get."
Covey himself was
in a bit of a precarious spot.
He had the reputation as the slave breaker.
And so, to retaliate in a way
that was visible, as in,
"I could not break Douglass,
therefore I had to kill him,"
was against Covey's best interest.
This battle
with Mr. Covey
was the turning point
in my life as a slave.
It rekindled in my breast the
smoldering embers of liberty.
I was nothing before.
I was a man now.
After that incident, there was a great deal
of discussion among his owners
about possibly selling him
down to Alabama or Mississippi,
to the cotton states
to sort of get him off their plate.
Enslaved people in Maryland
lived with the constant fear
that they or a family member
could be sold down into the Deep South,
and so that daily fear was
always with them,
even as they're looking north
and seeing Pennsylvania
not that far in the distance.
It was still a very dangerous,
very scary proposition to flee.
But Pennsylvania was not as far
away for them as it was for,
say, Mississippi.
Douglass and some fellow slaves,
tried to run away.
They tried to escape up to free soil.
They were caught.
And other planters on the
Eastern Shore told Thomas Auld
that Douglass was trouble
and that they wanted to
kill Douglass, essentially.
From Thomas Auld's perspective,
Douglass is property.
To protect his property, he had Douglass...
he sent Douglass back to Baltimore.
♪ I'm gonna sail like a ship
mmm... on that ocean ♪
♪ I'm gonna sail like a ship
on that ocean ♪
Once he got to Baltimore,
which was a thriving shipbuilding point,
Fells Point in Baltimore,
he would see people of color
from all around coming into
Fells Point not only
to get their boats repaired but
bringing in cargo.
♪ Well, I'm gonna sail till
I see my dear old mother, ♪
In a few weeks after I went to Baltimore,
Master Hugh hired me to
Mr. William Gardner,
and extensive ship builder on Fells Point.
I was put there to learn how to caulk.
The Caulkers are a high-skilled position
to help repair wooden vessels.
And Frederick Douglass became
very skilled in that craft
as well as many other African Americans
in Baltimore's Fells Point.
In Baltimore, you have a really robust
free Black population with AME Church.
The AME Church was central
in not only creating a space for
African Americans to worship,
but creating a network of
support for African Americans
who were committed to anti-slavery.
The church made possible a lot
of Frederick Douglass's life,
it made it possible for him
to meet Anna Murray and meeting
Anna Murray was really
what made it possible for
Douglass to get free.
There would be no Frederick Douglass
without Anna.
They met in Baltimore when
Frederick was a teenager,
enslaved.
As they started thinking about
a life together,
Anna was one of the first people
to plant the seed of thought
in his mind that,
"Frederick, you're not meant
to be a slave for life.
It doesn't matter what your
enslaver says to you."
And as they're starting to think
about a life together, she said,
"Frederick, I don't want
our children's father
to be a slave."
The only way that they can get married,
and have a family and live
the way that they wanna live
is for him to escape and, and
her to meet him in the north.
The problem is, the steamboats,
the railroads,
the road crossings into Pennsylvania,
all of these are guarded.
African American individuals had
to carry their free papers
in order to get through those
different checkpoints.
So, it's quite a quandary,
but they come up with
a plan to pass him off
as a free Black sailor.
The U.S. Navy had more
people of color in their ranks
than any other branch of service.
There was a brotherhood
of people of the sea.
It didn't matter whether you
were Black or White,
if you had your seamen's papers.
What Anna does is get
him, a suit of sailor's clothes.
They borrow a set of,
of papers that sailors carried
when they travel to different
ports so they wouldn't be,
arrested.
And so, this is his disguise.
So, Frederick Douglass took the train up
to the Susquehanna River.
They were so used to seeing
the blue jackets
and the gold buttons with the eagles on it.
That wasn't news.
This is how he is able to board a train,
board a steamer, and ultimately,
make it across
the Mason Dixon line,
first to Philadelphia,
and Delaware, and then on to New York,
where he meets up with Anna again,
he gets married to her.
Had she not sold her personal belongings
to help finance his escape,
who knows if he would've had
the courage or the wherewithal to escape.
And had that not happened,
we would be a very different
country sitting here today.
It was suggested that Frederick and Anna
go to New Bedford so he could get work.
Once, initiated
into my new life of freedom,
a comparatively unimportant
question arose as to a name
by which I should be known thereafter.
Between Baltimore and New Bedford,
the better to conceal myself
from the slave hunters,
I had parted with Bailey and called myself
"Frederick Douglass."
Even though he changes his last name
and becomes Frederick Douglass,
he holds on to the "Frederick."
That's a... a sort of an
essential part of his identity.
He feels some connection to that name,
a name that was likely or
possibly given to him
by his mother,
and he doesn't want to abandon
that entire sense of who he is,
even as he is building
a new life for himself.
♪ I am an abolitionist,
I glory in thy name, ♪
♪ though now my slavery's
minions hiss'd ♪
♪ and covered o'er
with shame. ♪
♪ It is a spell of
light and power, ♪
♪ the watchword
of the free ♪
New Bedford had a lot of things
going for her, for one there was
a Black community there,
and Douglass became exposed to
the abolitionist movement
that was really hot in Massachusetts,
led by William Lloyd Garrison.
♪ A nobler strife
the world never saw ♪
♪ Th'enslaved to disenthral ♪
William Lloyd Garrison
was one of the most prominent
abolitionists in the country,
the editor of the Liberator,
a weekly newspaper,
which was fervently anti-slavery
and for the rights
of African Americans.
I love this paper and its editor.
He was never loud and noisy,
but calm and serene
as a summer sky and as pure.
And his paper took a place in my
heart second only to the Bible.
Garrison was fighting for justice,
and he was fighting for equality.
And Frederick knew what
injustice felt like.
He knew what inequality felt like,
and that's when Frederick
really began to speak out
about his enslavement.
In the 19th Century,
oratory was a huge deal.
Going to an oration, going to a debate
was the equivalent of going to the movies.
For the next several
years Douglass traveled
throughout the North and what's
now the Upper-Midwest,
speaking out against slavery.
Douglass in a sense was
so eloquent and elegant
as a speaker that some whites
started to accuse him of being
a fraud.
People doubt that I had ever been
a slave.
They said, "I did not talk like a slave,
look like a slave nor act like
a slave."
Thus, I was in a pretty fair way
to be denounced as an imposter.
And so, in order to prove
he was who he claimed to be, he wrote...
"Narrative of the Life
of Frederick Douglass,
An American Slave."
The sort of concluding piece of the title
is "written by himself."
Those words were really powerful
and challenging to a lot
of what White Americans thought
was possible.
It was published in 1845.
It sold 4500 copies in three months.
You know, he was a star.
And now, he had another problem.
Once he publishes the narrative,
he's probably the most famous
Black person in the world
at that point.
But he, in the narrative,
has outed himself as a fugitive.
The writing of my pamphlet in the spring
of 1845 endangered my liberty
and led me to seek a refuge
from republican slavery in
monarchical England.
Douglass goes to the UK,
in part to seek refuge but also
in part to continue to boost
his political profile.
And when he goes there,
he is incredibly well-received.
When Frederick Douglass arrives
in the UK, he is celebrated
as the moral and social
and political voice of
the anti-slavery movement.
He becomes a global figure that
represents the brutality
of slavery and the possibility of freedom.
When Douglass goes to England,
he is embraced by a community
of radical-thinking people.
And he is allowed to become,
even more of who
he already is because of
the community there
that embraces him.
People start saying to him,
"We can raise money to... uh,
buy you out of slavery.
We can offer... er... your slave
master a sum of money
that basically he can't refuse."
The Garrisonians thought,
"No, you can't do that."
Because to allow yourself to be
bought out of slavery
tacitly accepted the principle
that slavery was legal.
By our standards today,
we would think it's ridiculous
that abolitionists
would not embrace Douglass
securing his freedom.
But I think that for many of them,
they also understood that
Douglass was a political tool.
And I think Douglass never saw
himself as that.
He saw himself as a person seeking freedom.
I think, the very best thing was done,
in letting Master Hugh have
the 150 pounds sterling,
and leaving me free to return to
my appropriate field of labor.
I could have easily remained in
England, for the same friends,
who had so generously purchased my freedom,
would have assisted me
in establishing myself
in that country.
But I felt that I had a duty
to perform - and that was,
to labor and suffer with the
oppressed in my native land.
After returning from the UK,
Douglass became increasingly
sure about his capacity
to sort of act as an independent
political figure.
But he also was developing
into a person who was more
comfortable with his own political ideas.
You know, at first,
Frederick was Garrison's protégé,
and so Garrison said to Frederick,
"You just tell your story and,
and leave the thinking to us."
"Tell your story Frederick,"
would whisper my revered friend
Mr. Garrison,
as I stepped upon the platform.
I could not always follow the injunction.
It did not entirely satisfy
me to narrate wrongs.
I felt like denouncing them."
White abolitionists think there is only
one point of view.
But Douglass wants a role that's
much wider than this,
a scripted role of someone who
simply opposed to slavery,
Douglass is someone who is now
prepared to contest
a... a more widespread system
of injustices.
And this was one of the reasons
why he wanted to start
The North Star, his newspaper.
For Frederick Douglass,
starting the North Star was
critical to create
a Black voice of abolition.
There were other abolitionist newspapers,
but very few spoke to the
question of the end of slavery
from the perspective of Black people.
Right is of no sex, truth is of no color,
God is the father of us all
and all we are brethren.
Editors rule the day.
The editors of the newspaper
really shaped who saw what,
where and when.
And so, to have a newspaper
was to be the shaper
of public opinion.
Founding the newspaper is sort
of like Douglass's declaration
of intellectual and activist independence.
The North Star was published weekly,
and averaged circulation of
3000 subscribers.
I had an audience to speak to every week.
Douglass had this capacity to be
a great editor,
to be a great political leader,
but his vision was different
from Garrison's,
and Garrison couldn't roll with that.
William Lloyd Garrison was
not only disagreeing
with the political strategy but
also objecting or felt kind
of offended that Douglass
was splitting from him.
He even recommended that
his followers not read
Douglass's newspaper.
Douglass says, "I am no longer going to be
dependent on your infrastructure
to give me voice,
I'm going to take my own voice."
And that's the point where
Douglass is in a seat of power.
And so, when you read something like,
"What to the Slave is the Fourth of July"
you get a sense that Douglass
saw words as battleaxes.
What, to the American slave,
is your fourth of July?
I answer a day that reveals to
him more than all of the days
in the year the gross injustice
and cruelty to which
he is the constant victim.
To him, your celebration is a sham,
your boasted liberty and unholy license,
your national greatness, swelling vanity,
your sounds of rejoicing
are empty and heartless,
your denunciation of tyrants,
brass fronted impudence,
your shouts of liberty and equality,
hollow mockery, your prayers, and hymns,
your sermons, and thanksgivings
with all your religious parade
and solemnity are to him mere
bombast, fraud, deception,
impiety and hypocrisy.
A thin veil to cover up crimes
which would disgrace a nation
of savages.
There is not a nation on the
earth guilty of practices
more shocking and bloody
than are the people
of the United States at this very hour.
This Fourth of July is yours, not mine.
Why am I called upon to speak here today?
What have I, or those I represent,
to do with your national independence?
In speeches and essays Douglass talks about
the daguerreotype, developed in 1840s
as one of the central modern
marvels of the day.
As important as... say,
the telegraph for its ability
to capture a reality, unfiltered.
And so, Douglass saw in photography,
a way to show African descended
people as they were,
in all their beauty.
Douglass recognized the degree to which
representation itself could
be a powerful mechanism
for ending slavery,
for achieving universal freedom
and equality.
And throughout his life,
Douglass recognized
the power of the image.
We now understand that Frederick Douglass
is the most photographed American man
in the 19th century,
not African American man,
but American man.
He consciously put himself
in front of the camera
because he understood the
democratic power of that new
technological medium.
Frederick Douglass
was obsessed with the way
that Black people were stereotyped;
that they were made to look stupid,
they were made to look savage.
So, he became preoccupied
with how he looked.
And you look at the images
themselves and you see
that he's up to something.
It's, presenting himself
in this particular way.
He is serious, he's engaged,
he's really smart.
He understood the way
in which his embodied form
self-possessed, dignified, masterful,
could create a weapon to counter
the sea of racist stereotypes
that surrounded Douglass and everyone
in the dis-United States at that time.
Frederick said, "When you look
at a photograph of me,
you're never going to deny
that I'm a man worthy of freedom
and citizenship.
You're going to look me in the
eye and see my humanity."
You can see in his gaze
that he's not afraid
of the camera.
He's able to go toe-to-toe with the camera,
he's able to hold his gaze.
He commands your attention.
And Douglass is extraordinarily
handsome no matter what, uh,
vantage point you want to use.
Whatever standard of beauty you've got,
Douglass gives it to you.
Douglass was meticulous in how he himself
photographed.
He was always dressed to the hilt.
He was always intent on his particular,
sort of how he would be posed.
The head-on daguerreotype of Douglass,
with that piercing gaze,
right... was important.
The central question of the day
for Frederick Douglass was,
"By what right does anyone
have to own another human
being?"
So when you're looking at
Frederick Douglass
in a photograph, you are seeing
insistent self-possession.
You're seeing a refutation of
the very idea that slavery
could even be possible.
♪ It makes a long,
long-time man oh feel bad ♪
♪ It makes a long,
long-time man feel bad... ♪
"Runaway from the subscriber in Albemarle,
a mulatto slave called Sandy,
about 35 years of age,
his stature is rather low,
inclining to corpulence
and his complexion, light.
Whoever conveys the said
slave to me in Albemarle,
shall have a 40 shillings reward
if taken up within the county.
And ten pounds, if in any other Colony.
From Thomas Jefferson."
♪ He was a long
Oh driving man ♪
♪ Yes, he was
What got him done ♪
♪ He worked hard ♪
What's remarkable about this is that
it's not remarkable.
It's Thomas Jefferson,
so we find it significant,
but enslavers were placing these
kinds of ads in every state
or territory where slavery existed.
Between the ratification
of the Constitution 1789 and 1850,
there's increasing conflict
over the rendition
of fugitives from slavery.
And so, the southern-most
states: North Carolina,
South Carolina, Georgia, make a demand
which is that they will
be able to claim anybody
who escapes from slavery
in the slave states
to the free states.
And this immediately puts
the freedom of every single
African American in the north at
a much greater level of threat.
The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850
was the last ditch effort of
those slaveholder's
who wanted to hold on to the
bondage and greed of slavery.
The 1850 Fugitive Slave Act
created enforcement mechanisms
that forced and required
the federal government to get in
the business of sending back
to slavery those who ran away.
Now, the federal government
was going to go after
those who had fled to northern states.
This hadn't happened before.
What we saw were these slaveholders
who were very politically
connected and very wealthy,
and they lobbied the Congress
to have a fugitive slave act
that not only meant that their
escaped property
would be brought back,
but anyone, Black or White,
involved in assisting that
person to escape slavery
would also have criminal consequences.
The hardships imposed by this atrocious,
and shameless law were cruel, and shocking.
Although, I was now myself free,
I was not without apprehension.
Even colored people who had
been free all their lives
felt themselves very insecure
in their freedom.
Douglass argued in 1850 in the wake
of the Fugitive Slave Law being
passed that Blacks had the right
to use violence to resist
fugitive slave catchers.
It can never be wrong for the imbrued
and whip-scared slaves or their
friends to hunt, harass,
and even strike down the
traffickers in human flesh.
That was a radical position,
using violence as a way to a way
to challenge slave catchers.
And he says, "That the best way
to make the Fugitive Slave Act
a dead letter is to make two
or three dead kidnappers."
And he says, "That this is
a thing that's justifiable."
After the Fugitive Slave Act,
Frederick Douglass knew that
it would come to war.
He realized just how deeply
entrenched as Southerners
and many others were in this
institution of bondage.
They were not going to willingly
give up slavery.
Lincoln was running for president
as a anti-slavery Republican in 1860.
On the one hand, Douglass said,
"Look, this guy is not an abolitionist.
We are abolitionists.
We're demanding immediate end to slavery.
That's not Lincoln.
On the other hand,
Lincoln is a major step forward
in the struggle against
slavery."
Abraham Lincoln proposed his grand
historic doctrine of the power and duty
of the national government to
prevent the spread
and perpetuity of slavery.
Into this contest, I threw
myself with firmer faith
and more ardent hope than ever before.
And what I could do by pen or
voice was done with a will.
When Lincoln was elected,
he was the first openly
anti-slavery president
in the United States, the first president
for whom anti-slavery was a central theme.
Na... it's the first time.
It was Mr. Lincoln
who told the American people
that the Union could not long
endure half-slave and half-free,
that they must be all one or the other,
that the public mind could
find no resting place
but in the belief in the
ultimate extinction of slavery.
Slavery is not safe under the rule
of anti-slavery people.
We're going to pick up our
marbles and go and set up
a new country, the Confederate
States of America.
Leaving, walking out, seceding,
it was always the trump card
of Southerners.
And when Lincoln gives us
his inaugural address,
seven states have seceded.
The Confederacy's already been formed.
Douglass was actually,
cautiously very optimistic
about secession, because he recognized this
as a golden opportunity to destroy slavery.
I confess to strongly favoring the prospect
of a conflict between
the North and the South.
Standing outside the pale
of American humanity,
denied citizenship, unable to call the land
of my birth my country,
and longing for the end
of the bondage of my people,
I was ready for any
political upheaval which
should bring about a change
in the existing condition of things.
Frederick Douglass knew
how deeply invested these Southerners
were in their free labor.
Free labor.
The cotton and other products
that came from slavery
were bought and sold on the
New York Stock Exchange.
This was not just a Southern endeavor,
and they were not going to
let it go, but for war.
And so, he had to become
an advocate for something
that he did not want -
and that was for one person
to have to kill another in order
to break the bonds of slavery.
When the war breaks out,
Lincoln says, you know,
very explicitly,
"This is a war about the Union.
We are fighting to save the Union.
It is not about slavery.
We are not going to threaten
the institution of slavery."
And Douglass criticizes Lincoln
very harshly for not fighting
an anti-slavery war, fighting
a war for the Union.
My paramount object in this struggle
is to save the Union,
and is not either to save
or to destroy slavery.
If I could save the Union
without freeing any slave,
I would do it, and if I could
save it by freeing
all the slaves, I would do it.
What I do about slavery
and the colored race,
I do because I believe it
helps to save the Union.
Douglass, from the beginning,
emphasizes that a war to preserve the Union
is inseparable from a war to end
slavery because he understands
that the four million slaves
in the South constitute
a potent source of Black power.
So, Douglass emphasizes right away,
"Free slaves and arm them,
and this war will... will,
we will win the war and it will
end it fairly quickly."
In 1861 and 1862,
Douglass was a fierce critic
of Lincoln for refusing to
allow African Americans
to enlist in the Union military.
Douglass said from the
beginnings of the war
that this war between slave
owners in the United States,
that it would have to be a war
that would end slavery.
But Lincoln was hesitant to do
that and... and Douglass
was basically saying, "You are,
you're not doing your job.
You are... ah... failing in this
project of... of running
this war because you're trying
to fight it with one arm
tied behind your back."
I have implored the imperiled nation
to unchain against her foes
her powerful Black hand.
The day dawns, the morning star
is bright upon the horizon,
the iron gates of our prison
stands half-open.
One gallant rush from the North
will fling it wide open,
while four millions of our
brothers and sisters
shall march out into liberty.
The chance is now given
you to end, in a day,
the bondage of centuries.
Lincoln was a politician,
so he was truly on the fence,
and it would take somebody
like Frederick Douglass,
who I think Lincoln
had great respect for,
to say "Mr. President,
we can't wait."
The Emancipation Proclamation authorizes,
formally and publicly, the
arming of Blacks as soldiers.
They know the Southern landscape in a way
that Union soldiers don't.
They end up becoming essentially
almost a special force
for the army.
And Douglass eagerly supports
the recruitment of Blacks
as soldiers.
And he recruits his two sons,
Charles and Lewis,
for the first Northern Black regiment,
the Massachusetts 54th regiment.
I now, for the first time during this war,
feel of liberty to call
and counsel you to arms.
I urge you to fly to arms and
smite with death the power
that would bury the government
and your liberty in the same
hopeless grave.
The tide of the war changes -
with the fall of Atlanta,
with Lincoln's eventual victory
in early November, 1864.
His re-election has guaranteed
that he's going to now bring
this war to a close and slavery
will end across the board.
The fact that a radical fugitive slave
has the ear of the president
means that, ultimately,
that president became a very smart person.
It is to his credit that
he learned to listen
to Frederick Douglass.
I think, it also says
something about the crises
in which Lincoln found himself,
that he had to listen to
and then was willing to listen
to voices that would have
seemed outside, that seemed radical.
That... that's the lesson of
a Lincoln presidency
and a lesson of the possibilities
of transformative change.
You don't get transformative
change by not listening
to the radicalness of a Douglass.
To all appearance, we were on the eve
of a restoration of the Union,
and a solid and lasting peace.
A country redeemed and
regenerated from the foulest
crime against human nature
that ever saw the sun.
What a bright vision of peace,
prosperity, and happiness.
After the Civil War,
Frederick believed that it was
a new founding of our country.
He had hope through the
Amendments - the 13th, 14th,
and 15th Amendment - that his people
would be making progress.
The whole history of
the progress of human liberty
shows that all concessions yet
made to her august claims
have been born of earnest struggle.
The conflict has been exciting,
agitating, all-absorbing,
and for the time being, putting
all other tumults to silence.
It must do this, or it does nothing.
If there is no struggle,
there is no progress.
It's hard to pinpoint a moment in Douglass'
life when he wasn't a danger,
especially to structures
of white supremacy and enslavement.
Douglass, through and through,
was a revolutionary.
You want a handbook of how to
be successful in this world?
You want a handbook on how to
advocate for Black rights,
for justice, how to navigate
really thorny moral,
spiritual, political, legal issues?
Read Douglass' life.
He walks you through how he does that.
Frederick Douglass was a Renaissance man.
He was the first African American nominated
for Vice President of the United States,
first African American
U.S. Marshal,
first African American Ambassador
and Consul General in Haiti,
and people would ask him,
you know, "Frederick,
where did you go to school?
Where did you get your
education?"
And he would take a line from
his anti-slavery lecture circuit
days and say, "My degree
is written on my back."
Frederick Douglass helps us understand
the history of American freedom
in a really complicated way.
The fact that he was born
a slave in this country
that was supposedly defined
by liberty reflects
the limitations of freedom as
a real experience.
But it also shows us the
possibilities of... of freedom
as... as a tool to advocate
for not only liberty,
but also justice.
Frederick Douglass
moved from being a mirror
to hold up to the nation about
its failures to becoming a lens
for future generations to
understand their own
public service, to understand their own
commitment to justice,
to understand why bravery
is so important.
And so, Frederick Douglass
challenges us to become
the fullest expression of
ourselves and our ideals.
Douglass is one of
the most complicated people
in our history, and just when you think,
you know him is an invitation
to come and know him more.
And he's one of the few Black Americans
or Americans of any race who
left so much for us
to read and engage so that
he's still, in some ways,
directing us... uh... as we... as
we try to learn more about him.
I have lived several lives in one:
the life of slavery; the life of
a fugitive from slavery;
the life of comparative freedom;
the life of conflict and battle;
and, the life of victory.
I am impressed with a sense
of completeness,
a sort of rounding up of the
arch to the point
where the keystone may be inserted,
the scaffolding removed, and the work,
with all its perfections or faults,
left to speak for itself.
To order Becoming Frederick Douglass on DVD
Also available with PBS Passport
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