Historical Annotation

Historical Annotation

1.x George L. Ruffin] George Lewis Ruffin (1834-86), a lawyer and judge, was born in Richmond, Virginia, to free blacks. In 1853 his family moved to Boston, where he attended Chapman Hall School, became involved in the Republican party, and met Josephine St. Pierre, whom he married in 1858. Soon after their wedding, the couple left for Liverpool, England, hoping to escape the pervasive racial discrimination in America, but after six months they returned to Boston, where Ruffin took up barbering. During the Civil War, he participated in the Home Guard and the Sanitary Commission. In 1869 Rutlin graduated from Harvard Law School, becoming the first black to earn an L.L.B. degree from that institution. After joining the bar, Ruffin became involved in politics and was elected to the Massachusetts state legislature and the Boston Common Council. In addition to running a thriving law firm, Ruffin was appointed as a municipal judge in Charlestown, Massachusetts, and as Boston's consul resident for the Dominican Republic in 1883. J. Clay Smith, Jr., "In Freedom's Birthplace: The Making of George Lewis Ruffin, The First Black Law Graduate of Harvard University," Howard Law Journal, 39:201-35 (Fall 1995); Rayford W. Logan and Michael R. Winston, eds., Dictionary of American Negro Biography (New York, 1982), 535. 3.9-10 Horace Walpole's prophecy] Fourth earl of Oxford, historian Horace Walpole (1717-97) laments what he perceives to be Europe's inevitable cultural decline. He shares his vision of future sites of renewed creativity and intellectual advance on the American continents in his letter of 24 November 1774 to Sir Horace Mann. Ruffin utilizes these sentiments in order to place Douglass's achievements as both former slave and American at the vanguard of this shift: "The next Augustan age will dawn on the other side of the Atlantic. There will be, perhaps a Thucydides at Boston, a Xenophon at New York, and in time a Virgil at Mexico and a Newton at Peru." Walpole to Mann, Strawberry Hill, 24 November 1774, in The Yale Edition of Horace Walpole's Correspondence, with Sir Horace Mann, ed. W. S. Lewis et al., 48 vols. (New Haven, Conn., 1937-83), 8:59-64; John Cannon et al., eds., The Blackwell Dictionary of Historians (New York, 1988), 439-40; The Dictionary of National Biography, 22 vols. (London, 1921-22), 20:627-33. 3.9 Xenophon] Xenophon (c. 428-c. 354 BCE), Greek historian and orator, was a contemporary of Socrates. whom he met while fighting in the Peloponnesian War. Xenophon produced fifteen works, including Hellenica, a contemporary history of Greece from 411 to 362 BCE. He probably intended to complete Thucydides's history of the Peloponnesian War but later extended his history to include the Spartan defeat at Mantineia. Xenophon also composed works of political science, adventure, and

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instruction. Michael Grant, Greek and Roman Historians: Information and Misinformation (London, 1995), 9-10; Kelly Boyd, ed., Encyclopedia of Historians and Historical Writing, 2 vols. (Chicago, 1999), 2:1343-44; Cannon, Blackwell Dictionary of Historians. 459-60. 3. 10 Thucydides] Thucydides (c. 460/455-c. 400 BCE), Greek historian and Athenian general, wrote The Peloponnesian War, a contemporary history covering all but the last seven years of the war in which he participated. Because of his interest in numbers, chronology, and causation, he is considered the first "scientific historian." Thucydides's history is often studied for its literary value as well as for its historical accounts. Grant, Greek and Roman Historians, 7-9; Boyd, Encyclopedia of Historians, 2:1193; Cannon, Blackwell Dictionary of Historians, 412-13. 3.15 Pantheon] A group of illustrious persons, but originally a term used for a temple to officially recognized gods. 3.16 sui generis] Of one's own class; singular. 3. 19 of negro extraction] Douglass's mother was Maryland slave Harriet Bailey (1792-1825 ). The identity of his father is not certain, but since his skin color was considerably lighter than that of his siblings, Douglass concluded that it was a white man. McFeely, Frederick Douglass, 5, 8. 3.29 a high officer in the National Government] At the time that George Ruffin composed this introduction. Douglass had held the following federal posts: assistant secretary of the Santo Domingo Commission (1871); marshal of the District of Columbia (1877-81); recorder of deeds for the District of Columbia (1881-86). McFeely, Frederick Douglass, 276-77, 289, 291-92, 306, 335. 3.30 a husband, father] Douglass married Anna Murray (c. 1813-82) in September 1838. The couple had five children: Rosetta Douglass Sprague (18391906); Lewis Henry Douglass (1840-1908); Frederick Douglass, Jr. (1842-92); Charles Remond Douglass (1844-1920); and Annie Douglass (1849-60). McFeely, Frederick Douglass, 73, 81, 97, 103, 161, 207, 365. 4.1 Douglass has now reached and passed the meridian of life] At the time that Ruffin composed this introduction, Douglass was approximately sixty-three years of age. As nearly as can be determined, Douglass was born in February, 1818. Ledger books kept by his master, Aaron Anthony, contain a table, "My Black People," with the notation "Frederick Augustus son of Harriott Feby 1818," Aaron Anthony Ledger B, 1812-26, folders 9, 165, Dodge Collection, MdAA. Further evidence for the year 1818 is presented in Preston, Young Frederick Douglass, 31-34, 218. 4.2 Garrison] William Lloyd Garrison (1805-79) was the foremost white abolitionist of the nineteenth century and was credited with the discovery of Douglass as a speaker at an antislavery meeting in Nantucket in 1841. He began his career as an apprentice printer on the Newburyport (Mass.) Herald at the age of thirteen. Garrison became editor of the Newburyport Free Press in 1826, but the paper closed within a year. He was then associated with a series of periodicals in Boston that advocated reform before Benjamin Lundy offered the young journalist the opportunity to write

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for his antislavery newspaper. Garrison joined Lundy in editing the Genius of Universal Emancipation in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1829, during the last year of the paper's 1821-1830 run. In 1830 a libel suit against the editors forced the paper to close and landed Garrison in jail. After his release, he courted the wealthy merchants of New York and Boston in order to start the Liberator (1831-65), a weekly journal based in Boston in which he advocated an immediate end to slavery. Garrison's brand of abolition condemned any institution that would tolerate the existence of slavery, including churches, political parties. and even the United States itself and any scheme aimed at removing black people from the country. Instead, Garrison hoped to raise the public's awareness that slavery was morally wrong and thereby force its end in an almost millennial moment of emancipation. His approach appealed to both white and black antislavery advocates but earned him many enemies among those only moderately opposed to slavery and slaveholders alike. Seeing the need for greater action and organization beyond the pages of the Liberator; Garrison joined with other abolitionists to form the New England Anti-Slavery Society in 1831. Two years later he helped found the larger American Anti-Slavery Society. In 1833 he established ties with English abolitionists after a trip to Great Britain, and he later brought the noted and notorious speaker George Thompson to the United States for a tour. Garrison also dedicated himself to women's rights, encouraging women to enter the public sphere by inviting them, via the Liberator, to form female antislavery societies. In addition to the thirty-three women's antislavery societies that flourished by 1838, Garrison's American Anti-Slavery Society welcomed women as well as blacks into its ranks. However, female delegates were excluded from the World's Anti-Slavery Convention of 1840 in London. The issue of women's participation in the antislavery movement and Garrison's absolute refusal to turn to politics to end slavery caused a division in the American Anti-Slavery Society. Brothers Lewis and Arthur Tappan, who opposed women's acting as speakers and who hoped to use politics toward abolition, broke with Garrison's American Anti-Slavery Society, forming the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, or the "New Organization" in 1841. Garrison's ideas were so closely associated with the "Old Organization" that the American Anti-Slavery Society became known simply as the "Garrisonians." With the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865, Garrison believed that he had accomplished his life's work and that of the antislavery movement. He then resigned from the presidency of the American Anti-Slavery Society and closed the Liberator. Wendell Phillips Garrison and Francis Jackson Garrison, William Lloyd Garrison, 1805-1879: The Story of His Life Told by His Children, 4 vols. (New York, 1885- 89); Henry Mayer, All on Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition of Slavery (New York, 1998); James Brewer Stewart, William Lloyd Garrison and the Challenge of Emancipation (Arlington Heights, Ill., 1992); John L. Thomas, The Liberator: William Lloyd Garrison (Boston, 1963); Dictionary of American Biography, 20 vols. (New York, 1928-36), 7:168-72. 4.3 Gerrit Smith] Gerrit Smith (1797-1874), a New York businessman and land

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speculator, became best known for his philanthropic work in such reforms as temperance and abolition. Between 1828 and 1835, he donated large sums of money to the American Colonization Society but abandoned that movement in 1835 when his sympathies shifted to the immediate abolitionists. In the 1840s he gave approximately 140,000 acres of land in upstate New York to three thousand black settlers, thus enabling them to qualify to vote. Smith was a founder and frequent candidate of the Liberty party, running for governor of New York on that ticket in 1840, and winning a seat in Congress in 1852. When the Free Soil merger with moderate antislavery Democrats and Whigs lured away many Liberty party supporters, Smith helped bankroll the Liberty party until 1860. Smith befriended Douglass when the latter moved to Rochester and frequently assisted in financing the Frederick Douglass' Paper. Like Douglass, Smith supported John Brown, but psychological stress caused by the failure at Harpers Ferry brought on the first of a series of bipolar episodes that greatly reduced his subsequent reform activities. Ralph Volney Harlow, Gerrit Smith: Philanthropist and Reformer (1939; New York, 1972); Gerald Sorin, The New York Abolitionists: A Test Case of Political Radicalism (Westport, Conn., 1971), 269-87; Lewis Perry, Radical Abolitionism: Anarchy and the Government of God in Antislavery Thought (Ithaca, N.Y., 1973), 170-80; John R. McKivigan and Madeleine Leveille, "The 'Black Dream' of Gerrit Smith, New York Abolitionist." Syracuse University Library Associates Courier, 20:61-76 (Fall 1985); NCAB, 2:322-23; DAB, 17:270-71. 4.3 Giddings] Joshua Reed Giddings (1795-1864), antislavery congressman from Ohio, was first elected to the House of Representatives as a Whig in 1838. He vigorously opposed the "gag rule," the annexation of Texas, and the Mexican-American War. In 1842, while negotiations were underway with Great Britain over the Creole affair, Giddings introduced unpopular resolutions supporting the right of mutiny for slaves aboard the British ship. Widely opposed, Giddings immediately resigned his seat, appealed to his constituents, and won reelection by an overwhelming margin. In 1848 Giddings left the Whig party to join the Free Soilers and then allied himself with the Republicans after the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Passed over for renomination in 1858 on account of his antislavery radicalism and declining health, Giddings was a delegate to the 1860 Republican convention, at which he and his allies forced the adoption of a plank endorsing the principles of the Declaration of Independence. In the last three years of his life, Giddings served as the consul general to Canada. James Brewer Stewart, Joshua R. Giddings and the Tactics of Radical Politics (Cleveland, 1970); Appleton's Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 6 vols. (New York. 1888-89), 4:478; DAB, 7:260-61; Biographical Directory of the United States Congress, 1774-Present (online). 4.3 Sumner] Best remembered as the victim of a vicious attack by a congressional colleague, the senatorial career of Charles Sumner (1811-74) from 1851 to 1874 was dedicated to the cause of emancipation. Born in Boston, Sumner attended and then taught at Harvard College. He engaged in a semisuccessful law practice but was

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thrust into politics by his outspoken opposition to the U.S. war against Mexico. He was a founder of the Free Soil party in Massachusetts, and a coalition of Free Soilers and Democrats elected him to the U.S. Senate in 1850. Immediately embroiling himself in the heated topic of slavery, Sumner became an outspoken advocate of emancipation and repeatedly opposed compromises proposed by Henry Clay and others. After one particularly scathing speech in the Senate against slavery, Sumner was brutally beaten with a cane by southern congressman Preston Brooks, causing Sumner to go through years of recovery before reentering the Senate. Sumner's lasting legacy was turning popular sentiment in the North toward emancipation, and after the Civil War Sumner continued to fight for the individual freedoms of blacks until his sudden death in 1874. Frederick J. Blue, Charles Sumner and the Conscience of the North (Arlington Heights, Ill., 1994); David Donald, Charles Sumner and the Coming of the Civil War (New York, 1960); DAB, 18:208-14. 4.5-6 Emancipation of the slaves] After many drafts and revisions, President Lincoln issued his Emancipation Proclamation on 1 January 1863. In it Lincoln declared all the slaves in the Confederate states to be free, thereby deliberately granting all slaveholding Border States immunity. To address northerners' fears that the emancipation would cause a large-scale slave rebellion, Lincoln included pleas to ex-slaves to behave peaceably unless justifiably provoked. As an act of war, the legality of this proclamation was questionable. especially after the war's end. Thus beginning in 1864 the Senate debated the first draft of a constitutional amendment that would outlaw slavery. The first attempt at passage was defeated by the Democrats in the House of Representatives, and the issue languished until Congress reconvened in 1865. Lincoln's proactive approach to the bill's passage, coupled with the nation's growing weariness of the war, paid off in January 1865, when the bill passed Congress. A sufficient number of states had ratified the amendment by December of the same year, ending all constitutional questions regarding emancipation. Michael Vorenberg, Final Freedom: The Civil War, the Abolition of Slavery, and the Thirteenth Amendment (Cambridge, Eng., 2001), 26-60, 89-114, 176-210. 4.16 "lost cause" at Appomattox] On 9 April 1865, Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered his Army of Northern Virginia to Union army forces commanded by General Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox, Virginia. Soon after the South's defeat in the Civil War, the "Lost Cause philosophy" surfaced. The notion of the "Lost Cause" effectively rewrote the war's purpose and outcome. As a result, the South's intent became a noble struggle for states' rights rather than a defense of slavery, and southerners argued that they were not defeated in the war but were simply outnumbered by the North. Heartily endorsed in the South, this revision of history, though inaccurate, was accepted well into the twentieth century and even influenced northern states' interpretation of the Civil War. Thus, the war was romanticized and glorified, while the memory of the cruelty of slavery that it abolished was diminished. Grady McWhiney, Braxton Bragg and Confederate Defeat (New York, 1969), vii-xi; Blight, Race and Reunion, 37-38, 258-60, 452-53; Dwight T. Pitcaithley, 'The American