Reader Responses, 1881-93

Reader Responses, 1881-93

The following are contemporary published reviews of Life and Times of Frederick Douglass located by the editors. Those lengthy passages excerpted from Life have been abridged. Deleted passages are indicated by ellipses and by bracketed notations of their page and line numbers in the Yale edition.

LITERARY. [Anon.]. Trenton Sentinel, 29 October 1881.

An excellent autobiography. Mr. Douglass has written much concerning himself, but nothing so full, complete and interesting as this. The introduction, by Geo. L. Ruffin, of Boston, is a deserved and graceful tribute to Mr. Douglass' worth and services. The mechanical execution is all that could be desired. Price, cloth, $2.50. For sale by John T. Ray. Trenton. N.J.

FRED. DOUGLASS' LIFE. A REMARKABLE VOLUME OF ADVENTURE AND REMINISCENCE. THE CAREER OF THE NEGRO PATRIOT AND MARTYR. AS WRITTEN BY HIMSELF — THE INSTITUTION OF SLAVERY AS A SLAVE KNEW IT. Erasmus. Philadelphia Press, 26 December 1881. Also reprinted in Washington. D.C. National Republican, 31 December 1881.

NEW YORK, Dec. 23. — Every once in a while we hear of the extraordinary success of a subscription book, yet I never knew a person who had ever bought one. Indeed I do not know how people buy them who want them unless they happen to run across an agent. Sometimes a subscription book finds its way into a bookstore, but as a general thing they cannot be purchased in the ordinary way. They are seldom sent to a paper for review, in truth the publishers prefer that they should not be reviewed. Some time ago I sent THE PRESS a few extracts from Frederick Douglass' account of his escape from slavery. That interesting paper was a chapter printed in the Century Magazine, in advance of publication, from "The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass," by himself. This volume was published a short time after by a Hartford subscription book house, and I have been trying ever since to get a copy, and have only just succeeded. It took as much wire-pulling and correspondence as to get a Government position. No one had it but the agents, and no bookseller knew who the agents were. I have just finished reading this autobiography, and a remarkable one it is. Certainly Frederick Douglass is one of the most extraordinary men of his time. Born in slavery, of a despised race, allowed to run wild as a child, starved and beaten as a man, he managed to learn to read and write, this by the greatest stealth, and finally to so educate himself that after his escape from slavery he took rank among the orators of the day, and attained a position his "old master"

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might have envied. After reading the biographies of most of the great men, I have come to the conclusion that obstacles in the path are the best incentives to those who would climb the hill of fame. If Douglass had been born in the North, a free man, he would probably never have risen above some humble position; but where every step he made cost him a blow, he determined to conquer, and he did. The story of his life is told in the simplest and most straightforward manner. I have never read a book on the subject of slavery, not even "Uncle Tom's Cabin," that made that institution appear so awful. Douglass does not seem to be straining after a sensation . There is no attempt at word painting. He gives the facts just as they were, and they need no coloring to make them more terrible.

Who his father was Douglass never knew, and his mother he only saw once, I believe. Then she walked twelve miles and back in the night to see him for a few minutes. His grandmother, who seemed to have a better position than usually fell to the lot of slaves, took care of him until he was seven years old; then he was sent to the "old master's." This "old master" was Captain Aaron Anthony, who was the "chief clerk and butler" on the home plantation of Colonel Lloyd, the owner of the "great house." Douglass belonged to Colonel Lloyd, an immensely wealthy man who owned a thousand slaves, and lived in Oriental splendor on the eastern shore of Maryland. The description of the manner of living at this mansion reads like a romance. Fifteen noiseless slaves glided about the dining room waiting upon the guests, or fanning them with large fans as they ate. A "Yankee" tutor taught the young people, who spent their leisure in every sort of enjoyment. Colonel Lloyd was a kind husband and father, but he would have none but brutes as overseers of his slaves, and would even take the whip in his own hand and beat his most devoted and faithful servants. Douglass was accustomed to see men and women beaten in the most cruel manner from his earliest childhood. The first woman he ever saw beaten was his own cousin, who was tied up with her arms over her head, and lashed until her back was cut to the bone and the floor was red with her blood. The crime for which she suffered this terrible punishment was having spoken to a young negro with whom she was in love, but of whom her owner did not approve. As a child Douglass escaped severe floggings, hut when he grew up and displayed what was considered too independent a spirit, he was beaten as cruelly as any other slave, and more so than most because he resisted. He did not shirk his work, and as he was a big, strong fellow, he accomplished a great deal, and made himself valuable to his master. When he was hired out he brought good wages home to the master, but even this did not make him show any solicitude for his health or well-being. The man who employed him was the worst sort of a brute, yet Douglass tells us that he went to church and prayed with the loudest. When Douglass was working one day, he fell twice to the ground from exhaustion and real illness. Instead of letting him rest, his employer hit him over the head with a stick of wood and kicked him with all his might. I should think a selfish motive, if nothing else, would have made him more considerate. You wouldn't want to maim a horse if he was temporarily laid up, and

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why any more a man? But slavery days are over, and these stories are now things of history. Let us hope that history will not repeat itself in this instance. There is no doubt but that Douglass was an "ugly customer." He was ever really with a knockdown blow or a bitter word. It is hardly surprising that he did not feel very amiably towards the people who kept his race in bondage, maltreating innocent children and degrading defenseless women . Perhaps if he had been less of a fighter he would not have accomplished the great object of his life. The story of Douglass' escape from slavery has already been told in THE PRESS. After establishing himself at New Bedford, he was drawn into the current of anti-slavery demonstration then flowing from Massachusetts all over the country. As a runaway slave, his words carried great weight. He visited England more than once in the interest of the cause, and was warmly received by some of the best people in the country. He was very intimate with the Howitt's, and visited their house for some time. Here he met Hans Christian Anderson, but as he spoke no Swedish and the poet spoke no English, their acquaintance did not become very intimate.

There is no more interesting part of Douglass's book than that which describes his connection with John Brown. When they first met in Rochester Brown was a respectahle and prosperous merchan, who owned a large brick store on one of the principal streets. After seeing the store Douglass expected that the house would be proportionately fine. On the contrary, it was a small wooden building on a back street, and the inside was plainer than the exterior. Its furniture "would have satisfied a Spartan," and there was an "air of plainness about it that almost suggested destitution." The first meal Douglass ate there was called "tea," but it consisted of "beef soup, cabbage and potatoes." The table was "innocent of paint, veneering, varnish or table-cloth.'' and the mother and daughters cooked the meals and did the waiting. The master of this household "fulfilled St. Paul's idea of the head of the family. His wife believed in him, and his children observed him with reverence." Douglas describes Brown as his face is known to us through the illustrated papers of those stormy days: "In person he was lean [213.6-18] neither seeking nor shunning observation."

After tea Brown cautiously approached the subject that was nearest his heart— the freeing of the slavcs— and he laid his plan before Douglass. It was a bold one, and one that would send him down the pages of history either as a murderer or a martyr. He was ready to take his life in his hand, and all the money he had saved by living in the most economical manner was to be devoted to the cause. "I can but be killed," he said. There is nothing in our history hetter known than the John Brown raid, and there arc few ofus who do not respect the misguided man whose body "lies a-mouldering in the grave" while " his soul goes marching on."

Of course Douglass met Mrs. H.B. Stowe whose "Uncle Tom's Cabin'' was one of the strongest weapons with which the anti-slavery tight was fought . Mrs. Stowe invited him to her house to talk over a plan for the bettering the condition of the colored people. She wanted a college at first but Douglass convinced her that shops

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to teach them how to earn their living would be of greater practical value. Another person whom Douglass admired and loved was Abraham Lincoln, and well he might. "I shall never forget my first interview with this great man." he writes; "I was accompaned to the [271.26–272.4] without reserve or a doubt." The fairmindedness and humanity of Abraham Lincoln's character were never better shown than in this interview with Douglass. The latter came on behalf of the colored troops. He wanted more favors for them. He was not satisfied with the entering of the wedge, but he wanted to drive it up to the head with one blow. First, he wanted them paid the same as the white soldiers; second, he wanted a Southern prisoner of war hanged for every colored prisoner of war hanged in the South, and, third, he wanted them to be rewarded by promotion for bravery the same as the white men. If Mr. Lincoln had granted his requests Jefferson Davis would have been the next President of the United States, and there would have been a national riot, exceeding in its horrors the one in New York. I will give Mr. Lincoln's reply, as Douglass reports it:

"He began by saying that [272.29- 273.14] War should commend to him."

I have given up my entire letter to this book, but as your readers will probably never meet it or know anything more of its contents, and as it is really an important chapter in the history of the anti-slavery movement and of the war, it is well worth the space.

ERASMUS

THE CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH OF A SLAVE. E.L.W. London Sunday Magazine, (1882), 11.

SLAVERY in the British dominions was swept away by an outburst of generous and humane feeling. In the United States the same institution was destroyed amid the blood and fire of a tremendous revolutionary convulsion. Easy-going people are now too ready to assume that slavery is a thing of the past, and that to dwell upon its miseries and wrong at this time of day is to rake up an old story which had better be forgotten. There could not be a greater mistake. Those who take the trouble to inquire, or indeed to observe the statements contained in publications of the day, know too well that slavery still exists, and not only so, but that in the interior of Africa and on the African coast the slave-trade goes on in all its enormity. Thousands of men, women, and children are every year captured, sold, driven long distances, chained, beaten, starved, and dying "like flies" by the wayside and on board ship. Slavery is not yet an extinct institution, and it is well that British people should retain a vivid realisation of what slavery means, in order that sentiments of common humanity and compassion may move them to sustain that honourable crusade against this accursed system to which it is the distinction of the British Government to have committed itself. It is therefore no mere old-world narrative. calculated only to harrow the feelings and lead to no practical result, which we find in the pages of the volume which has prompted us to write these lines.

The autobiography of Frederick Douglass. who was once well known in

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England as a "fugitive slave" and a lecturer on the subject of slavery, and who for many years past has occupied an honourable position as a public man in the United States, has lately been published in America and in this country. A more thrilling, tragic, and romantic narrative has seldom been given to the world. The record is brought down to the present year, and it thus includes not only a sketch of an individual career of quite exceptional interest, but also of the course of a great national movement and upheaval, abounding in heroic and terrible episodes, and in illustrations, on a stupendous scale, of the awful penalties of national wrong-doing and of the inexorable certainty with which the wheels of Divine Providence "grind small," although they may, as so often happens, "grind slowly." "Yes," we cannot but say to ourselves as we read these pages, "the cry of the negro in America as certainly and as truly went up into the cars of God as did the cry of the Israelites in Egypt; and the sea of blood through which the slaves of the United States passed to freedom told of the wrath of the Lord against the oppressor not less distinctly and emphatically than did the destruction of Pharaoh and his host in that great catastrophe which called forth Miriam's impassioned song of thanksgiving and of victory."

The child-life of Frederick Douglass. as described in his reminiscences, affords pathetic pictures of sorrows and wrongs. such as. no doubt, millions of slave children had to endure, but which, as we read of them now, seem as if they must have belonged to a far-off age and to a country upon which the light of Christianity had not dawned, instead of belonging, as they do, to our own time and to a social condition professedly, and indeed actually, penetrated by many Christian influences. He was horn about the year 1817, on one of the great slave-holding plantations of the Southern States. There were about a thousand slaves on the estate; and however various the outward lot of these might be, from that of the sleek and pampered household servants to that of the hard-driven, ill-fed, overtasked field labourers, all alike were subject to the appalling degradation of being regarded and treated as property and as such were just as absolutely at the disposal of their owner as the cattle, horses, and dogs of the establishment.

Frederick Douglass's first recollections are of a cabin which served as a rough shelter for himself and a number of other children, placed with him under the charge of an old slave woman, whom he was taught to regard as his grandmother. His mother was a "field hand," and it was only by a walk of many miles, after her day's labour was done, that she was able to snatch an occasional visit to her little child. Brief and rare as those interviews were, the child caught from them some glimpses of a mother's heart, and the impression made was indelible. He recalls the image of his mother still. and remembers her as "tall and finely proportioned, of dark, glossy complexion, with regular features." and as having been "remarkably sedate and dignified." She was the only slave of the district who could read, and her son's impression, still fondly cherished, is that she was a woman richly endowed by nature, and of tender maternal affections. Her visits, however, broke off abruptly, and her child seems to haw learned, in some dimly remembered way, that death had