July 31, 2017 • 36 mins
Frederick Douglass was an orator, writer, statesman and social reformer. His early life shaped the truly remarkable advocate he became, and the two primary causes he campaigned for — the abolition of slavery and women's suffrage.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to steph you missed in history class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy B. Wilson and I'm Holly Frying. We are
just back from Seneca Falls. Yeah, they were so kind
(00:22):
to invite us to Convention Days. Yes, at the Women's
Rights National Historical Park. We had a live show there
on Sunday this past Sunday it is now Tuesday. We
did Unfortunately, though we had a little bit of an
issue with the recording. Yeah, well, it's like there's a
combination of factors. We had the just immense honor of
(00:45):
doing our live show in Wesleyan Chapel, which is where
the Seneca Falls convention was held. As you might imagine
from a chapel dating back to that area, it is
essentially a big empty space. It's a big box adjacent
to the road. Um. So, like for a number of reasons,
(01:06):
it just we were not able to get clear audio
of the live show that we did that day. So
we are still going to talk about Frederick Douglas. Yeah,
we'll just do, yes, a studio version of that show.
We do. Definitely they'll want to thank the folks of
the National Park service um and Ashley Nottingham, who was
(01:27):
a person who did all of the arranging or a
lot of the arranging with us specifically for this, like,
thank everyone for having us out because we had a
wonderful time. Yeah, we had. I was so delighted by
just how fun and kind and welcoming and warm everyone was.
It was really lovely. Yes. Uh. And it is also
a better service to Frederick Douglas to to have a nice,
(01:50):
clean recording of him rather than uh, the somewhat noisier
one from on the day. So today, as we just said,
we are going to talk about the life and work
of orator, writer, states of an and social reformer Frederick Douglas.
Frederick Douglas's work was just tireless and prolific, and we
could literally fill a whole episode of our show just
(02:10):
listing off the titles of all his writings and all
the positions that he held, and all the laws that
he influenced, and all the speeches that he made, and
all the people's whose rights he championed during his lifetime.
He was even nominated for Vice President of the United
States on the ticket with Victoria Woodhall in eighteen seventy two.
Just as an example of a thing that happened that
(02:32):
we're not even going to talk about in detail today.
So our focus is really going to be on how
his early life shaped the truly remarkable advocate that he became,
and that his work with the two primary causes that
he campaigned the most for. He campaigned for a lot
of stuff that would all fall under the umbrella of
like humanitarianism and human rights in some way, but the
(02:55):
two biggest parts where the abolition of slavery and women's suffrage.
Frederick Douglas was born Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey around February
of eighteen eighteen in a region of Maryland's eastern shore
known as Tuckahoe. He was enslaved from birth, and his
exact birth date and place of birth are not known.
(03:15):
His father was white, and although there was speculation that
he may have been the owner or overseer of Douglas's mother, Harriet,
his identity remains unknown as well. Douglas was separated from
his mother while still a baby and sent to live
with her parents, Betsy and Isaac Bailey. Betsy was enslaved
and Isaac was free, and Betsy was known for her
(03:36):
skills as a nurse and her knack for making and
using fishing nets, along with being particularly good at growing
sweet potatoes. People from all around would come to Frederick
Douglas's grandmother to be like, can you help me out
with my sweet potatoes because you are the best at
growing them. That's a good life skill to have, ma'am.
But Betsy's primary duty was actually caring for children, in
(03:57):
particular her five daughter's children. Enslaved women were typically sent
right back to work as soon as possible after giving birth,
and they were not allowed to raise their own children,
so Frederick had very little memory of his mother until
the age of about seven. Those years with his grandmother
were an odd mix of relative freedom and a growing
(04:17):
comprehension that he was not free. The children had few
physical comforts they just they didn't have really playthings or
much to eat, but they also had few worries or constraints.
In My Bondage and My Freedom, which was one of
Douglas's autobiographies, he described the early years of a young
enslaved boy as quote in a word, he is, for
(04:39):
the most part of his first eight years of life,
a spirited, joyous, uproarious, and happy boy upon whom troubles
fall only like water on a duck's back. But as
he got older, Douglas gradually came to perceive that the
cabin that they were living in was not his grandmother's
It and his grandmother, all of the other children, and
(05:01):
he himself were in fact the property of someone they
knew as old Master, and that was Captain Aaron Anthony,
and Douglas faced a dawning understanding that he would at
some point be forced to leave his grandmother to begin
a life of enslaved labor. That happened when Douglas was
seven or eight, and he was sent to the plantation
of Colonel Edward Lloyd, who had previously been governor of
(05:23):
Maryland and a United States Senator. And they're a woman
known as Aunt Katie was the one responsible for the children,
including some of her own, so she was sort of
an exception to the typical behavior that women were not
allowed to raise their own children. Aunt Katie's treatment of
the children was incredibly cruel, and Douglas often went hungry
(05:43):
when she would give his share of food to her
own children instead. And it was on Lloyd's plantation that
Douglas got to see just a little more of his mother,
who was a field hand on another plantation. Even then, however,
he didn't see her very often at all, and she
died when he was not yet ten years old. After
her death, Douglas learned that, quite unusually for a field hand,
(06:06):
she had actually known how to read, and in later years,
when racist commentators suggested that his skill with language probably
came from his white father, he would insist that the
credit should instead go to his mother. He still wasn't
at this point in his life big enough to do
field work, so while on Lloyd's plantation, Douglas did chores
and errands, mainly for Lucretia Auld, who was Captain Anthony's
(06:30):
married daughter. When Douglas was about eight, he was then
hired out to another one of the Alds, Hugh Auld,
Lucretia's brother in law, who worked as a ship carpenter
in Baltimore. Douglas would later describe this as quote one
of the most interesting and fortunate events of my life.
Not only was he removed from the cruelty and brutality
(06:50):
of the plantation, but he was also introduced to Hugh's wife, Sophia.
Apparently unaware that it was illegal, or that it's illegality
was a techno for controlling enslaved people. Sophia taught Frederick
to read. Hugh All put a stop to these reading
lessons as soon as he found out about them, but
(07:11):
it was at this point too late to stop Douglas
from learning how to read. And Frederick Douglas had already
realized that literacy would be a key to finding his
way to freedom. So when Sophia's reading lessons stopped, Douglas
started trading his bread to white children that he would
run into when he was out on the old Errands.
(07:31):
And he would do this in exchange for their teaching
him a few words out of a Webster's spelling book.
He also gradually saved enough money to buy another book,
The Columbian Orator, and this was a collection of speeches
and essays and poems that had come into use as
a school book. It began with general instructions for speaking,
and it included the work of men like George Washington,
(07:53):
John Milton, Socrates, and Cistero. And this he read and reread,
finding a piece called Dialogue between a Master and Slave
particularly compelling, and in that piece of writing, a master
chastises his recaptured slave for having run away, and the slave,
eloquently dissecting the inhumanity and injustice of slavery, convinces the
(08:14):
master to free him. This is to me one of
the most amazing things about Frederick Douglas. He was not
just teaching himself to read by practicing. He was teaching
himself rhetoric and how to make an argument and eloquence
by studying this work, and the whole time that he
was living in Baltimore, he continued teaching himself, eventually also
(08:35):
using old copybooks and school books belonging to the auld
Son in order to teach himself how to write, and
as he got older, he started teaching other enslaved children
he met to read as well. Baltimore was formative in
other ways to Douglas. First heard the word abolition while
he was there, and he began to piece together that
(08:55):
there was an ambolitionist movement working to end slavery. He
also became religious, worshiping in an African Methodist Episcopal church,
while simultaneously coming to understand that the scriptures were being
used to both justify slavery and to convince enslaved people
that they should submit to it. He became increasingly aware
of the hypocrisy of Christian slave owners who applied Christ's
(09:19):
teachings only to white men while treating their enslaved workforce
with severe cruelty. Frederick Douglas remained in Baltimore for about
seven years. At this point, there was a series of
deaths within his owner's family, as well as some inner
family drama, and Thomas all demanded that he be returned
(09:40):
to the plantation. Douglas only worked directly for Thomas Auld
for about nine months, though he had become, in the
eyes of his enslavers, a troublemaker. He tried to start
a Sabbath school to teach other enslaved people, and he
started standing up for himself and other people. So from
Thomas Auld's point of view, Douglas had been ruined. So
(10:03):
Thomas Ald hired Douglas out to a man named Edward Covey,
who was a notorious slave breaker. So this is a
man to whom slave owners would hire out their troublesome
enslaved people for free so that he could train them. And,
in Douglas's words quote, Mr. Covey could have under him
the most fiery bloods of the neighborhood for the simple
(10:23):
reward of returning them to their owners well broken. For
the next six months, Covey beat Douglas on a nearly
daily basis, and he also engaged in a sort of
psychological warfare which was meant to make him feel as
though he was constantly watched and constantly threatened. In eighteen
thirty five, after his time with Covey was up, Douglas
was hired out as a field hand to William Freeland,
(10:45):
who was not nearly as cruel as Thomas Auld or
Edward Covey had been. Douglas once again tried to start
a Sabbath school to teach and educate other enslaved people.
On January one, eighteen thirty six, Douglas resolved that he
would be free by the end of the year, and
he planned to liberate several of the other men enslaved
(11:06):
with him as well. He forged passes for the group
which said they had permission to go to Baltimore, but
unfortunately their plan was discovered and all of the men
were captured and taken to jail. After this escape attempt,
Thomas all decided it would be best to send Frederick
Douglas away, especially because of the Sabbath School and the
influence that he was having among the enslaved people in
(11:29):
the neighborhood. It wasn't just that Thomas Auld was finding
Douglas's behavior to be unacceptable, it was also that he
was drawing the ire of other slave owners in the area.
Thomas Auld was afraid that some harm was going to
come to his property. So Douglas was sent back to Baltimore,
and it was from there that he ultimately would escape.
(11:51):
And we will get to that after a quick sponsor break.
So back in Baltimore with Hugh and Sophie Auld, Frederick
Douglas was first hired out to a shipyard, but after
being attacked by a group of white laborers, which is
something the authorities refused to investigate because no white witness
(12:14):
would attest to it, he was allowed to seek out
his own work. He would basically go and solicit work
in places that he felt more safe working, and then
he would turn over all of the pay that he
earned to Hugh Auld at the end of each week.
And eventually Douglas asked for permission to hire himself out
during his off hours, and this would allow him to
(12:36):
keep the pay above and beyond what was due back
to the Alds, and it was viewed as a huge privilege.
He secretly planned to save this pay in order to
fund his escape, but his permission to hire his time
was revoked after he attended a camp meeting one Saturday
night instead of delivering his pay to Hugh Auld on schedule.
This pushed Douglas's plans to escape into high gear. He
(12:59):
was basicly afraid that if he made any kind of
wrong move, it was going to become even harder for
him to escape. They would be keeping an even closer
eye on him. At this point, he had met and
fallen in love with a free black woman named Anna Murray.
She secured a sailor's uniform for him and gave him
some of her savings to fund the way, and then
(13:19):
he traveled using identification papers that had been borrowed from
a free black man. He traveled by train and then
steamboat and left Baltimore and traveled to New York City
on September three, thirty eight. For a long time, he
would not tell anyone exactly how he had done this,
because he was afraid that if he did that escape
(13:40):
route from Baltimore would get shut down, and once he
arrived at a safe house belonging to abolitionist David Ruggles,
he sent for Anna and they were married on September
fift The pair would eventually have five children together, Rosetta, Lewis, Frederick, Charles,
and Annie. Knowing that Douglas had were calking ships in Baltimore,
(14:02):
Ruggles suggested that he go to New Bedford, Massachusetts, which
had a large whaling and shipping industry, as well as
a sizeable free black community. Douglas had traveled under several
names while making his way to New Bedford, eventually landing
on Johnson, but once he got there, there were so
many other Johnson's in New Bedford that he thought it
(14:23):
would be confusing to have yet another one, so he
and Anna took the last name of Douglas. At first,
the Douglas's life in New Bedford was dedicated to just
trying to make ends meet and to find a home
in their new community, and Douglas also resumed going to church.
After encountering segregation and racism at New Bedford's Methodist church,
(14:44):
he joined the African Methodist Episcopal Zionist Church and Eventually
he became a lay minister there. A few months after
settling in New Bedford, Douglas got a copy of William
Lloyd Garrison's abolitionist newspaper, The Liberator. This was his entry
into the thti slavery movement that he had first heard
about back in Baltimore. Soon he was attending abolitionist meetings
(15:06):
in In eighteen forty one, he attended and spoke at
an anti slavery convention in Nantucket. This is his first
time really speaking in public, and he didn't think he
did a particularly great job. But afterward John A. Collins
of the Massachusetts Anti Slavery Society asked Frederick Douglas to
come and work for them as a speaker. He began
(15:27):
to travel around the North and Midwest speaking against slavery.
And although Douglas had a remarkable ability to draw from
his own experience to change hearts and minds, his opposition
to slavery was not about his own enslavement. His focus
was on humanity as a whole in the inherent brutality
and destructiveness of the institution of slavery. But by writing
(15:50):
about his own experience, he was giving potential abolitionists particularly
in the North, something many had lacked, and that was
a window into the reality so the institution of slavery.
This was incredibly important to the success of the movement
for abolition, especially in the North. Slavery affected people's lives,
particularly white people's lives, in really dramatic ways that they
(16:13):
weren't necessarily even consciously aware of. Many wealthy and prominent
families had earned their fortunes either directly through the slave
trade or through industries that relied on enslaved labor. So
even if no one in a community was currently enslaving anyone,
it was incredibly likely that its wealthiest and most influential
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families were living on inherited wealth that came at least
in part from slavery. And people were also traveling on
roads and railroads, and attending schools and working in buildings
that had been built by enslaved people, including the US
Capital Building. So people were living in a nation that
had been built on and financed through slavery, but they
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often didn't have a conscious connection to what any of
that actually meant. That changed as Douglas spoke and wrote
about fighting off dogs for crumbs of food, sleeping on
bare floors with little protection from the cold, brutal beatings,
the murder of an enslaved man named Denby at the
hands of an overseer, the wilful destruction and separation of
(17:20):
enslaved families, and the constant exhausting work that continued well
after the work day was over, as enslaved people then
had to care for their own food, care for their quarters,
mend their clothes, and on and on. But it wasn't
simply Douglas's documentation of the daily conditions and degradations of
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enslavement that influenced the abolition movement. He also wrote extensively
on how the institution of slavery impacted the enslavers as
well as the enslaved. By making enslaved people into a
class that was supposedly less than human, enslavers were also
corrupting their own humanity. These were all things that Douglas
(18:00):
had experienced and learned and thought about during his years
of enslavement, and he was particularly adept at putting them
into words in a way that motivated readers and listeners
to act. We should make clear he wasn't the only
previously enslaved person that was writing and speaking about their
own experience, but he did become particularly famous. In eighteen
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forty five, he published the first of three autobiographies, Narrative
of the Life of Frederick Douglas, an American Slave, in
part to debunk critics claims that he was too eloquent
who have ever really been a slave? And in it
he detailed the experiences that we talked about in the
first part of our episode today, including naming who his
(18:43):
owners had been, and that was a colossal risk under
fugitive slave laws. He could be captured and returned to Maryland,
and as his book became a bestseller, he left the country,
sailing for Liverpool on August sixteenth of eighteen forty five.
He arrived Fived in Britain, just before the start of
the Great Famine in Ireland. As a side note, this
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was not the only time that Frederick Douglas would have
to flee the country. He did again in eighteen fifty
nine after John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry, after investigators
found a letter that Douglas had written that could have
led to his being named as a co conspirator. Douglas
at that point didn't return home until eighteen sixty as
the nation was careening towards Civil war. After learning that
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his daughter Annie had died at the age of eleven,
so jumping back to eighteen forty five. For nearly two years,
Douglas traveled around the British Isles and spoke against slavery
and four civil rights, and while he was there, British
supporters raised the funds to purchase his freedom. Thomas all
First sold him to Hugh Auld for the sum of
(19:48):
one hundred dollars, and Hugh released him from slavery on
December five, eighty six. Douglas returned to the United States
the following year, and he and his family moved to Rochester,
New York work. Douglas received some criticism for allowing himself
to be purchased, since to some it legitimized the institution
that he was fighting against. They basically thought he was
(20:10):
being complicit in the very thing that he was advocating
to have abolished. But from Douglas's point of view, he
had a calling and a duty to return to the
United States and continue to fight slavery, something he would
best be able to do if he was not simultaneously
trying to evade capture or captured and returned South. Of course,
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the Civil War started in eighteen sixty one, and by
that point Frederick Douglas was one of the most famous
black men in the United States. Although the South was
fighting the war in large part to protect and expand
the institution of slavery, at first, the North was fighting
primarily to preserve the Union. Douglas became an outspoken advocate
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for making the abolition of slavery one of the Union's
goals as well, and he also recruited for the Union Army,
and two of his sons served in the fifty fourth
Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry. In eighteen sixty three, Douglas met with
Abraham Lincoln about the treatment of black soldiers fighting for
the Union and advocated for their receiving equal pay. Of course,
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the abolition of slavery did ultimately get folded into the
Union schools in the Civil War, and when the war
was over, slavery was indeed abolished. Douglas then turned his
attention to protecting the lives and civil rights of African Americans,
including campaigning for the right to vote. He also encouraged
abolitionist organizations to turn their attention to Native Americans, whose
(21:37):
condition he called, quote the saddest chapter in our history.
Frederick Douglas never like looked at an accomplishment and then said, okay,
we're done now. If the if the thing he had
been campaigning for, was successful, he would then find the
next thing. And after the war he also held a
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number of so shill in political positions, including Charge da
Fair for the Dominican Republic, Minister Resident and Consul General
to Haiti, and the Recorder of Deeds of the District
of Columbia. He served as president of the Freedman Savings Bank,
and he was on the board at Howard University. The
list of accomplishments and appointments that he had goes on
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and on and on. It is quite lengthy. Um. And
even before the Civil War, Frederick Douglas had become a
supporter of women's rights. And especially because we were originally
giving this episode as a live show at Convention Days
in celebration of the anniversary of the Seneca Falls Convention,
made a lot of sense to spend a little more
(22:40):
time on that which we are going to do. After
another quick sponsor break, Frederick Douglas first met Susan B.
Anthony in eighteen forty five, but his direct involvement with
the movement for women's suffrage really started after he moved
to Rochester with this family in eighteen forty seven. That December,
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he published his first issue of his newspaper, The North Star,
which was one of several newspapers he would create and
run during his lifetime. The North Star was printed with
the motto right is of no sex, Truth is of
no color. God is the father of us all, and
we are all brethren and The Seneca Falls Convention began
(23:25):
on July nineteenth of eighteen forty eight, and Douglas was
one of only thirty two men out of about three
hundred attendees. Of these men, he was the only one
who supported Elizabeth Katie Stanton's resolution that women be allowed
to vote, and he seconded her motion that the right
to vote be one of their resolutions. He was one
of the signers of the Declaration of Sentiments. Another woman's
(23:48):
rights convention was held almost immediately in Rochester on August
two of eighteen forty eight, and Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth
Katie Stanton recommended that Douglas be made its chair, although
he ultimately wasn't. He did attend and speak at this
convention as well, and both conventions were covered in the
newspaper of the North Star. This was really um like
(24:10):
Frederick Douglas was already under a huge amount of scrutiny
because he was a black man living in America, and
becoming involved in the women's rights movement brought on a
whole other layer of scrutiny because men who were involved
in the movement were viewed with extreme suspicion and derision.
There was a lot of undertone of like, something must
be wrong with you for you to be into this. Yes,
(24:32):
so there's definitely a lot of bravery in that move
And in addition to being actively involved in the movement
for women's rights and suffrage, Douglas took those ideas back
with him to the movement for abolition. In eight Douglas
presided at the National Convention of Colored Freedman in Cleveland,
and under his leadership, the convention passed a resolution affirming
(24:53):
equality between the sexes and women were actively invited to participate.
Douglas presided over and introduced similar affirmations at other abolitionist
meetings as well. Although obviously there were also black suffragists
such as I. Toby Wells Barnett and A. Julia Cooper.
The suffrage movement as a whole was largely focused on
(25:15):
the needs and wants of relatively affluent white women, like
if you read the Declaration of Sentiments, there are parts
in it about things like your property becoming your husband's
property when you marry. So we're starting from the foundation
of women affluent enough to have property. It's kind of
a narrow segment of women. At the end of the
(25:37):
Civil War Reconstruction efforts to guarantee civil rights, including the
right to vote to former slaves and their descendants, clashed
with this focus of looking for voting rights for white women.
At first, it actually seemed as though these two movements
for suffrage could combine. At the first Women's Rights Convention
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after the Civil War, its name was changed to the
Equal Rights Association, which would work toward universal suffrage, not
just suffrage for women, and Frederick Douglas was one of
the Equal Rights Association's three vice presidents. But as the
Reconstruction amendments to the Constitution were drafted, a schism developed
within the movement. The May eighteen sixty nine meeting of
(26:20):
the Equal Rights Association took place after Congress had passed
the Fifteenth Amendment, as it was up for ratification by
the States. This amendment read quote the right of citizens
of the United States to vote shall not be denied
or abridged by the United States or by any State,
on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.
(26:41):
So this amendment made no reference to the rights of
vote as related to sex, and Douglas was willing to
accept this less than universal suffrage because he knew how
much resistance there was to women's voting rights in much
of the nation, and he thought it was likely that
the fifteenth Amendment could only be ratified it if it
didn't include women. He also thought that white women wanted
(27:04):
the right to vote but had other ways to take
political action, while overall the black population desperately needed to
vote because they had no other means to take political
action themselves. Of course, many of the Equal Rights Association
vehemently disagreed, and the ensuing discussion, Douglas said, quote, when
women because they are women are dragged from their homes
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and hung upon lamp posts, when their children are torn
from their arms and their brains dashed out upon the pavement,
when they are objects of insult and outrage at every turn,
when they are in danger of having their homes burnt
down over their heads, when their children are not allowed
to enter schools, they will have an urgency to obtain
(27:48):
the ballot equal to black men. Someone from the audience
then asked whether this was not also true of black
women as well, and he answered yes, yes, yes, it
is true of the black woman, but not because she
is a woman, but because she is black. So he
was basically pointing out that like yes, it was right
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and and important for women to have the right to vote,
but the need was a lot more dire for black
people to have the rights to vote. The debate over
the fifteenth Amendment split the Equal Rights Association. At the
conclusion of the meeting, it was disbanded, with Susan B.
Anthony and Elizabeth Katie Stanton forming the National Woman's Suffrage
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Association to once again focus only on voting rights for women,
even to the extent of directly opposing the fifteenth Amendment.
Those who supported the fifteenth Amendment formed the American Woman
Suffrage Association. We should also make it clear that this
was not just an ideological dispute over the wording of
(28:52):
the fifteenth Amendment and whether it included any references to
sex or gender. There was also explicit sitism at work,
with Elizabeth Katie Stanton, for example, saying quote, what will
we and our daughters suffer if these degraded black men
are allowed to have the rights? That would make them
even worse than our Saxon fathers. I also kept finding
(29:16):
reference to a quote by Susan B. Anthony about how
she would rather cut off her right arm than campaign
for vote for black people before women. I couldn't find
the original place where she purportedly said that, but it
came up over and over. There were also elements of
the suffrage movement who argued that women should have the
right to vote because white women would help form a
(29:38):
voting block that would help maintain white supremacy, even if
black people could also vote, and one such advocate of
this was Henry B. Blackwell, husband of suffragist Lucy Stone.
When the fifteenth Amendment was ratified on February three, eight seventy,
Frederick Douglas immediately began campaigning for a sixteenth Amendment to
(29:59):
grant voting rights to women and he would continue to
advocate for women's suffrage for the rest of his life. Sadly,
Charlotte Woodward was the only signer of the Seneca Falls
Conventions Declaration of Sentiments to live to see the ratification
of the Nineteenth Amendment giving women the right to vote
on August eighteenth of nineteen twenty. Apparently because of her
(30:19):
poor health, she never actually got to vote herself. But
even then, the same racially discriminatory voting laws that had
already been suppressing black men's right to vote since the
end of Reconstruction just applied to black women as well.
So although the letter of the Nineteenth Amendment gave black
women the right to vote, it was not until the
(30:41):
Voting Rights Act of nineteen sixty five that many Black
women and other women who were part of, you know,
minority populations, were actually able to do so. And of course,
discriminatory voting laws and attempts to suppress voters still exists today.
I feel like every time I turn around, there's another
case before the Supreme Court about it. To close out
(31:03):
his story, we're going to return for a moment to
Frederick Douglas's last years in the eighteen seventies, He moved
to Washington, d c. And his wife, Anna, died of
a stroke in eighteen eighty two. In eighteen eighty four,
he remarried a woman named Helen Pitts, which raised some
eyebrows because she was about twenty years younger than he
was and she was also white. On February, Frederick Douglas
(31:28):
went to a meeting of the National Council of Women.
He came home and began preparing to give a speech
at a local church when he died suddenly of a
heart attack. He was about seventy seven. He had been
campaigning for equal rights until literally the last day of
his life, that is Frederick Douglas. We were actually joined
(31:49):
by Frederick Douglas there in Seneca Falls. Yeah. It was
quite exciting. They had a wonderful reenactor there who was
really great, and he came in a halfway through and
I turned into Buddy the Elf. Yeah. He uh. He
was very gracious. He he was um, he was so kind.
He we had a lot of people who wanted to
(32:11):
have pictures made after the show. Um, and he accommodated everyone.
It was super gracious and warm and lovely the whole time. Yeah,
so everyone we met uh and while we were in
Seneca Falls. UM was gracious and kind and welcoming. The
National Park Service staff that we met were all amazing.
(32:33):
We I said. I said at the top of the show,
we were so honored to be able to do this show.
Um there in the Wesleyan Chapel and its great. So
if you get a chance to go to Seneca Falls,
especially to go to a future convention days Uh, Yeah,
we had a great time. That's a pretty great event. Yeah,
(32:55):
Sadly we did not get to spend a ton of
time in Seneca Falls. It was a very Uh that
was a quick, quick turnaround trip. Yeah, it was a
quick turnaround trip for both of us. Oh, and I
also would like to thank my spouse for riding with
me slush and driving the car all the way there
and back. We made a weekend trip out of it,
and I don't think I could have made the drive
(33:18):
by myself because it's it's it's a stretch. Do you
also have some listener mail for us? I sure do. Um.
This is from Rick and it is about our Unearthed
in July episode. Rick says, I was listening to your
latest Unearthed episode while commuting to work today and your
discussion of brew stones felt especially serendipitous to me. In California,
(33:42):
fourth graders learn about California history and in particular, the
California Missions system. My daughter is entering fourth grade in
the Falls, and my wife and I have taken upon
ourselves to take our daughter to visit all twenty one
missions in California. This weekend, we were visiting the mission
San Francisco, Solano and so No, the northernmost and last
mission built. During the tour, from our docent, we were
(34:05):
told about how the Native American tribes in the area
Miwalk and Pomo cooked inside woven baskets. Obviously, they couldn't
place them on a fire like you would with an
iron pot, so they would drop a heated stone into
the basket filled with acorn porridge, which was the staple
food source for them. Apparently, worldwide, the use of stones
for cooking liquids has been prevalent in all Stone age societies.
(34:27):
Thank you so much for your incredible show. Even as
a rabid fan of history, I learned something new every week.
Keep up the good work, Rick. Thank you so much. Rick,
I somehow did not know that, and now I do,
and I am kind of delighted to know that this
is a phenomenon from all over the world. I think
I just assumed that if you did not have iron
(34:49):
pots yet and you were cooking food over a fire,
you were skewering things on sticks. This. Um, I gotta confess.
I always have that like crafty part of me that
wants to try stuff like this, but I envision making
a horrible disaster. Yeah, and you you had brought up
(35:09):
when we did that unearthed episode that it brings a
whole new meaning to stone soup Um story that many
of us have heard as children. Anyway, one more thank
you to everyone who was involved at convention days and
Seneca Falls in the National Park Service, folks, all of that,
which was we were so glad to be there. We
had such a good time. Fingers crossed that. Uh. We
(35:33):
we don't have to studio redo our live shows very often.
I think this is only the second time, and uh
the first time, it was only part of it that
we needed to read. So anyway, if you would like
to write to us, we were at History Podcast at
how Stuffworks dot com. We're also on Facebook at facebook
dot com, slash miss in History and on Twitter. At
miss in History, are Tumbler, miss in history dot tembler
(35:54):
dot com, basically all of our social media, including Pinterest
and Instagram all at miss in history dot com. You
can come to our parent company's website, which is how
stuff works dot com to find information on just about
anything your heart desires. You can come to our website,
which is missed in history dot com, where you will
find a searchable archive of every episode that we have
ever done, also show notes for all the episodes Holly
(36:15):
and I have done other cool stuff. So you can
do all that and a whole lot more at how
stuff works dot com or missed the history dot com.
For more on this and thousands of other topics, is
it how stuff works dot com.
Welcome to steph you missed in history class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy B. Wilson and I'm Holly Frying. We are
just back from Seneca Falls. Yeah, they were so kind
(00:22):
to invite us to Convention Days. Yes, at the Women's
Rights National Historical Park. We had a live show there
on Sunday this past Sunday it is now Tuesday. We
did Unfortunately, though we had a little bit of an
issue with the recording. Yeah, well, it's like there's a
combination of factors. We had the just immense honor of
(00:45):
doing our live show in Wesleyan Chapel, which is where
the Seneca Falls convention was held. As you might imagine
from a chapel dating back to that area, it is
essentially a big empty space. It's a big box adjacent
to the road. Um. So, like for a number of reasons,
(01:06):
it just we were not able to get clear audio
of the live show that we did that day. So
we are still going to talk about Frederick Douglas. Yeah,
we'll just do, yes, a studio version of that show.
We do. Definitely they'll want to thank the folks of
the National Park service um and Ashley Nottingham, who was
(01:27):
a person who did all of the arranging or a
lot of the arranging with us specifically for this, like,
thank everyone for having us out because we had a
wonderful time. Yeah, we had. I was so delighted by
just how fun and kind and welcoming and warm everyone was.
It was really lovely. Yes. Uh. And it is also
a better service to Frederick Douglas to to have a nice,
(01:50):
clean recording of him rather than uh, the somewhat noisier
one from on the day. So today, as we just said,
we are going to talk about the life and work
of orator, writer, states of an and social reformer Frederick Douglas.
Frederick Douglas's work was just tireless and prolific, and we
could literally fill a whole episode of our show just
(02:10):
listing off the titles of all his writings and all
the positions that he held, and all the laws that
he influenced, and all the speeches that he made, and
all the people's whose rights he championed during his lifetime.
He was even nominated for Vice President of the United
States on the ticket with Victoria Woodhall in eighteen seventy two.
Just as an example of a thing that happened that
(02:32):
we're not even going to talk about in detail today.
So our focus is really going to be on how
his early life shaped the truly remarkable advocate that he became,
and that his work with the two primary causes that
he campaigned the most for. He campaigned for a lot
of stuff that would all fall under the umbrella of
like humanitarianism and human rights in some way, but the
(02:55):
two biggest parts where the abolition of slavery and women's suffrage.
Frederick Douglas was born Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey around February
of eighteen eighteen in a region of Maryland's eastern shore
known as Tuckahoe. He was enslaved from birth, and his
exact birth date and place of birth are not known.
(03:15):
His father was white, and although there was speculation that
he may have been the owner or overseer of Douglas's mother, Harriet,
his identity remains unknown as well. Douglas was separated from
his mother while still a baby and sent to live
with her parents, Betsy and Isaac Bailey. Betsy was enslaved
and Isaac was free, and Betsy was known for her
(03:36):
skills as a nurse and her knack for making and
using fishing nets, along with being particularly good at growing
sweet potatoes. People from all around would come to Frederick
Douglas's grandmother to be like, can you help me out
with my sweet potatoes because you are the best at
growing them. That's a good life skill to have, ma'am.
But Betsy's primary duty was actually caring for children, in
(03:57):
particular her five daughter's children. Enslaved women were typically sent
right back to work as soon as possible after giving birth,
and they were not allowed to raise their own children,
so Frederick had very little memory of his mother until
the age of about seven. Those years with his grandmother
were an odd mix of relative freedom and a growing
(04:17):
comprehension that he was not free. The children had few
physical comforts they just they didn't have really playthings or
much to eat, but they also had few worries or constraints.
In My Bondage and My Freedom, which was one of
Douglas's autobiographies, he described the early years of a young
enslaved boy as quote in a word, he is, for
(04:39):
the most part of his first eight years of life,
a spirited, joyous, uproarious, and happy boy upon whom troubles
fall only like water on a duck's back. But as
he got older, Douglas gradually came to perceive that the
cabin that they were living in was not his grandmother's
It and his grandmother, all of the other children, and
(05:01):
he himself were in fact the property of someone they
knew as old Master, and that was Captain Aaron Anthony,
and Douglas faced a dawning understanding that he would at
some point be forced to leave his grandmother to begin
a life of enslaved labor. That happened when Douglas was
seven or eight, and he was sent to the plantation
of Colonel Edward Lloyd, who had previously been governor of
(05:23):
Maryland and a United States Senator. And they're a woman
known as Aunt Katie was the one responsible for the children,
including some of her own, so she was sort of
an exception to the typical behavior that women were not
allowed to raise their own children. Aunt Katie's treatment of
the children was incredibly cruel, and Douglas often went hungry
(05:43):
when she would give his share of food to her
own children instead. And it was on Lloyd's plantation that
Douglas got to see just a little more of his mother,
who was a field hand on another plantation. Even then, however,
he didn't see her very often at all, and she
died when he was not yet ten years old. After
her death, Douglas learned that, quite unusually for a field hand,
(06:06):
she had actually known how to read, and in later years,
when racist commentators suggested that his skill with language probably
came from his white father, he would insist that the
credit should instead go to his mother. He still wasn't
at this point in his life big enough to do
field work, so while on Lloyd's plantation, Douglas did chores
and errands, mainly for Lucretia Auld, who was Captain Anthony's
(06:30):
married daughter. When Douglas was about eight, he was then
hired out to another one of the Alds, Hugh Auld,
Lucretia's brother in law, who worked as a ship carpenter
in Baltimore. Douglas would later describe this as quote one
of the most interesting and fortunate events of my life.
Not only was he removed from the cruelty and brutality
(06:50):
of the plantation, but he was also introduced to Hugh's wife, Sophia.
Apparently unaware that it was illegal, or that it's illegality
was a techno for controlling enslaved people. Sophia taught Frederick
to read. Hugh All put a stop to these reading
lessons as soon as he found out about them, but
(07:11):
it was at this point too late to stop Douglas
from learning how to read. And Frederick Douglas had already
realized that literacy would be a key to finding his
way to freedom. So when Sophia's reading lessons stopped, Douglas
started trading his bread to white children that he would
run into when he was out on the old Errands.
(07:31):
And he would do this in exchange for their teaching
him a few words out of a Webster's spelling book.
He also gradually saved enough money to buy another book,
The Columbian Orator, and this was a collection of speeches
and essays and poems that had come into use as
a school book. It began with general instructions for speaking,
and it included the work of men like George Washington,
(07:53):
John Milton, Socrates, and Cistero. And this he read and reread,
finding a piece called Dialogue between a Master and Slave
particularly compelling, and in that piece of writing, a master
chastises his recaptured slave for having run away, and the slave,
eloquently dissecting the inhumanity and injustice of slavery, convinces the
(08:14):
master to free him. This is to me one of
the most amazing things about Frederick Douglas. He was not
just teaching himself to read by practicing. He was teaching
himself rhetoric and how to make an argument and eloquence
by studying this work, and the whole time that he
was living in Baltimore, he continued teaching himself, eventually also
(08:35):
using old copybooks and school books belonging to the auld
Son in order to teach himself how to write, and
as he got older, he started teaching other enslaved children
he met to read as well. Baltimore was formative in
other ways to Douglas. First heard the word abolition while
he was there, and he began to piece together that
(08:55):
there was an ambolitionist movement working to end slavery. He
also became religious, worshiping in an African Methodist Episcopal church,
while simultaneously coming to understand that the scriptures were being
used to both justify slavery and to convince enslaved people
that they should submit to it. He became increasingly aware
of the hypocrisy of Christian slave owners who applied Christ's
(09:19):
teachings only to white men while treating their enslaved workforce
with severe cruelty. Frederick Douglas remained in Baltimore for about
seven years. At this point, there was a series of
deaths within his owner's family, as well as some inner
family drama, and Thomas all demanded that he be returned
(09:40):
to the plantation. Douglas only worked directly for Thomas Auld
for about nine months, though he had become, in the
eyes of his enslavers, a troublemaker. He tried to start
a Sabbath school to teach other enslaved people, and he
started standing up for himself and other people. So from
Thomas Auld's point of view, Douglas had been ruined. So
(10:03):
Thomas Ald hired Douglas out to a man named Edward Covey,
who was a notorious slave breaker. So this is a
man to whom slave owners would hire out their troublesome
enslaved people for free so that he could train them. And,
in Douglas's words quote, Mr. Covey could have under him
the most fiery bloods of the neighborhood for the simple
(10:23):
reward of returning them to their owners well broken. For
the next six months, Covey beat Douglas on a nearly
daily basis, and he also engaged in a sort of
psychological warfare which was meant to make him feel as
though he was constantly watched and constantly threatened. In eighteen
thirty five, after his time with Covey was up, Douglas
was hired out as a field hand to William Freeland,
(10:45):
who was not nearly as cruel as Thomas Auld or
Edward Covey had been. Douglas once again tried to start
a Sabbath school to teach and educate other enslaved people.
On January one, eighteen thirty six, Douglas resolved that he
would be free by the end of the year, and
he planned to liberate several of the other men enslaved
(11:06):
with him as well. He forged passes for the group
which said they had permission to go to Baltimore, but
unfortunately their plan was discovered and all of the men
were captured and taken to jail. After this escape attempt,
Thomas all decided it would be best to send Frederick
Douglas away, especially because of the Sabbath School and the
influence that he was having among the enslaved people in
(11:29):
the neighborhood. It wasn't just that Thomas Auld was finding
Douglas's behavior to be unacceptable, it was also that he
was drawing the ire of other slave owners in the area.
Thomas Auld was afraid that some harm was going to
come to his property. So Douglas was sent back to Baltimore,
and it was from there that he ultimately would escape.
(11:51):
And we will get to that after a quick sponsor break.
So back in Baltimore with Hugh and Sophie Auld, Frederick
Douglas was first hired out to a shipyard, but after
being attacked by a group of white laborers, which is
something the authorities refused to investigate because no white witness
(12:14):
would attest to it, he was allowed to seek out
his own work. He would basically go and solicit work
in places that he felt more safe working, and then
he would turn over all of the pay that he
earned to Hugh Auld at the end of each week.
And eventually Douglas asked for permission to hire himself out
during his off hours, and this would allow him to
(12:36):
keep the pay above and beyond what was due back
to the Alds, and it was viewed as a huge privilege.
He secretly planned to save this pay in order to
fund his escape, but his permission to hire his time
was revoked after he attended a camp meeting one Saturday
night instead of delivering his pay to Hugh Auld on schedule.
This pushed Douglas's plans to escape into high gear. He
(12:59):
was basicly afraid that if he made any kind of
wrong move, it was going to become even harder for
him to escape. They would be keeping an even closer
eye on him. At this point, he had met and
fallen in love with a free black woman named Anna Murray.
She secured a sailor's uniform for him and gave him
some of her savings to fund the way, and then
(13:19):
he traveled using identification papers that had been borrowed from
a free black man. He traveled by train and then
steamboat and left Baltimore and traveled to New York City
on September three, thirty eight. For a long time, he
would not tell anyone exactly how he had done this,
because he was afraid that if he did that escape
(13:40):
route from Baltimore would get shut down, and once he
arrived at a safe house belonging to abolitionist David Ruggles,
he sent for Anna and they were married on September
fift The pair would eventually have five children together, Rosetta, Lewis, Frederick, Charles,
and Annie. Knowing that Douglas had were calking ships in Baltimore,
(14:02):
Ruggles suggested that he go to New Bedford, Massachusetts, which
had a large whaling and shipping industry, as well as
a sizeable free black community. Douglas had traveled under several
names while making his way to New Bedford, eventually landing
on Johnson, but once he got there, there were so
many other Johnson's in New Bedford that he thought it
(14:23):
would be confusing to have yet another one, so he
and Anna took the last name of Douglas. At first,
the Douglas's life in New Bedford was dedicated to just
trying to make ends meet and to find a home
in their new community, and Douglas also resumed going to church.
After encountering segregation and racism at New Bedford's Methodist church,
(14:44):
he joined the African Methodist Episcopal Zionist Church and Eventually
he became a lay minister there. A few months after
settling in New Bedford, Douglas got a copy of William
Lloyd Garrison's abolitionist newspaper, The Liberator. This was his entry
into the thti slavery movement that he had first heard
about back in Baltimore. Soon he was attending abolitionist meetings
(15:06):
in In eighteen forty one, he attended and spoke at
an anti slavery convention in Nantucket. This is his first
time really speaking in public, and he didn't think he
did a particularly great job. But afterward John A. Collins
of the Massachusetts Anti Slavery Society asked Frederick Douglas to
come and work for them as a speaker. He began
(15:27):
to travel around the North and Midwest speaking against slavery.
And although Douglas had a remarkable ability to draw from
his own experience to change hearts and minds, his opposition
to slavery was not about his own enslavement. His focus
was on humanity as a whole in the inherent brutality
and destructiveness of the institution of slavery. But by writing
(15:50):
about his own experience, he was giving potential abolitionists particularly
in the North, something many had lacked, and that was
a window into the reality so the institution of slavery.
This was incredibly important to the success of the movement
for abolition, especially in the North. Slavery affected people's lives,
particularly white people's lives, in really dramatic ways that they
(16:13):
weren't necessarily even consciously aware of. Many wealthy and prominent
families had earned their fortunes either directly through the slave
trade or through industries that relied on enslaved labor. So
even if no one in a community was currently enslaving anyone,
it was incredibly likely that its wealthiest and most influential
(16:35):
families were living on inherited wealth that came at least
in part from slavery. And people were also traveling on
roads and railroads, and attending schools and working in buildings
that had been built by enslaved people, including the US
Capital Building. So people were living in a nation that
had been built on and financed through slavery, but they
(16:57):
often didn't have a conscious connection to what any of
that actually meant. That changed as Douglas spoke and wrote
about fighting off dogs for crumbs of food, sleeping on
bare floors with little protection from the cold, brutal beatings,
the murder of an enslaved man named Denby at the
hands of an overseer, the wilful destruction and separation of
(17:20):
enslaved families, and the constant exhausting work that continued well
after the work day was over, as enslaved people then
had to care for their own food, care for their quarters,
mend their clothes, and on and on. But it wasn't
simply Douglas's documentation of the daily conditions and degradations of
(17:40):
enslavement that influenced the abolition movement. He also wrote extensively
on how the institution of slavery impacted the enslavers as
well as the enslaved. By making enslaved people into a
class that was supposedly less than human, enslavers were also
corrupting their own humanity. These were all things that Douglas
(18:00):
had experienced and learned and thought about during his years
of enslavement, and he was particularly adept at putting them
into words in a way that motivated readers and listeners
to act. We should make clear he wasn't the only
previously enslaved person that was writing and speaking about their
own experience, but he did become particularly famous. In eighteen
(18:22):
forty five, he published the first of three autobiographies, Narrative
of the Life of Frederick Douglas, an American Slave, in
part to debunk critics claims that he was too eloquent
who have ever really been a slave? And in it
he detailed the experiences that we talked about in the
first part of our episode today, including naming who his
(18:43):
owners had been, and that was a colossal risk under
fugitive slave laws. He could be captured and returned to Maryland,
and as his book became a bestseller, he left the country,
sailing for Liverpool on August sixteenth of eighteen forty five.
He arrived Fived in Britain, just before the start of
the Great Famine in Ireland. As a side note, this
(19:05):
was not the only time that Frederick Douglas would have
to flee the country. He did again in eighteen fifty
nine after John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry, after investigators
found a letter that Douglas had written that could have
led to his being named as a co conspirator. Douglas
at that point didn't return home until eighteen sixty as
the nation was careening towards Civil war. After learning that
(19:28):
his daughter Annie had died at the age of eleven,
so jumping back to eighteen forty five. For nearly two years,
Douglas traveled around the British Isles and spoke against slavery
and four civil rights, and while he was there, British
supporters raised the funds to purchase his freedom. Thomas all
First sold him to Hugh Auld for the sum of
(19:48):
one hundred dollars, and Hugh released him from slavery on
December five, eighty six. Douglas returned to the United States
the following year, and he and his family moved to Rochester,
New York work. Douglas received some criticism for allowing himself
to be purchased, since to some it legitimized the institution
that he was fighting against. They basically thought he was
(20:10):
being complicit in the very thing that he was advocating
to have abolished. But from Douglas's point of view, he
had a calling and a duty to return to the
United States and continue to fight slavery, something he would
best be able to do if he was not simultaneously
trying to evade capture or captured and returned South. Of course,
(20:32):
the Civil War started in eighteen sixty one, and by
that point Frederick Douglas was one of the most famous
black men in the United States. Although the South was
fighting the war in large part to protect and expand
the institution of slavery, at first, the North was fighting
primarily to preserve the Union. Douglas became an outspoken advocate
(20:52):
for making the abolition of slavery one of the Union's
goals as well, and he also recruited for the Union Army,
and two of his sons served in the fifty fourth
Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry. In eighteen sixty three, Douglas met with
Abraham Lincoln about the treatment of black soldiers fighting for
the Union and advocated for their receiving equal pay. Of course,
(21:13):
the abolition of slavery did ultimately get folded into the
Union schools in the Civil War, and when the war
was over, slavery was indeed abolished. Douglas then turned his
attention to protecting the lives and civil rights of African Americans,
including campaigning for the right to vote. He also encouraged
abolitionist organizations to turn their attention to Native Americans, whose
(21:37):
condition he called, quote the saddest chapter in our history.
Frederick Douglas never like looked at an accomplishment and then said, okay,
we're done now. If the if the thing he had
been campaigning for, was successful, he would then find the
next thing. And after the war he also held a
(21:59):
number of so shill in political positions, including Charge da
Fair for the Dominican Republic, Minister Resident and Consul General
to Haiti, and the Recorder of Deeds of the District
of Columbia. He served as president of the Freedman Savings Bank,
and he was on the board at Howard University. The
list of accomplishments and appointments that he had goes on
(22:19):
and on and on. It is quite lengthy. Um. And
even before the Civil War, Frederick Douglas had become a
supporter of women's rights. And especially because we were originally
giving this episode as a live show at Convention Days
in celebration of the anniversary of the Seneca Falls Convention,
made a lot of sense to spend a little more
(22:40):
time on that which we are going to do. After
another quick sponsor break, Frederick Douglas first met Susan B.
Anthony in eighteen forty five, but his direct involvement with
the movement for women's suffrage really started after he moved
to Rochester with this family in eighteen forty seven. That December,
(23:03):
he published his first issue of his newspaper, The North Star,
which was one of several newspapers he would create and
run during his lifetime. The North Star was printed with
the motto right is of no sex, Truth is of
no color. God is the father of us all, and
we are all brethren and The Seneca Falls Convention began
(23:25):
on July nineteenth of eighteen forty eight, and Douglas was
one of only thirty two men out of about three
hundred attendees. Of these men, he was the only one
who supported Elizabeth Katie Stanton's resolution that women be allowed
to vote, and he seconded her motion that the right
to vote be one of their resolutions. He was one
of the signers of the Declaration of Sentiments. Another woman's
(23:48):
rights convention was held almost immediately in Rochester on August
two of eighteen forty eight, and Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth
Katie Stanton recommended that Douglas be made its chair, although
he ultimately wasn't. He did attend and speak at this
convention as well, and both conventions were covered in the
newspaper of the North Star. This was really um like
(24:10):
Frederick Douglas was already under a huge amount of scrutiny
because he was a black man living in America, and
becoming involved in the women's rights movement brought on a
whole other layer of scrutiny because men who were involved
in the movement were viewed with extreme suspicion and derision.
There was a lot of undertone of like, something must
be wrong with you for you to be into this. Yes,
(24:32):
so there's definitely a lot of bravery in that move
And in addition to being actively involved in the movement
for women's rights and suffrage, Douglas took those ideas back
with him to the movement for abolition. In eight Douglas
presided at the National Convention of Colored Freedman in Cleveland,
and under his leadership, the convention passed a resolution affirming
(24:53):
equality between the sexes and women were actively invited to participate.
Douglas presided over and introduced similar affirmations at other abolitionist
meetings as well. Although obviously there were also black suffragists
such as I. Toby Wells Barnett and A. Julia Cooper.
The suffrage movement as a whole was largely focused on
(25:15):
the needs and wants of relatively affluent white women, like
if you read the Declaration of Sentiments, there are parts
in it about things like your property becoming your husband's
property when you marry. So we're starting from the foundation
of women affluent enough to have property. It's kind of
a narrow segment of women. At the end of the
(25:37):
Civil War Reconstruction efforts to guarantee civil rights, including the
right to vote to former slaves and their descendants, clashed
with this focus of looking for voting rights for white women.
At first, it actually seemed as though these two movements
for suffrage could combine. At the first Women's Rights Convention
(25:57):
after the Civil War, its name was changed to the
Equal Rights Association, which would work toward universal suffrage, not
just suffrage for women, and Frederick Douglas was one of
the Equal Rights Association's three vice presidents. But as the
Reconstruction amendments to the Constitution were drafted, a schism developed
within the movement. The May eighteen sixty nine meeting of
(26:20):
the Equal Rights Association took place after Congress had passed
the Fifteenth Amendment, as it was up for ratification by
the States. This amendment read quote the right of citizens
of the United States to vote shall not be denied
or abridged by the United States or by any State,
on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.
(26:41):
So this amendment made no reference to the rights of
vote as related to sex, and Douglas was willing to
accept this less than universal suffrage because he knew how
much resistance there was to women's voting rights in much
of the nation, and he thought it was likely that
the fifteenth Amendment could only be ratified it if it
didn't include women. He also thought that white women wanted
(27:04):
the right to vote but had other ways to take
political action, while overall the black population desperately needed to
vote because they had no other means to take political
action themselves. Of course, many of the Equal Rights Association
vehemently disagreed, and the ensuing discussion, Douglas said, quote, when
women because they are women are dragged from their homes
(27:26):
and hung upon lamp posts, when their children are torn
from their arms and their brains dashed out upon the pavement,
when they are objects of insult and outrage at every turn,
when they are in danger of having their homes burnt
down over their heads, when their children are not allowed
to enter schools, they will have an urgency to obtain
(27:48):
the ballot equal to black men. Someone from the audience
then asked whether this was not also true of black
women as well, and he answered yes, yes, yes, it
is true of the black woman, but not because she
is a woman, but because she is black. So he
was basically pointing out that like yes, it was right
(28:10):
and and important for women to have the right to vote,
but the need was a lot more dire for black
people to have the rights to vote. The debate over
the fifteenth Amendment split the Equal Rights Association. At the
conclusion of the meeting, it was disbanded, with Susan B.
Anthony and Elizabeth Katie Stanton forming the National Woman's Suffrage
(28:32):
Association to once again focus only on voting rights for women,
even to the extent of directly opposing the fifteenth Amendment.
Those who supported the fifteenth Amendment formed the American Woman
Suffrage Association. We should also make it clear that this
was not just an ideological dispute over the wording of
(28:52):
the fifteenth Amendment and whether it included any references to
sex or gender. There was also explicit sitism at work,
with Elizabeth Katie Stanton, for example, saying quote, what will
we and our daughters suffer if these degraded black men
are allowed to have the rights? That would make them
even worse than our Saxon fathers. I also kept finding
(29:16):
reference to a quote by Susan B. Anthony about how
she would rather cut off her right arm than campaign
for vote for black people before women. I couldn't find
the original place where she purportedly said that, but it
came up over and over. There were also elements of
the suffrage movement who argued that women should have the
right to vote because white women would help form a
(29:38):
voting block that would help maintain white supremacy, even if
black people could also vote, and one such advocate of
this was Henry B. Blackwell, husband of suffragist Lucy Stone.
When the fifteenth Amendment was ratified on February three, eight seventy,
Frederick Douglas immediately began campaigning for a sixteenth Amendment to
(29:59):
grant voting rights to women and he would continue to
advocate for women's suffrage for the rest of his life. Sadly,
Charlotte Woodward was the only signer of the Seneca Falls
Conventions Declaration of Sentiments to live to see the ratification
of the Nineteenth Amendment giving women the right to vote
on August eighteenth of nineteen twenty. Apparently because of her
(30:19):
poor health, she never actually got to vote herself. But
even then, the same racially discriminatory voting laws that had
already been suppressing black men's right to vote since the
end of Reconstruction just applied to black women as well.
So although the letter of the Nineteenth Amendment gave black
women the right to vote, it was not until the
(30:41):
Voting Rights Act of nineteen sixty five that many Black
women and other women who were part of, you know,
minority populations, were actually able to do so. And of course,
discriminatory voting laws and attempts to suppress voters still exists today.
I feel like every time I turn around, there's another
case before the Supreme Court about it. To close out
(31:03):
his story, we're going to return for a moment to
Frederick Douglas's last years in the eighteen seventies, He moved
to Washington, d c. And his wife, Anna, died of
a stroke in eighteen eighty two. In eighteen eighty four,
he remarried a woman named Helen Pitts, which raised some
eyebrows because she was about twenty years younger than he
was and she was also white. On February, Frederick Douglas
(31:28):
went to a meeting of the National Council of Women.
He came home and began preparing to give a speech
at a local church when he died suddenly of a
heart attack. He was about seventy seven. He had been
campaigning for equal rights until literally the last day of
his life, that is Frederick Douglas. We were actually joined
(31:49):
by Frederick Douglas there in Seneca Falls. Yeah. It was
quite exciting. They had a wonderful reenactor there who was
really great, and he came in a halfway through and
I turned into Buddy the Elf. Yeah. He uh. He
was very gracious. He he was um, he was so kind.
He we had a lot of people who wanted to
(32:11):
have pictures made after the show. Um, and he accommodated everyone.
It was super gracious and warm and lovely the whole time. Yeah,
so everyone we met uh and while we were in
Seneca Falls. UM was gracious and kind and welcoming. The
National Park Service staff that we met were all amazing.
(32:33):
We I said. I said at the top of the show,
we were so honored to be able to do this show.
Um there in the Wesleyan Chapel and its great. So
if you get a chance to go to Seneca Falls,
especially to go to a future convention days Uh, Yeah,
we had a great time. That's a pretty great event. Yeah,
(32:55):
Sadly we did not get to spend a ton of
time in Seneca Falls. It was a very Uh that
was a quick, quick turnaround trip. Yeah, it was a
quick turnaround trip for both of us. Oh, and I
also would like to thank my spouse for riding with
me slush and driving the car all the way there
and back. We made a weekend trip out of it,
and I don't think I could have made the drive
(33:18):
by myself because it's it's it's a stretch. Do you
also have some listener mail for us? I sure do. Um.
This is from Rick and it is about our Unearthed
in July episode. Rick says, I was listening to your
latest Unearthed episode while commuting to work today and your
discussion of brew stones felt especially serendipitous to me. In California,
(33:42):
fourth graders learn about California history and in particular, the
California Missions system. My daughter is entering fourth grade in
the Falls, and my wife and I have taken upon
ourselves to take our daughter to visit all twenty one
missions in California. This weekend, we were visiting the mission
San Francisco, Solano and so No, the northernmost and last
mission built. During the tour, from our docent, we were
(34:05):
told about how the Native American tribes in the area
Miwalk and Pomo cooked inside woven baskets. Obviously, they couldn't
place them on a fire like you would with an
iron pot, so they would drop a heated stone into
the basket filled with acorn porridge, which was the staple
food source for them. Apparently, worldwide, the use of stones
for cooking liquids has been prevalent in all Stone age societies.
(34:27):
Thank you so much for your incredible show. Even as
a rabid fan of history, I learned something new every week.
Keep up the good work, Rick. Thank you so much. Rick,
I somehow did not know that, and now I do,
and I am kind of delighted to know that this
is a phenomenon from all over the world. I think
I just assumed that if you did not have iron
(34:49):
pots yet and you were cooking food over a fire,
you were skewering things on sticks. This. Um, I gotta confess.
I always have that like crafty part of me that
wants to try stuff like this, but I envision making
a horrible disaster. Yeah, and you you had brought up
(35:09):
when we did that unearthed episode that it brings a
whole new meaning to stone soup Um story that many
of us have heard as children. Anyway, one more thank
you to everyone who was involved at convention days and
Seneca Falls in the National Park Service, folks, all of that,
which was we were so glad to be there. We
had such a good time. Fingers crossed that. Uh. We
(35:33):
we don't have to studio redo our live shows very often.
I think this is only the second time, and uh
the first time, it was only part of it that
we needed to read. So anyway, if you would like
to write to us, we were at History Podcast at
how Stuffworks dot com. We're also on Facebook at facebook
dot com, slash miss in History and on Twitter. At
miss in History, are Tumbler, miss in history dot tembler
(35:54):
dot com, basically all of our social media, including Pinterest
and Instagram all at miss in history dot com. You
can come to our parent company's website, which is how
stuff works dot com to find information on just about
anything your heart desires. You can come to our website,
which is missed in history dot com, where you will
find a searchable archive of every episode that we have
ever done, also show notes for all the episodes Holly
(36:15):
and I have done other cool stuff. So you can
do all that and a whole lot more at how
stuff works dot com or missed the history dot com.
For more on this and thousands of other topics, is
it how stuff works dot com.
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Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
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