June 10, 2023 • 35 mins
This 2017 episode covers orator, writer, statesman and social reformer Frederick Douglass. His early life shaped the advocate he became, and informed the two primary causes he campaigned for - the abolition of slavery and women's suffrage.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday. This past week. We briefly mentioned Frederick Douglass
in our episode on Lucy Stone, and something we spent
just a little more time on is an open letter
that Stone's husband, Henry Blackwell, wrote to be published in
the South, arguing that granting voting rights to white women
(00:22):
could offset the effects of suffrage for black men. Something
I had totally forgotten even though I wrote our episode
on Frederick Douglas, is that Blackwell's argument is mentioned in
our episode on him too. So thanks to all of
those connections, Frederick Douglas is Today's Saturday Classic. This episode
(00:44):
originally came out on July thirty first, twenty seventeen. Enjoy
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V.
(01:04):
Wilson and I'm Holly Frye. We are just back from
Seneca Falls. Yeah, they were so kind 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
(01:26):
had a little bit of an issue with the recording. Yeah, well,
it's a there's a combination of factors. We had the
just immense honor of 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,
(01:47):
it is essentially a big empty space. It's a big
box adjacent to the road. So like for a number
of reasons, 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,
well just do your version, Yes, a studio version of
(02:09):
that show. We do definitely, though, want to thank the
folks of the National Park Service and Ashley Nottingham, who
was 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
(02:30):
just how fun and kind and welcoming and warm everyone was.
It was really lovely. Yes, And it is also a
better service to Frederick Douglas to have a nice, clean
recording of him rather than 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, statesmen,
(02:52):
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 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 peoples whose rights
he championed during his lifetime. He was even nominated for
(03:14):
Vice President of the United States on the ticket with
Victoria Woodhull in eighteen seventy two, just as an example
of a thing that happened that 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 his work
(03:34):
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 humanitarianism and human rights in
some way, but the two biggest parts were the abolition
of slavery and women's suffrage. Frederick Douglas was born Frederick
Augustus Washington Bailey around February of eighteen eighteen in a
(03:56):
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. 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
(04:17):
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 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,
(04:38):
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 particular her five daughters. 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
(04:58):
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 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,
(05:21):
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 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
(05:44):
that the cabin that they were living in was not
his grandmother's. It and his grandmother, all of the other children,
and he himself were in fact the property of someone
they knew as old Master, and that was Captain Aaron Anthony,
and Douglas faced a dawn understanding that he would at
some point be forced to leave his grandmother to begin
(06:04):
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
Maryland and a United States Senator, and there 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
(06:25):
allowed to raise their own children. Aunt Katie's treatment of
the children was incredibly cruel, and Douglas often went hungry
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,
(06:46):
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,
she had actually known how to read, and in later years,
when Race's 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
(07:10):
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 Ald, who was Captain Anthony's
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
(07:30):
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
of the plantation, but he was also introduced to Hugh's wife, Sophia.
Apparently unaware that it was illegal, or that its illegality
was a technique for controlling enslaved people, Sophia taught Frederick
(07:53):
to read. Hugh Auld put a stop to these reading
lessons as soon as he found out about them, but
it was at this point too late to stop Douglas
from learning how to read, and Frederick Douglass had already
realized that literacy would be a key to finding his
way to freedom. So when Sophia's reading lessons stopped, Douglas
(08:15):
started trading his bread to white children that he would
run into when he was out on the Aulds errands,
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 Colombian Orator, and this was a collection of speeches
and essays and poems that had come into use as
(08:36):
a school book. It began with general instructions for speaking,
and it included the work of men like George Washington,
John Milton, Socrates, and Cisco. And this he read and
re read, 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,
(08:58):
and the slave, eloquequ dissecting the inhumanity and injustice of slavery,
convinces the 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
an eloquence by studying this work. And the whole time
(09:21):
that he was living in Baltimore, he continued teaching himself,
eventually also using old copy books and school books belonging
to the Aulds' 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 too. Douglas first heard the
(09:42):
word abolition while he was there, and he began to
piece together that there was an abolitionist 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
(10:04):
became increasingly aware of the hypocrisy of Christian slave owners
who applied Christ's 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
(10:25):
as some inner family drama, and Thomas auld demanded that
he be returned 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.
(10:47):
So from Thomas Ald's point of view, Douglas had been ruined.
So 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, mister Covey could
(11:09):
have under him the most fiery bloods of the neighborhood
for the simple 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,
(11:31):
Douglas was hired out as a field hand to William Freeland,
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 first, eighteen thirty six, Douglas resolved that he
would be free by the end of the year, and
(11:53):
he planned to liberate several of the other men enslaved
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 Ald decided it would be best to send Frederick
Douglass away, especially because of the Sabbath school and the
(12:16):
influence that he was having among the enslaved people in
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,
(12:38):
and it was from there that he ultimately would escape
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 being attacked
(13:00):
by a group of white laborers, which is something the
authorities refused to investigate because no white witness 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 hew
Ald at the end of each week. And eventually Douglas
(13:23):
asked for permission to hire himself out during his off hours,
and this would allow him to 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
(13:45):
delivering his pay to Hugh Auld on schedule. This pushed
Douglas's plans to escape into high gear. He was basically
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 close on him. At
this point, he had met and fallen in love with
a free black woman named Anna Murray. She secured a
(14:08):
sailor's uniform for him and gave him some of her
savings to fund the way, and then 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 third, eighteen
thirty eight. For a long time, he would not tell
anyone exactly how he had done this, because he was
(14:30):
afraid that if he did, that escape 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 fifteenth. The pair
would eventually have five children together, Rosetta, Lewis, Frederick, Charles,
and Annie. Knowing that Douglas had worked calking ships in Baltimore,
(14:54):
Ruggles suggested that he'd go to New Bedford, Massachusetts, which
had a large whale in 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
(15:16):
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,
(15:36):
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 anti slavery movement that he had first heard
about back in Baltimore. Soon he was attending abolitionist meetings,
(15:59):
and an 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
(16:20):
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
(16:43):
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
(17:06):
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
(17:27):
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
Capitol building. So people were living in a nation that
had been built on and financed through slavery, but they
(17:50):
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 willful destruction and separation of
(18:13):
enslaved families, and the constant exhausting work that continued well
after the workday 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
(18:33):
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
(18:53):
had experienced and learned and thought about during his years
of enslavement, and he was particularly adept putting them into
words in a way that motivated readers and listeners to act.
We should make clear he wasn't the only previously enslave
person that was writing and speaking about their own experience,
but he did become particularly famous. In eighteen forty five,
(19:15):
he published the first of three autobiographies, Narrative of the
Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, in part to
debunk critics claims that he was too eloquent to 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 owners had been,
(19:37):
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 in Britain just before the start of the Great
Famine in Ireland. As a side note, this was not
(19:59):
the only time that Frederick Douglass 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 his daughter
(20:21):
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 Auld first
sold him to Hugh Auld for the sum of one
(20:41):
hundred dollars, and Hugh released him from slavery on December fifth,
eighteen forty six. Douglas returned to the United States the
following year, and he and his family moved to Rochester,
New York. 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 being
(21:04):
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,
(21:24):
the Civil War started in eighteen sixty one, and by
that point Frederick Douglass 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
(21:45):
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 treetment of black soldiers fighting
for the Union and advocated for their receiving equal pay.
(22:05):
Of course, the abolition of slavery did ultimately get folded
into the Union's goals 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
(22:28):
Native Americans, whose condition he called quote the sadust chapter
in our history. Frederick Douglas never looked at an accomplishment
and then said, Okay, we're done now. If the thing
he had been campaigning for was successful, he would then
find the next thing. Yeah. And after the war, he
(22:51):
also held a number of social and political positions, including
Charge da Fair for the Dominican Republic, Minister Resident and
Consul General to him, 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
(23:11):
had goes on and on and on. It is quite lengthy.
And even before the Civil War, Frederick Douglass 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,
(23:32):
made a lot of sense to spend a little more
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
(23:54):
to Rochester with his family in eighteen forty seven. That December,
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
(24:16):
we are all brethren. And the Seneca Falls Convention began
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 Katy 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
(24:39):
of the signers of the Declaration of Sentiments. Another woman's
rights convention was held almost immediately in Rochester on August
second of eighteen forty eight, and Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth
Katy 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 inventions were covered in the
(25:02):
newspaper of the North Star. This was really like Frederick
Douglass 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
(25:23):
wrong with you for you to be into this. Yeah,
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 eighteen forty eight,
Douglas presided at the National Convention of Colored Freedmen in Cleveland,
(25:45):
and under his leadership, the convention passed a resolution affirming
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 so obviously there were also black
suffragists such as Ia b Wells Barnett and Anna Julia Cooper,
(26:06):
the suffrage movement as a whole was largely focused on
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
(26:28):
a narrow segment of women. At the end of the
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
(26:48):
for suffrage could combine. At the first Women's Rights Convention
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 Douglass was one of
the Equal Rights Association's three vice presidents. But as the
Reconstruction amendments to the Constitution were drafted, a schism developed
(27:11):
within the movement. The May eighteen sixty nine meeting of
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,
(27:32):
on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.
So this amendment made no reference to the right to
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
(27:52):
the fifteenth Amendment could only be ratified if it didn't
include women. He also thought that white women wanted the
right to vote 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.
(28:13):
In the ensuing discussion, Douglas said, quote, when women, because
they are women, are dragged from their homes 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
(28:36):
down over their heads, when their children are not allowed
to enter schools, they will have an urgency to obtain
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 women, but not because she
(28:57):
is a woman, but because she is black. So he
was basically pointing out that like yes, it was right
and important for women to have the right to vote,
but the need was a lot more dire for black
people to have the right to vote. The debate over
the fifteenth Amendment split the Equal Rights Association. At the
(29:20):
conclusion of the meeting, it was disbanded, with Susan B.
Anthony and Elizabeth Katy Stanton forming the National Woman's Suffrage
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's
Suffrage Association. We should also make it clear that this
(29:44):
was not just an ideological dispute over the wording of
the fifteenth Amendment and whether it included any references to
sex or gender. There was also explicit racism at work,
with Elizabeth Katy 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
(30:06):
even worse than our Saxon fathers. I also kept finding
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
(30:27):
the suffrage movement who argued that women should have the
right to vote because white women would help form a
voting bloc 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 third, eighteen seventy,
(30:50):
Frederick Douglas immediately began campaigning for a sixteenth Amendment to
grant voting rights to women, and he would continue to
advocate for women's suffrage for the rest of his life. Sadly,
Charlotte Wodward was the only signer of the Seneca falls
Convention's Declaration of Sentiments to live to see the ratification
of the nineteenth Amendment giving women the right to vote
(31:11):
on August eighteenth of nineteen twenty. Apparently because of her
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
(31:34):
women the right to vote, it was not until the
Voting Rights Act of nineteen sixty five that many black
women and other women who were part of 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 a turn around, there's another
(31:55):
case before the Supreme Court about it. To close out
his story, we're going to react turned 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
(32:17):
was and she was also white. On February twentieth, eighteen
ninety five, Frederick Douglass 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
(32:39):
last day of his life. That is Frederick Douglas. We
were actually joined 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 halfway through
and I turned into Buddy the Elf, so you got
to see him. Yeah, he was very gracious, he was
(33:03):
He was so kind. We had a lot of people
who wanted to have pictures made after the show, and
he accommodated everyone and was super just gracious and warm
and lovely the whole time. Yeah, he was great. Yeah,
So everyone we met and while we were in Seneca
Falls was gracious and kind and welcoming. The National Park
(33:25):
Service staff that we met were all amazing. We sa
as I said at the top of the show, we
were so honored to be able to do this show
there in the Wesleyan Chapel. It is great. So if
you get a chance to go to Seneca Falls, especially
to go to a future convention days, Yeah, we had
(33:46):
a great time. That's a pretty great event. Yeah. Sadly
we did not get to spend a ton of time
in Seneca Falls. It was a very that was a quick,
quick turnaround tip. Yeah, it was a quick turnaround tip
for both of us. Oh and I also would like
to thank my spouse for writing with me slush driving
the car all the way there and back. We made
(34:08):
a weekend trip out of it, and I don't think
I could have made the drive by myself because it's
a stretch. Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday.
Since this episode is out of the archive, if you
heard an email address or a Facebook RL or something
(34:29):
similar over the course of the show, that could be
obsolete now. Our current email address is History Podcast at
iHeartRadio dot com. Our old house Stuffworks email address no
longer works. You can find us all over social media
at missed in History, and you can subscribe to our
show on Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, the iHeartRadio app, and
(34:51):
wherever else you listen to podcasts. Stuff you Missed in
History Class is a production of IHEARTRADI d For more
podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or
wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Happy Saturday. This past week. We briefly mentioned Frederick Douglass
in our episode on Lucy Stone, and something we spent
just a little more time on is an open letter
that Stone's husband, Henry Blackwell, wrote to be published in
the South, arguing that granting voting rights to white women
(00:22):
could offset the effects of suffrage for black men. Something
I had totally forgotten even though I wrote our episode
on Frederick Douglas, is that Blackwell's argument is mentioned in
our episode on him too. So thanks to all of
those connections, Frederick Douglas is Today's Saturday Classic. This episode
(00:44):
originally came out on July thirty first, twenty seventeen. Enjoy
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V.
(01:04):
Wilson and I'm Holly Frye. We are just back from
Seneca Falls. Yeah, they were so kind 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
(01:26):
had a little bit of an issue with the recording. Yeah, well,
it's a there's a combination of factors. We had the
just immense honor of 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,
(01:47):
it is essentially a big empty space. It's a big
box adjacent to the road. So like for a number
of reasons, 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,
well just do your version, Yes, a studio version of
(02:09):
that show. We do definitely, though, want to thank the
folks of the National Park Service and Ashley Nottingham, who
was 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
(02:30):
just how fun and kind and welcoming and warm everyone was.
It was really lovely. Yes, And it is also a
better service to Frederick Douglas to have a nice, clean
recording of him rather than 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, statesmen,
(02:52):
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 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 peoples whose rights
he championed during his lifetime. He was even nominated for
(03:14):
Vice President of the United States on the ticket with
Victoria Woodhull in eighteen seventy two, just as an example
of a thing that happened that 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 his work
(03:34):
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 humanitarianism and human rights in
some way, but the two biggest parts were the abolition
of slavery and women's suffrage. Frederick Douglas was born Frederick
Augustus Washington Bailey around February of eighteen eighteen in a
(03:56):
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. 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
(04:17):
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 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,
(04:38):
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 particular her five daughters. 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
(04:58):
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 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,
(05:21):
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 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
(05:44):
that the cabin that they were living in was not
his grandmother's. It and his grandmother, all of the other children,
and he himself were in fact the property of someone
they knew as old Master, and that was Captain Aaron Anthony,
and Douglas faced a dawn understanding that he would at
some point be forced to leave his grandmother to begin
(06:04):
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
Maryland and a United States Senator, and there 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
(06:25):
allowed to raise their own children. Aunt Katie's treatment of
the children was incredibly cruel, and Douglas often went hungry
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,
(06:46):
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,
she had actually known how to read, and in later years,
when Race's 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
(07:10):
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 Ald, who was Captain Anthony's
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
(07:30):
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
of the plantation, but he was also introduced to Hugh's wife, Sophia.
Apparently unaware that it was illegal, or that its illegality
was a technique for controlling enslaved people, Sophia taught Frederick
(07:53):
to read. Hugh Auld put a stop to these reading
lessons as soon as he found out about them, but
it was at this point too late to stop Douglas
from learning how to read, and Frederick Douglass had already
realized that literacy would be a key to finding his
way to freedom. So when Sophia's reading lessons stopped, Douglas
(08:15):
started trading his bread to white children that he would
run into when he was out on the Aulds errands,
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 Colombian Orator, and this was a collection of speeches
and essays and poems that had come into use as
(08:36):
a school book. It began with general instructions for speaking,
and it included the work of men like George Washington,
John Milton, Socrates, and Cisco. And this he read and
re read, 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,
(08:58):
and the slave, eloquequ dissecting the inhumanity and injustice of slavery,
convinces the 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
an eloquence by studying this work. And the whole time
(09:21):
that he was living in Baltimore, he continued teaching himself,
eventually also using old copy books and school books belonging
to the Aulds' 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 too. Douglas first heard the
(09:42):
word abolition while he was there, and he began to
piece together that there was an abolitionist 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
(10:04):
became increasingly aware of the hypocrisy of Christian slave owners
who applied Christ's 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
(10:25):
as some inner family drama, and Thomas auld demanded that
he be returned 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.
(10:47):
So from Thomas Ald's point of view, Douglas had been ruined.
So 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, mister Covey could
(11:09):
have under him the most fiery bloods of the neighborhood
for the simple 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,
(11:31):
Douglas was hired out as a field hand to William Freeland,
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 first, eighteen thirty six, Douglas resolved that he
would be free by the end of the year, and
(11:53):
he planned to liberate several of the other men enslaved
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 Ald decided it would be best to send Frederick
Douglass away, especially because of the Sabbath school and the
(12:16):
influence that he was having among the enslaved people in
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,
(12:38):
and it was from there that he ultimately would escape
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 being attacked
(13:00):
by a group of white laborers, which is something the
authorities refused to investigate because no white witness 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 hew
Ald at the end of each week. And eventually Douglas
(13:23):
asked for permission to hire himself out during his off hours,
and this would allow him to 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
(13:45):
delivering his pay to Hugh Auld on schedule. This pushed
Douglas's plans to escape into high gear. He was basically
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 close on him. At
this point, he had met and fallen in love with
a free black woman named Anna Murray. She secured a
(14:08):
sailor's uniform for him and gave him some of her
savings to fund the way, and then 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 third, eighteen
thirty eight. For a long time, he would not tell
anyone exactly how he had done this, because he was
(14:30):
afraid that if he did, that escape 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 fifteenth. The pair
would eventually have five children together, Rosetta, Lewis, Frederick, Charles,
and Annie. Knowing that Douglas had worked calking ships in Baltimore,
(14:54):
Ruggles suggested that he'd go to New Bedford, Massachusetts, which
had a large whale in 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
(15:16):
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,
(15:36):
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 anti slavery movement that he had first heard
about back in Baltimore. Soon he was attending abolitionist meetings,
(15:59):
and an 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
(16:20):
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
(16:43):
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
(17:06):
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
(17:27):
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
Capitol building. So people were living in a nation that
had been built on and financed through slavery, but they
(17:50):
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 willful destruction and separation of
(18:13):
enslaved families, and the constant exhausting work that continued well
after the workday 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
(18:33):
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
(18:53):
had experienced and learned and thought about during his years
of enslavement, and he was particularly adept putting them into
words in a way that motivated readers and listeners to act.
We should make clear he wasn't the only previously enslave
person that was writing and speaking about their own experience,
but he did become particularly famous. In eighteen forty five,
(19:15):
he published the first of three autobiographies, Narrative of the
Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, in part to
debunk critics claims that he was too eloquent to 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 owners had been,
(19:37):
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 in Britain just before the start of the Great
Famine in Ireland. As a side note, this was not
(19:59):
the only time that Frederick Douglass 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 his daughter
(20:21):
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 Auld first
sold him to Hugh Auld for the sum of one
(20:41):
hundred dollars, and Hugh released him from slavery on December fifth,
eighteen forty six. Douglas returned to the United States the
following year, and he and his family moved to Rochester,
New York. 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 being
(21:04):
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,
(21:24):
the Civil War started in eighteen sixty one, and by
that point Frederick Douglass 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
(21:45):
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 treetment of black soldiers fighting
for the Union and advocated for their receiving equal pay.
(22:05):
Of course, the abolition of slavery did ultimately get folded
into the Union's goals 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
(22:28):
Native Americans, whose condition he called quote the sadust chapter
in our history. Frederick Douglas never looked at an accomplishment
and then said, Okay, we're done now. If the thing
he had been campaigning for was successful, he would then
find the next thing. Yeah. And after the war, he
(22:51):
also held a number of social and political positions, including
Charge da Fair for the Dominican Republic, Minister Resident and
Consul General to him, 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
(23:11):
had goes on and on and on. It is quite lengthy.
And even before the Civil War, Frederick Douglass 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,
(23:32):
made a lot of sense to spend a little more
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
(23:54):
to Rochester with his family in eighteen forty seven. That December,
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
(24:16):
we are all brethren. And the Seneca Falls Convention began
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 Katy 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
(24:39):
of the signers of the Declaration of Sentiments. Another woman's
rights convention was held almost immediately in Rochester on August
second of eighteen forty eight, and Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth
Katy 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 inventions were covered in the
(25:02):
newspaper of the North Star. This was really like Frederick
Douglass 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
(25:23):
wrong with you for you to be into this. Yeah,
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 eighteen forty eight,
Douglas presided at the National Convention of Colored Freedmen in Cleveland,
(25:45):
and under his leadership, the convention passed a resolution affirming
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 so obviously there were also black
suffragists such as Ia b Wells Barnett and Anna Julia Cooper,
(26:06):
the suffrage movement as a whole was largely focused on
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
(26:28):
a narrow segment of women. At the end of the
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
(26:48):
for suffrage could combine. At the first Women's Rights Convention
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 Douglass was one of
the Equal Rights Association's three vice presidents. But as the
Reconstruction amendments to the Constitution were drafted, a schism developed
(27:11):
within the movement. The May eighteen sixty nine meeting of
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,
(27:32):
on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.
So this amendment made no reference to the right to
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
(27:52):
the fifteenth Amendment could only be ratified if it didn't
include women. He also thought that white women wanted the
right to vote 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.
(28:13):
In the ensuing discussion, Douglas said, quote, when women, because
they are women, are dragged from their homes 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
(28:36):
down over their heads, when their children are not allowed
to enter schools, they will have an urgency to obtain
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 women, but not because she
(28:57):
is a woman, but because she is black. So he
was basically pointing out that like yes, it was right
and important for women to have the right to vote,
but the need was a lot more dire for black
people to have the right to vote. The debate over
the fifteenth Amendment split the Equal Rights Association. At the
(29:20):
conclusion of the meeting, it was disbanded, with Susan B.
Anthony and Elizabeth Katy Stanton forming the National Woman's Suffrage
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's
Suffrage Association. We should also make it clear that this
(29:44):
was not just an ideological dispute over the wording of
the fifteenth Amendment and whether it included any references to
sex or gender. There was also explicit racism at work,
with Elizabeth Katy 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
(30:06):
even worse than our Saxon fathers. I also kept finding
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
(30:27):
the suffrage movement who argued that women should have the
right to vote because white women would help form a
voting bloc 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 third, eighteen seventy,
(30:50):
Frederick Douglas immediately began campaigning for a sixteenth Amendment to
grant voting rights to women, and he would continue to
advocate for women's suffrage for the rest of his life. Sadly,
Charlotte Wodward was the only signer of the Seneca falls
Convention's Declaration of Sentiments to live to see the ratification
of the nineteenth Amendment giving women the right to vote
(31:11):
on August eighteenth of nineteen twenty. Apparently because of her
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
(31:34):
women the right to vote, it was not until the
Voting Rights Act of nineteen sixty five that many black
women and other women who were part of 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 a turn around, there's another
(31:55):
case before the Supreme Court about it. To close out
his story, we're going to react turned 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
(32:17):
was and she was also white. On February twentieth, eighteen
ninety five, Frederick Douglass 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
(32:39):
last day of his life. That is Frederick Douglas. We
were actually joined 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 halfway through
and I turned into Buddy the Elf, so you got
to see him. Yeah, he was very gracious, he was
(33:03):
He was so kind. We had a lot of people
who wanted to have pictures made after the show, and
he accommodated everyone and was super just gracious and warm
and lovely the whole time. Yeah, he was great. Yeah,
So everyone we met and while we were in Seneca
Falls was gracious and kind and welcoming. The National Park
(33:25):
Service staff that we met were all amazing. We sa
as I said at the top of the show, we
were so honored to be able to do this show
there in the Wesleyan Chapel. It is great. So if
you get a chance to go to Seneca Falls, especially
to go to a future convention days, Yeah, we had
(33:46):
a great time. That's a pretty great event. Yeah. Sadly
we did not get to spend a ton of time
in Seneca Falls. It was a very that was a quick,
quick turnaround tip. Yeah, it was a quick turnaround tip
for both of us. Oh and I also would like
to thank my spouse for writing with me slush driving
the car all the way there and back. We made
(34:08):
a weekend trip out of it, and I don't think
I could have made the drive by myself because it's
a stretch. Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday.
Since this episode is out of the archive, if you
heard an email address or a Facebook RL or something
(34:29):
similar over the course of the show, that could be
obsolete now. Our current email address is History Podcast at
iHeartRadio dot com. Our old house Stuffworks email address no
longer works. You can find us all over social media
at missed in History, and you can subscribe to our
show on Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, the iHeartRadio app, and
(34:51):
wherever else you listen to podcasts. Stuff you Missed in
History Class is a production of IHEARTRADI d For more
podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or
wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang
Ding dong! Join your culture consultants, Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang, on an unforgettable journey into the beating heart of CULTURE. Alongside sizzling special guests, they GET INTO the hottest pop-culture moments of the day and the formative cultural experiences that turned them into Culturistas. Produced by the Big Money Players Network and iHeartRadio.