Below is an excerpt from Frederick Douglass’ 1845 book, NARRATIVE OF THE LIFE OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS, about his slave mother.
That one excerpt has more power to unmask the incredible, RELENTLESS, unrelenting, targeted cruelty of American Slavery, than anything the films, 12 YEARS A SLAVE, or DJANGO UNCHAINED or anything, angry, at her white mother, Nikole Hannah-Jones can conjure up.
There is a consensus that Frederick’s father was a white man; his name is lost to History.
Frederick Douglass was his nom de guerre; his official name was Frederick Bailey. No one knows if Bailey was the name of his true white father, or the name of another white person, or a slave.
This Blogger does not know why he took a new surname. This Blogger assumes there was a Douglass who had been kind to him.
His real mother had died when he was young ( see excerpt), and, as a slave, he was given to one of those conflicted Southern slaveholding families in Maryland.
Conflicted, because the new mistress saw in him, an intelligent youngster; as did his new master. The mistress did not want his mind to go to waste; so, she taught him the alphabet. The Maryland Master saw a brilliant mind; so brilliant it was dangerous. The master wanted the education of Frederick aborted.
The master thought that literacy would encourage Frederick to seek freedom. Young Frederick heard the debate, and internalized it; as the first antislavery debate he had been exposed to. Later he would write: "Knowledge makes a person unfit to be a slave.”
The Mistress came around to the Master’s viewpoint, and banned all reading materials from Frederick, including the Bible.
Frederick, in his first act of rebellion, taught himself to read on the sly.
As a slave, Frederick was passed from owner to owner; until he met his SIMON LEGREE, a real life version of the villain in UNCLE TOM’S CABIN.
The real life LEGREE, whipped Douglass again and again; so often that the wounds from the prior whippings did not have time to heal.
Then one day, Frederick rebelled; he took the whip away from the villain and beat the villain. Douglass thought that was the seminal moment in his life: "You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man."
Now, it gets interesting; if the villain had been a true patriot of slavery, he would have informed the authorities, that Douglass had rebelled and physically assaulted him.
If the villain had reported Douglass, it is likely Douglass would have been hanged after a trial. More likely, Douglass would have been lynched, as a rogue slave.
But the villain did not report Douglass.
Was the omission because of the LEGREE’S shame or embarrassment at being physically chastised? Or……slaves were valuable commodities, and if he had reported the Douglass rebellion, the authorities would have stripped him of Douglass, costing the villain a valuable asset.
Seemingly, American greed kept Douglass alive.
It is an irony of History, that, of all the Blacks lynched by slave holders in the antebellum South, the most dangerous slave, ever, to American Slavery was spared lynching.
The Confederacy would rue the day it was short one lynching of a Black Man.
Then again , it could be reasonably argued by Believers, that Douglass not being lynched was a Divine manipulated anomaly.
It is not correct to say Douglass fled slavery; he just left it.
In the North, emancipated by location, he became a preacher, an author, a lecturer, a leading abolitionist, and, most critically, a celebrity.
Frederick Douglass had three seminal moments in American History, and one wistful, would be Camelot moment.
SEMINAL MOMENT ONE
John Brown was an anti-slavery fanatic, who made his bones and reputation in Bloody Kansas, by mercilessly killing pro-slavery Americans; beheading some with a rusty sword, so that the death would hurt more.
After being chased out of Kansas; he and some of his sons concocted a plan to seize the federal armory at Harper’s Ferry and distribute the mass of rifles and ammunition stored there to Black Slaves; in the belief that the distribution would trigger a mass slave uprising in the South.
In a secret meeting, in an isolated quarry in Pennsylvania, right before the raid, John Brown met Frederick Douglass, to offer him leadership of the upcoming Black Slave rebellion.
To a shocked John Brown, Douglass turned down the offer.
Later, John Brown intimated that Douglass was a coward. Douglass said he turned down the offer ,because he thought the rebellion would not work, because it would have to be white men, not Black slaves who would have to bleed to free the oppressed.
That is the Preacher in Douglass talking; for he was seeking not revenge, nor reparations nor even a reckoning but expiation for the white race. An expiation for the sin of Slavery; which could only be achieved by a massive bloodletting of white blood.
After Lincoln became president, he and Douglass had conversations, conversations drenched with the almighty. This Blogger believes it was from those exchanges with Douglass that Lincoln conceived his gospel of expiation; best articulated in his Second Inaugural.
“Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes. "Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh." If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether." . LINCOLN.”,
To this Blogger, that is Abraham Lincoln channeling Frederick Douglass; Douglass did not join John Brown for he understood that the sins of the lash had to be expiated by redemption, a blood redemption, offered up by the white race, on a thousand different battlefields.
Douglass and then Lincoln knew that the sins visited on Douglass’ mother, and all Black Slaves, could only be expiated by the terrible creation of white widows and white orphans, after bloody strife.
SEMINAL MOMENT TWO
Since the beginning of the Biblical Conflict, Douglass had advocated for the use of Black soldiers in the Union Army.
Lincoln was hesitant; seriously, what white man would give a gun to a Black man just freed from slavery? Or who still had family in Slavery?
In the end, Douglass won; the war exacted a terrible toll on white males, and in the end, Lincoln relented and enlisted Black soldiers in the Union Army. By the end of the war, 10% of the Union soldiery was Black, 180,000. They acquitted themselves well; they died well. 40,000 Black soldiers died in the terrible conflict.
It is another savage irony of American History; the Civil War exacted such a terrible toll on the South, that before the end of the conflict, Robert E. Lee advocated the recruitment of Black soldiers in the Confederate Army, with freedom as a reward for service.
SEMINAL MOMENT THREE
Lincoln had always opposed the expansion of slavery beyond the South; and he had an antipathy to slavery in the South. On the other hand, he was married to a lady whose brothers would fight for the South.
Lincoln had to deal with all these conflicting claims of his loyalty.
His solution was to try and end slavery in America, and then ship off all the freed slaves, either back to Africa or to Panama, or to the Black nation of Haiti, Colonization.
On December 31, 1862, the day before Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, he signed a contract with Floridian planter Bernard Kock, to ship 5,000 recently liberated Black slaves to an island off the coast of Haiti, Cow Island.
Lincoln agreed to this scheme because he was intellectually stymied as to how he would integrate 4,000,000 former slaves into white society as free men, after the war.
Lincoln thought Colonization was one of his more brilliant ideas; he would have relocated freed slaves to either Liberia, Panama or Haiti. “If …[we] succeed in freeing our land from the dangerous presence of slavery; and, at the same time, in restoring a captive people to their long-lost father-land,…it will indeed be a glorious consummation.” A. Lincoln.”
Lincoln proposed a constitutional amendment to colonize Blacks outside of the United States. The amendment included federal compensation for slaveowners who lost their human property due to emancipation. Douglass reacted with a fury: “Shame upon the guilty wretches that dare propose, and all that countenance such a proposition….We live here—have lived here—have a right to live here, and mean to live here."
Lincoln was not pleased; on August 14, 1862, Lincoln met at the White House delegation of Black leaders to make his case for the voluntary emigration of Blacks. Douglass was not invited to the meeting, even though he was the leading Black leader in America.
Lincoln told the Black Leaders: “Your race suffer from living among us, while ours suffer from your presence… It is better for us both, therefore, to be separated”…A. LINCOLN.”
Lincoln was a great man, with a stubborn streak. On April 14, 1863, he shipped 453 Black volunteer émigrés to Cow Island.
Douglass, having met Kock, recognized a SIMON LEGREE when he saw him, thought the scheme would be a disaster.
It was. “…..at least 30 of its Black passengers had died from smallpox. A second ship, which was supposed to follow the Ocean Ranger with building and living supplies, never set sail. Kock, the self-appointed superintendent of the island, had misled the government and the Black settlers about the living conditions. On a visit to the island, a government official found the African American settlers with “tears, misery and sorrow pictured in every countenance.” Instead of the homes they were promised, the families slept on the ground in small huts made of palmetto and brush. Kock offered wages in a self-printed currency, which workers were obliged to spend on exorbitantly priced food and goods in a kind of company shop. There was also a “no work, no rations” policy. When the emigrant workers threatened revolt, Kock fled….HISTORY.”
Lincoln rarely spoke of the Cow Island misadventure again; he sent ships to rescue the abandoned Blacks, and renewed his interest in Black assimilation.
WOULD BE CAMELOT MOMENT
Douglass thought James A. Garfield was the finest white American he had ever met, a Lincoln without Lincoln’s depressions or stubbornness, or ruthlessness.
Garfield had been an outstanding Union General during the Civil War; was furiously anti-slavery and pro Black rights. And, perhaps dearer to Douglass' heart, he was an ordained minister.
Garfield was Douglass' Bobby Kennedy; the man who could bring progress honorably and adroitly.
Douglass was overjoyed when Garfield was elected president; thinking an all racial Camelot was at hand.
Alas, Garfield was soon assassinated; by someone who thought Garfield owed his election to him, and him alone and had not delivered.
Douglass had a profound effect on American history, and it would have been greater if Garfield had lived.
DOUGLASS ON HIS MOTHER
"I never saw my mother, to know her as such, more than four or five times in my life ; and each of these times was very short in duration, and at night. She was hired by a Mr. Stewart, who lived about twelve Miles from my home. She made her journeys to see me in the night, travelling the whole distance on foot,
after the performance of her day’s work. She was a field hand, and a whipping is the penalty of not being in the field at sunrise, unless a slave has special permission from his or her master to the contrary — a permission which they seldom get, and one that gives to him that gives it the proud name of being a kind master. I do not recollect of ever seeing my mother by the light of day. She was with me in the night. She would lie down with me, and get me to sleep, but long before I waked she was gone. Very little communication ever took place between us. Death soon ended what little we could have while she lived, and with it her hardships and suffering. She died when I was about seven years old, on one of my master’s farms, near Lee’s Mill. I was not allowed to be present during her illness, at her death, or burial.
She was gone long before I knew any thing about it. Never having enjoyed, to any considerable extent, her soothing presence, her tender and watchful care, I received the tidings' of her death with much the same emotions I should have probably felt at the death of a stranger.”
From: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass published c. 1845”
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