Frederick Douglass and the "Progress of American Liberty"

James Oliver Horton was the Benjamin Banneker Professor Emeritus of American Studies and History at George Washington University and historian emeritus of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History. He edited, authored, and co-authored ten books, including Black Bostonians: Family Life and Community Struggle in the Antebellum North (1979) and Slavery and the Making of America (2004), the companion book for the WNET/PBS series of the same name. Horton served as president of the Organization of American Historians from 2004 to 2005.

In a letter to an old friend in 1884, Frederick Douglass touches on key moments, both hopeful and discouraging, in his experience of post–Civil War America. He reveals to Amy Post his frustration with the public reaction to his recent marriage to Helen Pitts, a white woman. (His first wife, Anna Murray Douglass, a black woman, had died in 1882.) Amy Post and her husband, Isaac, were Quaker abolitionists active in the Underground Railroad. They had been friends with Douglass since the early 1840s, when he and Anna moved to Rochester. Amy had assisted Douglass in the 1850s with financial support for his newspaper, the North Star, and had helped look after his family when he fled authorities pursuing him for complicity in John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859. Though Isaac Post had died shortly after the Civil War, Frederick and Amy had remained close friends.

Here, despite his regret at having missed Amy in Rochester, Douglass sounds upbeat looking back over his extensive honeymoon tour with Helen through the Midwest, New York State, Canada, and New England. Undoubtedly to his relief, he and his new wife had met with no insults or rebuffs, in sharp contrast to many of his travels before the Civil War, when he was turned away from eating houses, confined to segregated quarters on trains and ships, and openly insulted in the street. His recent experience seemed to have raised his estimation of the nation’s progress toward racial equality, although his optimism was shown to be premature when the Supreme Court ruled segregation constitutional in 1896, the year after Douglass’s death.

The trip was a respite from the controversy that the mixed-race couple’s wedding had caused. The private ceremony had been at the home of Francis Grimké, a black minister and the nephew of famed white abolitionists Angelina and Sarah Grimké. The wedding was an intimate affair. Blanche Kelso Bruce, a black US senator from Mississippi, and his wife attended as witnesses along with Grimké’s wife and two house guests. But the newlyweds’ privacy did not last long. That evening, newspaper reporters descended, demanding details of this wedding between a white woman and America’s most prominent black man. Criticism emerged from both blacks and whites. Grimké received hate mail, including one letter whose author, unaware that Grimké was black, threatened that “any white minister who would marry a Negro to a white woman ought to be tarred and feathered.” [1] Some African Americans viewed Douglass’s marriage as a display of contempt for black women. Others charged that he had married a “common, poor white woman” for the status of her color alone. In reality, her background was hardly common. A graduate of Mount Holyoke, a descendant of Mayflower passengers John and Priscilla Alden, and a distant relative to the John Adams family, Helen had taught at the Hampton Institute before becoming Douglass’s secretary in the 1880s. She had assisted him in preparing revisions for his third and last autobiography, The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass ([1881] 1892).

To compound their problems, family members on both sides also objected to the match. Helen’s father, Gideon Pitts, despite his lifelong abolitionism and his admiration for Douglass, refused to admit Douglass to his home and soon broke off all relations with his daughter. Douglass’s adult children also kept their distance and never completely reconciled with Helen, even after their father’s death. Nonetheless, Helen remained faithful to Douglass’s life purpose, working to preserve Cedar Hill and to memorialize her husband’s achievements as an inspiration to future generations.

The letter to Amy Post marks a high point in Douglass’s deeply mixed experience of nineteenth-century America. The acceptance he and Helen found in their travels encouraged his faith in the possibilities for the country. He recognized the nation’s multiracial character and believed in its future. Once, when challenged about his choice of wives, he explained that his first wife was the color of his mother and his second the color of his father. Amy Post, Douglass’s “dear friend,” understood.