"The Seed Time of a Great Harvest": Douglass Recalls Fellow Abolitionists

Quandra Prettyman, senior associate in the English and Africana Studies departments at Barnard College, was one of the first Black faculty members at the college. She taught the first courses in African American literature there in the 1970s and is the editor of Out of Our Lives: A Selection of Contemporary Black Fiction (1975). An accomplished poet, she has been published in I Am the Darker Brother: An Anthology of Modern Poems by African Americans (1970) and The Poetry of Black America: Anthology of the 20th Century (1973), both edited by Arnold Adoff.

In a letter written on March 2, 1880, Frederick Douglass reflects upon memories stirred by reading Reminiscences of a Journalist (1880) by his old friend and colleague Charles T. Congdon. For Douglass, the book “brought to life a phase of the ‘dead past’ of which I never think without emotion. It was not merely the seed time of a great harvest but the hard time when old and knarly oaks were to be hewed down . . . I shall never cease to be glad that I had a small share in this rough and flinty work.” [1]

Beginning with his first job delivering newspapers, Charles Congdon (1821–1891) never left the world of journalism. The journalist, he wrote, has “no calling to the clerical profession; he does not desire to dose his fellow-creatures; the law tempts him not; a purely literary life means beggary: but in journalism he may be always near human interests, and where he may always hear the beating of the great human heart.” [2] Congdon had worked on several newspapers in New Bedford, Massachusetts, by 1857 when Horace Greeley asked him to come to New York and work for the New York Tribune. A prolific writer, Congdon also contributed articles to many leading magazines of the day, among them the North American Review and the Knickerbocker.

In Reminiscences, Congdon recalls Frederick Douglass’s early days in New Bedford where, within a few days of his escape from slavery, Douglass and his wife, Anna Murray Douglass, settled. Douglass was then “a day-laborer upon the piers, or was engaged in the still humbler occupation of whitewashing.” [3]

Congdon, a New Bedford native, draws a picture of race relations in the town. According to him, the town was “antislavery from the start, being full of Quakers . . . and the people all Abolitionists before William Lloyd Garrison began his wonderful work.” [4] New Bedford was a major destination for fugitive slaves; the cook for Congdon’s own family was an escaped slave. In Reminiscences, he describes this fugitive population as “self-emancipated people . . . and a thrifty and well-behaved class.” It was not all a rosy picture. Congdon recalls, as well, the presence of “colorphobia . . . in full and fierce and most uncharitable force.” He attended “a public school in which the black boys were seated by themselves, and the white offenders were punished by being obliged to sit with them.” [5]

When Frederick and Anna arrived in New Bedford, they were delivered to the home (now a National Historic Landmark) of two African Americans, Nathan and Mary Johnson. Both were highly successful in business (Nathan as a caterer and Mary, a confectioner) and anti-slavery activists, providing sanctuary for fugitives as well as involving themselves in multiple activities in the broader black community. Most notably, as Douglass acknowledges in his Narrative, “I gave Mr. Johnson the privilege of choosing me a name.” [6]

Not long after settling in, Douglass made his first public speech, and Congdon recalls his “good fortune to listen to [Douglass’s] earliest rhetorical efforts” when he “was persuaded to address a meeting called to consider the case of the fugitive, George Latimer.” Congdon sketches one lively episode when Douglass was hissed (hostile interruptions of anti-slavery speakers being common), observing that “the sharpest of such intruders never meddled with Mr. Douglass without being sorry for the temerity.” [7]

In his letter to Congdon thanking him for a copy of Reminiscences, Douglass takes special notice of Congdon’s references to Charles Sumner and Henry Clapp, Jr. “You will have to know something about Henry Clapp if you want to know all about me,” Walt Whitman had asserted. Indeed, Clapp’s name survives today primarily as an early and ardent champion of Whitman, whose work he published as the editor of the Saturday Press. Although he is largely forgotten now, his obituary in the New York Times begins, “No man was better known in the newspaper and artistic world a few years ago than the eccentric and gifted King of the Bohemians—Henry Clapp, Jr.” [8] In his early years, Clapp advocated temperance and anti-slavery, but a sojourn in Paris introduced him to a new and raging Bohemianism. By the time he returned to New York, he had forsaken temperance, although an ardent abolitionist he remained. Douglass’s note follows Clapp’s sad trajectory: “I can never think of that brilliant little man but with deep sadness. I knew him long and well in his best days and when his best qualities guided him and I knew him then to love and admire as afterwards I knew him to deplore and pity him.”

Congdon portrays Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts as a man whose “entire and perfect integrity” he would no sooner question than “the sun-rise, or the ebb and flow of the tide, or the Copernican system,” taking notice that in political party matters, he was a man “who began by bolting; he went on bolting; as a bolter he ended.” [9] Douglass’s relationship with Sumner was long, full, and complicated by the qualities Douglass mentions in this note: a “vain” man who was, as well, “mentally and morally . . . a giant.”

Sumner’s political life was devoted not only to the abolition of slavery but to the removal of barriers to full citizenship for Africans Americans and to racial equality, arguing unsuccessfully in the famous early case against school segregation, Roberts v. City of Boston (1849). He was a founder in 1848 of the Free Soil Party, which opposed both the extension of slavery into United States territories and the admission of slave states into the Union, and was active among the Joint Committee of Fifteen whose work supported the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the US Constitution. Sumner’s uncompromising idealism is recollected in Congdon’s Reminiscences and Douglass’s brief, graceful thank-you note.

In Douglass’s recollections of these two admired, nevertheless flawed, men, one hears “the beating of the great human heart.”

This essay was originally published in the Gilder Lehrman Institute’s collection of essays Frederick Douglass: A Life in Documents (2018).