Douglass on the 4th of July

Douglass (whom I imagine sounding much like James Earl Jones) gave this speech to a crowd of over 500 people in Corinthian Hall in Rochester, NY, on July 5, 1855. He reprinted it in his newspaper, Frederick Douglass' Paper, four days later.

On July 7, Douglass apologized to his friend and patron, Gerritt Smith, for his "silence." "I have been engaged in writing a speech for the 4th of July, which has taken up much of my extra time for the last two or three weeks," he wrote to Smith. "You will readily think that the speech ought to be good that has required so much time. Well, some here think was a good speech -- foremost among those who think so, is my friend Julia. She tells me it was excellent!"*

"Julia" was Julia Griffiths, an English woman who had become acquainted with Douglass during his first visit to England in the late 1840s. She and her sister Eliza came to visit Douglass in 1848 and stayed. Eliza married John Dick, Douglass's publisher, in 1850, and Julia stayed on in the Douglass home. At this time, the finances of the North Star, the first incarnation of Douglass's paper, were coming under scrutiny by abolitionists in Rochester. They formed a committee to oversee -- they saw it as helping, he saw it as controlling -- the business operations of the paper. Griffith seems to have stepped in, as Douglass's friend and a person with some business acumen, to ensure that the paper stayed solvent and gave no cause for any outside scrutiny.

Their unorthodox friendship attracted attention. Douglass and the Griffiths sisters all came under physical attack on at least two occasions. The first occurring on the canal boats from New York City to Rochester, when other passengers objected to two white women sitting in the company of a black man. The second time, in 1850, after an abolitionist meeting, when white men attacked Douglass for the crime of walking down Broadway with two white women. The sisters all but dragged a nearby policeman to the scene and forced him to stop the attack. Even in Rochester among friends, Julia and Frederick attracted attention and Frederick's caution about escorting Julia in the streets was interpreted as a guilty conscience on the part of neighbors.

To be fair to the neighbors, both Julia and Frederick seemed oblivious, or at least foolish, in their household arrangements. Julia wrote letters describing a domestic scene of music and discussion resembling that of a happily married couple, leaving out all mention of Anna Douglass or the Douglass children. Frederick seems to almost openly defy conventions, even as he clearly humiliated his wife, in order to prove that a black man could have an equal friendship with an unmarried white woman.

Rivals in Boston, still unhappy with Douglass's decision to publish his own paper and his development away from their own moral suasionist ideologies and tactics, used this relationship to discredit Douglass, and (I must look at this point more rigorously) viciously attacked Griffiths more than Douglass. In fact, Douglass seems more the object of pity, while Griffiths became an object of hatred.

In the wake of these attacks, she moved to the home of Maria Porter, a neighbor and partner if forming the Rochester Ladies' Anti-slavery Society, and ultimately to England. There she met and married Henry O. Crofts, and the couple acted as agents for Douglass' Paper and host to Douglass when he left America one step ahead of the law after becoming a suspect following John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry. Julia also hosted Douglass and his second wife, Helen, in England when they toured Europe on a very belated honeymoon trip.

Alas, I have done the opposite of the danger in writing of women with little documentation: I have started writing about the man, and ended up writing about one of the women who surrounded him. That right there is the the method of my book.

*Frederick Douglass to Gerrit Smith, Rochester, NY, 7 July 1852, Gerrit Smith Papers, Bird Library, Syracuse University.