Douglass’s first wife, Anna Murray Douglass, died in 1882. They remained close friends and were perhaps lovers, as Assing regularly accompanied Douglass on his speaking tours. One such friendship was with Ottilie Assing, a German woman who translated My Bondage and My Freedom into German and then journeyed from Germany to Rochester to meet with Douglass in 1856. The private Douglass remains elusive, though biographers are working to uncover friendships that never became fully public. After the embarrassed Griffiths returned to England, Douglass took a measure of revenge by presenting Garrison as a paternalistic racist in My Bondage and My Freedom. When Douglass decided to start his own newspaper in 1847, Garrison was furious, and by the early 1850s he was lashing out at Douglass, accusing him in The Liberator of having an affair with his British friend Julia Griffiths, who was the managing editor of Douglass’s newspaper. Garrison was the publisher and editor of The Liberator, which became the most popular antislavery newspaper in America. How did Douglass and Garrison become frenemies? Douglass clearly saw himself as being in the romantic tradition of Scott’s James Douglas, a character who is imprisoned as an enemy of the Scottish king but is eventually pardoned and celebrated. When he escaped, he changed his name to Frederick Douglass, taking the surname of one of the rebellious heroes of Sir Walter Scott’s 1810 narrative poem The Lady of the Lake. What does it signify?ĭouglass was born Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey. government’s request to set up a naval station there.ĭouglass chose his surname. consul to Haiti, he supported Haiti’s decision to deny the U.S. He collaborated with John Brown, met with Lincoln three times, toured Egypt, attended numerous women’s rights conventions, spoke out against the rise of lynching, and was a political friend of Ulysses Grant. He published two additional autobiographies- My Bondage and My Freedom and Life and Times-and a novella, The Heroic Slave.
What else do you wish people knew?ĭouglass published his most famous autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, in 1845 Garrison was his publisher. Most people know the story of Douglass’s daring escape from slavery and his work with William Lloyd Garrison. When you study Douglass, you read truly superb writing. I’ve had a long fascination with nineteenth-century American literature and culture, and Douglass spanned that period and addressed the big issues of the time: slavery, race, women’s rights, and immigration.
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