baldwin and i didn't learn a lot of those people in school. so a part of how people marginalize through history is what happens with an incomplete story about actionable and how it is told there is a reason i didn't know about those until i was in my mid- twenties. [inaudible conversations]

. >> good evening welcome to the historical society manager of public programs here it's always a joy to welcome you to the auditorium. tonight's program frederick douglass is a matthew mike lecture in biography for fall 2018 it was in honor of a man of great intellect and passion specifically that i would like to thank the entire family for the generous support of this lecture series. [applause] as well as your ongoing support we do two of these per year so keep your eye out this spring for the next. i would also like to thanks to our trustee and all the councilmembers who have all the great work and support but also we had former governor assistant governor david paterson in the off - - in the audience tonight.

[applause] welcome. the program will last an hour and also including question and answer session those will be written questions on notecards if you come into the auditorium if you didn't receive a pencil and notecards staff will go through to give you one or swing by later to collect and also a book signing following the program that will take place in the main smith gallery and books will also be for sale and we hope you turn out for that. now welcome david back to the historical society in addition to be a trustee 1954 professor of american history for studying slavery and the author and editor of a dozen

books which have been awarded the bancroft prize in the frederick douglass prize among many others the most recent book is profit of freedom chair for center of african-american studies at princeton university. the author of several books including democracy and black. and exodus. please silence your electronic devices and join me to welcome our guests. [applause] . >> how are you all doing? good. good.

welcome. . >> think you. . >> this is my pleasure. so let's jump into this. it is a wonderful book so by its. [laughter] talk a little bit about the archives. you have access to something that most simply did not have access to. >> with a full life of dougla douglas, did an early book on douglas the dissertation on douglas, 1989 to autobiographies, et cetera i.

but also the narrative to teachers i went to savannah georgia a couple years ago to talk to teachers with the douglas narrative apologies to some of those who have heard the story. but my host at the georgia historical society was a local collector wants to meet you and have lunch. i said that's fine. that collector was walter evans who is now a dear friend and this book is in part dedicated to him. he took me to his house and we sat at his dining room table he deserves a moment the way i speak about this i give him as many moments as i can and african-american retired surgeon who grew up in segregated savanna. went to the michigan medical

school practiced in detroit 30 some years which has a lot of common because i grew up in flint. he already had season tickets to the chargers and i could never afford to them. [laughter] so he started collecting in the seventies rare books and manuscripts and art. and in his remarkable house in savannah is a library of rare books, name any book in the african-american tradition he has first tradition but also archive boxes it should be at the library at yale and we have tried. [laughter] and if you're watching walter they are still waiting. [laughter] but what it consisted of in essence is about ten very

large books kept by his sons. during the last third of his life also a lot of family papers and letters and photographs and a lot of other tidbits that walter bought overtime mostly from one other collector and when i saw the collection it's one of those moments a historian has such luck that i realized oh god. i don't want to do this. [laughter] because if i didn't work with this material somebody else would. a lot of other scholars have now gone there and most of those i have introduced to him but with his collection you spend time at his dining room table i spent several spring breaks and other weeks without that collection i never would have done this it opens up

talks about the patriot douglas that's not the douglas that they generally know if you read biographies. so that new archive is the reason that i do this also issues of frederick douglass missing newspaper. and in the newspaper for 16 years and i have access now to every issue.

. >> so with this extraordinary account, the voice of the 19th century. and with that political insider. it is a story to reveal the powerful. >> so think about this. douglas has profit. and politician. so talk a little bit about this. . >> i can say that he has really read this book. [laughter]

we are upstairs chatting away and some time on the telephone also. he is talking about stuff i can hardly remember. [laughter] but if you put the word profit in your title you better be ready to defend it. it is a big word. it is a big w. . . . . but it isn't rocket science. he adopted the story of the old

testament, the idea that the templates are a celeb, and this is what the great prophet were all saying that the temple had to be destroyed, that the people have become so sinful and ploys and they have to have a reckoning and in that reckoning many of them would die. some of them would be sent into exile and would probably survive. some of that might eve them mige promised land. douglas took that story at all of its parts along the way if he did what so many americans did and this is one of the reasons i wanted to interview me. he took the story and applied it to his own people in his own life and especially to his

country. it makes him a bloodthirsty orator and unpleasant to read especially in the midst of a civil war when he becomes a virulent war propagandists in the words that are not pleasant to say the least. he did what the hebrew prophets did in that condescending language of the old testament. he was able to find that language at times to express a dilemma and explain the historical tradition and irony, to explain something terrible in which there might be possibili possibility. it sent me to some theologian friends who told me read so and

so. my good friends at you got to read robert alter and so on and so on. and i was trying to teach myself about the hebrew prophets that he was so adept at not just quoting that. phrasing and fusin using and i o realize particularly from reading the great jewish theologian who wrote a book among others that it is sometimes a person in our society and in our lives perhaps from the religious world and sometimes more from the political world or both at the same time through sometimes each in octaves the rest of us couldn't hear.

but as he also said, the profit is often the writer or the spokes person who has been shattered by a cataclysmic experience and therefore can shatter others. he had an experience that was burned into his soul and his scarred him psychologically. all you need to do is get into one or many others of the great speeches take the fourth of july speech if that isn't a work of frederick i'm not sure anyone in america wrote one. it masterpiece of abolitionism it is defined as the kind of rhetoric in the story that calls

people back to their principles and their proper way or face damnation. the fourth of july speech is like a symphony and the movement is horrible, the final movement barely lets you backup. so, the many places in the oratory and in his writing where you can begin to find these elements plus he always self-conscious of that? though. i don't know if any instanc of e called himself a prophet. hello, i'm here to be your profit. [laughter] a real profit personals he is, but he is going to hurt you while he teaches you, and douglas did that over and over

again. it doesn't mean that he's always right or prophetic by any means. he struggles with contradictio contradictions. >> when you think about this voice what is the relationship in which there are these moments into part of the story that you tell it is this ongoing creation in his life and in the african american studies you can trust see the fires in his eyes. that intensity has something to do with his rage against a

player institution of the kind of moral stride. then in the midst of this, there's this insistence. talk a little bit about that. >> douglas threw himself into exist is publicly. 20 years a slave in maryland and baltimore. he escapes and spends three years in massachusetts working at all kinds of jobs and lots of scholars have tried to have them meet, but a novelist must have

been made because we can't find a meeting. >> it doesn't mean i didn't use moby dick for epigraph when melville calls the proud ship a pulpit. he begins to also preach the church. 20, 21, and 22-years-old. it's not perfectly formed by any means as an orator or a thinker. but he gets discovered by gary soni and scum of the proponents of lloyd garrison's approach to ending slavery, which was moral persuasion. garrison was a genuine radical

who believed in ending it now and not waiting for a gradual plan over decades or generatio generations. he was a religiously driven and also have some principles and strategies that were difficult for frederick douglass and other abolitionists to follow such a strict nonviolence and long politics as you did not get involved in other parties complicit with slavery you had to get your hands dirty politics. douglas is going to take time to leave that one behind that he's going to learn politics. garrison was like a mentor figure particularly for a young

man who was a genuine worth and one of the things you need to know about frederick douglass, he barely knew his mother and never knew who his father was although he knew he was playing racial that's about all he could conclude and he spent the rest of his wif life trying to figurt out, but they were the first abolitionist home. once they discovered him as a speaker and took him out to do his first public speech in august of 1841 where he still was this trembling kid who shoved into his shoes when he got up to speak for the first time that they discovered a young man with a voice, not just ain the orator, but a story and he was already a good storyteller.

he had been preaching on sundays was his job to preach so for the next three and a half years they hired him and he went out on the road and a pair of sony and then minded body as i call him because that's the way he came to feel about it day in and day out and then eventually all the way out to ohio. he would tour with groups and the first three to four he traveled with abby kelly and some others. garrison at times this is where douglas accused chief as a public abolitionist and orator.

at the end of this period, he decided to just sit down in the winter to 44, 45 and essentially write up all these stories he's been telling on the circuit he told his own tail episode after episode all the things he witnessed and experienced but he also perfected his favorite speech in what was known this sermon was frederick douglass in those passages where it said

they would prance around the stage in his accent and would be a progressive christian slaveholders he was a star and it brought to the point where every day would go they always had a resolution to speak to. the audience would start saying do this sermon. [laughter] and he would say okay and keep break into the slaveholders sermon. he did that for years and years but this is where he cut his teeth as a radical abolitionist employee and the only weapon they had and then return of

course in newspapers. >> there is the sense in some ways drawing on the language of the king james bible the sense in which he understood the importance of rhetoric and its role. >> but he seems to understand that lesson about the role of frederick. >> they must have a moral position and preach the heart of the audience not just their mind. >> it seems to be organized along the lines of each autobiography kind of angered.

then you have the life and times in its various iterations. each moment as he said he is writing himself into existence, sso there's there is a way thate understood the power of langua language. he is doing this, he's having some issues with them but he's fine-tuning his craft. so talk about him as a literary figure. >> there is a letter he writes to the editors of the first journal in the late fall of 1844 just as he was starting to write the narrative he writes a little essay it's very short and he says in a letter to the editor

to write for a book i wonder if i could write a book and all of us who are writers the first time you imagine i'm going to writwrite it up and manchin dotd clearly he wanted to put this for his narrative to say this as 2 a.m. this is my story don't doubt me, i am real. he wanted to name his oppresso oppressors. then he lives until his british friends brought his freedom.

but in the 1840s and 50s and even into the civil war they tried to perfect his writing style is the remarkable thing about douglas he wrote in so many different genres. his life is punctuated the first in 1845 and he's only 27-years-old and then when he's 37 in the middle of the 1850s, his masterpiece 350 page autobiography which is a much more political book in the next of the great crisis of the 1850s and he also lives a lot more in a different kind of abolition.

third autobiography the old man kind of sums things up the life and times of frederick douglass attack full of name dropping and he wants to know all the famous people he knows and on and on and the other hand it's a gold mine of stuff. what we know about the relationship with john brown especially window from that text and then another one in 1892. but he mastered the short form political editorial for his newspaper. he could write in a different voice or go after a political issue.

he also wrote these elaborate speeches as text. the fourth of july speech is a masterpiece of writing and there is a letter where he said i worked for three weeks on this and longer than anything else i've delivered and you can tell if i could get him in a room to ask one of my hundred questions i would ask is what did you read before the speech where are your notes quite and then he wrote a novella and some people would say the autobiographies or nonfiction but then he writes a novella called the slave based on the revelation of a slave name madison washington. so he wrote it and he tried poetry.

he had at times magic with metaphors. my friend once wrote an essay i wouldn't say douglas won the metaphor but he certainly taught us a lot in the 19th century by the metaphor he had a way of capturing a moment or dilemma in a way he would draw from shakespeare is make it up so he becomes a writer that is never satisfied with his craft. there is a wonderfuthere's a won page 259 that i just write yes with an!

all great autobiographies are about loss and about the hopeless but the necessary request to control the past. memory is both inspiration and method and the subject the thing one cannot live with or without. >> it's almost manic in the way that he is constantly returning and we talk about this earlier i'm obsessed with james baldwin and he's constantly retelling the story of his stepfather filling it in order to process it because it is an act of self creation so he's rendering this narrative in order to constitute himself so you have this moment

where douglas is kind of the slave porn embodiment and you quote a passage where there is a moment where there's this chapter on douglas and lincoln where you gave an account of the second founding of the back and forth" emerges are these two figures that become central to the founding of the country and then at the end he is still trying to find the day that he is born.

>> remember we began with the sense of the interior life as much as the archive will allow you there's this moment where he says in effect the experience of slavery affected his ability for a fraction of. >> i speculate on that. douglas is scarred by this life as a teenager and adult and experienced every kind of

brutality. it's much harder and he was beaten savagely by at least one owner and one overs here and witnessed all kinds of beatings at the white house plantation. they took the carriage house to a bloody pulp one day. he's like 7-years-old witnessing this off. there were many moments the memory was imported in trying to understand him. i didn't think of this ahead of time until i was writing those first chapters what do we

remember of our childhood and how do we remember childhood and find time to remember childhood. he's re-creating it over and over. both for this brutality and also for his humane sensibilities. when she taught him to read until she stopped teaching him to read and then they talk about how an angel can become a devil but the way that he cultivates that to try to understand what it did to him is remarkable in that got me off reading a bunch of child psychology which i didn't read if no offense to anyone i tried to read a bunch

of psychology on how do we remember childhood and i thought let's go back and read douglas. but then later in life he is all about the memory of the civil war to try to preserve that abolitionist emancipation trying to remember victory and take the country remember emancipation is the greatest result of the war and responsibility of the nation but he's also try to line up his own life. anybody here ever tried to write anything in the genre of a memoir does the work trying to constantly find what goes in and what can i trust in my memory" can i not trust. what a nightmare he makes a great story and what doesn't. but it's also true at the end of the day douglas seems to have believed he had one great story

to tell and he kept doing it. at the same time he wrote great speeches on political issues and philosophical issues and legal issues but the tale of his own my is that he is searching for and i think only three or four months before he died, he writes to benjamin, one of thomas's sons, one of his owners and potentially his father although we don't know, he writes and says do you know when my birthdate was because i can't find it. it was another week of asking was your father and my father. he went to the eastern shore up four times after the war with

paparazzi in tow wherever he went he had to press with him. he asked him are you my father. she didn't get a yes which is one of the reasons that he never stops trying to find out his paternity because he knows he has a love of kinfolk. they found him later in life he not only have four surviving adult children that he had 21 grandchildren and some siblings either adopted him or he adopted them out of slavery and all of them end up at the big house in washington at one time or another in the 1880s and 1890s about 14 of the

grandchildren died in infancy or by their teenage years. the death of children was not uncommon but this was extraordinary they lost four or five in one month over and over. he never writes about any of that in the biographies of course. douglas the writer, the politicianthepolitician, the pro went public about the one who jealously guarded the position and the black theater. >> he didn't like their idols either. douglas loved being king of the hill and those who tried to knock him off he did some things

back. douglas loved politics in the crucible of the 1850s the decade that leads to the civil war as a garrison in the end he was supposed to leave the political parties alone but he was a political man named quoted speeches by the liberator and it got to be a contradiction to some of his followers to say the least. but douglas by 51, 52, 53 as it was over the expansion is exploding across the country and the political parties they are tearing themselves apart and douglas comes to realize this is a hugely political question and he also gets like a lot of area sunday in he becomes quite impatient with moral persuasion you can keep trying to change a

person's heart forever and ever thought at some point you need to bend somebody's oil and change the law if you can. he loved politics but only shouldered up to it carefully in the 1850s. at first he considered himself a free soil or and goes to the convention in the 1848 they called him a to speak. he didn't quite know what to do with that first party in 1854 though he was excited about it. it's certainly against the expansion of slavery and he begins to develop -- i spent two or three chapters on this he begins to develop a hard-earned pragmatism about the crisis over slavery and he realizes you may have to make relationships here with people you do not like whose principles you can't stand but they make things happen. he began to realize from 54 to

56 and 58 when lincoln runs, he's causing great. the enemy of my enemy is my friend. he also came slowly to trust some republicans like gerald sumner and a few others. he doesn't know when to end yet and he follows him into lincoln douglas debate and they had quite an exchange at times and i was lucky to have a fellow studying that who had quite an exchange with each other. anyway, he becomes a republican for sure in the civil war because the republican party was waging war against slavery at least it was eventually in as

many in this room know douglas was a ferocious critic in the first year to year and a half in the war because the union government wasn't moving against slavery in fact it was protecting fugitive slaves but with the preliminary proclamation of 1863, douglas not only changed his tune, he appropriated lincoln as lincoln appropriated him and he saw what was now the civil war had become whawhat's lincoln hadn't wantedt to become. he didn't want it to become a remorseless revolutionary struggle. the rest of his life after 1864 he would campaign every year and

the republican party would decide which is the to send them to. there were pockets of the voters in the state he would be sent there and there's other sections of the country they thought they would work well and for some reason in indiana he was always sent to indiana, a swing state. others would campaign week after week. then sometimes he would wonder why because the republican party is changing and abandoning the cause of the emancipation civil rights in the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments and to round that out a bit, it's quite an

issue today like all great questions that matter this has a huge legacy. the libertarian right love was o appropriate douglas because he was a staunch proponent of self-reliance that every black theater in the century to speak of was a proponent of self-reliance that is not unusual. but in the wa a way that douglas appropriated a.

he is on our side. but what douglas do is this. you are so attentive to anna. say a word about her. >> at 18 or 19 when she was three years older, she was born free in the eastern shore from where he was born they played at the same know when they were

kids. at the foot of chambers street on the lower west side they found themselves safe within 48 hours to baltimore we don't know who he wrote a letter to annotate the same trains and ferries and they were in new york in the same 38 hours or so to join him and that was an act of bravery. she was free and porn free. if they had been caught, we

wouldn't have known about either one of them. she remained his helpmate with another of his five children, ill let her all of her life by and large, and it was a problem. the most famous african-american man of letters in the world who is married to an illiterate woman who couldn't be part of that professional intellectual life was very much part of his life in other ways. we know what we know about her not entirely but largely from the children wrote about her and one of the things in the collection in savanna are little-known narratives written by two of the sons.

we always have the one the daughter wrote that there are two narratives one is coming up in the douglas home and one is about their parents. i try to find my way into anna's life and that there are no documents. there were testimonies about her and she kept the books. if you get to know douglas you will notice, he was desperate to make and preserve a home because he never had one.

>> let's go to some questions from the audience. one of the first, i heard frederick douglass was biased against native americans. is this true? 's panic somebody has read a copy of the book. >> it's one of those big words he trafficked in some indian stereotypes, no question. for example when he sometimes would make the case after the civil war in particular for the uptight ambitions let them vote and get educated he would sometimes do it and not a very pleasant language.

it's a 19th century stereotypes that was all over the culture. but i have students read chapters of this in a seminar i taught. they want douglas to be in on it and forever an advocate of the right and against the reservations. >> the relationship between douglas and grant. >> it's never got very close. grant becomes president in 1868 and douglas have been mad a dist admirer like all yankees were.

grant appoints him to a commission in 70 and 71 -- 1771 in the dominican republic to discuss with the leadership of senator domingo whether the u.s. would annex it. douglas was the secretary, he wasn't an official member of the commission and he took one of his sons along with him and kept a diary on tha their trip to the caribbean actually he went swimming one day and almost drowned according to his diary that he put him on the commission and advocated for the annexation. douglas became an expansionist after the civil war and there are reasons.

reconstruction hasn't fallen apart yet. reconstruction hasn't fallen apart yet. they were among the group of abolitionists who argued the united states is now an abolitionist country and we are the nation of emancipation and we should export it and take the 13th and 14th and 15th amendments out to the work of in the societies like the caribbean and give them our ideas. they were invited for a special dinner and didn't invite douglas that he at least from a distance admired grand at least in 76 he won the grand two run again and

didn't know how to trust the other candidates. he thought grant wanted the republicans to win. he didn't think grant could lose but they never had a truly close relationship which made me fascinated with the speech given in 1876 the second greatest with the unveiling of the lincoln monument and friedmans memorial and he was sitting there in the front row when douglas gave that speech. i went to the papers to find out whawhat they've grant think that nothing was there. he must have gone back to have a nap at the white house.

how did the rise of jim crow impact douglas clegg >> it had an impact because he got thrown off lots of trains by hotels, taverns, restaurants, trains, stagecoaches they got to be a source of humor for him at times. but the period that we talk about, mississippi passes the first disenfranchisement law in 1890 and douglas lives to see the beginning of the bitter segregation in the 80s and 90s but doesn't live to see

its fruition until the early 20th century. nothing about it as much as i could tell surprised him because he had experienced all of the antebellum jim crow although he always referred to things like being jim crow or a former segregation as another variation of the ideas he would just call it reconstructed, the tradition brought back to life. for him it was a resurrection of slavery. >> the infinite manifestations.

>> is it because they had he hoped >> hell was he in getting the suffrage movement passed? >> i don't think he was crucial in getting the resolution passed as the only male speaker and flex participant who signed the seneca falls declaration of human rights and he was there and gave his presence to this event was huge and he wrote essays and was always for women's rights and as a patriarcis apatriarch in many ws private life that didn't make

him that he was all in on the women's suffrage and economic rights and civil rights until the 14th and 15th amendments and has a typical breakup as some of you know susan anthony and stanton miss behaved badly in the way they mistreated douglas with all kinds of racist epithet not just aimed at douglas but aimed at black men. they were fed up. they didn't want to wait any longer. anybody with one eye open and understood it never would have passed. to stanton and anthony at that point it was put us in order you

can have your country back. douglas didn't have choice. it's one of those moments of his life he has to make decisions and choices about this political issue or that, this strategy or that. >> whited british supporters help him? >> he spends 1845 to 47 about 18 or 19 months when he's still in his 20s a huge turning point in his life.

his british friends begin to realize first there were a lot of friends who tried to coax him into debating tuesday in engla england. he thought about it it's clear there are some letters that he couldn't. the idea that he was going to move to sort of richardson sisters from newcastle led the effort to raise the money and get all the negotiations and letterwriting and bought his freedom for $730 douglas wouldn't return to the united states until he had the official document in his hand that he was free. the other person answer is a

terrace on the ends were very strict moralists and they said to purchassentto purchase the fe complicitous. she was thank you very much i will take my freedom. better than not having it. >> douglas is telling his story and in so many ways it is america's story. what should we take from this in this current moment that we find ourselves in what does this story teach us? but as he is never over. it doesn't only have cycles that

it has terrible surprises and when you think you've won a victory, watch out. he's one of those reformers who lives to see the cause and frankly beyond his belief as late as 58 and 59 they have little reason to believe they would see the slavery destroyed and a new constitution crafted out but then he also lives 30 more years to see those causes and constitutional amendments and civil rights acts all but wiped out or eat base day becaud by the terrorist violence and by politics that what no would notd

could not preserve. the trajectory of his life covers most of a century and the greatest transformative events of the civil war and the great story of slavery to freedom we are still every day fighting over how to define that amendment and with the quality of law means. god knows we are still fighting over the supreme court. [laughter] >> on that note, thank you very much for joining us. i want to remind you we have the book is for sale. david will be signing books and a warm thank you for moderating

tonight's discussion. i also want to make an important production he was the 55th governor of new york and the first african-american governor so we are so thrilled to have him with us and the audience and all of you as well. [applause]

most of us, not all of us but most of us come from modest backgrounds don't get to see much of the worldwide leader growing up as kids. we tend to live within a few blocks of our home that is where we play, most of our friends are there unless you are in places like new york in which everybody has to travel but for most people, your world is very small and the bigger world is something you have to spooler with time and age so the books give you the chance to do that in a way that nothing else does. television and movies present you with pictures that what they don't let you do is imagine.

the power of words is creating pictures in your mind and when you can do that without television or movies or pictures telling you what to imagine, it can become more special so for me i explored the world as a child with books and i saw the possibility of things i never could have imagined without reading. i could never have imagined traveling to faraway places. now i do it but it was that wish to meet about what other people lived and wanting to see it.

is is

launched booktv 20 years ago on c-span2 and since then we've covered thousands of authors and festivals including more than 100 events about the first ladies. in 2010 we interviewed laura bush at the national book festival. mrs. bush founded the festival in 2001 and we've covered it every year since. >> personal to politics and criticism about george. every one does not list their, but i also knew that it was a fact of wife and i knew when he ran for president that is what happens to the american president. remember we've been the child of a president ourselves if we been so distraught president bush, georggeorge bush's dad was critd so much in 92 when he lost. ..

. >>. >> encore presentation of the texas book festival coverage from earlier today we will

hear authors discuss the m