of frederick douglass.

>> thank you. >> you are welcome. [laughter] >> good evening everyone. i am alex kassl and it is a joy to welcome you to our auditorium. tonight program is a lecture in biography for fall 2018. the lecture was founded in the owner of the late mike glad steen, a man of passion for biography. i would like to thank edith and her family who are with us for their generous support of this lecture series. [applause] as well for their ongoing support. we do two of these per year so keep an eye out for the next

lecture in biography. i would like to thank and recognize all the chairman's council members who are with us for their great work and support. i also just learned that we have former governor -- assistant governor david paterson in the audience with us tonight. we would like to recognize and thank him. [applause] alexander: so welcome. tonight's program will last an hour and will include a question and answer session. the q&a will be conducted via written questions on note cards. coming into the auditorium, you may have received a note card and pencil. if not we are going to have staff going through throughout the program and we will give you a card. i will be by later to collect them as well. there will be a book signing with david blight. that will take place at our main smith gallery. books will be for sale there and we hope you join us for that.

at last we are thrilled to welcome david w blight back to the new york historical society. he is class of 1954 professor of american history and director of the center for the study of slavery, resistance, and abolition at yale. he is the author or editor of a dozen books which have been awarded the bancroft prize, and the frederick douglass prize, among many others. his most recent book is frederick douglass, prophet of freedom. our moderator tonight is eddie s. glaude junior. and william s todd. dr. glaude is the author of several books including democracy in black, how race enslaves the american soul, and exodus: religion, race, in early 19th-century black america. we ask that you silence any cell phones and we ask that you join

osama con welcoming our guests -- join us in welcoming our guests. [applause] >> how are you doing? good. welcome. >> thank you, eddie. this is my pleasure. it is a blessing. let's jump into this. is that ok? this is a wonderful book, so buy it. so. david, talk a little bit about the archives. that inform this magisterial text. you had access to something most folks simply have not had access to. prof. blight: i had no intention of ever writing a full life of

douglass. i had done a dissertation on douglass in 1989. i had edited two autobiographies, etc.. but i had douglass kind of out of my life. except for giving talks on douglass's narrative to teachers. i went to savannah georgia about 10 years ago to give a talk to teachers on douglass's narrative because they were teaching it. apologies to some of you who may have heard this story. but my host at the georgia historical society said, there's a local collector who wants to meet you and have lunch. i said that's fine. that collector was walter evans who is now a dear friend, and to whom this book is in part dedicated. he got out on his dining room table his douglass collection.

walter deserves a moment here. everywhere i speak about this i give walter as many moments as i can. he's an african-american retired surgeon who grew up in's aggravated -- in segregated savannah. went to the michigan medical school, practiced in detroit for 30 some years. which gave us a lot in, and because i grew up in flint, michigan. although he had season tickets to the tigers and i could never afford them. [laughter] at any rate walter started collecting in the 1970's. african-american rare books, manuscripts. and in his remarkable house in savannah is a library of rare books. name any book in the african-american tradition and he has a first edition. but his house is chock of archive boxes.

this stuff should be at yale. we have tried hard to get him to sell it. [laughter] walter if you are watching, they are still waiting. but there were 10 large family scrapbooks kept by douglass's son during the last third of his father's life. also family papers, letters, photographs. a lot of other tidbits. that walter bought overtime. mostly from one other collector. when i saw that collection it was one of those moments a historian really has such luck. i realized, oh god, i don't want to do this. i don't want to do this. i don't want to do this. if i did not try to work with this material someone else

would. a lot of other douglass scholars have gone there. many i have introduced to walter. you spend time on his dining room table and i spent several spring breaks there, a lot of other weeks. particularly that collection opens up the life of the older douglass, which we talked a lot about. the aging douglass, the patriarch douglass. that is not the douglass people generally >> douglas work is extraordinary, and many forms. a lot of it digitized. i also had access to missing -- missing issues of frederick douglass newspaper, which i will tell you how they got them, --

they bought them, in some cases. but there have always been missing issues to frederick douglass newspaper. he had the newspaper for 16 years and they are gold mines of information. douglas profit, douglas as

writer, and douglas as politician. douglas as politician. talk a little bit about his profit of freedom. >> first, i have to say, eddie has really read this book. and it is a little scary. we were sitting upstairs chatting away and we had some time on the telephone, he's bringing up things that i can hardly remember. if you put the word profit in your title, you better be ready to defend it, it's a big, big word. all through these years of working on douglas, you can't miss it in his rhetoric, written and spoken, that he is deeply steeped in the bible, particularly in the old testament. that's not surprising in the 19th century, many people were, most intellectuals were. the most, his first reading, in

serious ways, comes not just in reading the bible, but in reading with ministers, in preachers, the streets of baltimore and certain churches in baltimore. with douglas adopted isn't rocket science, he adopted the great story of the old testament. the idea that the temple of jerusalem -- this is what the great prophet jeremiah and isaiah and ezekiel in a myth were all saying, it had to be destroyed, that the people had become so sinful, so poison, they had to have a reckoning. and in that reckoning many of them would die. some of them would be sent into exile. some of them would probably survive the exile. some of them might even find the promised land. douglas took that great story of exodus and all of its parts

along the way, and he did with so many americans did, especially african-americans, and eddie has written about this period one of the reasons i wanted him to interview me. he took the exodus story and he applied it to his own life, and especially to his country. it makes him have a bloodthirsty origin. it makes him unpleasant to read, especially in the midst of the civil war when he becomes a war propagandists advocates the death of every white southerner and words that are not pleasant, to say the least. he did what the hebrew prophets did in that confounding language of the old testament. he was able to find language at times to express a dilemma, to

explain a historical condition, to explain in irony, to explain something terrible out of which there might be possibility. it sent me -- in the course of working on this book, to some theology friends, theologian friends. some of them may even be here, donald schriever. if you're here tonight, god bless you. who told me, read walter bruggeman and read so-and-so. my good friend richard said, read robert alter and so-and-so and i was trying to teach myself about the hebrew prophets. the prophets douglas was so adept at not just quoting but paraphrasing and using. i came to realize, particularly from reading abraham, the great jewish theologian who wrote a book called the prophets, among other books, that a prophet is sometimes that person in our

society and our lives, perhaps from the religious world, sometimes may be more from the political world, sometimes from both at the same time, who sometime speaks in octaves the rest of us can't quite hear. but we have recognition from it anyway. or is he also said, the prophet is often that writer that spokesperson who has been shattered by some cataclysmic experience and therefore can shatter others. and douglas had a terrible shattering in his 20 years as a slave, and experience that was burned into his soul, and i think scarred him psychologically. i can't prove that, but i can suggest it. all you need to do is dip into one or another or many of his various great speeches. take fourth of july speech.

if that's not a prophetic work of rhetoric, i'm not sure any american ever wrote one. it's a rhetorical masterpiece of american abolitionism. it is a classic jeremiah defined as that kind of rhetoric, that story that calls the people back to the altar, back to their cause, back to their principles, back to their proper way. all faced damnation. the fourth of july speech is like a symphony. and the middle movement is horrible. the final movement barely lets you backup. so, there are many places in douglas life, and the oratory, and in his writing when you can begin to find these elements of the prophetic. was he always self-conscious of that?

no. i don't know if any instance where he called himself a prophet. hello, i'm here to peer your profit. a real prophet doesn't do that. he writes about that. a real prophet never tells you he's a prophet, but he's going to hurt you while he teaches you. in douglas did that over and over again. it doesn't mean that he's always right, by any means, and it doesn't mean that he's always prophetic, especially the older douglas, who struggles with all kinds of contradictions and conflicts in that last time of his life. >> when you think about young douglas in his prophetic voice. what is his relation to garrett sony and is him? part of the story that you tell is this ongoing active self creation that is douglas life. and we have a bust of the young

douglas in african-americans studies at sam ho hall at princeton. you can see the fire in his eyes and in the sculpture. absolutely, you could see it. it's intense. and that intensity has something to do with his rage against the institution, the kind of moral stridency. but then you tell a story that in the midst of this, there's this insistence on douglas's sense of self possession. tucker little bit about that. >> douglas wrote himself into existence, publicly. he's 20 years a slave in eastern shore maryland -- eastern shore,

maryland and baltimore. he escapes in 1830 and spends three years in new bedford, massachusetts working all kinds of menial jobs. during the same -- part of the same year. lots of scholars have tried to have them meet. but they must have the meat because we can't find that meeting. it's just not there. but it doesn't mean i didn't use moby dick for an epigraph, when millville calls the brow of the ship a pulpit. anyway, but he begins to also preach at the local church. he's 20, 21 and 22 years old. he's just out of slavery. he's not perfectly formed by any means, by any means as an orator yet, or anything yet.

who is at 22. but he gets discovered by a garrett sony and. -- garrisonian. it was the moral persuasion. garrison was a genuine radical, believed in ending slavery now, not waiting for some plan over decades or generations. he was a religiously driven radical abolitionist. he also had some principals or tenants and strategies that were very difficult for frederick douglass and a lot of black abolitionists to follow, such as strict nonviolence, such as, strict non-politics, that is, you did not get involved in political parties because political parties were complicit with state -- with slavery.

they were dirty institutions. had to get your hands dirty in politics. douglas was going to take time to leave that one behind but he was going to learn politics. he loved william lloyd garrison. garrison was like a mentor, 12 years old, father figure to some degree. particularly for a young man who was a genuine orphan. one of the first 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 biracial. that's about all he could conclude. and he spent the rest of his life trying to figure it out. but the garrison oni and -- garrisonian where the first abolitionist. he said they were my church, my community. once they discovered as a speaker, they took him out to nantucket to do his first public speech in august of 1881 where

he still was this trembling kid. he said i shook my shoes as i got up to speak for the first time to the white people. but they discovered in him, a young man with a voice. story. he was already a good storyteller. and he had been preaching at the church on sundays when it was his job to preach, he knew how to do that. so, for the next three and a half years they hired him. he went out on the road and in mind and body, as i call them because that's the way you came to feel about it. day in, day out, munson, months out all across the north, the first in new england and eventually all the way out to ohio. backbreaking. he would tour with groups, usually a troop of

abolitionists. the first three or four years he traveled with abby kelly, stephen foster. they were married, and some others. garrison himself at times. this is where douglas cut his teeth as a public abolitionists, as an orator, and he told the line of garrison principles, non-politics, nonviolence, etc.. had about 1845, he decided to sit down in the winter of 1844-1845, and essentially some up and write all of the stories he's been telling on the circuit. what he did in these first speeches was two things. he told his own tail. he told a story as a slave, which is all there in the narrative, episode after episode, the fight or learning his literacy from ms. sophia, all the beatings and the

terrible whippings that he witnessed and experienced. but he also perfected his favorite speech, at least at first, which was known as the slaveholder sermon. the slaveholder's sermon was frederick douglass writing on those passages of the bible that said slaves be obedient to your masters and he would get up and he would mimic a proslavery minister. he would prance around the stage and go into a southern accent. he would have the hypocrisy of a christian slaveholder and he was a star at it. got to a point where wherever they would go as a speaking troop, the system was that they would always have a resolution to speak to. two or three resolutions you spoke to or against it and douglas would start to speak to the resolution but the audience would say, fred, do the sermon. and he said, all right.

he break into the sermon. he kept doing that kind of speech for years and years and years. and that's where he cut his teeth as a radical abolitionist employing the only weapon they had, which was language, words, power of the word, spoken, and then written in newspapers. quick so there's this sense in which douglas cutting his teeth amongst them, in some ways draws on the language of the king james bible, the writer's manual , that he carried with him the sense of which he understood as following the importance of rhetoric and its role. >> he never read it but he surely could have. >> he seems to understand that

lesson of the moral role of rhetoric. >> in order to must have a moral position, you must reach the hearts of everybody. not just their mind. >> the biography, in so many ways, seems to be organized along the line where each on a biographer kind of constitutes the anchor. she have early douglas and you have the narrative. you have my bondage and my freedom. then you have the life and times with furious -- various durations. in each moment, douglas is writing himself into existence. there's a way in which douglas understood the power of language. he's doing this, he's running around the country with the ga rrisonians. he's fine tuning his craft. tucked a little bit about douglas as a literary figure.

david: there's a letter he writes to the editor of the first journal he first published something in. it was in the late fall of 1844. it's just as he was starting to write the narrative. he writes this first little essay, it's very short and he says, in the letter to that editor, but to write for a book. i wonder if i could write a book. in all of us who are writers have that moment. the first time you imagine, i will write a book, how about that, or maybe i will write a book. and, clearly he wanted to put this first narrative out because he wanted to say, this is who i am, this is my story, don't doubt me, i'm real. he wanted to name his oppressors, which he did, but douglas came by language when he was a slave and he continued

over and over in his free life after he escapes from slavery. and you have to remember he lives 20 years a slave and then he lives another seven years as a fugitive slave until his british friend brought his -- bought his freedom. in those years, the 1840's and 1860's and even into the civil war years, he's trying to perfect his writing style, his craft. in the remarkable thing about douglas, and there are lots of flaws this man had, even with his writing. i mean, all writing is flawed, he wrote in so many different genres. he rode on a 1200 plate -- pages of autobiography as eddie had suggested. his life is punctuated with three autobiographies. the first one in 1845, he's only 27 years old. the second 110 years later when

he is 37 in the middle of the 1850's. his longform masterpieces my bondage on my freedom, 300 50 page autobiography, which is a much more political book. it's in the midst of the great crisis of the 1850's and slavery. he's become a very different kind of abolitionists. the third autobiography he writes in 1881. the old man summoned things up as life and times of frederick douglass. it's a text that's full of name dropping. he wants you to know all the famous people he knows, the presidency has advised and on and on. for us scholars, it's a go mind of -- a gold mine of stories, events, details. what we know about his relationship with john brown, especially down to the people of the attack. we know from that text. and he revises the third one another time in 1892.

the autobiographies are one form, but he mastered the short form political editorial. the political essay for his newspaper. he could write in a very different voice. he could go after a political issue, whether it's the dred scott decision or whatever it is, in just kinda nail it in 400 words. he also wrote these elaborate speeches. as texts. the fourth of july speech is a masterpiece of writing first. there's a letter where he says, i work for three reasons period he says eyelet -- i work longer on this than anything i have ever delivered, and you can tell. if i could ever get him in a room and ask him, one of the hundred questions i would ask him is, what did you read before that speech? where are your notes? and then he wrote one work of fiction. he wrote a novella. some would say the autobiography

are fiction. he had been practicing already. in 1852 in 1853 he wrote a novella called their rebellious slave. based on a slave based on a ship . he tried poetry. there is a fair amount of poetry douglas rowe. not his best form. he wrote pros poetry. he's a pros poetry writer. he had, at times, magic with metaphors. my friend, jim mcpherson once wrote a little essay called, how abraham lincoln won the civil war with metaphors. i wouldn't say douglas won the civil war with metaphors, but he certainly taught us a lot in the 19th century by his metaphors. he had a way of capturing a moment or a dilemma sometimes, in a metaphor that he would drop from the bible or shakespeare or just make it up.

so he becomes a skilled writer who never is completely satisfied with his craft. which i think is -- eddie: there's a wonderful passage on page 259 that i just wrote yes with exclamation points. all great autobiography is about loss, about the hopeless but necessary quest to retrieve and control the past that forever slips away. memory is both inspiration and burden, method in subject, the same one cannot live with or without. so, douglas is manic in the way in which he is constantly returning to -- and you know, we talked about this earlier. i'm obsessed with james baldwin.

he's constantly retelling the story of his stepfather. he's constantly telling that story and he's telling it in order to possess it. he's been telling it, it's an act of self creation. so he's rendering this narrative in a way to cause it to himself. this is what we mean by writing himself into existence. you have this moment where douglas is the embodiment. you quote a passage from his song, but then there's this moment of this gorgeous chapter on douglas and lincoln re-given account of the second founding through their back-and-forth and what emerges is these two figures become absolutely central to the second founding of the country. and then of course, at the end,

the old man still is trying to find the day he was born. as is trying to write life and times, as he calls. there something going on here. it's about memory loss, trying to reteach -- retrieve something. i have to say this other line. just to let them know i read it. because there's something -- remember we begin by saying it was all too human. powerful and flawed. you give us a sense of the interior life as much as the archive will allow you. david: probably a little more than the archive. eddie: but there's this moment great quote douglas where he says in effect, to the experience of slavery, and i'm paraphrasing this part, indelibly affected his ability for feel io affection. the way he even loved.

david: yes, i speculate on that, and others have. that was his scar by this life as a slave child, teenager and young adult. he experienced every kind of brutality slavery could throw at you. especially the emotional brutality. and he said that himself many times, protecting his mind, he said, was much harder than protecting his body. he was beaten savagely by at least 2, 1 owner and one overseer. he witnessed all kinds of savage beatings at the white house plantation. he even witnessed the owner of the whole place beat old barney, the guy who kept the carriage house, to a bloody pulp one day. douglas was seven years old witnessing this stuff.

many elements -- many moments where memory is so important in trying to understand douglas, but i found one of them and i didn't think this ahead of time until i was writing those first chapters, what do we remember of our childhood. how do we remember childhood. how do we find prompts to remember childhood? he is re-creating that childhood over and over in his life and he is telling us over and over how terribly important it was. both for all of this brutality of slavery but also for his humane sensibilities. he loved this white woman who fed them biscuits out the window he would sing for her. he loved her. he loves sophia, when she taught him to read until she stopped teaching him to read, and he talks about how an angel can

become a devil. slavery can make an angel into a devil. but the ways that he cultivates that childhood memory to try to understand what it did to him is remarkable. it got me reading a bunch of child psychology, most of which i didn't use. no offense to anyone, i tried to read a bunch of child psychology on how do we remember childhood and i read a bunch and said, let's go back and read douglas. but then later in life, he's all about memory, he's about the memory of the civil war and trying to deserve that abolitionist emancipation -- is what i call it. he's trying to make the country remember the emancipation was the greatest result of this war and the greatest responsibility of the nation. but he's also trying to line up his own life. anyone in here who has ever tried to write anything in the genre of memoir knows that you

try constantly to figure out what goes in and what doesn't go in and what can i trust in my memory and what can i not trust. what in my memory makes a great story, what doesn't, but it's also true at the end of the day that douglas seems to have believed that he had one great story to tell and that was his story. and he kept doing it and kept doing it. at the same time he wrote great speeches on political issues on philosophical issues. he wrote great speeches on legal issues. but the tale of his own life is always what he searching for and what eddie just suggested is, i three -- i think three or four months before he died, he wrote to benjamin old -- thomas auld had been one of his owners and potentially his father, although we don't know, he writes to him and says, do you know when my

birthday was. i can't find it, can you help me at all? that was another way of asking, is your father my father. he didn't visit thomas deathbed. turns out he didn't die for another nine months, but it seemed like it was his deathbed. douglas went back to the eastern shore four times after the war. eventually with paparazzi in. everywhere he went he had the press with them. he went to thomas deathbed and asked him, are you my father. he didn't get a yes, which is one of the reasons i don't think he was his father, but he never stopped trying to figure out his paternity. because, he knows he has white kinfolk, he's lots of white kinfolk, he had black folk he didn't know and they found him later life. he not only had four surviving adult children but he had 21 grandchildren and he had some siblings who either adopted him

or they adopted them out of slavery. all of them end up at cedar hill, the big house in washington at one time or another, they all died there and they all vary from there. cedar hill became a place of funerals in the 1880's and 1890's. about 14 of the grandchildren died in infancy or by their teenage years. the death of children in the 19th century was not uncommon. they lost four or five over and over. he never writes about any of that and the autobiographies of course. eddie: what's talked about in douglas the prophet, douglas the writer, douglas the politician, the republican, the blood sugar waving figure, the one who

jealously guarded his position as the black leader. the old man who is famous. talk about this douglas. david: he didn't like the young rivals either. douglas loved being king of the hill. and those who tried to knock him off, he did some ugly things back. douglas learns politics in the crucible of the 1850's. the decade that leads to the civil war. as a cure sony and you were supposed to leave political parties of -- alone. garrisonian constantly quoted speeches by henry clay and then said, don't vote. that has to be a contradiction to some of his followers, to say the least, but douglas by 1851, 18 52, the end of the 1850's, the slavery crisis is exploding

across the country in the political parties are tearing themselves apart. douglas comes to realize this is a hugely political question as well as a moral question. he also gets -- like a lot of garrisonian moralists, he became quite inpatient with moral persuasion. you can keep trying to change a person's heart forever and ever. at some point, you may just need to bend somebody's will to change a lot, if you can. he loved politics, but he only shouldered up to it carefully in the 1850's. at first, he considered himself a free soil or. he goes to the first free soil convention in 1848 and they called him up to speak. he didn't quite know what to do with that first republican party in four, although he was excited about it. here's a political party that's antislavery. it's against the expansion of slavery and he begins to develop

-- 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 with people you do not like, whose principles you can't stand, but they can make things happen. he began to realize the republican party from 1860 when lincoln runs, is causing this south grief. the enemy of my enemy is my friend. he also came slowly to trust some republicans. charles sumner, ben wade, and a few others. he doesn't know lincoln yet, he knows lincoln by reputation, he follows lincoln in the lincoln-douglas debates, a lot, and he also followed stephen douglas a lot. they had quite an exchange at

times, and i was lucky to have a fellow at our center in yell who is studying that turns out stephen douglas and frederick douglass had quite an exchange. i had never known that. he becomes a republican in the civil war because the republican was waging war against slavery -- at least, it eventually was. as many of you know in this room, because you know you're lincoln, douglas was a ferocious critic of abraham lincoln in the first year, year and a half of war because the union government was not moving against slavery. it was protecting fugitive slaves and sending them back to slavery, or trying to. with the preliminary emancipation proclamation, the final proclamation of january 1863, douglas not only changed his tune, he appropriated lincoln as lincoln appropriated him. and he saw that what was now the

civil war, had now become what lincoln had not wanted it to become and in lincoln's favorite -- famous words, he did not wanted to become a remorseless revolutionary struggle, but that's exactly what it had become. the rest of douglas life after 1864, he would campaign every year for the republican candidate for president, the republican party would decide what the states would descend into, if there were pockets of free black voters in a state, you'd be sent there. there were other sections of the country he thought he'd work well in, upper new england and indiana. it was always sent to indiana. indiana was a swing state in the 19th century. in douglas would campaign week after week for hayes, garfield, etc. and sometimes he'd wonder why,

because that republican party was really changing and abandoning his cause, the cause of emancipation in the voting rights, the 13th, 14th and 15th amendment, but he never gave up on the republican party, just around that out, it's quite an issue today, like all great questions in history that matter, this has a huge legacy because today's -- let's just call them libertarians -- the republican right, the libertarian right, the cato institute right loves to appropriate douglas because he was a staunch proponent of self-reliance, of blacks raising themselves either own institutions and their own hired work, their own thrift and so on. but every black leader in the 19th century to speak of was a proponent of self-reliance. that is not unusual. but sometimes the way this gets

portrayed today in political discussion, the way douglas gets appropriated now, it drives me a bit crazy because, to do that you have to ignore his entire life as a radical abolitionist. it's good news because douglas has become a little bit like abraham lincoln. everyone wants to have him on their side. everyone wants to claim douglas, he's on our site, no, he's on our side, i get asked this all the time, what would douglas think of black lives matter, what would he think of the #metoo movement, what would douglas think of donald trump praising him? i thought that might not come up tonight. he'd say -- now, i won't go there. eddie: before we go to questions, you do something so wonderful and beautiful, it say a word about anna.

david: douglas first wife, his wife of 44 years, he meets her in baltimore, probably in a church, don't know for sure. when he was 18 or 19 and she was three years older. she was born free out on the eastern shore, just on the other side of the river from where he was born. they probably played at the same mill when they were kids. but they didn't know each other. they fell in love in baltimore, he escaped from slavery in late august, 1838. anna had the extraordinary bravery to pack her bag and wait for a letter when frederick got to new york city at the foot of chambers street down on the lower west side and found themselves safe within 48 hours at david's house. he writes a letter back to baltimore. we don't know who he wrote the letter to, but whoever he wrote it to, went immediately to anna

and she took the same three trains in the same three fairies and was in new york in the same 38 hours to join him. and, that was an extraordinary act of bravery. she was free, she was born free and, if they had been, -- well, we wouldn't have ever known about either one of them. she remained his helpmate for all of those decades, the mother of his five children. she remained illiterate all of her life, by and large. and it was a problem. the most famous african-american man of letters in the world -- the most famous black man in the world who is married to an illiterate woman who could not be part of that professional intellectual life in meaningful ways. she was very much a part of his

life in a lot of other ways. what we know about her, not entirely, but largely from what the children wrote about her. one of the things in the collection in savannah are two new little narratives written by two of the sons. we always had the one that the daughter wrote, -- rosetta, but there are two narratives there, one entitled growing up in the douglas home. it's a little narrative about their parents. at every stage i try to find my way into anna's life. there are no documents that anna wrote. no letters, but there are lots of little testimonies about her. she kept account books. she kept a bank book. she did numbers when he didn't.

and she provided a home and never -- if you get to know douglas at all, you will sense this. he was desperate to make and preserve a home because he had never had one. and that's what she represented to him. eddie: let's go to some of the questions from the audience. one of the first questions, i heard that frederick douglass was biased against native americans. david: yes. biases one of those. words. yes. 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 uprightness and the ambitions of black people. why people should stop worrying

about black folk. that them vote, let them own land, let them get educated. they want to be americans. he would often trot out the image of the vanishing indian. and he would sometimes do it and not very pleasant language like, the indian just wants to wrap himself in a blanket and walk off into his hills whereas the black man wants to own a company and wants to get into the best school and so forth. it's not pretty. it's a 19th-century stereotype that was all over the culture. i've had students read chapters of this in the seminar of taught and it's jarring when they read it. they want douglas to be a forever advocate of indian rights. they want him to be against the reservations. he thought the reservations were probably the proper thing. so, all too human. eddie: tell me the relationship

between douglas and grant. david: it's very important, it never got very close, grant becomes president in 1868 douglas had been a distant admirer. like all yankees were. grant appoints him to a commission in 1870, the santo domingo commission, which was a commission sent to what is now the dominican workup just a medic in republic, to discuss with the leadership of the dominican or sent to domingo, whether the u.s. would annex it. the grant administration was trying to an extent to domingo. douglas was the secretary for this commission. he wasn't an official member of this commission and he took one of his sons along with them and he kept a diary on this three-month trip into the

caribbean -- actually, he went swimming in the surf one day and almost drowned, according to his diary. let grant to put him on that commission and douglas advocated for the annexation. douglas became an expansionist after the civil war. there are reasons for that. lots of abolitionist it. this is 1870, 18 71, reconstruction hasn't fallen apart yet. the clan is raging everywhere. frederick douglass was among a large group of former abolitionist who argued the united states is now in abolitionist country. we are the nation of emancipation and we should export it. we should take the 13th, 14th and 15th amendment out to the world, especially still slave societies like in the caribbean, and give them our ideas. that's not unfamiliar to us. americans of all stripes have

done this for a very long time. but when they come back from the santo domingo commission, grant invited the regular commissioners to the white house for a special dinner and didn't invite douglas, not a pleasant thing. but from a distance, he admired grant. in 1876, he wanted grant to run again. he didn't know how to trust the other candidates. despite the scandals. there were so many grant scandals. he thought grant -- he wanted the republicans to win. he didn't think grant could lose. but, they never had a truly close relationship, which is always made me truly fascinated with the speech douglas gives in 1876. it's his second greatest speech at the unveiling of the lincoln monument and lincoln park in washington, friedman's memorial.

ulysses s grant was sitting up in the front row when douglas gave that speech. grant pulled the rope that unveiled that, and i went to grants papers to find out what did grant think. nothing there. grant must've gone back and had a nap at the white house. he didn't say a word about that. he should have. so -- eddie: how did the rise of jim crow impact douglas? david: the rise of jim crow in the early 19th century really had an impact on him because douglas got thrown off lots of trains, he got jim crow to more times in his life than he could ever count by hotels, taverns, restaurants, trains, stagecoaches, it got to be a source of humor for him at times. sorry. but later, the time we often

talk about, the rise of jim crowe, douglas luce to see it. he lives from 1895, mississippi passes the first disenfranchisement line 1890. douglas lives to see the beginnings of bitter segregation in the late 1980's and into the 1900s. he doesn't see it enter for wishon in the 20th century, but he sees it. nothing about it, as much as i could tell, surprises him because he had experienced all of the antebellum jim crow over and over and over. although, he always referred to things like being jim crowed or a form of segregation, legal or otherwise, as another variation of proslavery ideas. he would just call it their proslavery vision reconstructed. the proslavery tradition brought

back to life. for him it was the resurrection of slavery. that's the way he knew how to understand it. eddie: that wonderful phrase he uses, the infinite manifestation of racism as our national for -- national face. david: he calls racism a national phase. it had been. eddie: that's also why the civil war and emancipation was so important. david: it habit. eddie: how influential is douglas and getting the women's suffrage past? david: very important seneca falls. he was the only male speaker. the only black participant who signed the seneca falls declaration of rights. that he was there, that he gave

his presence to this event was huge. and he was -- from that time on an even before, always a women's rights man. he wrote essays entitled i'm a women's rights man. he was always for women's rights. he is also a patriarch in many ways in his private life. that didn't make him that unusual for some reformers and radicals and abolitionists, but he was all in on women's suffrage, on women's economic rights and women's civil rights until the 14th and 15th amendments. he has a terrible breakup, some as you probably know with ellis susan anthony was with cady stanton by any measure, misbehaved badly in the way they treated douglas was all kinds of racist epithets. not just aimed at douglas but

aimed at black men. they were fed up. they didn't want to wait in the longer, they want to admit -- women in the 15th amendment, but everybody was when i open understood that women's suffrage was put in the 15th amendment, it never would've passed. but to stanton and anthony, at that point, it was put us in or you can have your country back. douglas didn't have that choice. it's one of those many moments in his life where he has to make decisions and choices about this political issue or that political issue or that strategy or that strategy and it's often the horns of a dilemma. eddie: why did british supporters help douglas by his freedom and not the american abolition? david: two reasons. he spends 1845 to 1847, about 18, 19 months in the british

isles when he still in his 20's. a huge turning point in his life. he gets treated like a hero most of the time in ireland, scotland and britain. and to this day, in ireland, they practically made him a patron saint. he only lived four months there and he has two monuments to him. crazy. but, anyway. but his british friends begin to realize -- first, there were a lot of british abolitionist friends who try to convince him to stay in england. move his family over to england, adopt england. he actually thought about it. it's clear, there are some letters, but he couldn't. his cause was here, his family was here in the idea that he was going to move anna and for small children to england made no sense. so, the richardson sisters from newcastle led the effort to raise money and did all of the

negotiation and the letter writing with thomas and bought his freedom for $730. and douglas would not return to the united states until he had the official document in his hands that he was free. the other part of the answer is, that the garrison only ends, although not garrison himself, they were very strict moralist and they said to purchase the slaves freedom was to be complicit to slavery. you don't pay slaveholders. douglas said, thank you very much, i'll take my freedom. it's better than not having it. eddie: one last thing before we end. douglas is telling his story and in so many ways douglas story is america's story. what should we take from this

and this current moment we find ourselves in? what does this story teach us? david: you didn't tell me we were going to ask that. that history is never over. history is only a cycle that has terrible surprises, and when you think you've won a victory, watch out. he experienced that in his life over and over. he's one of those rare reformers, especially radical reformers, who lives to see his cause triumph in the middle of his life, in his 40's, and frankly almost beyond his belief. in 1858 in 1850 nied in abolitionist had little reason to believe they would see slavery destroyed and a new constitution crafted out of it. not going to happen. it happened. but then he also lives 30 more years to see that very victory,

those causes, those constitutional amendments, those civil rights acts all but wiped out or erased by the supreme court, by terrorist violence, and by april of that could not preserve it. the trajectory of his life covers most of the 19th century. it covers the greatest transformative event in our history, the civil war, and it covers that great story from slavery to freedom, which we still, in so many ways, are living. we are still, every day, fighting over how to decide that 14th amendment and what equality before law means. god knows they are still fighting over the supreme court. oops.

[laughter] eddie: on that note, thank you all very much for joining us. [applause] eddie: before you leave i do want to remind you that we have the books for sale. david blight will be signing books out there. a very warm thank you to eddie for moderating tonight's wonderful discussion. there is so much left to cover. before you go i just want to make sure i make a really important correction for my intro because i had just learned before that david patterson is here, he was the 55th governor of new york and he was also new york state's first african-american governor. again, we are happy to have him with us in the audience and to also have all of you as well. so thank you all for joining us. [applause]