Life and Times of Frederick Douglass

Frederick DouglassNonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 1881

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Index of Terms

Abolitionism

Abolitionism is the belief in immediate, unconditional abolition of slavery. Inspired by the Second Great Awakening, an era of religious revival and intense enthusiasm, abolitionists denounced slavery’s practitioners as sinners and thus refused all compromise on the issue. In this respect, abolitionists differed from the majority of their anti-slavery contemporaries, many of whom regarded abolitionists as reckless firebrands who would destroy the Union rather than accommodate slaveholders in any way. As a young fugitive, Douglass shared the abolitionists’ view of slavery as a moral abomination with which no compromise was either possible or desirable, and he devoted 25 years of his life to the abolitionists’ cause. Significantly, however, Douglass’s abolitionism did not prevent him from extolling the myriad virtues of mere anti-slavery men such as Abraham Lincoln. In fact, Douglass joined Lincoln in blaming slavery’s evils on the system itself. If slaveholders were sinners, then slavery was the devil, “for slavery could change a saint into a sinner, and an angel into a demon” (56).

Civil Rights Act of 1875

The Civil Rights Act of 1875 guaranteed equal rights to all Americans regardless of color. It required the federal government to enforce both the letter and the spirit of the 14th Amendment by prohibiting discrimination in public accommodations. Had the federal government maintained this commitment, it is possible that the ensuing 90 years of legal segregation in the American South would have been avoided. In the 1883 Civil Rights Cases, however, the Supreme Court struck down the 1875 Civil Rights Act as unconstitutional. Douglass recognizes this decision as a devastating setback to Black Americans and denounces the Supreme Court as “wholly under the influence of the slave power” (457)

Dred Scott Decision

On March 6, 1857, the Supreme Court issued its ruling in the case of Dred Scott v. Sandford. Having spent part of his life as the slave of an army surgeon living at Fort Snelling in present-day Minnesota, Dred Scott sued for his freedom on grounds of prolonged residence in a territory from which the 1820 Missouri Compromise had banned slavery. In the Opinion of the Court, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney ruled that Scott, as a Black man, had no federal civil rights and therefore never should have had access to federal courts. Taney also ruled that Congress, when it adopted the 1820 Missouri Compromise, had acted outside the bounds of its constitutional authority. In one infamous opinion, therefore, Taney declared that no American of African ancestry could be a citizen of the United States and that the federal government had no power to arrest the spread of slavery into the Western territories. Contrary to the hopes of President James Buchanan and many of his fellow Northern Democrats, the ruling only intensified Republican resistance to the “slave power” and its aggressive demands. Douglass personally felt the Dred Scott opinion’s effect while exiled in England, where the Democrat United States Minister denied Douglass’s application for a passport to visit France on grounds that Douglass, according to the Supreme Court, was not a US citizen.

Emancipation Proclamation

On January 1, 1863, President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, which freed all slaves in areas under the control of rebel governments. Three months earlier, on September 22, 1862, five days after the Battle of Antietam, Lincoln had announced a preliminary proclamation promising to free slaves in rebel-controlled areas that refused to return to the Union by New Year’s Day. The official Emancipation Proclamation, therefore, did not free slaves in states or parts of states that were loyal to the Union. It freed slaves only in states or parts of states where Union authority did not then exist. Critics, then and since, have pointed to the Emancipation Proclamation’s limited immediate effect as proof of the Lincoln administration’s timidity in pursuing slavery’s abolition. Douglass, however, viewed this interpretation as “narrow and erroneous” (298), for the Proclamation instantly transformed a limited and floundering war for union into a crusade against slavery.

Fugitive Slave Act of 1850

Part of the broader Compromise of 1850, the Fugitive Slave Act required the federal government to assist slaveholders in the recapture of fugitive slaves. Its predecessor, the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793, much like the US Constitution, did not specify how fugitives were to be returned and did not even use the word “slave.” Meanwhile, most free states adopted “personal-liberty laws” forbidding state officials from aiding in the re-capture of runaways. In Prigg v. Pennsylvania (1842), the Supreme Court ruled that while states could not nullify a federal fugitive-slave law, those states did have the constitutional right to prohibit their own officials from assisting slaveholders. The 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, therefore, placed the full power of the federal government at the disposal of slaveholders and their agents. The act created a class of slave commissioners, invested them with judicial authority, and bribed them to act in the slaveholders’ interests. For instance, these commissioners received $10 each time they ruled in favor of the slaveholder and only $5 when they ruled in favor of the accused fugitive. Furthermore, the accused had no right to speak in their own defense. In short, the Fugitive Slave Act sacrificed civil rights to preserve the Union, at least for another 10 years. In a famous 1852 speech, Douglass denounced the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act as a “hell-black enactment” (Douglass, Frederick. “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” BlackPast.org).