Frederick Douglass
From Philosopedia
Douglass, Frederick (14 February 1818? - 20 February 1895)
Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey was born a slave in Talbot County, Maryland. Separated as an infant from his mother, Harriet Bailey, who died when he was around 7 years old, he chose February 14th to celebrate his birthday.
An American abolitionist and freethinker, Douglass escaped from slavery in 1838, and an autobiograpy published in 1845 is entitled Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave.
In 1847 when English friends purchased his freedom he established North Star, a Rochester, NY, publication which advocated abolitionism through political activism.
According to Howard-Pitney, author of The Afro-American Jeremiah: Appeals for Justice in America, Douglas
- moved from a God-centered, humanly passive religion toward a human-centered creed stressing the efficacy of human will, good works, faith in human progress, and the perfectibility of humankind. By the 1850s, Douglass was a thorough-going religious liberal, or humanist. His liberal Protestantism coexisted comfortably with Enlightenment ideals of natural law and reason. Douglass’s humanistic worldview was anchored in both Christian theology and natural rights philosophy, and his experience with religion helped form and support his humanistic faith.”
J. M. Robertson described Douglass’s views as being as heterodox as Lincoln’s, adding that he knew this from personal information.
Douglass in 1845 wrote,
- I can see no reason but the most deceitful one, for calling the religion of this land Christianity. I look upon it as the climax of all misnomers, the boldest of all frauds, and the grossest of all libels.
In a Fourth of July lecture, he said,
- I would say, welcome infidelity! welcome atheism! welcome anything . . . in preference to the gospel as preached [by those who] connect the very name of religion into an engine of tyranny and barbarous cruelty.
In his Autobiography, he included,
- I prayed for twenty years but received no answer until I prayed with my legs.
In The Radical and the Republican: Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and the Triumph of Antislavery Politics (2008), James Oakes details how the two disagreed as well as agreed. At times Douglass thought Lincoln was "the black man's genuine friend," at other times he did not. He was outraged by Lincoln's "pride of race and blood, his contempt for Negroes and his canting hypocrisy." But in light of Lincoln's difficult position as leader of a white majority that was equally negative about his stand, according to Princeton's James M. McPherson, Douglass in 1863 met personally and "stood together on the same side of an immense historical struggle."
The Library of Congress has scrapbooks that document Douglass's role as minister to Haiti and the controversy surrounding his interracial second marriage.
(Four Douglasses are buried in Mount Hope Cemetery: Frederick, his daughter Annie, and both his first and second wives. Anna, the first wife, originally was buried in Washington, D.C., and was moved to Rochester three years after her husband's death.
{AAH, David Howard-Pitney; CE; FFRF; JMR; TYD
