Douglass landed April 20, 1847. He returned to the United States
with the intention of publishing the newspaper for which his English
friends had so kindly furnished the means; but his plan meeting with
opposition from his abolitionist friends, who thought the platform
offered him a better field for usefulness, he deferred the enterprise
until near the end of the year. In the mean time he plunged again into
the thick of the anti-slavery agitation. We find him lecturing in
May in the Broadway Tabernacle, New York, and writing letters to the
anti-slavery papers. In June he was elected president of the New
England Anti-slavery Convention. In August and September he went on a
lecturing tour with Garrison and others through Pennsylvania and Ohio.
On this tour the party attended the commencement exercises of Oberlin
College, famous for its anti-slavery principles and practice, and
spoke to immense meetings at various places in Ohio and New York.
Their cause was growing in popular favor; and, in places where
formerly they had spoken out of doors because of the difficulty of
securing a place of meeting, they were now compelled to speak in the
open air, because the churches and halls would not contain their
audiences.
On December 3, 1847, the first number of the _North Star_ appeared.
Douglass's abolitionist friends had not yet become reconciled to this
project, and his persistence in it resulted in a temporary coldness
between them. They very naturally expected him to be guided by their
advice. They had found him on the wharf at New Bedford, and given him
his chance in life; and they may easily be pardoned for finding it
presumptuous in him to disregard their advice and adopt a new line of
conduct without consulting them. Mr. Garrison wrote in a letter to his
wife from Cleveland, "It will also greatly surprise our friends in
Boston to hear that in regard to his prospect of establishing a paper
here, to be called the North Star, he never opened his lips to me
on the subject nor asked my advice in any particular whatever." But
Samuel May Jr., in a letter written to one of Douglass's English
friends, in which he mentions this charge of Garrison, adds, "It is
only common justice to Frederick Douglass to inform you that this is a
mistake; that, on the contrary, he did speak to Mr. Garrison about it,
just before he was taken ill at Cleveland." The probability is that
Douglass had his mind made up, and did not seek advice, and that Mr.
Garrison did not attach much importance to any casual remark Douglass
may have made upon the subject. In a foot-note to the _Life and Times
of Garrison_ it is stated:--
"This enterprise was not regarded with favor by the leading
abolitionists, who knew only too well the precarious support which a
fifth anti-slavery paper, edited by a colored man, must have, and who
appreciated to the full Douglass's unrivalled powers as a lecturer
in the field ... As anticipated, it nearly proved the ruin of its
projector; but by extraordinary exertions it was kept alive, not,
however, on the platform of Garrisonian abolitionism. The necessary
support could only be secured by a change of principles in accordance
with Mr. Douglass's immediate (political abolition) environment."
Douglass's own statement does not differ very widely from this,
except that he does not admit the mercenary motive for his change
of principles. It was in deference, however, to the feelings of his
former associates that the _North Star_ was established at Rochester
instead of in the East, where the field for anti-slavery papers was
already fully occupied. In Rochester, then as now the centre of a
thrifty, liberal, and progressive population, Douglass gradually won
the sympathy and support which such an enterprise demanded.
The _North Star_, in size, typography, and interest, compared
favorably with the other weeklies of the day, and lived for seventeen
years. It had, however, its "ups and downs." At one time the editor
had mortgaged his house to pay the running expenses; but friends came
to his aid, his debts were paid, and the circulation of the paper
doubled. In _My Bondage and My Freedom_ Douglass gives the names of
numerous persons who helped him in these earlier years of editorial
effort, among whom were a dozen of the most distinguished public men
of his day. After the _North Star_ had been in existence several
years, its name was changed to _Frederick Douglass's Paper_, to give
it a more distinctive designation, the newspaper firmament already
scintillating with many other "Stars."
In later years Douglass speaks of this newspaper enterprise as one of
the wisest things he ever undertook. To paraphrase Lord Bacon's famous
maxim, much reading of life and of books had made him a full man, and
much speaking had made him a ready man. The attempt to put facts
and arguments into literary form tended to make him more logical
in reasoning and more exact in statement. One of the effects of
Douglass's editorial responsibility and the influences brought to bear
upon him by reason of it, was a change in his political views. Until
he began the publication of the _North Star_ and for several years
thereafter, he was, with the rest of the Garrisonians, a pronounced
disunionist. He held to the Garrisonian doctrine that the pro-slavery
Constitution of the United States was a "league with death and a
covenant with hell," maintained that anti-slavery men should not vote
under it, and advocated the separation of the free States as the
only means of preventing the utter extinction of freedom by the
ever-advancing encroachments of the slave power. In Rochester he found
himself in the region where the Liberty party, under the leadership of
James G. Birney, Salmon P. Chase, Gerrit Smith, and others, had its
largest support. The Liberty party maintained that slavery could be
fought best with political weapons, that by the power of the ballot
slavery could be confined strictly within its constitutional limits
and prevented from invading new territory, and that it could be
extinguished by the respective States whenever the growth of public
opinion demanded it. One wing of the party took the more extreme
ground that slavery was contrary to the true intent and meaning of
the Constitution, and demanded that the country should return to the
principles of liberty upon which it was founded. Though the more
radical abolitionists were for a time bitterly opposed to these views,
yet the Liberty party was the natural outgrowth of the abolition
agitation. Garrison and Phillips and Douglass and the rest had
planted, Birney and Gerrit Smith and Chase and the rest watered, and
the Union party, led by the great emancipator, garnered the grain
after a bloody harvest.
Several influences must have co-operated to modify Douglass's
political views. The moral support and occasional financial aid given
his paper by members of the Liberty party undoubtedly predisposed
him favorably to their opinions. His retirement as agent of the
Anti-slavery Society and the coolness resulting therefrom had taken
him out of the close personal contact with those fervent spirits who
had led the van in the struggle for liberty. Their zeal had been more
disinterested, perhaps, than Douglass's own; for, after all, they had
no personal stake in the outcome, while to Douglass and his people the
abolition of slavery was a matter of life and death. Serene in the
high altitude of their convictions, the Garrisonians would accept no
halfway measures, would compromise no principles, and, if their right
arm offended them, would cut it off with sublime fortitude and cast it
into the fire. They wanted a free country, where the fleeing victim of
slavery could find a refuge. Douglass perceived the immense advantage
these swarming millions would gain through being free in the States
where they already were. He had always been minded to do the best
thing possible. When a slave, he had postponed his escape until it
seemed entirely feasible. When denied cabin passage on steamboats,
he had gone in the steerage or on deck. When he had been refused
accommodation in a hotel, he had sought it under any humble roof that
offered. It would have been a fine thing in the abstract to refuse the
half-loaf, but in that event we should have had no Frederick Douglass.
It was this very vein of prudence, keeping always in view the object
to be attained, and in a broad, non-Jesuitical sense subordinating the
means to the end, that enabled Douglass to prolong his usefulness a
generation after the abolition of slavery. Douglass in his _Life and
Times_ states his own case as follows:
"After a time, a careful reconsideration of the subject convinced
me that there was no necessity for dissolving the union between the
Northern and Southern States; that to seek this dissolution was no
part of my duty as an abolitionist; that to abstain from voting was
to refuse to exercise a legitimate and powerful means for abolishing
slavery; and that the Constitution of the United States not only
contained no guarantees in favor of slavery, but, on the contrary, was
in its letter and spirit an anti-slavery instrument, demanding the
abolition of slavery as a condition of its own existence, as the
supreme law of the land."
This opinion was not exactly the opinion of the majority of the
Liberty party, which did not question the constitutionality of slavery
in the slave States. Neither was it the opinion of the Supreme Court,
which in the Dred Scott case held that the Constitution guaranteed
not only the right to hold slaves, but to hold them in free States.
Nevertheless, entertaining the views he did, Douglass was able to
support the measures which sought to oppose slavery through political
action. In August, 1848, while his Garrisonian views were as yet
unchanged, he had been present as a spectator at the Free Soil
Convention at Buffalo. In his Life and Times he says of this
gathering: "This Buffalo Convention of Free Soilers, however low their
standard, did lay the foundation of a grand superstructure. It was a
powerful link in the chain of events by which the slave system has
been abolished, the slave emancipated, and the country saved from
dismemberment." In 1851 Douglass announced that his sympathies were
with the voting abolitionists, and thenceforth he supported by voice
and pen Hale, Fremont, and Lincoln, the successive candidates of the
new party.
Douglass's political defection very much intensified the feeling
against him among his former coadjutors. The Garrisonians, with their
usual plain speaking, did not hesitate to say what they thought of
Douglass. Their three papers, the _Liberator_, the _Standard_, and the
_Freeman_, assailed Douglass fiercely, and charged him with treachery,
inconsistency, ingratitude, and all the other crimes so easily imputed
to one who changes his opinions. Garrison and Phillips and others of
his former associates denounced him as a deserter, and attributed his
change of heart to mercenary motives. Douglass seems to have borne
himself with rare dignity and moderation in this trying period. He
realized perfectly well that he was on the defensive, and that the
burden devolved upon him to justify his change of front. This he seems
to have attempted vigorously, but by argument rather than invective.
Even during the height of the indignation against him Douglass
disclaimed any desire to antagonize his former associates. He simply
realized that there was more than one way to fight slavery,--which
knew a dozen ways to maintain itself,--and had concluded to select the
one that seemed most practical. He was quite willing that his former
friends should go their own way. "No personal assaults," he wrote to
George Thompson, the English abolitionist, who wrote to him for an
explanation of the charges made against him, "shall ever lead me to
forget that some, who in America have often made me the subject
of personal abuse, are in their own way earnestly working for the
abolition of slavery."
In later years, when political action had resulted in abolition, some
of these harsh judgments were modified, and Douglass and his earlier
friends met in peace and harmony. The debt he owed to William Lloyd
Garrison he ever delighted to acknowledge. His speech on the death of
Garrison breathes in every word the love and honor in which he held
him. In one of the last chapters of his _Life and Times_ he makes a
sweeping acknowledgment of his obligations to the men and women who
rendered his career possible.
"It was my good fortune," he writes, "to get out of slavery at the
right time, to be speedily brought in contact with that circle of
highly cultivated men and women, banded together for the overthrow of
slavery, of which William Lloyd Garrison was the acknowledged leader.
To these friends, earnest, courageous, inflexible, ready to own me as
a man and a brother, against all the scorn, contempt, and derision of
a slavery-polluted atmosphere, I owe my success in life."