Frederick Douglass

by Booker T. Washington

He had long looked to Garrison and his associates for advice and direction in everything of importance, and in an enterprise of such moment as this newspaper, he naturally felt that their opinion was indispensable. The money was raised, as we have already seen, by English friends, and sent over to Mr. Douglass within three months after he reached America, with the understanding that the use of it was to be left wholly to his discretion. It was clearly stated that, if he thought it inexpedient to invest the funds in a newspaper, he could use them, under trustees of his personal choosing, for the benefit of himself and his children. But he wanted an “organ” of his own. As time went on he believed that he perceived the need of it more and more.

“I already saw myself,” he said, “wielding my pen as well as my voice in the great work of renovating the public mind and building up a public sentiment which should send slavery to the grave, and restore to ‘liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ the people with whom I suffered.”

Among other considerations that moved him to establish his own paper was the conviction that the example of a well-managed and ably edited organ would be a powerful evidence that the Negro was too much of a man to be held a chattel.

Another side to this question had not occurred to him until this time. His attention was called to the fact that he was more than Frederick Douglass, the individual. What he did and said, and what he was and was to be, were of so much concern to his associates and co-workers that, when it became known that he intended to start a newspaper, difficulties of all kinds arose. Douglass knew that Garrison opposed his enterprise. Could he ignore that leader’s advice? Clearly, his first impression was that he could not. He felt then and ever afterward that he owed everything to Mr. Garrison. It was the latter who had discovered and brought him to the attention of the people. The word of such a man must be law to him. Garrison’s philosophy of this whole slavery question was accepted by Douglass without an “if.” He was so completely under the spell of the great Abolitionist’s personality that, when he learned of the opposition to the newspaper project, he was overwhelmed with surprise and disappointment.

Various reasons were given for this attitude. Mr. Garrison thought it quite “impractical to combine the editor and the lecturer without either causing the paper to be more or less neglected, or the sphere of lecturing to be seriously circumscribed.” It was further urged that the publication was not needed, that it would diminish the support of the papers already in existence, and that it could not succeed. Some of Douglass’s other friends advised him, that being a man without any education and without any literary training, he would make himself ridiculous as an editor. These counselors wished to save him from the humiliation of an ignominious failure, and cautioned him against the mistake of allowing his ambition to bring him into ridicule and contempt. This opposition coming from his former advisers and associates caused him to hesitate, and, for a time, to give up the scheme; so, instead of starting the paper as soon as he received the money to be devoted to that purpose, he postponed the project for nearly a year, out of deference to the judgment of these wise and close friends.

During the interval, Mr. Douglass had time to examine into the merits of the advice against his becoming an editor. He had a further opportunity to feel the public pulse and learn something more definite in regard to the prospects for good or evil of a newspaper, such as he had in mind. He was much in demand on the lecture platform. His vogue was growing all the time, and with increasing popularity and power, he saw the possibility of a reading constituency large enough to support his publication and widen his influence.

But other considerations intervened to widen the breach between himself and Garrison. The Abolition movement, as planned and carried on by the outspoken leader and his followers, was non-political. It sought to effect a revolution, but by the moral regeneration of the people. Slavery, as Garrison conceived it, was a national sin which could be reached only by an appeal to the national conscience; but the effect of the anti-slavery agitation had not been confined to those who accepted his revolutionary doctrines. Many persons who were unable to follow the relentless logic of Mr. Garrison to its revolutionary conclusions were roused to opposition to slavery by the sting and fire of his sermons. The number of people who were disposed to do something to check its extension was rapidly increasing. This wider anti-slavery movement was fast drifting from a mere unorganized sentiment, without force sufficient to compel resistance, into a political party with a definite platform. Those who could not follow the “disunion” and “non-resistance” principles of Garrison, but began to fear the aggression of the slave-power, joined the “Free Soil” and “Liberty” parties. The issue raised by the Abolitionists was daily becoming less a question of the right or wrong of slavery and more a question of how, under the actual circumstances in which the institution existed, it might best be gotten rid of.

Garrison and his followers, supported by the infallible logic of their leader, still clung to the disunion policy, which was primarily a discharge of conscience from all complicity with slavery and only secondarily a means to the abolition of slavery.

Frederick Douglass, with less consistency, perhaps, and a keener sense for the practical exigencies of the situation, was undoubtedly influenced by a desire to get into close touch with this larger audience. The sequence of events, and Douglass’s position in relation to them, tended to convince him that he was justified in his desire to found a newspaper. A colored periodical would be no new thing. As early as 1827 the Ram’s Horn, published by and for Negroes, had been started in the North. Other papers conducted by colored men were, The Mystery, The Disfranchised American, The Northern Star, and The Colored Farmer. Opportunity and duty seemed to combine in urging him to do the thing that he had abandoned in deference to the advice of Mr. Garrison and at length he reached the point where he no longer feared failure, every objection urged against his purpose seeming to be overcome.

Being thus convinced, he heroically set himself to the task. The first duty was to select a field sufficiently removed from New England not to compete with The Liberator and The Anti-Slavery Standard. Rochester, N. Y., was the place chosen. This was good anti-slavery territory, but it was of the Gerrit Smith kind as distinguished from the Garrison kind. Both of these men were towers of strength in the cause of Abolition, and both were lavish in the expenditure of time and means for the cause of freedom.