On June 2, 1872, his house in Rochester burned to the ground. His papers were gone, and Douglass cursed the folly of his procrastination. Rosetta and her husband had managed to get out with a few personal possessions. Household furniture could be replaced, but Anna wept for a hundred precious mementos of the days gone by—little Annie’s cape, the children’s school books, the plum-colored wedding dress and Frederick’s first silk hat.
But Douglass thought only of his newspaper files and how he ought to have sent them to Harvard.
The gods were not yet finished with Frederick Douglass. It was as if they conspired to strip him of the last small vestige of his pride, as if to make sure that henceforth and forevermore he should “walk humble.”
“It is not without a feeling of humiliation that I must narrate my connection with the Freedmen’s Saving and Trust Company,” he wrote, when, later on, he felt he had to put down the whole unfortunate story.
The pathetically naïve account which follows is amazing on many counts. How could this little group of “church members” have expected to find their way within the intricate maze of national banking in the United States? From the start they were doomed to failure. Yet here stands an eternal monument to the fact that the newly emancipated men and women “put their money in banks,” were thrifty and frugal beyond our most rigid demands. For these banks were in the South among the masses of people who had just come out of slavery. The one Northern branch was in Philadelphia. Frederick Douglass did not see the reasons for the bank’s failure. He blamed himself and the handful of black men who tried to scale the barricades of big business, only to have themselves broken and left with a corpse on their hands.
This was an institution designed to furnish a place of security and profit for the hard earnings of the colored people, especially in the South. There was something missionary in its composition, and it dealt largely in exhortations as well as promises. The men connected with its management were generally church members, and reputed eminent for their piety. Their aim was to instil into the minds of the untutored Africans lessons of sobriety, wisdom, and economy, and to show them how to rise in the world. Like snowflakes in winter, circulars, tracts and other papers were, by this benevolent institution, scattered among the millions, and they were told to “look” to the Freedmen’s Bank and “live.” Branches were established in all the Southern States, and as a result, money to the amount of millions flowed into its vaults.
With the usual effect of sudden wealth, the managers felt like making a little display of their prosperity. They accordingly erected, on one of the most desirable and expensive sites in the national capital, one of the most costly and splendid buildings of the time, finished on the inside with black walnut and furnished with marble counters and all the modern improvements.... In passing it on the street I often peeped into its spacious windows, and looked down the row of its gentlemanly colored clerks, with their pens behind their ears, and felt my very eyes enriched. It was a sight I had never expected to see....
After settling myself down in Washington, I could and did occasionally attend the meetings of the Board of Trustees, and had the pleasure of listening to the rapid reports of the condition of the institution, which were generally of a most encouraging character.... At one time I had entrusted to its vaults about twelve thousand dollars. It seemed fitting to me to cast in my lot with my brother freedmen and to help build up an institution which represented their thrift and economy to so striking advantage; for the more millions accumulated there, I thought, the more consideration and respect would be shown to the colored people of the whole country.
About four months before this splendid institution was compelled to close its doors in the starved and deluded faces of its depositors, and while I was assured by its President and its actuary of its sound condition, I was solicited by some of the trustees to allow them to use my name in the board as a candidate for its presidency.
So I waked up one morning to find myself seated in a comfortable armchair, with gold spectacles on my nose, and to hear myself addressed as president of the Freedmen’s Bank. I could not help reflecting on the contrast between Frederick the slave boy, running about with only a tow linen shirt to cover him, and Frederick—President of a bank counting its assets by millions. I had heard of golden dreams, but such dreams had no comparison with this reality.