Reading Frederick Douglass’ Letter to Thomas Auld | A Primary Source Close Read w/ BRI

0:04 Hello, and welcome to another edition of Bill of Rights Institute’s Cose Reads. We’re really glad you’re joining us. I’m Kirk Higgins. For those of you who are new to our Close Read format, we host these conversations every other Thursday day, where we work through different primary sources for American history, looking for really big themes and ideas that we can unpack from these incredible documents.

0:25 This week, we are going to be looking at Frederick Douglass’s 1848 letter to Thomas Auld, his former master. To help me with unpacking this letter, I’m fortunate enough to welcome the president of the Bill of Rights Institute, Dr. David Bobb. Welcome, David. Thanks for joining me today. Thank you, Kirk. Great to join you. Absolutely. And so I think this letter is full of meaning.

0:46 Unfortunately, we’re only going to have time to look at just a few segments of it, but I hope it gives everybody a flavor of both Douglass’ thought and his rhetoric and just who he was as a person and how he went about thinking about these things. And so with that, let’s dive into a little bit of historical context so we can set the stage for the letter. So, David, Frederick Douglass I know, is someone that you’ve studied a lot

1:10 throughout your time, sort of in researching and thinking about sort of the American experiment and self government. He’s one of these characters, I think, that whenever you read about the history of the United States, you come across what do you think it is that is so powerful about Frederick Douglass, the man and his experience? And how does it speak to us today, even in 2021?

1:35 Frederick Douglass has a powerful voice that’s claimed by many in a kind of almost partisan way. And I think what I’m happy to be doing today with you is to get out of that mindset, to take the man on his own terms. Thus, a close read.

1:56 He’s not easily categorized. He had a life’s journey that it’s a wonder that it has not been made into a major film. His ability to communicate a dynamic, vital, really amazing rhetoric that latches onto you.

2:19 And it does not really sound, as some can going back more than 100 years, antique. There is a vibrancy and a poignancy to his words, because I think he gives you his whole self, his whole soul. And we have a lot of his writings.

2:39 It was a maturing corpus, because he wrote not one, not two, but three autobiographies. As he got further and further away from his enslavement, he could become that much more candid. So we have a rich record. He lived a long life, and he lived a life that is emblematic of all of the travails, the troubles,

3:01 the struggles, the sacrifice of the 19th century. Yeah. And his story really is powerful. His autobiographies, I think, are written in the same style that this letter is, which is very clear and powerful and raw in a lot of ways and just for a quick background.

3:26 So for those who may not know or are just looking for a refresher that he was born into slavery in Maryland, and in fact, one of the reasons we’re having this conversation today is that his chosen birthday was February 14. And I think it’s a powerful thing to reflect on that he did not know his actual birthday, but February 14 was the day that he chose to celebrate.

3:50 He escaped Enslavement in September of 18th, 38th, and then obviously went on to become a very noted author, lecturer and abolitionist. And one of the things he did was begin the newspaper called the North Star, which is an anti slavery newspaper. And it was in that newspaper that this letter, on this open letter to Thomas Auld was first published in 1847.

4:16 When I’m looking at a document, I really like going to the very beginning of the document because I think it lays out a lot of the themes for what’s going to take place, but it also says something about the tone and what the author is going to try and accomplish. And I think in that. Douglass opening of this letter is really powerful and moving. Or at least it was to me.

4:37 And I think relevant to a lot of contemporary conversations in that he talks about his relationship to Thomas Auld. Which I like the line the long and intimate. Though by no means friendly relation. Showing that strange isn’t powerful enough of a word. But the horrific sort of kind of relationship that this would form was

5:01 in a sense an intimate or close one. But then he goes on in his opening paragraph to talk about that. People are going to find it rude of him to take time to write in a public manner to Thomas Auld, to call him out for the transgressions that both Douglass suffered and Douglas’

5:21 family and close relations suffered while in Enslavement. It’s a remarkable thing, isn’t it Kirk? You are right to point out that word, I think, intimate. An enslaved person sees, in Frederick’s case, the family up close, he comes to know them very well.

5:44 They shared a common faith. Thomas the Enslaver wore his Christianity on his sleeve. And this was something that, of course, galled Frederick. It jarred him the horrific abuse that he suffered at his hands.

6:06 Of course, it seems very almost uncomfortable for us to imagine that the enslaved would imagine that he would need to apologize in any way, because what he’s doing here is a reckoning. He’s doing a public accounting.

6:27 Why would he need to apologize for this? This action series of actions? The gross abuse of Frederick Douglass should not have required that apology. But what Douglass is doing is trying to say, yes, I’m doing this in a public way, I’m doing it through my newspaper, but I want people to know what this institution means.

6:48 Remember that it’s 1848. He’s only 30 years old. The reason that he doesn’t have knowledge of his birth date is he was born a slave. He didn’t even know the year, let alone the month or day. He did not know who his father was. He saw his mother four or five times during his entire life.

7:11 Yeah, it’s really powerful. And I was struck, too, because he calls out those in the north as well as the south, who entertain a much higher respect for rights which are merely conventional than they do for rights which are personal and essential. And I think that sets the tone for where he goes for the less of the letter, in the sense that people may he knows that writing this, particularly in 1848, so in the midst of

7:36 sectional, growing sectional troubles and travails in the United States, we’re coming up on the compromise of 1850. Debates over slavery and whether it can expand in the territories are happening in Congress and other places. This letter is being put into that sort of fraught atmosphere. He knows he’s going to it’s not going to happen without notice.

7:59 And noting that if people are upset with him for calling into account this failure of these recognition of these personal, essential virtues, I think is incredibly powerful. It is. And I think it’s easy for us today, in 2021,

8:20 to suppose, well, of course he would use that organ available to him. After all, he was a newspaper editor. But think of the courage that it took, because while he is removed from immediate captivity, the confidence that he can operate with his blockbuster autobiography having hit just three years previously, Douglass is not out of harm’s way.

8:47 There are many things that would militate against his doing this. And so he is trying to embolden those who, like him, are wishing to stand for those things, those rights that they have, the dignity that they have as human beings. And so there was an incredible boldness amongst Douglass and the abolitionists who,

9:10 like him, had endured captivity to come against those who had held them captive. Yes. And he goes on to talk about that act of leaving that captivity in a way that I think that really struck me. I’ve read this letter. I’ve encountered it before.

9:30 But reading it again in preparation for this conversation. I really had to pause at this paragraph where he deems it necessary to justify the morality of his own escape from enslavement. Which is incredible to me in the way that he does it. I thought was so beautiful in that he talks about what it means.

9:51 The fundamental nature of what it means to be a human being. You are a man, and so am I. God created both and made us separate beings and talked about sort of that relationship. And the idea that labor would be something that somehow makes people reliant on one another or that a property right would somehow even make that connection.

10:15 He completely dismisses and says, look, I justify because I am a human being. And I was really struck by this passage. Well, and notice that he also appeals to their common faith. God created both and made us separate beings. So there’s something of an appeal here to what we might see even

10:36 in the declaration to the laws of nature and of nature’s, God, I am a separate human being full of rights because of that humanity. And yet there is another plane on which we exist. Douglass is offering in a not so subtle reminder. You neglected that part of reality of even the religion that you profess.

11:03 And I think that kind of humanistic appeal here again, is so easy for us to take for granted. But imagine the way in which at this time in the United States, not just in the south, but in the north, to the mentality that would accept chattel slavery and increasingly say of it,

11:24 it is the good and right thing for the slave and for the master. And what Douglass is pointing out here and this was a common theme that he had, as he had many letters and exchanges with those who thought that they could hold property in human beings.

11:46 Hugh Auld Thomas’s Brother these letters carry with them the warning that slavery is toxic to the human heart. While his first concern is not that when he’s looking at slave and master, at the welfare of the master, he knows that the institution of slavery

12:10 corrupts them just as much as it degrades those who are enslaved. And there’s a way in which the whole system, the whole prideful kind of institution, had corrupted the United States of America and our soul.

12:32 And what Douglass warned about this time is that there’s nemesis that comes after pride and that we cannot sustain as a country in this way. Yeah. Putting in the context of that larger national conversation that is happening, of course, there you’re referencing

12:53 a little of a positive good school that was being advanced. This points towards sort of a more deeper sense of equality that I think Douglass was seeing as being abandoned by that school. There was a move to say by John C. Calhoun and others,

13:14 Roger Taney and other Chief Justice Taney, in looking at the nature of equality being something different, something that was based in some kind of notion of race or in some kind of notion of blood or heritage. And here I think Douglass is rejecting that outright and saying, no, we are equal in any way that you can imagine that we are equal.

13:38 We are equally provided with faculties necessary to our own individual existence. And I think coming in that conversation really this resonates so strongly, there’s an. Interesting and parallel journey that Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglas are on later in their lives to become a meeting of minds and meeting of hearts.

14:02 So they met only three times in person. Their similar journeys propelled them along this path. That said that the logic here nature does not make your existence depend on me or mine to depend upon yours. Lincoln said, just as I would not be a slave, so too would I not be a master.

14:22 Right. There’s a logic here that can have purchase on every American, and that’s what he’s working for here. And it’s interesting to note that these two thinkers of the first order and people who paid great attention to the rhetorical presentation Douglass is crafting this letter with the knowledge that it will be

14:45 an argument unto his fellow citizens and also read by those who are in the position of being enslaved as a message of hope. He got that hope from reading The Colombian Orchard, a book about heroism of people who had stood up and said, I will not subject myself to tyranny.

15:07 And that’s what Douglass kind of cry here, is that I will not be subjected to your tyranny. And that’s why I had to leave. Yeah. And he talks about equality sort of in that I don’t want to call it abstract.

15:28 That’s not what I’m going for, but in a way that is in a thoughtful kind of a way in trying to think about the fundamentals of it. But then later in the letter, he goes to this place of talking about the sheer barbarism of the institution of slavery, just the horrific physical abuse and mental trauma that was occurring to the enslaved.

15:50 And particularly when thinking about his children, which I found really powerful. And I know that this is something he also discusses in his autobiographies at length sort of the true physical costs. That was being inflicted upon these individuals. And David, I know you’ve touched. I mean, there’s a number of stories that Douglass tells.

16:12 He doesn’t talk about them here, but I think he maybe alluding to some of those other ones. But I was really struck by the way he phrases it. The grim horrors of slavery rise and all their ghastly terror before me just really impactful and powerful words. We need to remember them.

16:33 And I think that’s his remembrance, right? His saying, Never forget the whales of millions pierce my heart and chill my blood. When Douglass escaped at the age of 20 from Enslavement, he came to be known pretty quickly as an amazing, orator so amazing that he spoke largely around New England.

16:57 But even later in life, on international speaking tours, he would be sometimes challenged. People would say, oh, you’re in a slave. Nobody could speak this way if you had been. And he said, if you want to see the diploma that I have, look on my back, for it is written there. Those are the stripes that he’s talking

17:17 about there at the end of the passage we’re looking at now. I wear stripes on my back inflicted by your direction. When the brothers discovered, really, that Douglass had taught himself how to read, and there was even some help from Sophia ALD, hugh ALD’s wife,

17:39 about giving him instructions in reading the Bible and becoming more proficient. The thing that Hugh said was, don’t do that. Slavery is his lot in life, and reading reading will make him unfit for slavery. Well, Douglass said, I want to be unfit.

18:02 And what they recognize, though, is that he had to be broken and has happened with so many others. In Frederick’s condition, a slave breaker was brought in so that person who was known throughout the region as one of the worst inflictors of pain and torment would work Douglas from sun up to well after sunset.

18:25 And Douglass described this later, where he was tasked, among other things, to make a team of oxen work. And he wondered at the end of many of these days, was I the beast of burden or were they? He summed it up by saying of his early life that it didn’t have an intelligible beginning, because how can a person think

18:47 of a teenager trying to make sense of this? The idea that there would be a person whose job it is to break you. He called it the soul crushing and death dealing nature of slavery. And I think he puts this down as a remembrance. You, Thomas, will not forget this, nor will I.

19:16 Incomprehensible for us to try and even reflect, but powerful to remember and keep in mind. And that phrase you use as soul-crushing, I think, is very apt, because Douglass goes on later in the letter to talk about not just his physical costs, but also the cost to the soul or to the conscience that is inflicted upon the enslaved.

19:37 And he does so in part by talking about his sisters, which I found really moving, because he says, I would write to them and learn all I want to know of them without disturbing you in any way, but that through your unrighteous conduct, they have been entirely deprived of the power to read and write. You have kept them in utter ignorance and have therefore robbed them of the sweet enjoyment of writing or

20:00 receiving letters from absent friends and relatives. It is an outrage upon the soul, a war upon the immortal spirit, and one for which you must account at the bar of our common Father and Creator. Because I think the physical aspect is horrific. But it can’t be separated from. I think.

20:20 The idea that what it means to be a human being. This space in which a person comes to their own beliefs and conclusions and values. That is what is being assaulted in denying them the ability to learn and to live as a human being and forcing them to be just this beast of burden.

20:41 Yeah, that’s Douglas’s appeal to the universalism of the cause and pointing to, as you say, that human beingness, that each person is unique, and he’s establishing that dignity in his own journey. What he found is that though that slave breaker came back over and over again

21:03 and the predations of Thomas All himself were terrible, he came to a freedom in his mind and heart that was not matched by his freedom in body, but the liberation that came from that realization that he could be free in form.

21:26 Sorry, that he could really be slave in form. But freedman, in fact, what did he mean by that? Well, that he had liberated his soul because he recognized, you know, what? I am a man, and I don’t have to do what this person tells me to do. And so he resolved that he would start to resist. First, the resistance was moral, and then later, it manifests itself in physical resistance.

21:49 And I think that’s what he’s saying here in this appeal. How could you deprive my sisters of their ability to learn, to know how to read? It is such an affront to our common humanity.

22:10 And again, it’s that appeal to you preach all this religiosity. Do you even believe it? And of course, he didn’t. There was something that was wrong. Douglass is trying to search Auld’s heart and say, what is wrong here? There is such a gap between your rhetoric and the reality of the situation that you

22:34 still are in, and yet you would cloak it in Christianity incomprehensible. Yeah, Christianity dealing with sort of redemption of the soul. This really gets at the heart of that contradiction. And I think Douglass calling that out and putting it before, again, the audience of who would have been during a highly religious age.

22:58 This would have been language that spoke directly to their own experiences and their own understanding, and if nothing else, would challenge his readers to be thinking about that as well. And he concludes and touches on some of these same things again. But I found this conclusion. The end of his letter is just so extremely powerful.

23:20 I mean, not just his sign off that I know that we’ll talk about, but I intend to make use of you as a weapon with which to assail the system of slavery as a means of concentrating public attention on the system and deepening their horror of trafficking in the souls and bodies of men.

23:41 Calling Thomas all about calling him into account. Say, you are an example of everything that is horrible with this system and with the way that it exists in this nation and that you’re betraying the bodies and souls of these human beings in acting in this way.

24:01 Yeah, that betrayal. Right. Douglass writes about, at one point, there was a little church that had been established by himself and some of his fellow enslaved persons, and Auld couldn’t even countenance that being held.

24:22 He broke it up. And he did so violently. He’s flipping the script, right? He’s saying, you broke that up. You gave me no shelter, you gave me no peace, but there is no roof under which you would be more safe than mine. Right. Calls to my mind George Washington, which Douglass read

24:44 very much and was attuned to that the notion of liberty is where every man shall live under his own vine and fig tree, and none shall make him afraid. He is saying, I will extend that to you even though you did not to me. And there is something incredibly powerful. It’s an olive branch extended.

25:06 And you know what’s amazing, Kirk? Later in life, on his deathbed or really a death store, Thomas asked that Douglass would come. And Douglass dropped what he was doing, and he did so, and he entered through the front door, which historians believe is the first time that any

25:28 black man had done so, entering through the front door of the plantation house. And there was a spirit of reconciliation amongst the men, as Douglass acknowledged the tears that Thomas shed. But I think it’s different than saying from that while there was a blanket forgiveness for all of the misdeeds,

25:54 because there is not a forgetting, there was a reconciliation. And there was that amazing act of Douglas in this letter and then later in life, in reality, extending that grace. But it comes still with the fact that for the intervening, what is it, more than 30 years,

26:20 Douglass made Thomas Auld a very famous man, and he made his actions infamous. And that was a thing that he knew he was doing and that the nation needed, I think, have done. Yeah. And that remembrance piece, I think,

26:40 is incredibly important even as we continue to reflect on this letter this year, because I think this being one story of countless needs to be remembered. And this signing off, I thought was such a poignant line, and is often how this letter is titled with this one line I am your fellow man, but not your slave.

27:04 In summing up, I think all of the point of this entire letter, I think, is just to underline that one simple fact. And so, David, as we get to the end here, just reflecting on that line in this letter, what is it you think we should take away from this letter? And then reflecting on the story of Frederick Douglass, but also this story broadly within American history.

27:31 I think the long ways that this journey tells us we have yet to go for a while. That is a really remarkable closing, and it was echoed about ten years later.

27:51 In 1857, Douglass wrote the other brother, Hugh, and he said, I love you, but hate slavery. We are now in this nation going through yet another. We’ve done this many times in our history, but we’re going through a kind of reckoning in the wake of the murder of George Floyd and a lot of teachers,

28:16 a lot of those of us who care very much about how young people encounter this story and the American story, how are they to frame this? It’s not to say, well, let the past be the past, and we shouldn’t look back and understand it for sure. Not that, because I think Douglass grabs us and he once again can shake America

28:40 and say, do you not understand what I went through? Do you understand what so many millions went through? And yet they did not stay. He did not stay in a place where he was alienated from his country.

29:03 That’s an amazing thing. And I think that journey. Which is probably a conversation for another time of coming to not just saying. Everything’s fine because I’m not alienated. There was none of that. Right. But this almost uneasy harmony where he’s saying.

29:24 Boy. We have to remember those things. Remember the pain and the struggle and the barbarity of slavery. But recognize that in the American experience. There is the possibility of saying with real meaning. I am your fellow man. Not your slave.

29:44 And that we can go forward. As he urged the nation to after the Civil War. To a new place. I think Douglass is maybe the man for the hour in calling us to think about all of the questions that we’re grappling with now with his story firmly in mind.

30:11 Well, thank you, David. I really appreciate you joining us for this Close Read. I thought it was just wonderful to talk through with you. And I hope that others will seek out this letter and other writings of Frederick Douglass and explore for themselves just the incredible stories and insights and power of his thought.

30:38 So thank you so much and thank you, everyone, for tuning in. I hope you also enjoyed this. We release these primary source reads every other Thursday. I think we’re off to a great start this semester, but I’m excited about what we have to come too. If you like this video, please do subscribe to our channel so you get alerted every time these videos come out.

31:00 We have other videos similar to this that come out all the time, whether they be our BRIdge from the Past episodes, looking at more visual primary sources, conversations with scholars, all of the great, amazing stuff we do here at the Bill of Rights Institute. Our next close read is going to be exploring Dr. Martin Luther King’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail, which is another

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