Giant's Causeway by Tom Chaffin

Author:Tom Chaffin [Chaffin, Tom]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, United States, 19th Century
ISBN: 9780813936116
Google: 4nCdAwAAQBAJ
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
Published: 2014-12-15T00:25:17+00:00

CHAPTER 18

“Mr. Editor, If You Please”

BY OPERATING his own paper, Douglass could keep his words from being subject to the vagaries of other writers, editors, and publishers. Like other abolitionist papers, the North Star offered modest editorial fare—four pages, each with six columns. Also like other antislavery papers, it ran reports on the activities of abolitionist societies, texts of speeches by antislavery members of Congress, as well as presidential addresses. And, typical of other papers of that era—abolitionist and general—the North Star routinely reprinted materials from other publications.1

During that period, however, Douglass did not entirely forsake lecturing. Through the late 1840s, he continued a reduced but still demanding calendar of lecture dates and conferences. Notably, in July 1848, he joined Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott, William Lloyd Garrison, and other reformers for a two-day convention in Seneca Falls, New York, devoted to women’s rights, or, as contemporaries called it, “woman’s rights.”

The meeting reinforced Douglass’s commitment to the cause of women’s rights. Indeed, in the course of his life—beyond those activists who attended the Seneca Falls meeting—he also worked closely with Angela Grimké, Lydia Maria Child, Susan B. Anthony, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and other women’s rights advocates. Of his involvement in that cause, he later wrote:

Observing woman’s agency, devotion, and efficiency in pleading the cause of the slave, gratitude for this high service early moved me to give favorable attention to the subject of what is called “woman’s rights” and caused me to be denominated a woman’s-rights man. I am glad to say that I have never been ashamed to be thus designated. Recognizing not sex nor physical strength, but moral intelligence and the ability to discern right from wrong, good from evil, and the power to choose between them, as the true basis of republican government, to which all are alike subject and all bound alike to obey, I was not long in reaching the conclusion that there was no foundation in reason or justice for woman’s exclusion from the right of choice in the selection of the persons who should frame the laws, and thus shape the destiny of all the people, irrespective of sex.2

Weeks after the Seneca Falls meeting, Douglass attended, on August 9 and 10, the founding convention of the Free Soil Party, in Buffalo, New York. The gathering nominated former president Martin Van Buren as the new party’s candidate for that year’s presidential race. Twenty thousand people attended the convention—abolitionists as well as those seeking merely to ban slavery in the newly acquired U.S. territories in the West and to preserve those domains for exclusive use by white settlers. For the meeting’s attendees, their numbers swelled by rail fares reduced for the occasion, it offered a dazzling array of speakers and performers, including, besides Douglass, Charles Lenox Remond, Samuel Ringgold Ward, Henry Bibb, Henry Highland Garnet, and the Hutchinson Family Singers. The journalist, and later poet, Walt Whitman attended the gathering; and later remembered Douglass’s oratorical prowess before it: “He has a splendid voice, loud, clear and sonorous, which would make itself heard in the largest open air assembly.

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