Imperfect Union by Steve Inskeep

Author:Steve Inskeep
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2020-01-13T16:00:00+00:00

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OUTSIDE THE SENATE CHAMBER was a different matter. Seward’s speech was reprinted and shared in antislavery circles, where it inspired a prophecy from Frederick Douglass. The former slave wrote that Seward’s “higher law” concept would resonate in a God-fearing nation. Although most Americans, even in free states, were “dark and depraved on this subject” of slavery, they would finally choose the justice that was demanded by their faith. If both Whigs and Democrats continued resisting this truth, “they will have, for their pains, a new and powerful Northern party,” which would righteously rise to crush them both.

Douglass had been busy since the National Convention of Colored Citizens in 1843, when he pressed for nonviolent change only to be attacked by a mob weeks later. Funded by antislavery groups, he traveled to Britain to lecture. He published a popular autobiography detailing his enslavement and escape. Then he moved with his wife, Anna, and their children to a brick house in Rochester, New York, where he established a newspaper called the North Star. Naturally it was an abolitionist sheet, although its content was broader than that phrase would imply. Articles about slavery shared space with whatever else awakened the editor’s curiosity; it was a view of the world through the eyes of Frederick Douglass. The paper on April 20, 1849, included an item about Louis-Napoléon, the leader of France, who “rambles much about the Parisian streets, unattended,” and also an update on the progress of the famed explorer John Charles Frémont. It was a story of the disastrous expedition in which men “were compelled to eat the dead bodies of their comrades, before they became cold.” Later that year the paper noted the gold on John’s land (“Col. Fremont is said to have fallen upon untold riches”) and then his election to the Senate.

The two-story brick house where Douglass lived with his family was selected for its location between the homes of white abolitionists, minimizing friction with the neighbors. It was about a one-mile walk to his newspaper office, leading through the busy mill town and across the Genesee River on the Main Street Bridge, which had mills and a market built along its sides, propped directly over the river so that businesses could use it to turn waterwheels and dump waste. Reaching the west bank, Douglass entered a four-story stone office building, where a single room contained an iron printing press, a desk in the corner, and wooden type cases along the walls. Aided by an assistant and sometimes by his young daughter and son, he set articles into type. He expressed himself without apology as a black man. “Colored newspapers,” he wrote, “are sometimes objected to on the ground that they serve to keep up an odious and wicked distinction between white and colored persons, and are a barrier to that very equality which we are wont to advocate. We have, sometimes, heard persons regret the very mention of color. . . . We confess to no such feelings.

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