Frederick Douglass in Brooklyn. Frederick Douglass

      Introduction

       Mr. Douglass has been in the habit of carrying his audiences by storm. His peculiar wit, sarcasm, drollery, dramatic intensity, and, more than all, his noble moral earnestness, set in strong relief by an indefinable and touching sadness of tone and mien, [are] apparent [in] all his speeches. Though he makes his listeners alternately cheer, laugh, and weep, they inevitably carry away with them, as the chief impression of the evening, not the ornament or side-play, but the logical frame-work and solid sense of the discourse. Frederick Douglass, beginning his life as a bond-slave, will leave behind him an honest fame as one of the chief orators of his day and generation.

      —Brooklyn’s Theodore Tilton, Independent,

       February 12, 1863

      Upon Frederick Douglass’s death in 1895, the New York Tribune—a newspaper founded by a leading abolitionist, Horace Greeley—dug up a chestnut from a half-century earlier. In 1846, Douglass had delivered a speech at a temperance gathering in London’s Covent Garden Theatre. There he told an audience that included both British royalty and US ministers that while temperance was indeed a worthy cause, the abolition of slavery was more important. After Douglass’s address, the Tribune said, among those who sought to congratulate the speaker was an “eminent Brooklyn divine.” Never one to mince words, Douglass rejected the overture. He told the minister, “Sir, were we to have met under similar circumstances in Brooklyn, you would never have ventured to take my hand, and you shall not do it here.”[1]

      Beyond illustrating Douglass’s resolute character, the anecdote also yields insight into Brooklyn’s race relations in the decades before the Civil War. Despite the presence of prominent white abolitionists, as well as that of vocal African Americans, Brooklyn was far from a haven of black equality. In the wake of the London meeting, Douglass engaged in a high-profile war of words in print with Reverend Samuel Hanson Cox, the prominent pastor of Brooklyn’s First Presbyterian Church. Though an abolitionist, Cox was outraged that Douglass had raised the issue of slavery at the temperance convention. In the New York Evangelist, a Presbyterian weekly newspaper, Cox called Douglass’s actions a “perversion” of the meeting’s intent and “abominable!” In William Lloyd Garrison’s Liberator, an influential abolitionist paper from Boston, Douglass labeled Cox a “sham” opponent of slavery. Audiences across the Northeast thus became aware of Brooklyn’s contested racial terrain.[2]

      Frederick Douglass never lived in Brooklyn, but his visits to the “City of Churches” stirred both enthusiasm and controversy. During the Civil War era many of his key friends and allies—including Henry Ward Beecher, Theodore Tilton, Lewis Tappan, James and Elizabeth Gloucester, James McCune Smith, and William J. Wilson (a.k.a. “Ethiop”)—called Brooklyn home. Douglass had close ties to three publications with Brooklyn roots: the Ram’s Horn (1847–1849), the Anglo-African (1859–1865), and the Independent (1860s). Meanwhile, his own publications, the North Star and Frederick Douglass’ Paper, featured regular Brooklyn correspondents, most notably Ethiop. Douglass was a close friend of John Brown, and the pages of the Anglo-African noted the former’s stop in Brooklyn—at the home of Elizabeth Gloucester—en route to a pivotal Harpers Ferry planning meeting in late August 1859. Theodore Tilton, who rose to prominence in his defense of Brown in the Independent, would become one of Douglass’s closest confidants during the Civil War and Reconstruction.

      Both in person and print, Douglass was a powerful presence in Brooklyn—and the varied reactions to his positions on abolition and black equality thus illustrate the ways in which those issues shaped the city in its formative decades. At African American churches like Reverend James N. Gloucester’s Siloam Presbyterian or James Morris Williams’s Bridge Street AME, or at white abolitionist strongholds like Henry Ward Beecher’s Plymouth Church, the gifted orator received a hero’s welcome. But in the pages of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, a conservative Democratic organ during the Civil War, Douglass was often subjected to racist ridicule. Douglass had garnered a more friendly reception from Walt Whitman, during the latter’s short stints as editor of both the Eagle and the Brooklyn Daily Times. Even so, Whitman’s position on racial issues—antislavery but not proequality—reflected a notable current of local sentiment. Like New York City, Brooklyn (its own city until 1898)