Frederick Douglass in Brooklyn. Frederick Douglass
of his steadfast allies, Douglass navigated it safely.
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Twenty-year-old Frederick Bailey first became acquainted with New York abolitionists in September 1838. Born a slave on the Eastern Shore of Maryland around February 1818, Bailey came of age in Baltimore, where he learned to read and soon inspired his peers to do the same; after a few unsuccessful attempts to escape, he fled safely to New York via trains and ferries while carrying the identification papers of a free black seaman. Once in Manhattan, Bailey sought out David Ruggles, a leading African American conductor of the Underground Railroad. He informed Ruggles of his desire to marry his fiancée, Anna Murray, who would soon join him in New York; soon thereafter, Reverend James W.C. Pennington came from Brooklyn to perform the wedding at Ruggles’s home on Lispenard Street. (Thus began a long alliance between the soon-to-be Douglass and Pennington—who would preside over Shiloh Presbyterian, an abolitionist stronghold on Prince Street in Manhattan.) From New York, Frederick and Anna traveled via boat to Newport, Rhode Island, then by stagecoach to New Bedford, Massachusetts, where they set up shop and became the Douglass family. In the summer of 1841, Douglass first met William Lloyd Garrison, who helped launch his career as a public figure. That fall, the family moved to Lynn, Massachusetts, and it was there that Douglass wrote the book that would build his international reputation, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, which Garrison’s American Anti-Slavery Society published in 1845.
Brooklyn was far from a bastion of abolitionist support in the mid-1840s. Many early Kings County residents had owned slaves, and after Brooklyn officially became a city in 1834, local merchants competed with their counterparts across the East River for the trade in Southern products. Indeed, so widespread was the support for slavery in Brooklyn that in 1839 David Ruggles called the city “the Savannah of New York.”[3] Beginning in May 1842, Douglass spoke at the annual meetings of the Garrison-led American Anti-Slavery Society in Manhattan, which usually took place at the Broadway Tabernacle, the church where the Tappan brothers held sway. Beyond abolitionist circles, Douglass was not a household name in the New York area until his autobiography came out—and even then Brooklyn audiences more likely read about him in Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune (which published a front-page review by Margaret Fuller in June 1845) than in any local publication. Douglass, in turn, spent the next two years touring Ireland and England. Among his fellow speakers at the August 1846 temperance convention in London was Henry Ward Beecher, the charismatic Congregationalist minister who moved the following year from Indiana to Brooklyn, where he became the first pastor of Plymouth Church. Beecher’s arrival meant that Douglass and his fellow abolitionists in Brooklyn now had a much more sympathetic ally than Samuel Cox.
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Upon his return from England in the spring of 1847, Douglass informed his colleagues that he planned to start his own publication. He was still based in Lynn, but sought independence from Garrison, who presided over Boston-area abolitionists. Throughout 1847, various reports placed Douglass’s publication in different locations, including Lynn, Cleveland, and Rochester, its eventual home. One of the earliest announcements came from Walt Whitman, who had been editing the Brooklyn Daily Eagle for just over a year. In early June of 1847, Whitman noted:
Fred. Douglass, the runaway slave, having received the necessary subscriptions and contributions for a press etc., from Scotland principally, is about to publish an anti-slavery paper in Lynn, Mass. He will of course create a great sensation in the regions around shoe-dom. A Sunday paper says that Lynn and the neighboring peninsula of Nahant have heretofore mainly depended for excitement on the appearance of the sea serpent, whose visits of late years have been singularly irregular. Douglass will prove a first-rate substitute for the monster.[4]
Playful but clearly supportive, Whitman’s statement was based on word that spread in the wake of the May annual meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society at the Broadway Tabernacle, where Douglass had spoken. There is no record of the two figures formally meeting one another, but at the time Whitman and Douglass were traveling in similar circles—and the former’s opposition to slavery would cause him to lose his job at the Eagle in early 1848.
As he prepared to launch his own paper, Douglass also became involved with the Ram’s Horn, which was published by Willis Hodges, a leading figure in the black community in Williamsburgh (as it was spelled at the time), which would not become part of Brooklyn until 1855. The Ram’s Horn debuted in January 1847, with Thomas Van Rensselaer, a former slave turned Manhattan restaurateur, as its editor. Hodges, who became close friends with John Brown, had owned a small grocery stand near the ferry in Williamsburgh, and his brother William was also a leading minister in the area. After the May meeting of the Anti-Slavery Society, Douglass wrote to van Rensselaer, encouraging him to “Blow away on your ‘Ram’s Horn’! Its wild, rough, uncultivated notes may grate harshly on the ear of [the] refined . . . but sure I am that its voice will be pleasurable to the slave, and terrible to the slaveholder.”[5] In early August 1847, the paper announced that Douglass had joined the masthead as an assistant editor; Sydney Howard Gay, editor of the National Anti-Slavery Standard (also based in Manhattan), confirmed that report, adding that Douglass would also serve as a regular contributor to the Standard. Douglass, in turn, asked Gay to look into the Horn’s finances, in order to make sure he wouldn’t incur any debts.[6] For the next several months, Douglass remained affiliated with the Ram’s Horn.
In the fall of 1847, African American audiences on both sides of the East River could thus read a weekly paper that featured Frederick Douglass on its masthead. The banner across page one of the only extant copy of the Ram’s Horn—dated November 5, 1847—lists Van Rensselaer and Douglass as editors, placing their names on opposite sides of the paper’s motto: We are Men—and therefore interested in whatever concerns Men. It’s not clear what Douglass actually contributed to this (or any other) issue, but the editorial page carried his name in the top left-hand corner. Under it was a signed editorial from Willis Hodges encouraging readers to take interest in the “Gerrit Smith Lands.” Smith was a prominent abolitionist from Western New York who encouraged blacks (and white abolitionists) to become farmers on the 120,000 acres he donated to a community called “Timbuctoo” in North Elba, near Lake Placid. In the fall of 1848, Hodges became one of several New York City–area migrants to Timbuctoo, where fellow resident John Brown (a Ram’s Horn contributor) helped him set up shop.[7] Gerrit Smith, meanwhile, would become a pivotal supporter of both Douglass’s own paper as well as Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry. In 1849, Van Rensselaer moved the Ram’s Horn to Philadelphia, where it fizzled out a year later.
That same November 1847 issue of the Ram’s Horn also carried an announcement informing readers that contrary to recent reports, Douglass planned to publish his own paper in Rochester, not Cleveland.[8] One month later, the North Star indeed made its debut from the city on the banks of Lake Ontario that Douglass would call home for the next twenty-three years. In his inaugural statement, Douglass declared, “It has long been our anxious wish to see . . . [a paper] under the complete control and direction of the immediate victims of slavery and oppression.”[9] That jab seemed directed at Garrison and the Liberator, because it didn’t apply to the Ram’s Horn (or other preceding black-edited newspapers). But in order to sustain the North Star, Douglass needed to raise a steady stream of funds, via both donations and subscriptions. While Gerrit Smith was a steady source of financial support, according to biographer William McFeely, over the next few years, “Everywhere he went, Douglass urged his listeners to subscribe.”[10] Such efforts brought him down to New York City and eventually to Brooklyn.
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On April 16, 1849, Douglass made his first public appearance in Brooklyn, at Reverend James N. Gloucester’s Siloam Presbyterian Church on Myrtle Avenue at the edge of what is now Downtown Brooklyn. According to the Ram’s Horn’s report (which Douglass reprinted in his paper), the speaker had a dual purpose: “to lecture us on the subject of improvement, and [to] procure subscribers for the North Star.” In his own account, Douglass observed that Siloam’s location at that time was a “beautiful and commodious church under the pastoral care of Mr. Gloucester”; he also noted that after his talk, Van Rensselaer (with whom he stayed)