Frederick Douglass in Brooklyn. Frederick Douglass
counterpart, Reverend Pennington, for allowing Douglass to use their churches without charging admission, which stood in contrast to Zion AME in lower Manhattan. Like Pennington, Gloucester remained a prominent figure in New York abolitionism. In February 1858, he and his wife Elizabeth, a savvy businesswoman who helped finance the construction of Siloam’s first full church, would host John Brown for a week at their home in Downtown Brooklyn.[12]
The black community’s attempts to build its future in the fast-growing city would be chronicled first in the pages of the North Star, where Douglass regularly printed letters from correspondents based elsewhere. Joseph C. Holly, a shoemaker by trade, was the paper’s man in Brooklyn. In a May 1849 dispatch, Holly reported about an abolitionist gathering at which the mention of Douglass’s name brought forth a “most rapturous applause.”[13] That July, Father Theobald Mathew, a leading temperance advocate from Ireland, made a high-profile visit to Brooklyn. As Holly noted in the North Star, Mathew, who had met with Douglass in Cork a few years earlier, now “took him by the hand in Brooklyn”—a notable gesture of solidarity in an increasingly hostile racial climate.[14] In 1851, the annual May meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society had to be moved out of Manhattan because of increasing antiabolitionist violence, and organizers quickly found that they were not welcome in Brooklyn, either. (The gathering took place in Syracuse.) That summer, the North Star became Frederick Douglass’ Paper, which brought the editor closer to Gerrit Smith (who bankrolled the publication), a move that caused a hostile split between Douglass and Garrison.[15]
In the pages of Frederick Douglass’ Paper, Brooklyn correspondents assumed a more prominent role. In April 1852, James N. Still, a self-employed tailor who used the pen name “Observer,” highlighted the success of a recent series of talks in Brooklyn by Reverend Pennington as well as Beecher’s growing prominence in local abolitionist circles. In Still’s view, such efforts suggested that the “time will come” soon when Douglass would join that network of speakers in the area. Though Brooklyn was announced on his tour itinerary in early 1855, the event never happened, and Douglass’s first widely publicized lecture would not take place in the city until 1859.[16] Yet as recorded by his paper’s most prolific Brooklyn correspondent, William “Ethiop” Wilson, Douglass made well-received visits to Brooklyn in the middle of the decade. Included in the more than fifty letters that the editor would publish from Ethiop, a school principal in Weeksville, was mention of Douglass’s February 1855 visit to Plymouth Church. He attended with Lewis Tappan, now a member of Beecher’s congregation, and the two sat together in Tappan’s centrally located pew. According to Ethiop, Douglass was “the observed of all observers, and the lion of the occasion,” disrupting the “pious devotions” of the church service. Beecher’s name had shown up frequently, and favorably, in Douglass’s publications for the preceding seven years, and the editor also mentioned that he had visited Plymouth at least one other time, in May 1854.[17]
Throughout the 1850s, Beecher ascended to prominence as an abolitionist, and the theatrical performer became a fixture on the national lecture circuit. At the same time, the Independent also enabled him to reach audiences beyond those who came to Plymouth Church. Launched in late 1848 as both a Congregationalist and abolitionist publication, the weekly paper’s driving force in the next decade was publisher Henry C. Bowen, a Brooklyn resident, Lewis Tappan’s son-in-law, and a successful merchant who had helped found Plymouth Church. Yet as Beecher’s fame grew, the Independent came to be seen as his vehicle. In 1857, Bowen, realizing that the freewheeling minister needed some help managing the publication, hired a brash twenty-two-year-old New York City journalist named Theodore Tilton.[18] Toward the decade’s end, Tilton established his national reputation as an abolitionist when the Independent published his widely reprinted interview with Mary Brown on the eve of her husband John’s execution. (On her way to and from Harpers Ferry, Mary stayed at Tilton’s home in Brooklyn.) As the Civil War began, the Independent was a leading national voice of abolition, with regular contributions from Horace Greeley, poet John Greenleaf Whittier, and its figurehead’s sister, Harriet Beecher Stowe. At the behest of Tilton, who steered the ship in the 1860s, Douglass soon joined those ranks.
In the several years prior to his January 1859 lecture in Williamsburgh, Douglass did not make any noteworthy public appearances in Brooklyn. But during that time he served as a lightning rod for the virulently proslavery Brooklyn Eagle. In August 1856, the paper warned of “Fred Douglass, the Negro co-laborer of the white-skin[n]ed niggers of Abolition . . . The doctrines of this fellow are that slaves should not only run away but murder their employers before starting.” In 1857, the Supreme Court sanctioned such hostilities, issuing its landmark Dred Scott decision declaring that slaves were property rather than people. When Dred Scott, the person in question, died in September 1858, the Eagle compared him to leading black public figures. Most absurdly, the paper declared that “Fred Douglass, the smartest darkey we have produced, will leave no name beyond his generation, but Dred Scott, a poor simple-minded old Negro . . . will live in the annals of this great nation, as connected with a great constitutional principle.”[19] Such blatant racism in the daily local papers no doubt fueled the resolve of John Brown’s supporters, and during 1858 and 1859, the Gloucesters actively participated in planning for the Harpers Ferry raid. Douglass, in turn, worked closely with the Brooklyn couple in aiding Brown. In February 1858, Brown left Douglass’s home in Rochester and one of his next stops was the Gloucesters’ place at 265 Bridge Street (now MetroTech) for the aforementioned weeklong stay. As noted by the pioneering black historian , there Brown informed his Brooklyn hosts that any money sent on his behalf should be directed to Douglass in Rochester. In welcoming Brown to their home, James Gloucester told him, “I wish you Godspeed in your glorious work.”[20]
Douglass, the Gloucesters, and an array of familiar New York City–area names would soon appear regularly in the pages of the Weekly Anglo-African, a publication that debuted in July 1859 (as an offshoot of an eponymous magazine). The publishers were two African American brothers from Brooklyn, Thomas and Robert Hamilton,[21] while its eventual leading editor was Douglass’s friend James McCune Smith,[22] who moved to Williamsburgh after the Draft Riots of 1863. Along with Douglass and Smith, the Anglo-African’s roster of regular contributors included New York City ministers Pennington and Henry Highland Garnet, Douglass’s longtime editorial companions Martin Delany and William C. Nell, and Brooklyn mainstays Reverend Gloucester, William J. Wilson, and Junius C. Morel. Despite such an all-star cast (and modest financial backing from Gerrit Smith), the paper struggled financially, and two years after its founding, the Hamiltons temporarily ceded control to James Redpath, a leading white proponent of Haiti colonization schemes for freed slaves (which Douglass briefly supported). In the summer of 1861, James McCune Smith, an opponent of colonization, led a successful effort to restore the Hamiltons’ control of the publication.[23] Over the ensuing several issues, a fundraising letter from James Gloucester appeared atop the Anglo-African’s editorial page. That November, the paper began serializing Martin Delany’s novel Blake; or the Huts of America—and early the next year, the author, a leading early voice of pan-Africanism, listed his address as 97 High Street, at the edge of Brooklyn Heights.[24] Like the Independent, the Anglo-African’s office was in Manhattan (near Park Row), but it was closely identified with Brooklyn.
The Anglo-African also provided extensive coverage of the assault on Harpers Ferry, including important details regarding Douglass’s role in supporting John Brown, a matter of historical dispute.[25] In mid-August 1859, Douglass stayed overnight at the Gloucesters’ home on his way to meet Brown in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania; while in town, the Anglo-African noted at the time, Douglass stopped by their office for “a short visit.” A few weeks later, the paper reported that “Frederick Douglass, Esq., will leave this city [New York] in early November, on a lecturing tour through Great Britain.”[26] It was a seemingly uncontroversial announcement, but Douglass would later use his stated travel plans as evidence that he was not planning to join Brown in Virginia, a charge leveled against him at the time. Like the leading daily papers in New York and Brooklyn, the Anglo-African documented the mid-October attack and its aftermath in exhaustive detail. Meanwhile, proslavery forces—led by the New York Herald—eagerly sought to implicate Douglass, who at the end of October fired back at his accusers in a letter to the Rochester