Books: The Black Abolitionist

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Stalwart Republican. Douglass ended his youthful autobiography just when he was becoming famous. He joined the fiery William Lloyd Garrison's band of abolitionists. A powerfully built man with a great shock of hair and a sonorous voice, he was the best orator of the lot. When the Fugitive Slave Law was passed, enabling slaveowners to recover their runaways, Douglass thundered: "The only way to make the law a dead letter is to make half a dozen or more dead kidnapers." His lecture tour of Britain was cred ited with helping to keep Britain from recognizing the Confederacy during the Civil War. But he taxed the tolerance of even the abolitionists when he married a white woman of good colonial family who qualified for the D.A.R.

For all his militancy, Douglass was a practical man. When Garrison denounced the U.S. Constitution and urged the dissolution of the Union. Douglass broke with him, fearing that slaves would be helpless if left to the mercies of the South. He hoped to abolish slavery by the ballot and became a stalwart of the Republican Party, later helped to swing the Negro vote to a series of Republican Presidents. He was finally rewarded with the post of Minister to Haiti.

But his career was to end in disappointment, as he saw Negro rights steadily snuffed out in the South. He died at 77 (or 78), the same year that Booker T. Washington delivered his famous Atlanta address, agreeing that the white and black races should remain "in all things social ... as separate as the fingers."