After twenty years of slavery, and another seven suffering the stinging indignities of American prejudice, Douglass finally found a place where he was treated not "as a color, but as a man." The temptation for Douglass to embrace this new life and forget the old, to view his voyage on the Cambria as the scene of oceanic rebirth, and to imagine his experiences in Britain as divorced from those in America, was thus, understandably, very powerful. Indeed, these terms—"new life," "transformation," and "rebirth"—appear regularly in Douglass's letters and speeches. But Douglass also recognized that this temptation threatened the foundations of his representational duties. Douglass had to confront this threat in two significant decisions concerning how and when to return home. After postponing his departure for the second time in the summer of 1846, Douglass began to consider the possibility of settling in Britain permanently.[114] This move would constitute a radical redefinition of Douglass's character, and in the rejection of his American identity, a rupture with his slave past nearly as dramatic as his escape North. Douglass had frequently toyed with the idea of his exile being a permanent one, parrying American prejudice with a rejection of his American identity. He wrote to Garrison from Belfast, "as to nation; I belong to none," (SOURCE) and told a Scottish audience "I am a man before I am an American. To be a man is above being an American...But I have no nation. America only welcome me to her shores as a brute." (SOURCE) [115] But whereas these rejections had been merely rhetorical, now the rejection threatened to become very real indeed. Douglass's British hosts generally supported his move. At a meeting at Finsbury Chapel in London, one of Douglass's colleagues reminded the audience that Douglass could not be expected to stay in Britain for much longer without his family, and suggested that the audience contribute money to bring them over. In a few minutes, they had raised nearly £90, and days later, other friends donated generously to the cause.[116]
Douglass quickly wrote to his "own Dear Sister Harriet" proposing the move and asking for her response: "Speak Dear Harriet just what you think——even though [you may] differ from me. I will love you all the more for speaking out." He then asked Harriet to read the letter and another he had enclosed to his wife, "over and over again until Dear Anna shall fully understand their contents."[117] However, regardless of what Harriet and Anna thought, it was not his family's opposition to the idea that prevented Douglass from staying in Britain. At some point after the excitement of the suggestion had subsided, Douglass realized himself that the move, though financially feasible, could never be more than a fantasy.
Ultimately, Douglass was able to resist the temptation to disassociate himself from his slave past and embrace a new British identity because his dedication to antislavery—his "one idea"— would not allow it. Before a London audience he described his struggle, and the eventual resolution: "The money was raised, and I thought, at the time, I would bring my family to this country; but, on reflection, I was fearful, if I settled here, I might forget my brethren in bonds, and I have resolved not to bring my family to England, but to return to America." (SOURCE) Though Douglass admitted that any inherent patriotism he possessed was long ago whipped out of him "by the lash of the American soul-drivers," (SOURCE) he also recognized that American was his home.[118] His antislavery duties preserved his nationality, for he belonged "in the field, at work, preaching to the best of my ability salvation from slavery to a nation fast hastening to destruction." (SOURCE) [119]
But Douglass's sense of national allegiance was not entirely defined by his antislavery duties, and his letters to his family reveal another meaning of his decision to return home. As he thought about the possibility of bringing his family to England, and thought of his own experiences there, Douglass must have realized that his wife Anna—dark, uncultured, illiterate — would never enjoy the kind of reception he had received. The move would be impossible not merely because of Douglass's antislavery responsibilities, but because of his familial duties as well. In a sense, Douglass's family grounded him in a recognition and an acceptance of his American and racial identity; they were the emotional stake to which he was tethered. Recognizing these restrictive bonds, a little more than a month after he finally returned home Douglass told an audience, "the only thing that links me to this land is my family, and the painful consciousness that here there are 3,000,000 of my fellow creatures groaning beneath the iron rod of the worst despotism that could be devised." (SOURCE) [120]
Douglass established in this speech a complex relationship between his nationality, his family, and his slave past. That relationship is even more explicitly suggested in his private correspondence. In one revealing letter, Douglass responded to his sister Harriet's announcement that she was soon to be married. Her letter must have arrived in Douglass's hands just as he was expecting to hear her thoughts on the proposed move, and he was surprised and disappointed to find in it merely a request for money to buy a silk wedding dress. He had not been consulted about the character of the groom; he was not even told his name. This lack of communication must have reinforced Douglass's sense that by postponing his departure to the United States he had neglected his responsibilities as father, husband and brother. Quickly penning a response, Douglass expressed his disappointment and distress at not being involved in her decisions. He reminded her of the monumentality and permanence of the marriage contract, and warned her, "You ought not to marry any ignorant and unlearned person. You might as well tie yourself to a log of wood as to do so."[121]
The intensity of Douglass's reaction to Harriet's wedding plans suggests that, if not regret, there was something self-referential in his advice. Anna Murray Douglass had helped pay for Douglass's escape from Baltimore and had worked selflessly as a domestic to support the family while Douglass was overseas. She was loyal, diligent, and thrifty, but she was also simple, plain, and easily overshadowed by the elegant and cultured women who surrounded Douglass in Britain, who flocked to hear him speak, and who wrote glowing letters back to the United States, extolling his charms.[122] Douglass's British hosts noticed the almost idolatrous attention women paid to him, and worried about its consequences once he returned home. John Estlin, a Bristol surgeon and active antislavery man, wrote to an American colleague: "You can hardly imagine how he [Douglass] is noticed—petted I may say—by the ladies. Some of them really a little exceed the bounds of propriety, or delicacy, as far as appearances are concerned; yet F.D.'s conduct is most guardedly correct, judicious and decorous...My fear is that often associating so much with white women of education & refined taste & manner, he will feel a 'craving void' when he returns to his own family."[123]
Out of respect for Douglass's character, scholars have traditionally underestimated the full depth of that "craving void." But the recent analysis of the letters of the German journalist Ottilie Assing demonstrates that the temptation to "pet" back was stronger than Douglass's judicious and guarded conduct would suggest. Indeed, the temptation would ultimately overpower him: the letters reveal that Douglass and Assing were involved in a long, passionate affair from 1856 to 1881. As Assing told her sister, the two were "united in a deeper love than many who were married." Indeed, the most striking element of these letters is the jealous contempt exhibited by Assing toward Anna, who remained Douglass' devoted wife until her death in 1882. Assing, white, well-educated and well-bred, spoke of Anna as a "stupid old hag," and "an unknowledgeable and illiterate creature" who could never appreciate Douglass's brilliance and was thus an unworthy spouse. Even more disturbing is the sense that Douglass participated in, or at least condoned, this contempt; the two privately referred to Anna as "the Border-State."[124]
It is unlikely that Douglass was involved in a similar relationship while in Britain. The vigilance of the Free Church in locating the moral weaknesses of its enemies would certainly have discouraged him, if the idea of marital infidelity did not.[125] But Douglass's celebrity and his powerful attraction to women must have encouraged the thought that his marriage to Anna was a thing of the past, incompatible with his new life. This temptation was implicit in the very nature of his representational identity, stretched tautly between the plantation and the high-society salon. In returning to Anna and to America despite their distance, Douglass recognized the necessary and indissoluble link between his old and new lives, between his bondage and his freedom. He accepted, perhaps even a bit reluctantly, his responsibilities to his family, his country, and his past.
Thus, if we can assume that Douglass's relationship to his family, and to his wife especially, did limit both his psychic and physical movement, it also gave his identity as an American and as an escaped slave a rootedness.[126] Anna, who had once been instrumental in Douglass's flight from slavery, now drew him back. As the part of the black gentleman became less a role and more a permanent persona in Britain, in his transatlantic letters to his family Douglass revealed a vulnerable, rougher side that he did not share with audiences, or even with his Garrisonian friends. Even when he reminded his audience of his slave roots, disingenuously apologizing for his lack of education before he dazzled them with his skilled oratory, he did so from the position of the reborn, "self-made" man. Before an audience in London, he introduced his remarks by stating, "I have nothing to commend me to your consideration in the way of learning, nothing in the way of education, to entitle me to your attention." (SOURCE) [127] But these remarks merely highlighted the natural intelligence that prevented Douglass from remaining in slavery. The tone is quite different in his letters to his sister Harriet. In one, discussing his recent melancholy (his "fits of insanity"), Douglass suddenly broke out into a comic slave dialect:
Here Douglass embraced the demeaning "plantation manner of speech" that he had refused to adopt before white audiences. Even if this was a version of Douglass's famous comic mimicry, or simply a private joke between Douglass and his sister, this letter suggests once again that Douglass's family helped him resist the temptation to shake off the plantation, to "forget his brethren in bonds," and stay in Britain. Around the time of the composition of this letter, Douglass wrote to friends and colleagues of his acute homesickness. If we assume that his "fits of insanity" had much to do with this homesickness, then as evidenced by the letter, home for Douglass was linked fundamentally to his still vital, but undernourished, slave identity. This homesick Douglass—fragile, lonely, conflicted, and reverting back to slave vernacular—is an image disturbingly discordant with that of the bold orator embraced by British society, but it is one necessary to explore for a more complete understanding of his transatlantic experience.
Though Douglass recognized the necessity of returning home, he was still in significant danger of recapture, and he refused to put himself or his family at that kind of risk. This, in fact, was a frequent topic of his speeches: that all of the United States was implicated in slavery and that there was "no mountain so high, no valley so deep, and no spot so sacred as to give security to the slave." (SOURCE) [129] Around the same time that Douglass realized the impossibility of moving his family to Britain, he passed through Newcastle-upon-Tyne. There he stayed with Ellen Richardson and her brother and sister-in-law Henry and Anna, Quakers long active in the British antislavery movement. Ellen Richardson appreciated Douglass's predicament, and while he was visiting decided that the only possible solution was to buy his freedom. While Douglass was traveling with Garrison, promoting the Anti-Slavery League, Ellen began raising money for his purchase. Douglass's celebrity facilitated her search for donors, as many of his admirers were eager to contribute to the cause. After collecting the money, Richardson then employed the assistance of several prominent antislavery men, most notably the Boston lawyer Ellis Gray Loring, to manage the negotiations between Douglass's British supporters and his American master, Thomas Auld. Auld named his price— £150 sterling (around $1250 in 1846 dollars) — and transferred legal ownership of Douglass to his brother Hugh, in Baltimore. On December 12, 1846, Hugh formally registered a bill of manumission for "Frederick Baily, otherwise called Frederick Douglass."[130] It was as if even the legal agents of Douglass's manumission recognized the doubleness of Douglass's identity, and wanted to make sure that both bondsman and gentleman were included in the transaction.
The decision to buy Douglass's freedom provoked considerable opposition; even Douglass himself felt uncomfortable taking responsibility for it. (SOURCE) [131] Many felt betrayed by Douglass, and, picking up where Maria Weston Chapman left off, considered the act a selfish one in which, by legally recognizing the right of one man to hold property in another, Douglass placed his own comfort before the good of the cause. Others, critical of British abolition, placed the action in the context of British compensation of slaveholders. One foreign correspondent wrote that it was not surprising "that the English should purchase Douglass. They're accustomed to buying slaves."[132] The opposition however, did not fall neatly into any easy categorization; many Garrisonians opposed the transaction, though Garrison himself approved of it.[133] Nor was there any consensus along gender lines; some of the opponents presented the involvement of Ellen and Anna Richardson as an example of Douglass's dangerous hold over white women, but several female antislavery groups were vocal in their disapproval.[134]
The most impassioned declaration of opposition came from Henry Clarke Wright, the fiery radical with whom Douglass had had frequent, if strained, relations. In a letter that combined genuine concern for the antislavery cause with condescending moralism, Wright warned Douglass that by sanctioning the transaction, he was undermining his effectiveness as an antislavery agent:
Essentially, Wright urged Douglass to maintain his symbolic identity as an emblem of American inconsistency. This accusation of inconsistency and hypocrisy had been a standard trope in Douglass's attacks on the United States. In his farewell speech before a British audience, Douglass called America "a nation of inconsistencies; completely made up of inconsistencies." (SOURCE) [136] The United States, he claimed, was a place of "the Bible and the slave trade, the church and the prison, the gates of heaven and hell in the same street; the church bell and the auctioneers bell opposite each other." (SOURCE) [137] Ultimately, though Douglass was glad to denounce that inconsistency, he was not willing to sacrifice his own safety in order to embody it.
Douglass himself had a different understanding of his inconsistency, one based not on abolitionist propaganda but on his internal struggles with his conflicting representational duties. Douglass's response to Wright is thus a fascinating document of his developing sense of independence, identity and purpose. Douglass first introduced the question of his purchase as one "upon which I have thought and felt much," and thanked Wright for his concern. "Tell me, and tell me plainly, when you think I am deviating from the strict line of duty and principle; and when I become unwilling to hear, I shall have attained a character which I now despise, and from which I would hope to be preserved." (SOURCE) [138] In defending his actions, he then made use of a technical argument, endorsed by Garrison, differentiating "the purchase of legal freedom" from "abstract right and natural freedom." He compared his purchase to other situations in which one is compelled to make a payment in support of a despised institution, including payment of the Corn Law tax and submission to the passport system in Europe.
But Douglass also incorporated into his defense precisely those themes that had defined his representational crises. To counter Wright's accusation that he would loose the sublimity of the position as an escaped slave, he responded as he had often done before British audiences: "I have never made my own person and suffering the theme of public discourse, but have always based my appeal upon the wrongs of the three million now in chains." But at the same time, just as he had done in his letters home, Douglass reiterated the essential fixity of slavery within his personal, private identity, one that both transcended and informed his public role. "I shall be Frederick Douglass still, and once a slave still. I shall neither be made to forget nor cease to feel the wrongs of my enslaved fellow-countrymen. My knowledge of slavery will be the same, and my hatred of it will be the same." (SOURCE) [139]
What Douglass was demanding more than anything from Wright and his abolitionist colleagues was a recognition of his identity as an individual; ironically, the transaction that many claimed sanctioned the right of slave owners to hold property in another man could also be explained as a confirmation of Douglass as a fellow man, with an identity beyond that of an antislavery instrument. Importantly, though legally a freeman, Douglass did not deny still being a slave. The experience of slavery, rapidly receding into the past, was burned forever in his consciousness, a nightmare he could never forget. At the same time, his experiences in Britain confirmed for Douglass that he was now much more than just a scarred back or a chained leg. Still a slave, he would accept his duties as a representative figure, but he could no longer exist, and be manipulated, as an abolitionist symbol. If he had spent much of his antislavery life transforming his experiences into rhetorical gestures, he was now beginning the process of self 'derhetoricization.'
Thus, in the justification of his legal freedom, Douglass actually made crucial steps toward an assertion of his independence. These two concepts, and their essential difference, are fundamental to an understanding of Douglass's experience in Britain. Webb conflated the two in his ominous forecasts of Douglass's impending apostasy, but Douglass himself, in his writings and speeches, was careful to maintain the distinction. Freedom can be defined as a movement away from a past authority; but Douglass was not interested in burning any bridges or loosing any friends. He was, however, fiercely independent. For Douglass independence was primarily an internal struggle, not against Master Auld or Webb or Garrison, but with his own sense of self. And thus, at the heart of Douglass's transatlantic movement toward independence was a grappling, rough and insistent, with the fundamental element of his identity: his race.
Edmund Quincy noted in 1845, five months before Douglass left for Britain, that Douglass "has less of the constant sense of his color of [sic] almost any colored man I ever knew."[140] This statement can be taken in several different ways; probably Quincy, who himself demonstrated an unfortunately acute awareness of Douglass's blackness, meant that Douglass refused to conform to the conventional notions of black docility and childlike dependence.[141] But in the context of Douglass's experiences in Britain, the quote takes on a different meaning. Though the Boston Clique did treat Douglass cordially and with respect, Britain was Douglass's first real experience with a sort of equality that complicated the conventional semiotic system of his color. No longer did being black necessarily mean anything; it was now up to Douglass to determine that meaning for himself. Douglass expressed this development in a letter to Amy Post, an abolitionist friend in Rochester, New York. Britain, he hoped, had prepared him for the inevitable "proslavery kicks and cuffs at home" by confirming his belief that such ill treatment was not a necessary condition of "blackness," but was merely the product of America's debilitated moral climate.[142]
So although Douglass could write to Garrison from Dublin, "I find myself not treated as a color, but as a man," and to Webb, "I meet nothing here to remind me of my complexion," it would be misleading to state that Douglass forgot about his color while in Britain, just as it would be a mistake to suggest that, while embraced by British society, he could forget about his brethren in bonds. Douglass would write from Scotland in early 1846, "It is quite an advantage to be a 'nigger' here. I find I am hardly black enough for british taste, but by keeping my hair as wooly as possible, I make out to pass for at least a half a negro at any rate [italics mine]." (SOURCE) [143] There is a self-consciousness, a theatricality in his remark that suggests both an attempt to transcend color and to manipulate it. Douglass's language also reflects the ways in which British audiences perceived his racial identity . One Irish newspaper commented, "Evidently from his colour and confirmation descended from parents of different race, his appearance is singularly pleasing and agreeable...There is little, if anything, in his features of that peculiar prominence of lower face, thickness of lip, and flatness of nose, which peculiarly characterizes the true Negro type." (SOURCE) [144] Douglass's appearance, his light coloring, his wooly hair and his manly features, were for both his audience and for himself crucial elements of his contradictory representative identity; they positioned him both inside and outside the "circle of slavery," linked and distanced him from his brethren in bonds.
Douglass's light skin points to another related component of his inconsistent self, one deeply rooted in his consciousness, that was allowed to bloom in Britain. Douglass wrote of Britain as a place where he was treated as a white man, but he also referred to it as the "land of my paternal ancestors," as if he was a white man.[145] In a sense, Britain implicitly recognized an element of Douglass's character ignored by American society: that his father was white, most probably, one of his masters, Thomas Auld or Aaron Anthony. Peter Walker has ably demonstrated the extent to which Douglass struggled with the identity of his white father in the complex reworkings of that topic in his three autobiographies. Walker suggests that Douglass harbored a secret desire that the Boston Clique, recognizing his patrimony, would treat him as a white man, and was bitterly betrayed by their reluctance to do so. Their failure to recognize his whiteness painfully reproduced the original resistance of his master-father to accept him as his own son.[146]
But in Britain, Douglass could pass for "half a negro," and implicitly, for half white as well. He was able to approach the fantasy that the Boston Clique had disappointed, but by accepting the need to return home, Douglass recognized it as precisely that—a fantasy, incompatible with the full complexity of his identity. One of the anecdotes Douglass frequently included in his speeches while in Britain illustrates this realization. Late one night, back in the United States, Douglass found himself traveling in a coach with several white passengers. He joined in their conversation, and "his opinions were received with the utmost deference"; the coach being dark, the passengers did not notice Douglass's color. Douglass was so pleased with his reception that "he began to hope darkness would take the place of day." (SOURCE) But eventually, the sun rose, and when the passengers realized they had been chatting with a black man, the conversation was ended abruptly.[147] Britain was this darkened coach ride, and Douglass was thrilled and encouraged by his twenty months of celebrity. But he also realized that "the dreaded morning light" must come; and armed with a newly developed sense of self, he was prepared to return home.