Orator and Public Intellectual
“Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing up the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning” (“West India Emancipation,” 1857). By the time he delivered “Lessons of the Hour,” one of his final speeches, in 1894, Douglass was recognized as one of the most gifted orators in the world. His commanding presence, sharp wit, and rhetorical skill often left audiences in awe. Yet, before Douglass took the lecture circuit by storm, he learned the craft of oratory through Baltimore’s Black social and religious institutions—introduced to him, in part, by Anna Murray, his soon-to-be wife. His style, then, is grounded in a Black oratorical tradition and intellectual culture. Early in his career, Douglass chafed at white abolitionist demands to just tell his story. “We will take care of the philosophy,” they told him (Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom). The documents here represent the breadth and depth of Douglass’s career as an orator and essayist, beginning with his British tour.
Report of Proceedings at the Soirée Given to Frederick Douglass, London Tavern, March 30, 1847. London: Yorke Clarke and Co., 1847.
“I came here [England] a slave, but I go back free. I came here despised; I go back with a reputation.” British admirers threw a farewell party for Douglass before his return to the United States. These proceedings include Douglass’s remarks and letters of support from prominent British figures like Charles Dickens, who expressed the “warmest interest in any occasion designed as a denunciation of slavery.”
Samuel J. May Anti-Slavery Pamphlet Collection.
View selected pages from Report of Proceedings at the Soirée Given to Frederick Douglass
Frederick Douglass. Farewell Speech of Mr. Frederick Douglass… upon his Return to America. London: Ward, 1847
“Sir, the abolitionists have resolved, that wherever slavery manifests itself in the United States, they will hit it. They will deal out their heaviest blows upon it.” Douglass left the United States for Europe in 1845 following the publication of his Narrative to avoid re-enslavement. In 1846, supporters purchased his freedom, and he delivered this speech on March 20, 1847, before returning to the United States. Inscribed to Samuel J. May.
Letter from Frederick Douglass to His Old Master [Thomas Auld]. Extracted from The North Star, September 8, 1848.
In 1847, Douglass returned to the United States a legally free man. He penned this letter to his former enslaver, Thomas Auld, in 1848 and published it in The North Star, the newspaper Douglass coedited with Martin R. Delany. Douglass promises to use Auld “as a weapon with which to assail the system of slavery.” Douglass closes the letter, “I am your fellow man, but not your slave.”
Samuel J. May Anti-Slavery Pamphlet Collection.
Frederick Douglass. “Address by Frederick Douglass, and Poem by A.C. Hills, Delivered at the Erection of the Wing Monument at Mexico, Oswego Co. N.Y., September 11th 1855. Syracuse: J.G.K. Truair, 1855.
Frederick Douglass. Address by Frederick Douglass, Formerly a Slave, To the People of the United States of America. Edinburgh: H. Armour, 1849.
“The issue of freedom or slavery has been clearly submitted to you, and you have deliberately chosen slavery.”
Samuel J. May Anti-Slavery Pamphlet Collection.
Frederick Douglass. The Claims of the Negro, Ethnologically Considered: an Address before the Literary Societies of Western Reserve College, at Commencement, July 12, 1854. Rochester: Lee, Mann & Co., 1854.
Samuel J. May Anti-Slavery Pamphlet Collection.
Frederick Douglass. Two Speeches, by Frederick Douglass… on West India Emancipation… and the Dred Scott Decision. Rochester: C.P. Dewey, 1857.
“Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.” Douglass delivered these speeches in 1857 to commemorate British abolition of slavery (1834) and to protest the Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857) decision. This copy bears the signature of Moses Dresser Phillips, co-founder of The Atlantic Monthly.
Samuel J. May Anti-Slavery Pamphlet Collection.
View selected pages from Two speeches, by Frederick Douglass
Frederick Douglass. The Anti-slavery Movement: a Lecture by Frederick Douglass, before the Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society. Rochester: Lee, Mann & Co., 1855.
Samuel J. May Anti-Slavery Pamphlet Collection.
Frederick Douglass. “Eulogy of the Late Hon. Wm. Jay, by Frederick Douglass, Delivered on the Invitation of the Colored Citizens of New York City, in Shiloh Presbyterian Church, New York, May 12, 1859. Rochester: A. Strong & Co., Democrat & American Office, 1859.
William Jay, son of the first Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, John Jay, was a founding member of the American Anti-Slavery Society and drafted the Society’s constitution.
Letter from Frederick Douglass to Charles J. Langdon, August 15, 1872.
Frederick Douglass Autograph, 1890.
This autograph appears to have been cut out from the end of a letter.
Frederick Douglass and Ida B. Wells-Barnett. The Reason Why the Colored American Is Not in the World's Columbian Exposition: The Afro-American's Contribution to Columbian Literature. Chicago: Ida B. Wells, 1893.
Near the end of his life, Frederick Douglass saw Ida B. Wells as his heir apparent. Wells, born in Holly Springs, MS, moved to Chicago after a white mob destroyed the office of her newspaper, Memphis Free Speech and Headlight. Wells was one of the foremost chroniclers of lynching in the United States, and her Red Record and Southern Horrors remain among the foremost accounts of the relation between white supremacy and anti-Black lynching. Wells, Douglass, I. Garland Penn, and Ferdinand L. Barnett collaborated on The Reason Why after the Worlds Columbian Exposition omitted Black Americans as contributors to the United States. This book includes some of Wells’s work on lynching and contains images of racist violence.
WARNING: The following are images of racist violence, discretion is advised.
Frederick Douglass. Lessons of the Hour. Hon. Frederick Douglass. Metropolitan A.M.E. Church. Washington, D.C. Baltimore: Thomas & Evans, 1894.
Among the last of Douglass’s speeches, “Lessons of the Hour” famously rejects the notion that racism is a “negro problem”: “I repeat, and my contention is, that this negro problem formula lays the fault at the door of the negro and removes it from the door of the white man, shields the guilty, and blames the innocent. Makes the negro responsible and not the nation.”
The Frederick Douglass Souvenir, undated.
This souvenir booklet features portraits of Frederick Douglass and “Cedar Hill,” his home in Anacostia, D.C., from 1877-1895. This picture of Douglass seated at his library desk with his dog, “Frank,” is among the last taken of him. Cornell’s second copy of this book was gifted to the library by Cornell alum (1876), Theodore Stanton, in 1896, the year after Douglass’s death.
Samuel J. May Collection.