Douglass
was generally correct in saying that the Browns led a simple life in many
respects. In fact, the Browns were
intentional about conserving money so that it could be shared with the
needy. But in the “tablecloth-less”
episode, Douglass was writing many years after the fact and his memory seems to
have failed. When Douglass first visited Brown, probably on May 15, 1847, Mary
Brown and the younger children had not yet moved to Springfield from Akron,
Ohio, where the family still was managing the agricultural interest of Simon
Perkins, Jr. Brown had only recently moved into the house that Douglass
visited, and his family had not yet joined him, nor had home improvements and
décor been added. Douglass subsequently visited the Brown residences in
Springfield and Akron, Ohio, where doubtless he recalled being served by Mary
and the Brown children. But since Mary
and the family did not move to Springfield until July 1847, it seems his
description was a conflation of memory that nevertheless underscored an
essential truth about John Brown—that he was not a man given to materialism or
the ostentatiousness of the upwardly mobile.2
To
Douglass’s point, Brown’s eldest daughter, Ruth Brown Thompson, described their
home in Springfield as “plainly furnished, but very comfortably.”3 She also recalled that John and Mary Brown
wanted to beautify their parlor, but instead chose to buy clothing and supplies
for black families from New York State who were settling on the Adirondack
lands of abolitionist Gerrit Smith.4 Still, Ruth, who seems to have been the least
offended among Brown’s daughters, objected to Douglass’s characterization.5 In a reminiscence written
in later life, she observed: “Frederick Douglass has said in his last book that
John Brown economized so closely, in order to carry out his plans, that we did
not have a cloth on the table at meal times.
I think our good friend is mistaken, for I never sat down to a meal at
my Father’s table without a table cloth.
He was very particular about such things.”6
Douglass
stylized other incidents in his narrative of Brown, but likely did so to lessen
the tensions of the past and preserve what was most important about his
connection to John Brown and the Harper’s Ferry raid. Evidently, too, his narrative also was
stylized in honor of Shields Green—whom, in a sense, he had given over to the
very mission that he himself had refused to undertake.
In
1881, Douglass wrote his third and final autobiography, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, which was revised and
updated in 1892. As David Blight has
observed of the work: “It was as though he hoped that telling his story once
again, and constantly revising it, might bring symmetry to his life in the
present.”7 In fact, Life
and Times was “a highly revised version” of his 1855 autobiography, My Bondage and My Freedom.8 Douglass was well acquainted with John Brown
by the time that My Bondage and My
Freedom was published. He had even
“introduced” Brown to his black readers in the pages of his newspaper, The North Star, in a memorable 1848
description. Brown was “a white gentleman,” Douglass extolled,
who was “in sympathy a black man.”9
Georges
Gusdorf writes that autobiography “is a work of art and at the same time a work
of enlightenment; it does not show us the individual seen from outside in his
visible actions but the person in his inner privacy, not as he was, not as he
is, but as he believes and wishes himself to be and to have been.”12 If this can be applied to Douglass’ third
autobiography regarding John Brown, then Life
and Times not only brought symmetry to his life as it had become in later
years, but also portrayed his antebellum appreciation of Brown as he wished it
had been at the time.
In
fact, it took more than two decades after Brown’s death for Douglass to
acknowledge the extent to which the Old Man had challenged his life and
thinking. Of course, he had made laudatory speeches about the hero of Harper’s
Ferry in the 1860s and ‘70s, praising Brown’s sacrifice and providing insights
into the raid.13 But it was not until 1881, with his famous address at Storer College, West Virginia, and
the publication of his third autobiography, that Douglass began to acknowledge
the extent to which he had been challenged, vexed, and changed by John Brown’s
“rigid virtue.”14 It is quite possible, then, that in the 1850s, Douglass actually had mixed
feelings about Brown, whom he both loved but also found imposing and irritating
in his single-minded determination to take action against slavery—action that Douglass
himself was unwilling to take. In a
sense, My Bondage and My Freedom might provide an unspoken
commentary on how Douglass sometimes felt about John Brown at the time it was written in the early 1850s, while
his Life and Times, written decades after Brown’s death, provides a more
sympathetic and retrospective commentary.--LD
2 Compare John Brown to John
Brown Jr., May 15, 1847, New York Public Library Collection. In this letter, Brown informs his son that he
is “hourly” anticipating a visit from Douglass; in a letter the following
month, Brown encourages his son to marry and take over his responsibilities in
Akron, Ohio, so he can bring Mary and the younger children to Springfield. John Brown to John Brown Jr., June 25, 1847,
in John Brown Jr. Papers, Ohio Historical Society Collection; in a letter to
his friend and kinsmen, Seth Thompson later that summer, he mentions that had
moved Mary and the children to Springfield.
See John Brown to Seth Thompson, Aug. 12, 1847 in John Brown Papers,
Woodruff Library Collection, Atlanta University.
5 Anne Brown, daughter of the
abolitionist, told Katherine Mayo that “much of what Douglass wrote about [John
Brown] was not true, such as the details of their home in Springfield as he
described.” See Mayo’s interview with
Anne Brown Adams, Oct. 2-3, 1908, in Frederick Douglass folder, Box 7, John
Brown-Oswald G. Villard Papers, Columbia University Collection.
13 For instance, see his
speech at Wakefield, England, on Jan. 15, 1860, in The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass, Vol. 5. Edited by Philip S. Foner (New York:
International Publishers, 1955, 1975), p. 465; Douglass’ letter to James
Redpath, Jun. 20, 1860, in Foner, Vol. 5,
pp. 467-68; “‘Life and Times of John Brown’: Lecture by Fred. Douglass,” Buffalo Commercial Advertiser, Jan. 23,
1874, p. 3; “Lecture by Frederick Douglass in Corinthian Hall Last Evening,” Democrat and Chronicle [Rochester,
N.Y.], -Jan. 27, 1874, p. 4.
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