The inaugural assembly of two of the 19th century’s most well-known abolitionists, Frederick Douglass and John Brown, befell at Brown’s house in Springfield, Massachusetts, in 1847.
Douglass was already extensively identified for his enslaved upbringing and escape from captivity within the late 1830s, his account captured in 1845’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, and ceaselessly rehashed in his public speeches.
Yet it was Brown, a white man with a document of failed enterprise pursuits and unyielding non secular conviction, who seemingly got here off because the yet another decided to finish the merciless establishment of slavery that day.
Brown impressed Douglass with an early plan to free the enslaved
As he recalled in 1881’s Life and instances of Frederick Douglass, Brown instantly impressed his visitor along with his “lean, strong and sinewy build” and the best way “his children observed him with reverence.”
But it was Brown’s impassioned phrases that made the largest mark, as he spoke of a plan to free the enslaved and squirrel them to freedom by the Alleghany Mountains.
His measured responses to Douglass’ questions confirmed he had given the matter cautious thought. Armed males could be stationed at strategic checkpoints, he defined, from the place they’d slip right down to cities to rally the enslaved and purchase provisions. And even when authorities managed to nook them, what higher strategy to die than for such a noble trigger?
Douglass was then a proponent of William Lloyd Garrison‘s “non-resistance” type of abolitionism, however he started to reassess his beliefs after the evening at Brown’s house. “While I continued to write and speak against slavery, I became all the same less hopeful of its peaceful abolition,” he wrote. “My utterances became more and more tinged by the color of this man’s strong impressions.”
John Brown
Photo: VCG Wilson/Corbis through Getty Images
Douglass ceaselessly hosted Brown at his New York house
By the mid-1850s, Brown had turn into a nationwide determine in his personal proper for his involvement within the violent “Bleeding Kansas” border conflicts, his actions celebrated by those that felt that slavery would solely finish by bloodshed. “I met him often during this struggle,” Douglass wrote, “and all I saw of him gave me a more favorable impression of the man, and inspired me with a higher respect for his character.”
Brown ceaselessly stayed with Douglass throughout his journeys again east to accumulate cash and arms throughout these years, one such go to captured by their joint letter to Brown’s spouse in January 1858.
But regardless of his personal heightened militancy, Douglass believed within the significance of political motion to carry an finish to slavery, inserting him at odds with the growing radicalism of Brown. The two males joined different abolitionist leaders on the Detroit home of William Wells in March 1859 however have been unable to resolve the stalemate over their differing views.
Frederick Douglass
Photo: VCG Wilson/Corbis through Getty Images
Douglass refused to hitch Brown’s Harpers Ferry raid
Brown and Douglass met for the ultimate time at a quarry close to Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, in August 1859. This time, Brown offered the total scope of his plan to seize the federal armory on the Harpers Ferry, Virginia, and arm the enslaved for a significant rebel.
In Douglass’ recollection, Brown disregarded the warning that he was “going into a perfect steel trap” from which “he would never get out alive” and pressed ahead with the try and recruit his good friend: “When I strike the bees will begin to swarm, and I shall want you to help hive them.”
Whether it was resulting from “my discretion or my cowardice,” Douglass wrote, he declined to hitch what turned the ill-fated Harpers Ferry raid on October 16, 1859 – practically each member of the inciting social gathering was both captured or killed, and Brown was hanged on December 2.
There is a few dispute about whether or not Douglass’ model of occasions is correct. One of Brown’s captured males, John E. Cook, claimed that the orator had backed out of a promise to carry extra males to the raid. And Brown, who drew reward for refusing to implicate associates whereas awaiting his demise sentence, reportedly complained to a good friend concerning the “great opportunity lost” at Harpers Ferry, including, “that we owe to the famous Mr. Frederick Douglass.”
The accusations prompted Douglass to defend himself in an October 31 letter to the Rochester Democrat and American, through which he insisted that he “never made a promise” to hitch the raid and that the “taking of Harpers Ferry was a measure never encouraged by my word or by my vote.” Regardless, he knew he was in a world of hassle for his public ties to a person being tried for treason, and by November he had set sail for England.
READ MORE: John Brown’s Raid on Harpers Ferry
Douglass invoked Brown as a martyr to the trigger
Returning the next summer season to a rustic on the cusp of civil war, Douglass realized the worth of invoking Brown as a martyr for anti-slavery efforts and as a recruiting software for Union troopers.
His mission achieved with the Union victory, Douglass later celebrated his fallen good friend by a speech delivered quite a few instances, together with at Harpers Ferry’s Storer College in 1881, through which he depicted the armory raid as a “thunder clap” that sparked a morally decaying nation into motion.
“When John Brown stretched forth his arm, the sky was cleared,” he declared within the speech’s highly effective conclusion. “The time for compromises was gone, and to the armed hosts of freedom, standing above the chasm of a broken Union, was committed the decision of the sword. … and thus made her own, and not John Brown’s, the lost cause.”
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