Frederick Douglass -- Marking Time

 

As before, in 1880 Frederick Douglass urged black voters to elect the Republican Presidential candidate, James A. Garfield, another Civil War general from Ohio.  Douglass’s last duty as Marshall was to lead the newly elected President’s inaugural procession through the rotunda of the Capitol.  Afterward, as before, Douglass’s services were largely ignored.

 

He had let the president-elect know that he was willing to serve in a more important capacity.  He had written Garfield that “colored people of this country want office not as the price of their votes … but for their recognition as a part of the American people” (McFeely 305).  Samuel Clemons, the Mark Twain of soon-to-be-published The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, wrote Garfield that Douglass was a friend of his and deserved such recognition.  However, Garfield appointed a personal friend to Douglass’s former position and offered Douglass a position not more but less important, recorder of deeds for the District of Columbia.  Again, Douglass accepted, and minimized the slight, saying that the job more suited his tastes.

 

The job did permit him to fill clerical jobs with black civil servants, including two of his sons, Frederick, Jr. and Lewis, and his daughter Rosetta. After Garfield’s death in the fall of 1881, Douglass’s authority to fill positions was severely curtailed by the new President, Chester A. Arthur.  Douglass could not help, for instance, Amanda Auld Sear’s widower, John Sears, who had for “the first time since the War of the Rebellion” been forced to seek help getting “a place where I can earn a living for myself and family.”  Douglass knew that if he approached the President to ask a favor for a friend, he would be with absolute certainty “snubbed at the White House” (McFeely 306).

 

He was not snubbed, however, by the grandchildren of Colonel Edward Lloyd when he traveled again to Talbot County to revive his boyhood memories of Wye House.  They greeted him graciously, perhaps with genuine affection, and he felt none of the bitterness that had caused him many times in the past to condemn the plantation slave master.  With nostalgia he observed what still remained and what had changed.

 

Aaron Anthony’s square, sturdy brick house was still there, on Long Green; the closet Frederic had slept in had been incorporated into the kitchen, and its dirt floor “had disappeared under plank.”  Gone too was the memory of Hester being whipped in that kitchen; similarly, all he said now about the brutal overseer Austin Gore was that his house still stood.  So did “old Barney’s stable, and the wonderful carriage house ….”  And there was the great barn where a little child had once watched swallows ceaselessly sweeping the air.

 

The poplars that the red-winged blackbirds had favored were gone, but not the oaks and elms whose shade had cloaked Daniel Lloyd and Frederick Bailey, eating the food the young lord had brought from his kitchen to compensate for the meagerness of Aunt Katy’s fare.  And in the graveyard, crowded now with two hundred years of Lloyds, lay “Mr. Page, a teacher in the family, whom I had often seen and wondered what he could be thinking about as he silently paced up and down the garden walks” (McFeely 308).

 

In 1882 he hired a new clerk, Helen Pitts, the niece of Hiram Pitts, whose house was adjacent to Douglass’s Cedar Hill house.  Helen had been born in 1838 in a farming community about forty miles south of Rochester, New York.  Her father and mother had been abolitionists, the father having met Douglass once during his lecture tours in the 1840’s.  Helen was well educated and active in the women’s rights movement in Washington, a collaborator in the publication of a radical feminist newspaper.  Positions for women had been made available in the expanded government agencies after the Civil War; and Helen, a former teacher, unlikely to find a post equal to her ability and being single, having to support herself, had taken work in the pension office.  Later, when a position in the recorder’s office became available, she applied for it and was accepted.  Douglass and Helen met as neighbors, and continued to meet with greater frequently as she worked for him in the capitol, so well that he could trust her to run things while he was frequently absent.  Also, she and other women would meet a Cedar Hill, in the cause of women’s suffrage, which Douglass had always supported.  Helen Pitts would soon become his second wife.

 

 

Work cited:

 

McFeely, William S.  Frederick Douglass.  New York, W. W. Norton & Company, 1991.  Print.