Frederick Douglass -- Second Marriage

 

On August 4, 1882, Anna Murray Douglass died, following a month’s struggle to survive a severe stroke, her left side useless, but her mind and her speech clear.  She was buried in Rochester, by the graves of two children.

 

Douglass’s grief was deep.  For quite some time he was absent from Washington, at the homes of supporting friends in New York and in Maine.  When he returned to his duties, he began to speak in lecture halls again and at convention lecterns, with moderation, but also with pointed criticism.

 

Negroes lived “among a people whose laws, traditions, and prejudices have been against us for centuries, and from these they are not yet free.  … Though the colored man is no longer subject to be caught and sold, he is still surrounded by an adverse sentiment which fetters all his movements.  … He is rejected by trade unions … and refused work where he lives, and burial where he dies.”  Douglass still clung to the notion that the Republican Party, chastened, could be counted upon.  He opposed the desire of many of his race to support a third political party, for doing so, Douglass insisted, would only help the hated Southern Democrats.  On October 15, 1883, the Supreme Court, including eight of nine Republican judges, in a decision that, in Douglass’s words, “came upon the country like a clap of thunder,” removed “the rights of colored citizens as those rights are defined by the fourteenth amendment of the Constitution.”  According to the Court, only the state legislatures, not the United States Congress, had jurisdiction over a person’s rights.  “Seven millions of the people of this country,” Douglass would say in a speech soon afterward, were “naked and defenceless” against “malignant, vulgar, and pitiless prejudice.”  He predicted that “far down the ages” the Court’s decision would be reversed (McFeely 315, 317, 318).  [Federal legislation reversed the discriminatory policies of the Southern states eighty-one years later with the adoption of the Civil Rights Act of 1964]

 

Less than a year and a half after Anna’s death, on a cold January evening [the 24^th] in 1884, Douglass and his secretary, driving in Douglass’s carriage behind magnificent while horses, were joined by the Senator from Mississippi, Blanche K. Bruce, and Mrs. Bruce.  Douglass directed his coachman to the home of a prominent Negro clergyman.  A personal friend of Douglass’s, the minister was nevertheless surprised by his late callers.  He sent word downstairs for them to wait.  A few moments later, upon request of those concerned, the Reverend Mr. Francis J. Grimke joined Frederick Douglass and Helen Pitts in marriage, the Bruces witnessing.

 

… A hurricane of outraged letters hit Cedar Hill.  Negroes and whites seemed equally offended.  The venerable Douglass, white-haired and sixty-two, should not have married again at all, some thought.  Others shouted that Negro womanhood had been disparaged by the implications of his choice.  Could he not find … a colored woman good enough for him?  In the South, of course, criticism found its most picturesque expression.  Douglass was a “lecherous old African Solomon” in the eyes of the Franklin, Virginia, Gazette.

 

Douglass’s own children joined in the howl.  How could he do this to them—and without consultation?  … Douglass watched the whole demonstration with a twinkle in his eye.

 

He showed his amusement by keeping a scrapbook of the opprobrium heaped upon him and his white wife.  When confronting interviewers, he slyly observed that in his first marriage he had paid his respects to his black mother, in his second to his white father.  “Love came to me,” Helen crooned when questioned, “and I was not afraid to marry the man I loved because of his color.”  For the resentment of his children Douglass was prepared, and his retort was neither witty nor pleasant.  There wasn’t one of them who wasn’t at least partially dependent on him for support.  They swallowed hard and crept away.

 

Douglass and Helen began playing croquet on the lawns of Cedar Hill.  The place was quieter now.  His health was wonderful.  Douglass actually began to feel young again.  … None of his close friends, he discovered, had actually turned their back on him and Helen (Bontemps 175-177).

 

A Democrat President, Grover Cleveland, took occupancy of the White House in 1885.  Douglass presumed that his office, recorder of deeds, would be immediately given to a Democrat supporter; however, it was not until January of 1886 that Cleveland requested that Douglass resign.  Additionally, Cleveland, during the tenure of his office, unlike his Republican predecessors, extended to Douglass, and the ladies of his family, invitations to his large, official receptions.  Douglass and his new wife attended, without embarrassment.

 

Free from governmental responsibility, Douglass took his wife to Europe and leisurely toured the continent as far east as Greece; and, with aid, the seventy-year-old man climbed atop the great pyramid of Cheops in Egypt.  While in England, he and Helen had enjoyed the hospitality of the widowed Julia Griffiths-Crofts, whom Douglass had not seen for thirty-two years.  They did not, they could not visit Ottilia Assing.

 

On August 21, 1884, [almost seven months after Frederick and Helen’s marriage] Ottilia Assing dressed carefully in a monogrammed blouse and skirt, put on her hat, dropped her key, a brooch with a picture inside, and a bit of money into her red leather wallet, and left her Paris hotel.  Walking in the Bois de Boulogne, she stopped to pick a leaf from an oak tree and carefully put it into her purse; shortly, from that same purse, she took out a container of poison and swallowed its contents (McFeely 322).

 

 

Works cited:

 

Bontemps, Arna, Free at Last, the Life of Frederick Douglass, New York, Dodd, Mead & Company, 1971.  Print

 

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