Frederick Douglass (1818–1895) was a towering figure in the history of the United States, occupying the vanguard of the nation’s struggle for African-American civil rights during the nineteenth century. Near the end of a career spanning six decades, Douglass visited Charleston—once the capital of slavery in North America—as part of a short lecture tour. His brief stay in the Palmetto City during the spring of 1888 inspired members of the local Black community, while their frank conversations challenged Douglass’ view of the state of American racial politics.
Frederick Douglass was born in Maryland in 1818 to an enslaved mother and an unidentified white man. He escaped northward to New York in 1838 to gain freedom and to marry a free woman of color named Anna Murray. Both adopted the surname “Douglass” shortly thereafter, and Frederick was soon ordained as a minister in the African Methodist Episcopal, or A.M.E. Church. Preaching helped young Douglass hone his oratorical skills, as did speeches narrating his escape from slavery, delivered to abolitionist meetings across the Northeast. He published a best-selling Narrative of his life in 1845, by which time he was recognized as one of the strongest American voices for civil rights. He sailed to Britain that autumn and lectured at numerous cities across England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland, where he repeatedly voiced support for Irish independence from England.
Douglass returned to the U.S. in the spring of 1847 and in 1855 published a second autobiography, titled My Bondage and My Freedom. He lectured and wrote extensively during the American Civil War and defended the work of post-war Reconstruction. At nearly sixty years of age in 1877, he purchased a comfortable home in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., called Cedar Hill, then published a third memoir in 1881 (The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, revised and expanded in 1892). Anna, his wife of forty-odd years, died in 1882, and, two years later, Frederick married a younger white woman named Helen Pitts. The couple embarked on European speaking tour in September 1886, visiting the both the United Kingdom and the Continent. Douglass returned to New York in August 1887 and traveled overland to his residence in Washington D.C. There he enjoyed a relaxing autumn at home after a taxing year abroad.
His winter respite at Cedar Hill was interrupted by the arrival of a letter from down South. In January 1888, Reverend William H. Heard (1850–1937), pastor of Charleston’s Mount Zion A.M.E. Church, sent the white-haired orator an invitation to visit South Carolina. The thirty-seven-year-old clergyman had been born into slavery in rural Georgia, traveled northward after the Civil War, became an ordained minister, and forged a career in the Palmetto State combining ministry and education. He came to Charleston with his wife and children in 1885 to serve as pastor of Mount Zion Church, where he invited Frederick Douglass to present a lecture or two during the spring of 1888. Reverend Heard was an admirer of the famous orator, and might have met him or heard him speak some years earlier. Whatever their connection, Douglass accepted Heard’s invitation and proposed to arrive in Charleston during the first week of March.[1]
In late January, the good reverend or one of his neighbors shared this news with Charleston’s leading newspaper, the News and Courier, which published a short teaser for the proposed lectures by the “Hon. Fred Douglass.” The famous orator was to be entertained during his stay, said the paper, by members of the Douglass Literary Association, a local debating club organized by African-American men in June 1883. While Reverend Heard and his family prepared a room in their home for the celebrated speaker, a committee of the Literary Association began making “the necessary arrangements for the reception and entertainment of the distinguished visitor.”[2] If there were any local concerns about the public appearance of a famous interracial couple, Frederick pre-empted that issue by informing his Charleston hosts that Helen Douglass, his white wife, would not join him for this Southern excursion, where state laws would prohibit them from traveling in the same car.[3]
News of Douglass’ impending visit spread quickly within Charleston and beyond. By mid-February 1888, people in Columbia, South Carolina, and Augusta, Georgia, expressed their desire to host the traveling speaker in their communities as well.[4] The affair could have mushroomed into an extensive Southern tour, but Douglass, who celebrated his seventieth birthday that month, evidently preferred to limit the scope of his first and only excursion into the Deep South. Henry Morris, president of the local Republican Protective Union, observed that “there was a considerable movement among the colored people of Charleston to make the visit of the greatest colored man in America to Charleston a memorable event.” Morris and his colleagues proposed to hold at least one grand event in “one of the largest halls [in the city,] or possibly the Academy of Music [now the site of the Riviera Theater], and invite everybody, both white and colored, to attend the meeting.” For reasons unknown, that proposal did not come to fruition. Douglass was drawn to the cradle of the Civil War by the hospitality of Reverend Heard at Mount Zion Church, and the aging orator honored that commitment.[5]
Before the end of February, community leaders made plans for the reception of Douglass at the Northwestern Railroad Depot, at the east end of Chapel Street. From the depot to the residence of Rev. Heard, they planned a grand military escort and parade headed by the Douglass Light Infantry, a Black militia unit formed in May 1878 and named after the famous orator.[6] South Carolina’s antebellum militia system, composed of white male citizens aged 18 to 45, had been dismantled in the aftermath of the Civil War, but was resuscitated in 1869, during the era of Federal Reconstruction, as the National Guard of South Carolina (N.G.S.C.). The state National Guard was intended to be a racially-integrated military body, but the mass refusal of white South Carolinians to participate produced an organization dominated for a generation by Black men carrying rifles issued by the state.
The commander of the 1st Brigade of the local National Guard had already issued orders for the military parade when Rev. Heard received a letter from Douglass expressing his desire to dispense with the formality. “Mr. Douglass hints in his letter,” reported the local press, “that he is now on the shady side of 70, and that he is afraid that after his long journey he will be unable to stand the excitement of a military demonstration.” Douglass might also have sought to make a quiet entrance to the Palmetto City on a Sunday morning when most of the population would be preparing to attend divine services.[7] The militia orders were countermanded, and new arrangements made for a small party of Black dignitaries, including Ex-Congressman Robert Smalls, to meet Douglass at the train with a carriage drawn by four grey horses and deliver him to the Heard family residence.[8]
The finalized program for the speaker’s visit to Charleston included two evening lectures at Mount Zion Church followed by a private banquet hosted by “some of the influential and prominent colored men of the city.” A brief newspaper report in late February stated that “about two hundred seats have been reserved” within the church in Glebe Street, “for which seats a charge of 50 cents will be made.” The newspaper printed no advertisements for the ticketed events, however, probably because the organizers knew that the demand would far surpass the number of available seats. To facilitate a more general opportunity to see the celebrated figure, Mount Zion Church published a brief advertisement the day before his arrival, inviting all citizens to welcome Douglass after their 8 p.m. service on Sunday evening, opining that “Charleston never had such a literary feast.”[9]
On the morning of Sunday, March 4th, a segregated train from Washington, D.C., delivered Frederick Douglass at the Charleston depot in Chapel Street. There he was greeted by a suite of prominent Black citizens who conducted him by coach and four to the Heard residence on the west side of Coming Street, just north of Calhoun Street.[10] The hospitable reverend introduced the distinguished guest to the lady of the house, Josephine Henderson Heard (1861–1924) a talented twenty-seven-year-old native of North Carolina. Josie, as he called her, had been born into slavery during the Civil War, but post-emancipation education had transformed her into a “scholarly and poetic” woman. The proud reverend noted that her literary advice and criticism “have done much in making me the preacher they say I am.”[11]
Following an afternoon rest and the usual sabbath services at the reverend’s church, Douglass followed his hosts a short distance down Coming Street to their house of worship in Glebe Street. The scene before the church was crowded with bodies; the News and Courier noted that “fifteen hundred colored people” gathered at Mount Zion to welcome the world-famous defender of their civil rights. Members of the Douglass Light Infantry, dressed in “handsome uniforms,” snapped to attention at his arrival, creating an orderly avenue through the crowd.[12] Company Captain Samuel Weston McKinlay saluted and welcomed Douglass before conducting him into the stately church.
The handsome masonry edifice had opened as a Presbyterian church in 1848, shortly after the creation of Glebe Street, but was purchased and rededicated by the present A.M.E. congregation in 1882. Captain McKinlay escorted Douglass up the central aisle to the pulpit, where the young officer commenced the evening’s proceedings with “an extremely appropriate and gracefully-delivered address.” His introductory speech “briefly reviewed the history of Fred Douglass,” reported the News and Courier, “and bade him welcome in the name not only of the Douglass Light Infantry, but of the colored citizens of Charleston and of this State.” After Captain McKinlay closed his remarks, Josephine Heard took his place at the podium and read aloud “an original poem addressed to Mr. Douglass, and also extending to him a very hearty greeting and welcome.” Her verse, which she published in 1890, celebrated the famous orator in eight brief quatrains arranged in rhymed couplets. “Mr. Douglass responded briefly and to the point,” said the press, “although the pastor of the church with much difficulty subdued the demonstrations of applause. His few remarks were largely in response to the sentiments of the address and of the poem, for both of which he thanked the authors earnestly and cordially.”[13]
On Monday, March 5th, Douglass visited the home of Captain Henry Gradick, a local mariner, to share a midday meal. Later in the afternoon, he climbed into a carriage with Dr. William Demosthenes Crum, a prominent local physician, for a tour of the Palmetto City.[14] Douglass returned to Mount Zion Church at 7:30 p.m. on Monday evening to deliver the first of his publicized lectures. The News and Courier noted the attendance of a “very large audience, composed of the most cultivated class of Charleston colored society and a small sprinkling of white people.” More members of the white population might have attended, but a simultaneous event at nearby Hibernian Hall attracted a larger audience, including the governor of South Carolina, to hear Sir Thomas Esmonde , an Anglo-Irish baronet, lecture in support of Irish Home Rule.[15]
Back at Mount Zion Church, Dr. William Crum took the podium first to welcome the audience and introduce the speaker, whom he described as “the chief lieutenant and right arm of the noble band of Abolitionists who had crushed out the institution of slavery—the foremost man to-day of the negro race.” The subject of Douglass’s first presentation was “Self-Made Men,” a speech he had first given in 1859 and which he revised and repeated many times until his death. The orator proposed to discuss his topic in four headings: “first, who are self-made men; second, what is the secret of their success; third, what are the advantages they derive from the manners and institutions of the country in which they live; and fourth, the criticisms to which they are subjected owing to the manner of their coming up in the world.” A local reporter summarized the presentation in the following words:
“In discussing these subdivisions, the lecturer made many digressions, and in these his power as an orator and his remarkable skill as a humorist were most forcibly presented. The old man is not without satire either, and here and there were dashes of bitterness as he alluded to the days of his youth and slavery. Under the second head of his discourse he held that the only secret of success was honest, persistent effort. He scorned the good-luck theory by which some men were supposed to achieve greatness. Knowledge came by study—battles were won by fighting. The man of good luck was the man of hard work. In this connection the lecturer indicated that his religious views were somewhat free and fashioned on the modern school. He said that he did not believe in prayer as a means of accomplishing success. ‘I remember,’ said he, ‘the little chimney corner where for three years I knelt and prayed for freedom, but I failed to see the slightest scintillation of an answer until I prayed with my legs.’ This illustration convulsed the audience, and one woman had hysterics. ‘There is,’ he continued, ‘no royal road to learning, or wealth, or distinction. No growth without exertion, no polish without friction, no progress without motion, no victory without a conflict, no crown without a cross.’”
Douglass’s impassioned speech included the prediction of a “a great future” for Americans of African descent. After naming several Black men and women who had “achieved eminence in literature, science and art,” he expressed a modest requirement for the success of African-Americans in general: “All I ask for the colored man is to let him alone and give him fair play, particularly to give him fair play.” The orator concluded his optimistic lecture with “a very pretty tribute to the reunited country, where, he said, it was only a question of a short time now when there would be throughout all its broad confines equal and exact justice to all.”[16]
Douglass’ second speech, delivered before “a large audience” at Mount Zion Church on the evening of Tuesday, March 6th, concerned his travels in Europe, with reference to racial attitudes and comparisons to the United States. After a brief introduction by the Reverend Bruce Williams, pastor of Emanuel A.M.E Church, Douglass stated “that the relations existing between the races in the United States would be more interesting than any account of his travels abroad.” Nevertheless, he said, “we learn by comparing our advantages at home with those enjoyed abroad. We wink at things here that we loudly condemn abroad.”
For a moment, Douglass pursued a tangent about his sympathy for the oppressed people of Ireland, and his support for the cause promoted by Sir Thomas Esmonde at another crowded venue in Charleston that same evening. “But I didn’t come here to talk about Ireland,” said Douglass. “It is easy enough to hate oppression abroad. I came here to deliver you a literary lecture, and I must proceed. I propose to take you with me in thought over the part of the world embraced in my recent tour abroad. I shall give you my thoughts on things rather than any description of the things themselves.”
Over the ensuing hour, Douglass described his recent year-long journey across England, Ireland, Scotland, France, Switzerland, Italy, Greece, and Egypt. “The principal points of interest of the cities along the route were described in graphic style,” reported the News and Courier. “The line of travel as portrayed in the lecture was often broken by comments on events nearer home, and at times the old man broke forth into bursts of impassioned eloquence, while at other times he caused his audience to roar with laughter at his keen and sarcastic wit. Incidents of his youth and the days of slavery were recalled, and reference was made to matters of local history of special interest to the negro race.”
In closing his address, Douglass returned to the familiar theme of African-American progress in the United States. He observed “that the Israelites had to make bricks without straw, but that the American slaves had a harder task than that before them when they were emancipated. They were not emancipated by the convictions of the nation, but by the fate of the war.” The lack of national consensus about the abolition of slavery, in his opinion, represented a fatal flaw that retarded the advancement of civil rights. Before taking his seat, Douglass “thanked his audience for the kind attention they had shown him in attending his lectures, and said that he had enjoyed his stay in Charleston. There had been nothing to mar the pleasure of his visit. He had been treated politely and considerately by all classes of citizens, and he was glad that he had come.”[17]
After the second lecture, Douglass accompanied his hosts back to the Heard family residence in Coming Street. The septuagenarian was soon summoned outdoors by strains of music emanating from a brass band. Members of the Douglass Light Infantry had hired a local band of Black musicians to serenade the distinguished visitor and offer him a parting gift. “After the serenade” reported the press, Captain Sam McKinlay presented the orator with “a very handsome gold-headed walking cane,” accompanied by “a fitting speech.” Douglass accepted the gift and, “with evident emotion,” responded “in a few chosen and appropriate words.”[18] That cane, engraved with a commemorative message, is now part of the collections of the South Carolina State Museum in Columbia.
Douglass’ final day in Charleston, March 7th, concluded with a private banquet tendered by the Douglass Literary Association. The event took place at the home of local merchant Charles C. Leslie, who operated a substantial fish and oyster business in Market Street, slightly east of East Bay Street. Mr. Leslie and his family resided above the shop, but the banquet took place “in the large storeroom” behind the commercial storefront. A report published by the News and Courier noted the presence of a large banner at the end of the room bearing the inscription “We Welcome Fred Douglass,” while state and national flags trimmed with palmetto fronds covered other walls. Members of the Literary Association, joined by “a number of the most prominent and representative colored men of Charleston,” welcomed the famous orator to a Lowcountry feast prepared by William Barron (1847–1900), the city’s premier caterer of the day.
After their fraternal meal, the company drank a series of eight prepared toasts. The first, offered by an unidentified voice, raised a glass to “Our Guest—‘The Old Man Eloquent.’ As generous time has added another year to his illustrious life, may Nature lend him continued strength, that his powers may remain to illumine [sic] the path which will lead his people to the possibilities of that great future which lies before them.” The diners cheered as the smiling grey-haired orator stood to respond. His remarks, said the press, formed “the event of the evening.” Douglass spoke for nearly an hour while the rapt audience listened “with marked attention.” A brief newspaper article published the following day summarized part of his speech with the following words:
“Speaking about his race he said that he was hopeful for the future. What the race has gained, he said, came to it through the antagonisms and animosities of the white race. We have prospered by their falling out[,] and the most serious question for us is[,] what shall we lose by their renewed friendship? The white people of the United States cannot always be separate and distinct. The Northern and Southern people can’t always remember the war and its incidents. The time is coming, if it is not already here, when the Southern whites and the Northern whites will be in perfect accord. What is then to become of us? The question makes me thoughtful, but not despairing. My hope is in the growing intelligence of the colored race. My belief is that we shall yet exercise all the functions of the American citizen. . . . . European ideas are drawing us out every day, and European ideas are broad and liberal. Injustice must die out and truth and justice must prevail.”
Douglass departed from Charleston on the morning of Thursday, March 8th, on a west-bound train to Columbia. The engine paused for five minutes at the station in Orangeburg, where the orator briefly addressed a crowd that included African-American students of nearby Claflin College.[19] The train then steamed onward to Columbia, where Douglass was scheduled to speak at Calvary Baptist Church.[20] He boarded another train the following morning and traveled southwestward to Augusta, Georgia, where he arrived in the afternoon of Friday, March 9th. After repeating the same lectures he had given in Charleston and spending the sabbath with his Georgia hosts, Douglass returned to his wife and home in Washington, D.C.
In the weeks after his return to Cedar Hill, Frederick Douglass reflected on his recent experiences and conversations with Black citizens in Charleston, Columbia, and Augusta. He now realized that he had underestimated the resistance to the social, political, and economic progress of African-Americans in the Deep South. On 10 April 1888, this new outlook shaped the text of a letter Douglass wrote in support of a movement encouraging large-scale emigration from the South to the northwestern states: “I had hoped that the relations subsisting between the former slaves and the old master class would gradually improve; but while I believed this, and still have some such weak faith, I have of late seen enough, heard enough, and learned enough of the condition of these people in South Carolina and Georgia, to make me welcome any movement which will take them out of the wretched condition in which I now know them to be. While I shall continue to labor for increased justice to those who stay in the South, I give you my hearty ‘God-speed’ in your emigration scheme.”
One week later, on 16 April 1888, Douglass gave a speech in Washington to commemorate the twenty-sixth anniversary of emancipation in the District of Columbia. Telegraph wires spread transcripts and excerpts of the speech across the nation, and Douglass’s own typescript copy of the speech is preserved among his papers at the Library of Congress. His words angered some civil rights activists in the South who felt slighted, while others surely nodded in agreement with the orator’s dour new perspective.[21]
“I have recently been in two of the Southern states—South Carolina and Georgia,” said Douglass, “and my impression from what I saw, heard and learned there is not favorable to my hopes for the race.” After enumerating a number of unfair situations and deplorable conditions testified by the lives of Southern residents, Douglass arrived at a startling conclusion. Black Americans, as a collective population, were only “nominally free,” and, in many respects, were practically enslaved by the uneven playing field of American society. “I here and now denounce this so-called emancipation as a stupendous fraud,” shouted Douglass, “a fraud upon [the African American citizen], a fraud upon the world.”
Despite this bout of disillusionment, Douglass concluded the impassioned speech with a fitting summary of his life’s work: “My mission now, as all along during nearly fifty years, is to plead the cause of the dumb [i.e., voiceless] millions of our countrymen against injustice, oppression, meanness and cruelty, and to hasten the day when the principles of liberty and humanity expressed in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States shall be the law and the practice of every section, and of all the people of this great country, without regard to race, sex, color or religion.”[22]
Frederick Douglass died at Cedar Hill in 1895, but his legacy of civil rights agitation has sustained his relevance into the twenty-first century. The men and women whose lives he touched in Charleston in 1888 are not remembered so well, however. The Reverend William Heard, for example, departed from Charleston with his family later the same year and continued his long career as a minister. The Douglass Light Infantry, like other Black militia groups forming the National Guard of South Carolina, was disbanded in 1896 by Jim Crow legislation.[23] Charleston’s Douglass Literary Association faded out of memory around the turn of the twentieth century. No plaque or marker on the landscape commemorates the great orator’s visit in 1888, but the people of Charleston made a lasting impression in the mind of Frederick Douglass.
[1] For more information about the pastor, see William H. Heard, From Slavery to the Bishopric in the A.M.E. Church: An Autobiography (Philadelphia: A.M.E. Book Concern, 1928).
[2] Charleston News and Courier (hereafter CNC), 29 January 1888, page 8, “A Distinguished Visitor.”
[3] CNC, 28 February 1888, page 8, “Frederick Douglass.”
[4] CNC, 15 February 1888, page 1, “The Capital of the State”; CNC, 26 February 1888, page 2, “Affairs In Augusta.”
[5] CNC, 11 February 1888, page 8, “The Coming of Fred Douglass.”
[6] CNC, 19 February 1888, page 8, “Fred Douglass’ Reception”; the genesis of the Douglass Light Infantry was briefly noticed in CNC, 22 May 1878, page 1, “Odds and Ends.”
[7] CNC, 29 February 1888, page 8, “Military Escort for Fred Douglass”; CNC, 28 February 1888, page 8, “Frederick Douglass”; CNC, 3 March 1888, page 8, “Frederick Douglass. The Old Man Does not Want a Military Display—Orders to the Colored Troops.”
[8] CNC, 4 March 1888, page 8, “Frederick Douglass.”
[9] CNC, 21 February 1888, page 8, “Ready for Fred Douglass”; CNC, 27 February 1888, page 8, “A Banquet for Fred Douglass”; News and Courier, 3 March 1888, page 2 (advertisements), “Mount Zion A.M.E. Church, Glebe Street.”
[10] The published Charleston city directories of 1887 and 1888 give the address of Rev. Hurd (so spelled) as 99 Coming Street. That site is now part of the College of Charleston.
[11] William H. Heard, From Slavery to the Bishopric in the A.M.E. Church: An Autobiography (Philadelphia: A.M.E. Book Concern, 1928), 93–94.
[12] Their uniforms mentioned in CNC, 17 September 1878, page 4, “Odds and Ends.”
[13] CNC, 5 March 1888 (Monday), page 8, “Fred Douglass in Church.” The poem “Welcome to Hon. Frederick Douglass” appears in Josephine D. (Henderson) Heard, Morning Glories (1890; second edition; Atlanta, Ga.: Franklin Printing and Publishing Co., 1901), 15–16.
[14] CNC, 5 March 1888, page 8, “Fred Douglass in Church.”
[15] CNC, 5 March 1888, page 8, “The Welcome To Esmonde.”
[16] A description of the evening lecture appears in CNC, 6 March 1888, page 2, “Frederick Douglass.” The full text of “Self-Made Men” appears in John R. McKivigan, et al., eds., The Speeches of Frederick Douglass: A Critical Edition (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2018), 414–53.
[17] A description of the evening lecture appears in CNC, 7 March 1888, page 2, “Fred Douglass in Europe.”
[18] CNC, 7 March 1888, page 2, “Fred Douglass in Europe.”
[19] CNC, 9 March 1888, page 2, “The City on the Edisto.”
[20] According to “The Capital of the State,” in CNC, 15 February 1888, page 1, “The colored people of Columbia wish to have Fred Douglass here, and they propose to invite him. He will probably be here on the 8th of March.” A subsequent Columbia report, printed in CNC, 3 March 1888, page 1, under “The City on the Congaree,” stated that “at 8 p.m. on March 8 Fred Douglass will deliver an address at the Calvary Baptist Church in this city.”
[21] For examples of a negative response to Douglass’s April speech, see CNC, 18 April 1888, page 4, “Mr. Frederick Douglass”; CNC, 23 April 1888, page 2, “Fred Douglass and the Negro.”
[22] The full text of the speech also appeared in the Washington National Republican, 17 April 1888.
[23] The unit’s demise is noted in CNC, 1 September 1896, page 8, “A Little Coup D’Etat”; and CNC, 2 September 1896, page 3, “A Card from Capt. Weston.”
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