Five myths about Frederick Douglass - By Henry Louis Gates Jr. and John Stauffer
At a Black History Month event recently, President Trump seemed to suggest that Frederick Douglass is still alive: He’s “done an amazing job and is getting recognized more and more,” Trump said. If he was referring to our awareness of Douglass’s important historical legacy, then the president’s remarks were on the money: More than 120 years after Douglass’s death, the great abolitionist’s impact on our country is still unfolding. The former slave who became one of the nation’s most widely read authors and most popular orators speaks to us still through his prolific writings, and his legacy is ensured by his solid place in the literary canon and the treasure trove of images that he seemed determined to leave behind. But as Douglass’s fame has grown, so too have myths about his history and personality.
MYTH NO. 1
Frederick Douglass was an American patriot.
Douglass wanted blacks to fight for the Union in the Civil War, and after President Abraham Lincoln allowed them to serve, Douglass became the president’s loyal supporter and friend. Following the war, Douglass became the first African American to receive a federal appointment that required Senate approval and was an official emissary to Haiti. It’s no wonder that the Colored Republican Association of New York called Douglass “a patriot and a hero ” upon his death in 1895 or that he is often listed in collections of American patriots: A monograph from the 1990s, for instance, was called “Frederick Douglass: Patriot and Activist .”
Yet Douglass never defined himself as an American patriot — indeed, he was highly critical of the United States. In 1845, as a fugitive slave, he fled to the British Isles for two years, almost settling permanently in England. For the first time in his life, he said , he experienced “an absence, a perfect absence, of everything like that disgusting hate with which we are pursued” in America. Only a sense of duty to his wife and his fellow African Americans, and a desire to fight the scourge of racism and slavery, persuaded him to come back. “I have no love for America, as such,” he announced upon his return. “I have no patriotism. I have no country.”
Sixteen years later, on the eve of the Civil War, he planned a visit to Haiti to entertain permanent emigration to the black republic. “The North has never been able to stand against the power and purposes of the South,” he concluded. If Haiti met his expectations as a “light of glorious promise,” then he would remain in that country and call it home.
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