The North Star

Significance:The North Star was the vehicle for the first of Frederick Douglass’s newspaper campaigns against slavery and for abolition.

When the first issue of The North Star appeared on December 3, 1847, critics and readers discovered a newspaper that blended sardonic humor with moral urgency, written in a polished style. Some readers, however, were skeptical of editor Frederick Douglass’s sophistication. Fathered by a white man and born to the slave Harriet Bailey in Talbot County, Maryland, Frederick Bailey had worked in bondage as a slave for Thomas Auld, witnessing the horrors of slavery, the brutal beatings, and even murder. In his teens, he had taught himself to read and write from a discarded speller and copybook, and learned public speaking by imitating orations appearing in The Columbian Orator, an abolitionist publication. The Columbian Orator led to his awareness of the abolitionist movement and influenced his writing style when he later published The North Star. Clashing with his master in 1838, Frederick escaped from Baltimore to New York with Anna Murray, a free African American domestic servant. Once married, they settled in New Bedford, Massachusetts, which offered sanctuary. To prevent recapture, Frederick changed his surname to Douglass, in honor of a character in Sir Walter Scott’s poem Lady of the Lake.

Douglass and Garrison

Douglass became active in local abolitionist gatherings, discovering his gift as a compelling speaker who provided firsthand examples of barbaric slavery. He became a favorite on the lecture circuit during the early 1840s; his autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845), sold more than thirty thousand copies over the next five years. Douglass came under the tutelage of the leading abolitionist of the times, a white man named William Lloyd Garrison. From Garrison’s abolitionist newspaper, The Liberator, Douglass no doubt learned much about newspaper operations.

As Douglass’s fame increased, so did his risk of capture as an escaped slave. In 1845, he sailed for England, then on to Scotland and Ireland, where he passionately lectured on the inhumane treatment of slaves. His newfound friends, moved by his personal plight, arranged to purchase Douglass’s freedom for $711.66. Before returning to the United States in 1847, he also received $2,175 to bankroll his own antislavery newspaper.

When Garrison objected to Douglass’s projected newspaper, the two close friends became estranged, then bitter enemies. Douglass believed that the white abolitionists thought him a child to be led. African Americans, he insisted, must lead to gain respect. He held that his newspaper could create that leadership and help increase self-respect among African Americans. Douglass knew of the hazards in starting an African American newspaper, because about one hundred such papers already existed in the United States, the first having been started in 1827. He located in Rochester, New York, because of the area’s strong antislavery sentiments and because publishing there reduced the competition with The Liberator in Boston and the National Anti-Slavery Standard in New York City.

On December 3, 1847, the first issue of The North Star appeared—a four-page weekly with a subscription cost of two dollars per year, circulation of two to three thousand, and publishing costs of eighty dollars per week at the first print shop owned by an African American. Douglass chose journalist Martin Delaney as coeditor, but the two soon clashed over the issue of “colonization,” by which freed slaves would seek a separate homeland in Africa rather than integrate within the United States white society. When a disgusted Delaney left in 1848 to found a colony in the Niger Valley, in Africa, Douglass became sole editor, vigorously espousing the principles of integration, as he did throughout his life.

Advocacy for All

In the first issue of The North Star, Douglass urged African Americans to become politically active and pledged that his newspaper would aggressively attack slavery, work to free Southern slaves, and promote African American morality and progress. The lead article recounted the convention of “colored people” of 1847, with its primary objectives of abolishing slavery and elevating free African Americans. In subsequent years, The North Star dealt with a plethora of burning issues: injustice, inequality, racism, the avoidance of drink and dissipation, the benefits of integrated school systems, the elimination of segregated hotels and railroads, the folly of war and capital punishment, the worth of laborers, the imperative need for racial unity among African Americans, and the unfair voting practices leveled against African Americans in northern states. The North Star came to the defense not only of persecuted African Americans but also of American Indians, the Irish, and other immigrant groups.

From its beginnings, The North Star lived up to its masthead: “Right Is Of No Sex—Truth Is Of No Color— God Is The Father Of Us All, and All We Are Brethren.” Douglass vigorously supported the women’s rights movement, linking enslaved women to the abolition movement itself. At the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848, Douglass was the only one of the thirty-two men attending to speak and vote in favor of Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s Declaration of Sentiments, which demanded equality for women. He effectively used The North Star to promote Stanton’s feminist cause.

Subsequent Papers

Financially, The North Star foundered after six months. Douglass mortgaged his house and used his lecture fees to keep the paper going. From time to time, he received financial gifts from Gerrit Smith, a philanthropist, reformer, and wealthy New York landowner. In 1851, the two men agreed to merge the financially troubled North Star with Smith’s struggling Liberty Party Paper. Douglass maintained editorial control over the paper while including political news of the Liberty Party; he broadened his readership to four thousand; and he accepted a comfortable subsidy from Smith. The new effort, Frederick Douglass’ Paper, appeared in June, 1851, and lasted until 1859. The paper continued Douglass’s efforts in regard to abolition, equality, and women’s rights. Douglass also dabbled in the Liberty Party campaigns, endorsing Smith and helping him win a seat in Congress. In 1852, Douglass himself became the first African American nominated for vice president on the Equal Rights Party ticket of 1852.

Recurring financial problems forced Douglass to reduce the size and frequency of his paper in 1859. His third effort, Douglass’ Monthly, circulating in England as well as in the United States, lasted until the middle of the Civil War, 1863. Like the other two papers, Douglass’ Monthly remained a magnet for African American writers and reformers and framed Douglass’s own inimitable style and wit as well. He actively recruited African American soldiers for the war. He viewed Abraham Lincoln as the best hope for his race, pressing for the Emancipation Proclamation that Lincoln delivered in 1863. He proposed land reform, federally financed education, and a national association for African Americans. He believed that interracial marriages would someday eliminate racial hatred.

After the Civil War, Douglass moved to Washington, DC. There he published the New National Era, focusing on the interests of the newly freed African Americans. During that paper’s existence (1870–1873), Douglass editorialized on Reconstruction, the rise of mob lynchings in the South, race relations, politics, labor, and education. From 1873 until his death in 1895, Douglass continued to be heard on the lecture circuit and in leading newspapers. A self-made man, rising against great odds from slavery to publisher, race leader, prominent abolitionist, social reformer, and political activist, Douglass is one of the most important African Americans of the nineteenth century and became a powerful symbol in the Civil Rights movement throughout the twentieth century.

Bibliography

Douglass, Frederick. The Frederick Douglass Papers. Three series. New Haven: Yale UP, 1979–2012. Print.

Huggins, Nathan I., and Oscar Handlin. Slave and Citizen: The Life of Frederick Douglass. New York: Longman, 2001. Print.

Martin, Waldo E. The Mind of Frederick Douglass. Chapel Hill: U North Carolina P, 1984. Print.

Rogers, William B. “We Are All Together Now”: Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, and the Prophetic Tradition. New York: Garland, 1995. Print.

Voss, Frederick S. Majestic in His Wrath: A Pictorial Life of Frederick Douglass. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Inst., 1995. Print.