Indeed, until the Civil War all African Americans, slave or free, lived as exiles of a kind in their own land. But even more importantly, he was perhaps America’s most illustrious internal exile. Douglass was once called an “illustrious exile” for his triumphant antislavery lecture tours in Ireland, Scotland and England between 18 (while still a fugitive).

Whatever the current state of President Trump’s historical knowledge, or that of his staff, historians might offer some help for the next time the White House wades into the past for other than nostalgic purposes. Michael says the class let out an audible collective grown, and one student declared: “My God, he doesn’t know who he was!” Students had just been assigned to read Douglass’s classic first autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. “Frederick Douglass,” he said, “is an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job, that is being recognized more and more, I notice.” That afternoon in one of the discussion sections of my lecture course at Yale on “The Civil War and Reconstruction Era,” my teaching fellow, Michael Hattem, reports that he read that quotation to the class. Trump made some brief remarks on Black History Month. Among the many legacies of Douglass’s life and writings alive today, one of the most potent is his role as an illegal migrant and very public abolitionist orator and journalist posing as a free black citizen in slaveholding America.

They were at the heart of a politics of fear in the 1850s that led to disunion. The presence and contested status of fugitive slaves polarized voters in elections they were the primary subject of major legislation such as the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 as well as Supreme Court decisions such as Dred Scott v. From the 1830s through the 1850s, the many thousands of runaway slaves, like Douglass, who escaped into the North, into Canada, or Mexico put enormous pressure on those places’ political systems. Well, in 1838 he escaped a thoroughly legal system of enslavement to the tenuous condition of fugitive resident of a northern state that had outlawed slavery, but could only protect his “freedom” outside of the law.ĭouglass’s life and work serve as a striking symbol of one of the first major refugee crises in our history. Throughout modern history, the millions forced to flee as refugees and beg for asylum have felt Douglass’s agony, and thought his thoughts.įrederick Douglass, author, orator, editor, and most important African American leader of the 19th century, was a dangerous illegal immigrant.

Frederick douglass by david w blight