The Uneasy Alliance Between Frederick Douglass and White Abolitionists

THE COLOR OF ABOLITION
How a Printer, a Prophet, and a Contessa Moved a Nation
By Linda Hirshman

On Aug. 6, 1845, Frederick Douglass set sail on a talking tour of England and Eire to advertise the reason for antislavery. He had simply printed “The Narrative of the Lifetime of Frederick Douglass,” an instantaneous finest vendor that, alongside together with his highly effective oratory, had made him a celeb within the rising abolition motion. No sooner had he arrived in Britain, nonetheless, than Douglass started to comprehend that white abolitionists in Boston had been working to undermine him: Earlier than he’d even left American shores, they’d privately written his British hosts and impugned his motives and character.

The writer of those “sneaky,” condescending missives, Douglass quickly found, was Maria Weston Chapman, a rich, well-connected and devoted activist whose scornful nickname, “the Contessa,” stemmed from her imperious behind-the-scenes work with the main abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison.

In Linda Hirshman’s contemporary, provocative and engrossing account of the abolition motion, Chapman was “the prime mover” in driving Douglass away from the avowedly nonpolitical Garrisonians and towards the overtly political wing of abolitionism led by Gerrit Smith, a rich white businessman in upstate New York. With brisk, elegant prose Hirshman lays naked “the informal racism of the privileged class” inside Garrison’s abolitionist circle.

Setting out on her analysis, Hirshman initially thought of Chapman a feminist hero whose vital position within the motion had lengthy been neglected. In spite of everything, Chapman raised monumental funds for abolition societies, edited Garrison’s newspaper, The Liberator, for years in his lengthy absences, and carried on a large petition marketing campaign to finish slavery. However when she learn Chapman’s voluminous correspondence, Hirshman encountered the ugly private rivalries and personal politics on the middle of a shaky alliance between the uncompromising Garrison and the bold and self-possessed Douglass.