Frederick Douglass
Frederick Douglass was the delegate who spoke for the ninth resolution at the Woman's Rights Convention in Seneca Falls on 19 and 20 July 1848, the resolution demanding the vote for women and the only one of the eleven that was in doubt, and he then carried the demand in his own newspaper.
He lived from around 1818 to 1895. He was the most prominent Black man in the United States, he had escaped from slavery himself, and he supported woman suffrage from 1848 until the day he died, with one public and bitter break in 1869.
What Douglass did at Seneca Falls on 19 and 20 July 1848
At Seneca Falls, Douglass did the one thing the convention could not do for itself: he argued for the resolution the meeting was not sure it wanted. He was living in Rochester, New York, and came to the Wesleyan Chapel after the convention was called at about a fortnight's notice by an advertisement in the Seneca County Courier. Eleven resolutions were put over the two days. All of them passed unanimously except the ninth.
Resolved, That it is the duty of the women of this country to secure to themselves their sacred right to the elective franchise.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton had insisted on that resolution against advice, including Lucretia Mott's warning that a demand for the ballot would make the meeting look ridiculous. Douglass spoke for it, and it carried by a narrow margin. He also signed the Declaration of Sentiments, which drew one hundred signatures in all: sixty eight women and thirty two men.
The convention's arrangement is what put him in the room on the day it mattered. The first day, 19 July, was advertised for women. The second day, 20 July, was open to the public including men, and it was on the second day that Douglass spoke. The other ten resolutions covered property, education, entry to the professions, the legal standing of married women, and the double standard of morals. The franchise was the only demand the meeting would not carry on its own.
What Douglass printed in the North Star
The North Star, which Douglass published from Rochester, printed a report of the convention and endorsed its resolutions, keeping the woman suffrage question in front of an antislavery readership that had not asked for it. That mattered more than the speech. A convention resolution is a day's work; a newspaper carrying the same demand week after week made it a position. Douglass kept appearing at women's rights conventions after 1848.
The timing is what gave the paper its weight. Seneca Falls was a local meeting called at about a fortnight's notice, and nothing obliged anybody outside the county to hear of it. The first National Woman's Rights Convention did not meet until 1850, at Worcester, Massachusetts. Until then, the demand for the vote existed as a resolution passed in a chapel and as print, and Douglass controlled some of the print.
Why Douglass and Stanton broke over the Fifteenth Amendment
Douglass and Stanton broke because the Reconstruction amendments forced the movement to say which claim came first, and they answered differently, in public and in print. The American Equal Rights Association had been formed in 1866 to press for the vote without distinction of sex or color, and Douglass was part of it. Then the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified in 1868, and it put the word male into the Constitution for the first time, in the clause apportioning representation.
the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age
When the Fifteenth Amendment came forward, barring denial of the vote on account of race but not on account of sex, Douglass supported it and argued that the urgency was not equal: Black people in the South were being murdered, and the ballot for Black men was a defense against that in a way it was not for white women. Asked whether the same was not true of Black women, he answered that it was, and that it was true of them because they were Black rather than because they were women.
Stanton and Anthony opposed the amendment, and the terms they used were explicitly racist. Stanton argued in print and on the platform against enfranchising Black men and immigrant men ahead of educated white women, and she named those groups with slurs. The Revolution, the paper Anthony ran, was financed for a period by George Francis Train, who campaigned for woman suffrage and against Black suffrage in the same speeches. The association broke apart. In May 1869 Stanton and Anthony formed the National Woman Suffrage Association; in November 1869 Lucy Stone and others formed the American Woman Suffrage Association. The Fifteenth Amendment was ratified in 1870.
What Douglass did after 1870, and what he is wrongly credited with
After 1870 Douglass went back to appearing for woman suffrage, while the two rival associations were still refusing to speak to each other. They merged in 1890 as the National American Woman Suffrage Association, and he lived to see it.
Four things are commonly attached to his name in this story and do not belong there.
- Calling the Seneca Falls convention. It was called by Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Martha Coffin Wright, Mary Ann M'Clintock and Jane Hunt; Douglass came down from Rochester as a participant.
- Abandoning woman suffrage in 1869. He argued for the priority of the Fifteenth Amendment, not against the vote for women, and he went on appearing at women's meetings until his last day.
- Recruiting Susan B. Anthony. Both were Rochester figures and knew each other for decades, but Anthony came in through temperance, after Seneca Falls.
- Settling the argument with a famous exchange with Sojourner Truth. A widely repeated anecdote has Truth interrupting a speech of his from the floor with a single question about God; it comes from later accounts and the wording differs between them.
Douglass died in 1895, on a day he had spent at a meeting of the National Council of Women in Washington. Neither he nor Anthony, who died in 1906, lived to see the Nineteenth Amendment, passed by Congress on 4 June 1919 and certified on 26 August 1920.