Frederick Douglass Disagreed with the Quakers Trying to Free Him _ Smithsonian Channel

One prominent group of anti-slavery activists were the Quakers, the first religious group on either side of the Atlantic to come out against slavery. This house was home to a family called the Richardsons, Ellen, her sister Anna, and her husband Henry. They were radical Quakers, and in the 1840s, it was in this house that Frederick Douglass stayed while he was in Newcastle. Anna and Ellen began the process through meetings and writing letters of purchasing the freedom, purchasing the manumission papers for Frederick Douglass. However, the transaction arranged to purchase Douglass' freedom was for some deeply problematic. Douglass and the Richardsons were immediately criticized. Douglass' freedom is to be purchased through a legal contract of sale and the argument was made that to accept a transaction is to accept that Douglass was chattel, and that that was acceptance of the principle that one person could own another person. One of the people who makes this argument is the abolitionist Henry Clark Wright, and he wrote a letter to Frederick Douglass, and that letter, along with Frederick Douglass' response to it, was published in this newspaper, The Liberator, the great American abolitionist newspaper. This is from January 1847. Dear Frederick, that certificate for your freedom, that bill of sale for your body and your soul, from that villain, Thomas Old, I wish you would not touch it. Douglass responds by stating some pretty stark and painful facts. He says, I am legally the property of Thomas Old, and if I go to the United States, Thomas Old, aided by the American government, can seize, bind, and fetter me, and drag me from my family, and feed his cruel revenge upon me, and doom me to unending slavery. And Douglass rejects this idea that by purchasing his freedom that he is accepting the idea of property in man. He says that it is almost like giving money to an armed robber. You're not accepting the morality or the legality of being mugged or being robbed at gunpoint when you hand your money over.