Frederick Douglass's Women

Ottilia Assing

 

I encourage you to read my Frederick Douglass May 28, 2017, post, “Ottilia Assing and Slavery in the Territories,” before you proceed with the following.

 

Maria Diedrich's ''Love Across Color Lines'' explores in depth Douglass's 28-year relationship with Ottilie Assing, a German journalist and intellectual. Diedrich makes a persuasive case that this long friendship was in fact an intimate love affair that Douglass and Assing maintained in spite of Douglass's marriage to a black woman who was the mother of his five children. Although previous biographers have acknowledged the importance of Assing to Douglass, Diedrich, a professor of American studies at the University of Mnster in Germany, offers a much more elaborate portrait of Assing and of the liaison that was at the center of her life .

 

Ottilie Assing was born in Hamburg in 1819 to a Jewish physician and his wife, the daughter of one of Germany's most prominent intellectual families. Ottilie's aunt Rahel Varnhagen had presided over a legendary salon in turn-of-the-century Berlin, and her writings came to serve as a ''feminist bible'' for her niece. Ottilie's parents, ''disciples of Romanticism,'' provided her and her younger sister with an excellent education and with revolutionary ideals emphasizing human equality, the intellectual capabilities of women and the dangers of the constraints of convention. From a young age, Ottilie and Ludmilla engaged in bitter emotional rivalry, and, not long after their parents' deaths in the early 1840's, Ottilie set out to establish an independent identity.

 

She first turned to journalism, attacking Hamburg's cultural philistinism, then assumed a position as a tutor to the children of one of the city's leading actors, Jean Baptiste Baison. Assing became Baison's ''partner, nurse and probably his lover,'' and she ''enjoyed the spotlight of scandal,'' deriving satisfaction from her superiority to convention. But what Assing regarded as a relationship of equality was in fact profoundly asymmetrical, ''for it was always Ottilie Assing adapting to Baison's needs,'' even to the point of yielding him a substantial portion of her inheritance. When Baison died of typhoid fever, Assing was forced to rely almost entirely on her own labors for support. In 1851 she began to write for Morgenblatt fr Gebildete Leser, a distinguished journal to which she contributed for the next 14 years. Faced with increasing anti-Semitism and growing restrictions on freedom of the press in the aftermath of the failed Revolution of 1848, Assing immigrated to the United States in 1852.

 

Her experience as a person of Jewish descent in Germany made her especially interested in American racial issues, and soon after her arrival she began to write for Morgenblatt on ''race relations, slavery, black America'' and ''to set herself up as Germany's 'Negro expert.' ''Such ambitions made it almost inevitable that she should seek out Douglass, as she did in 1856, literally knocking on his door in Rochester to propose a German translation of his work. From the outset, Diedrich writes, she was ''completely taken by Douglass's powerful male presence'' and wrote about him in such erotic terms that Diedrich calls her subsequent Morgenblatt article ''the first . . . of the many public love songs'' Assing composed for Douglass. But Diedrich characterizes Assing's description of Douglass as one that ''deprived him of his blackness,'' assimilating him into her elitist white conceptions of cultural excellence.

 

Assing and Douglass began to correspond as she arranged to translate ''My Bondage and My Freedom,'' and in 1857 Assing spent the first of 22 summers living in the Douglass family home. Douglass had earlier been romantically linked in public gossip with an English abolitionist, and Assing believed that ''the Douglass marriage had been over long before she entered the scene.'' ''Unable, or perhaps unwilling, to see'' Douglass's wife, Anna, ''as a fellow human being and as a woman,'' Assing treated her with contempt, writing disdainfully of her blackness and her illiteracy.

 

In the years that followed, Douglass and Assing shared an intense personal and professional relationship during summers in Rochester and through his frequent winter visits to her rooms in Hoboken, N.J. It was to Assing that Douglass fled when he feared implication in the John Brown conspiracy, and after the Civil War broke out the two collaborated to produce parallel articles for Douglass' Monthly and Morgenblatt urging the transformation of the conflict into a war to end slavery (Faust 1-4).

 

Diedrich presumes that the 28-year friendship of German journalist Ottilie Assing and married abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass was a love affair. Styling herself as Germany's ""Negro expert,"" Assing ""enjoyed the spotlight of scandal,"" according to Diedrich. She wrote and traveled in the U.S. after having been ostracized in Germany as a ""half-breed"" whose Jewish father converted to Christianity, believing that her genius would uplift America's underdeveloped cultural scene. Although envisioning herself as egalitarian, Assing told friends she meant to ""introduce readers to highly educated darkies""; in writing about Douglass, Diedrich argues, she ""carefully avoided any physical feature or character trait that might denote difference,"" presenting Douglass as ""the ideal personification of the classical Western orator (PW 1).

 

Although their collaboration continued after the war, Douglass showed no inclination to leave his wife. More pessimistic than he about the future course of American politics and race relations, Assing also began to quarrel with him about the fecklessness of his grown children. Although Diedrich believes it was still ''obvious that Douglass cared deeply'' about her, signs of tension and even estrangement began to appear. In 1876 Assing departed for a European trip with hopes that Douglass would join her en route. But he proved to be less interested in her than in his career and family in the United States.

 

When Anna Murray Douglass died in the summer of 1882, Douglass made no apparent effort to contact Assing. Eighteen months later he married Helen Pitts, a white woman almost 20 years younger than Assing. The following August, Assing, said by friends to be suffering from breast cancer, killed herself in a Paris park with a dose of potassium cyanide. She coupled this ultimate gesture of Romantic self-determination with what Diedrich calls ''a more substantial way of haunting'' Frederick Douglass. Her will provided that the income of her $13,000 estate be delivered to him in semiannual installments for the rest of his life (Faust 5).

 

In the process of writing her book, Women in the World of Frederick Douglass, Leigh Faught expressed doubts about the accuracy of Maria Diedrich’s interpretive narration.

 

I am just having problems with the book [Love across Color Lines] as I re-read it while trying to place Assing in my own work; and in reading the book yet again I am finding that I question the premise of the work, the methods and interpretations of the research, and -- most importantly -- the overall significance of Assing herself.

 

…

 

The author doesn't show her work in how she got to the conclusion that this affair was a sexual affair, she doesn't discuss how she deduced that and interrogated that deduction and then come to that conclusion. The conclusion is just there as an accepted fact that guides everything afterward.

 

Thus, everything that Assing and Douglass say or do is motivated by or interpreted only as furthering that relationship. Thus, Assing moves from New York City to Hoboken, NJ, to have a place to meet with Douglass, not because she is quite poor at that point and a boarding house Hoboken might be a less expensive place to live. She moves from Hoboken to Washington, D.C., during Reconstruction again to be near Douglass, not to (or not also to)be near the center of political action as a political journalist.

 

Such real, practical considerations are ignored elsewhere, too, and with greater implications. If this affair went on for two decades, at least half of which were before Assing entered an age for menopause, and during which she stayed with the Douglasses for months on end, why did she not get pregnant? Where, in fact, did they have sex? Under the same roof as Douglass’s wife and children – and later in laws and grandchildren? Under the boarding house roof where her landlady and landlords were raising children?  … The Garrisonians who made such gossip of Julia Griffths only a year before Assing showed up make no mention of Assing at all (and they were as gossipy as a clique of 12-year-olds). No alternate explanations are explored nor practicalities considered. All the reader receives are contradictory dismissals that the landlady and landlords were German and liberal, and therefore exempt from American middle class sensibilities, that the Douglass family – in laws included – were forced to accept whatever Douglass imposed on them (likely, but still not satisfying), and that no one talked about the affair because everyone wanted to protect the movement as a whole and, besides, no one ever visited the Douglasses anyway.

 

…

 

What I am thinking here is that Assing was very deeply taken with Douglass, but him not so much with her. I think he got something out of the relationship with her – she was a journalist, he was an editor, she had connections on the European continent, perhaps she was a kind listener, clearly she would have been a willing booty-call … but he wasn’t deeply in love with her and certainly wasn’t going to follow her to Europe or leave his wife, or really go out of his way for her. That, right now, is my hypothesis that I have to test through rigorous research in the documents (Fought 1-6)

 

If you search for Ottilie or Ottilia Assing in Google, you would think that she killed herself because Frederick Douglass had broken her heart by marrying Helen Pitts, another white woman, twenty years their junior. Online sources say this because her biographer, Maria Diedrich, painted a tragically romantic portrait of her despite evidence to the contrary. All sources, which Diedrich cites, say that Assing had been diagnosed with breast cancer.

 

Despite the 21st century image of breast cancer being pink ribbons and survival narratives, the disease is still dreadful and deadly today, even with treatments. Indeed, treatment is still heroic, involving surgery and essentially poisoning the woman just enough to eliminate the cancer without killing the woman. This is progress. In the nineteenth century, radical mastectomy was the only treatment; and, in an age without mammograms or other early detection technologies, by the time surgery took place, the cancer was already in the lymph nodes, coursing throughout her body.   … Suicide was a your own merciful exit, even when you had a family, doctors and wealth to take you through the longer death.

 

Assing had no family when she learned of this diagnosis. Sure, she had friends, but they had families or were elderly, none equipped to take on the last months or years of a dying woman's life. Douglass himself was out of the question because he was a man. Men did not do that. Women did, and she did not know the new Mrs. Douglass. This ordeal she faced, she faced alone; and, even had she not been alone, she still faced the ordeal. Suicide allowed her control and dignity in her dying (Fought 1-2).

 

 

Works cited:

 

Faust, Drew Gilpin.  “Fatal Attraction: The Affair Between Frederick Douglass and a German Journalist Endured for 28 Years until Its Tragic Conclusion.”  Books: The New York Times on the Web.  August 1, 1999.  Net.  http://www.nytimes.com/books/99/08/01/reviews/990801.01faustt.html

 

Fought, Leigh, “Suicide in the Bois de Boulogne: Ottilia Assing's Death.”  Frederick Douglass: In Progress, Notes, Queries, and Musings about Frederick Douglass.  April 30, 2012.   Net.  http://leighfought.blogspot.com/2012/04/suicide-in-bois-de-boulougne-ottilia.html

 

Fought, Leigh, “The Problem With Assing.”  Frederick Douglass: In Progress, Notes, Queries, and Musings about Frederick Douglass. November 14, 2011.  Net. http://leighfought.blogspot.com/2011/11/problem-with-assing.html

 

Publishers Weekly Book Review of Love Across Color Lines: Ottilie Assing and Frederick Douglass by Maria Diedrich.  June 1, 1999.  Net. https://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-8090-1613-6