Frederick Douglass's Children

Rosetta Douglass Sprague

 

Rosetta Douglass was born June 24, 1839, in New Bedford, Massachusetts, a year after her parents had escaped Baltimore seeking asylum in the North.  Frederick had not yet drawn the attention of prominent abolitionist leaders.  1839 was the year that he subscribed to William Lloyd Garrison’s Liberator.  Two years later, speaking at a meeting of the Bristol Anti-Slavery Society, he gained Garrison’s notice.  Urged by Garrison, he traveled widely in the East and Midwest for the American Anti-Slavery Society lecturing against slavery and campaigning for rights of free Blacks.

 

When Rosetta was five (1844), she and her family moved to Lynn, Massachusetts.  A year later, she was sent to Albany, New York, to be educated by the well-known abolitionist sisters, Abigail and Lydia Mott.  Abigail taught her to read and write, and Lydia taught her to sew.  The same year, 1845, Frederick’s first autobiography, The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, was published.  To escape slave catchers, he traveled to England and lectured throughout the kingdom.  The following year, 1846, British supporters purchased his freedom.  After returning to America, attracted by Susan B. Anthony's active women's movement, in 1847 he moved his family to Rochester, New York.  Rosetta was then 8, her brother Lewis 7, her brother Frederick 5, and her brother Charles 3.

 

The Rochester school system was segregated.  Douglass refused to have his children attend an all-black school.   He placed Rosetta and her brothers “under the instruction of Miss Phebe Thayer, a Quaker lady who was employed as governess in the family” (Gregory 1).  In 1848 he enrolled Rosetta in the prestigious Seward Seminary in Rochester.  

 

Likely having accepted Rosetta in the first place because her father was a well-known man, the school’s principal Lucilia Tracy, in deference to the school’s trustees, made Rosetta learn her lessons in a separate room from the other students. Rosetta, no surprise, was the only black student enrolled. When Rosetta tearfully told her father of this, Douglass was enraged. He confronted Tracy, who tried to evade responsibility by putting it to a student vote: who would object if Rosetta would sit next to them? One after the other, every student in the room said they were not only willing, but many requested that Rosetta be placed next to them. As is so often the case, these children proved themselves more fair-minded and far more progressive than even most of the adult citizens in Rochester, where racism was still rife. Yet in response to the notes that Tracy sent home with the students reporting the situation, every parent voted in tandem with their children, except one, the editor of the Rochester Courier. As he had with train car segregation in New England, Douglass took this battle to the public, castigating this H.G. Warner in the North Star and other papers, and all those like him in front of the School Board of Education. 

 

In his vigorous expose of the injustice and harm in such undignified treatment of children, Douglass’ campaign to integrate the public schools in Rochester was ultimately successful (Cools 1-2).  Douglass’s children were admitted to white schools in 1850.  The public schools were integrated entirely in 1857.

 

Douglass had started printing his own newspaper, the North Star, in 1847.  Some local citizens were unhappy that their town was the site of a black newspaper, and the New York Herald urged the citizens of Rochester to dump Douglass's printing press into Lake Ontario. Gradually, Rochester came to take pride in the North Star and its bold editor.  Starting the North Star marked the end of his dependence on Garrison and other white abolitionists.

 

The cost of producing a weekly newspaper was high and subscriptions grew slowly. For a number of years, Douglass was forced to depend on his own savings and contributions from friends to keep the paper afloat. He was forced to return to the lecture circuit to raise money for the paper. During the paper's first year, he was on the road for six months. In the spring of 1848, he had to mortgage his home.

 

In England he met Julia Griffiths and brought her home to live with him in the Rochester family house as a tutor for his children and for wife Anna in 1848. But his effort with his wife failed and Anna remained almost totally illiterate until her death (Timeline 3-4).

 

At the age of eleven, 1850, Rosetta “was employed by her father in his office in folding papers and in writing wrappers. As she advanced in age and acquired skill and experience, she became his amanuensis [a literary or artistic assistant, in particular one who takes dictation or copies manuscripts], writing editorials and lectures at his dictation” (Gregory 2).  In the evenings Douglass enjoyed having her play the piano for visitors.  Perhaps this occurred during the interlude of time between Julia Griffiths’s departure from the Douglass’s house (1852) and Ottilia Assing’s arrival in 1855.  During her later adolescent years Rosetta attended in Ohio Oberlin College’s Young Ladies Preparatory and New Jersey’s Salem Normal School.  She did not attend college.

 

Rosetta would describe her parents as “Two lives whose energy and best ability were exerted to make my life what it should be, and who gave me a home where…a cultivated brain and an industrious hand were the twin conditions that led to a well balanced and useful life” (Schmitt 1).

 

She taught school briefly in Salem, New Jersey. The Civil War erupted.  On December 24, 1863, at the age of 24, she married Nathan Sprague, a poorly educated ex-slave struggling to secure a job.  Sprague would serve with Rosetta’s two oldest brothers as soldiers in the Civil War.  “The Spragues were living at the Douglasses’ South Avenue farm the night their house burned in 1872 and Nathan Sprague helped save many of the Douglass’ possessions. The couple later lived in a home owned by Frederick Douglass on Hamilton Street in Rochester” (Schmitt 3).  They would have seven children.

 

Rosetta is credited with having a keen sense of racial justice, inherited from her father’s example of activism and from her experience as a woman in antebellum and Reconstruction America. She advised Frederick Douglass against accepting the presidency of the Freedman’s Bank and did not support his interracial marriage, after her mother’s death (Temple 2).

 

Rosetta “developed into a prominent orator of her own right and spoke publicly, lecturing alongside other famous speakers like Sojourner Truth.  In 1986, Rosetta founded the National Association of Colored Women (NACW) with Ida Wells-Barnett and Harriet Tubman” (Rosetta 1).  She converted to Seventh-day Adventism in the 1890s and was a member of Washington, D.C.'s First Church.

 

“Worried that her mother’s legacy would be overshadowed by her father’s considerable achievements,” Rosetta wrote in 1900 a biography titled, My Mother as I Recall Her.  In the book, she “revealed that her mother lived an isolated life while regularly hosting white abolitionists who could barely hide their hatred for her. Anna Murray never learned to read despite her husband’s attempt to teach her how. Sprague’s manuscripts are preserved in a series of Douglass family papers at the Library of Congress” (Gilliam 1).

 

Here are several excerpts.

 

In the home, with the aid of a laundress only, she managed her household. She watched with a great deal of interest and no little pride the growth in public life of my father, and in every possible way that she was capable aided him by relieving him of all the management of the home as it increased in size and in its appointments. It was her pleasure to know that when he stood up before an audience that his linen was immaculate and that she had made it so, for, no matter how well the laundry was done for the family, she must with her own hands smooth the tucks in father's linen and when he was on a long journey she would forward at a given point a fresh supply.

 

Being herself one of the first agents of the Underground Railroad she was an untiring worker along that line. To be able to accommodate in a comfortable manner the fugitives that passed our way, father enlarged his home where a suite of rooms could be made ready for those fleeing to Canada. It was no unusual occurrence for mother to be called up at all hours of the night, cold or hot as the case may be, to prepare supper for a hungry lot of fleeing humanity.

 

She was a woman strong in her likes and dislikes, and had a large discernment as to the character of those who came around her. Her gift in that direction being very fortunate in the protection of father's interest especially in the early days of his public life, when there was great apprehension for his safety. She was a woman firm in her opposition to alcoholic drinks, a strict disciplinarian-her no meant no and yes, yes, but more frequently the no's had it, especially when I was the petitioner. So far as I was concerned, I found my father more yielding than my mother, altho' both were rigid as to the matter of obedience.

 

During her wedded life of forty-four years, whether in adversity or prosperity, she was the same faithful ally, guarding as best she could every interest connected with my father, his life- work and the home. Unfortunately an opportunity for a knowledge of books had been denied her, the lack of which she greatly deplored. Her increasing family and household duties prevented any great advancement, altho' she was able to read a little. By contact with people of culture and education, and they were her real friends, her improvement was marked. She took a lively interest in every phase of the Anti-Slavery movement, an interest that father took full pains to foster and to keep her intelligently informed. I was instructed to read to her. She was a good listener, making comments on passing events, which were well worth consideration, altho' the manner of the presentation of them might provoke a smile.

 

In 1882, this remarkable woman, for in many ways she was remarkable, was stricken with paralysis and for four weeks was a great sufferer. Altho' perfectly helpless, she insisted from her sick bed to direct her home affairs. The orders were given with precision and they were obeyed with alacrity. Her fortitude and patience up to within ten days of her death were very great. She helped us to bear her burden.

Unlettered tho' she was, there was a strength of character and of purpose that won for her the respect of the noblest and best. She was a woman who strove to inculcate in the minds of her children the highest principles of morality and virtue both by precept and example. She was not well versed in the polite etiquette of the drawing room, the rules for the same being found in the many treatises devoted to that branch of literature. She was possessed of a much broader culture, and with discernment born of intelligent observation, and wise discrimination she welcomed all with the hearty manner of a noble soul (Sprague 97-101).

 

Rosetta Douglass Sprague died November 25, 1906, at the age of 67 in Washington, D.C.  She was buried in Mount Hope Cemetery in Rochester, New York.

 

 

Works cited:

 

Cools, Amy. “Frederick Douglass, Rochester NY Sites Day 2.” Ordinary Philosophy. Web. < https://ordinaryphilosophy.com/tag/rosetta-douglass-sprague/>.

 

Gilliam, Karim. “10 Things You May Not Have Known About Frederick Douglass.” HuffPost: The Blog. Feb 02, 2017. Web. <https://www.huffingtonpost.com/karim-gilliam/10-things-you-may-not-hav_1_b_9094090.html>.

 

Gregory, James M. “Rosetta Douglass Sprague.” Frederick Douglass the Orator. Awesome Stories. Web. < https://www.awesomestories.com/asset/view/Rosetta-Douglass-Sprague>.

 

“Rosetta Douglass (1839-1906).” Fine Ancestry.Com Historical African American Families.Web. < http://establisher.angelfire.com/rosetta-douglass.html>. 

 

Schmitt, Victoria Sandwick. “Rochester's Frederick Douglass Part Two.” Rochester History. Vol. LXVII. Fall, 2005. No. 4. Web. <http://www.libraryweb.org/~rochhist/v67_2005/v67i4.pdf>.

 

Sprague, Rosetta Douglass. “My Mother as I recall Her.” The Journal of Negro History, Vol. 8, No. 1 (Jan., 1923). Association for the Study of African American Life and History, Inc. Web. http://msa.maryland.gov/megafile/msa/speccol/sc5400/sc5496/051200/051245/images/2713462.pdf.

 

Temple, Christel. “Rosetta Douglass-Sprague (1839-1906).” blacksdahistory.org. Web. <http://www.blacksdahistory.org/rosetta-douglass-sprague.html>.

 

“Timeline of Frederick Douglass and Family.” African American History of Western New York. Web. <http://www.math.buffalo.edu/~sww/0history/hwny-douglass-family.html.>