Six months later, Douglass learned of the death of his daughter and returned to America, where he worked for the election campaign of Abraham Lincoln in 1860, calling Lincoln a man "destined to do greater service to his country and to mankind than any man who [has] gone before him in the presidential office."
When the Civil War erupted, Douglass worked hard to persuade the Union to accept blacks in the military. Governor Andrew of Massachusetts was allowed by President Lincoln to organize two black regiments, the famed 54th and 55th. (Their heroism is depicted in the movie Glory.) Two of Douglass' sons, Charles and Lewis, joined the black regiments, knowing full well that captured black Union soldiers were not treated well by Southerners; they were either shot or sold into slavery. Douglass pressured Lincoln to obtain assurance from Jefferson Davis of the Confederacy that this practice would be reversed, but Lincoln never received it. In October 1864, Douglass met with other blacks at a convention in Syracuse, New York, to discuss the future of African Americans in a post-Civil War America. Douglass pushed for universal suffrage for black Americans but faced opposition from ambivalent racist whites and even from the Garrisonian wing of the abolitionist movement.
After the North defeated Southern forces in Atlanta, Georgia, and in Richmond, Virginia, Lincoln won at the polls, and on April 9, 1865, General Lee of the Confederate Army surrendered to General Grant, the Union commander. Although sporadic fighting continued, the Civil War was effectively over.
On April 14, 1865, Lincoln was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth, and the assassination ironically gave a boost to the civil rights movement. The ideals of the martyred president became a rallying force for pro-Union Americans. In the heady days of victory over the South, Congress passed the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments. For the first time, citizenship was defined by the Constitution and was extended to all people born within the United States—including blacks—but excluding Native Americans.
The Post-War Years. Following the Civil War, Douglass worked to elect Republican party candidates and also worked for black suffrage. He returned to the lecture circuit in 1874 after his newspaper, The New National Era, and a bank for freed slaves failed. The bank, of which Douglass had been appointed president three months earlier, had a deficit of $200,000. The trustees thought Douglass' appointment would bring prestige and inspire confidence in black depositors, but that didn't happen. (Douglass was unaware of the bank's perilous financial situation when he accepted the job.) Shortly after the bank failed, he began lecturing again to make ends meet. His oratory skills gained him a new reputation, and he was in demand again, earning as much as $100 to $200 per lecture, considerable sums in those days.
Douglass remained close to many Republican politicians, including President Grant, who offered him a short-term commission in January 1871 to investigate whether the United States should annex the Caribbean country of Santo Domingo. Douglass believed in the American dream of personal success. He believed that the people of Santo Domingo could benefit from American institutions, values, capitalism, and know-how, and he supported American annexation. Some scholars, particularly those belonging to the school of new historicism, believe that this philosophy, on a national level, became an American ideology of political, economical, and geographical expansion, an expansionist ideology referred to in the nineteenth century as the doctrine of Manifest Destiny. Ultimately, Grant's ambition to annex Santo Domingo was opposed by his political enemies and his plan never took effect. After returning from the Caribbean, Douglass labored for Grant's reelection. He expected to be appointed to an office, but no appointment was forthcoming. He was, however, appointed U.S. Marshal of the District of Columbia in 1877 by Rutherford B. Hayes, and, in 1878, he was financially secure enough to buy a fifteen-acre estate and a large house in Washington, D.C. In 1881, he updated his autobiography again, calling it The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass.
In August 1882, Douglass' wife, Anna, died after forty-four years of marriage. Douglass was consoled by a number of their female friends, including many white women in the suffrage and abolitionist movements. The suffragettes were activists who fought for women's rights, including the right for women to vote, and, as civil rights activists, they shared many of the goals of the anti-slavery movement. Susan B. Anthony, possibly the most famous of the nineteenth-century suffragettes, was a good friend of Douglass' and would give his funeral oration.
Douglass enjoyed flaunting his friendships with white women and explained that such relationships confronted racism head-on.
Historians now believe that Douglass had an affair for over twenty years, from 1856 to 1881, with Ottilie Assing, a German journalist and political radical. But Assing was more than a lover; she was Douglass' intellectual partner. The two spent much time together, reading everything from Shakespeare to Marx. Assing's letters, discovered in Poland in the late 1980s, have helped historians understand their sexual relationship. As someone who was overtly Christian, as well as a leader in the African-American community, Douglass was naturally very secretive about his affairs. None of his three autobiographies reveal much about his wife or his liaisons with other women. A year and a half after his wife died, he married Helen Pitts, his white secretary, who worked for the Recorder of Deeds. Assing committed suicide soon afterward but left a trust fund for Douglass. Many blacks and whites were shocked by his second marriage, but Douglass argued that black and white sexual relations had always existed in the United States; he had merely legitimized it with marriage.
In 1888, Douglass worked for Benjamin Harrison's campaign for the presidency. Upon becoming president, Harrison rewarded Douglass with the post of Ambassador to Haiti. Returning from Haiti, Douglass spent his remaining years writing and lecturing about the lynching of blacks, their deprivation of civil rights in the South, and the growing use of Jim Crow laws. These laws prevented blacks from voting by requiring a literacy test, the payment of property taxes, and other unconstitutional measures. They also prevented blacks from participating in government and, in general, stripped them of their constitutional rights.
Douglass died of heart failure on February 20, 1895, at the age of approximately seventy-seven. He had lived a long life by nineteenth-century standards—particularly, for a black man. More significantly, however, he had lived an extraordinary life, overcoming all odds to become one of the greatest figures in American history.
