"What Business has the World With the Color of My Wife?" A Letter From Frederick Douglass

Abstract

In this 1884 letter to an old friend, Frederick Douglass touches on key moments, both hopeful and discouraging, in his experience of post-Civil War America. He reveals to Amy Post his frustration with the public reaction to his recent marriage to Helen Pitts, a white woman. (His first wife, Anna Murray Douglass, a black woman, had died in 1882.) Amy Post and her husband Isaac were Quaker abolitionists active in the underground railroad. They had been friends with Douglass since the early 1840s, when he and Anna moved to Rochester, New York. Amy had assisted Douglass in the 1850s with financial support for his newspaper, the North Star, and had helped look after his family when he fled authorities pursuing him for complicity in John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859. Though her husband Isaac had died shortly after the Civil War, Amy and Frederick had remained...