Frederick Douglass, War, Haiti

At the outset of his public career, when he was aligned with William Lloyd Garrison's American Anti-Slavery Society, Frederick Douglass followed Garrison's lead in preaching the efficacy of moral suasion in the fight against slavery. Douglass elaborated his Garrisonian position in “My Opposition to War,” an address delivered to the London Peace Society in May 1846, one year after Garrison published Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. A self-proclaimed “advocate of peace,” Douglass declares unequivocally that “such is my deep, firm, conviction that nothing can be attained for liberty universally by war, that were I to be asked the question as to whether I would have my emancipation by the shedding of one single drop of blood, my answer would be in the negative” (Frederick Douglass Papers [FDP] 1: 262). Offering an example of what he terms “the demoniacal spirit of war,” Douglass reports on how a New York iron worker and several women and children were killed by a bomb recently discovered from the British bombardment during the Revolutionary War. Then and now, he says, the loss of innocent life was a daily occurrence of “the demon, war” (263).