Eleven days later, Frederick Douglass wore that pistol on a tour that took him 70 miles southwest of Rochester into Allegany County. At first glance, a small, rural county seems an unlikely destination for Douglass, who was nearing the pinnacle of his success as a public speaker. However, the remoteness of the locale put him, quite conveniently, out of reach of any marshals on the trail of the fugitives from Christiana. Douglass had been in correspondence with several abolitionists in Allegany County since at least June 1851, prompted in no small part by his new friend, the wealthy and very radical abolitionist Gerrit Smith, who had several connections there. In addition, there was a strong abolitionist sentiment in the county. The ‘subscribers’ section of both The North Star and Frederick Douglass’ Paper list several prominent men of the county as well as members of the non-conformist Seventh-Day Baptist Church who were strongly represented in the area and generally held anti-slavery sentiment.

Thus, in the early fall of 1851 Douglass set out on a tour of Allegany County, with planned stops in Belfast, Friendship, Cuba, Rushford, Hume and Granger. is fascinating for two reasons. First, the now globetrotting and world-famous Douglass was in the midst of tremendous personal upheaval, both politically and philosophically, since he had begun to distance himself from the rhetoric of abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison. Second, Allegany County was in the midst of a transportation revolution that led to a mini ‘burned over district’ where religious revival and the formation of new religious sects was commonplace. 

Douglass began his public life as a disciple of William Lloyd Garrison, who as the head of the American Anti-Slavery Society, believed that slavery was primarily a moral issue. To solve the “problem” of human property, Garrison and his followers felt they had to persuade Americans that slavery was immoral, and that the use of force, even the force of law by the government, was antithetical to this moral argument. 

The incredibly erudite Douglass was a godsend to Garrison when he showed up on the abolitionist speaking circuit in 1841. Here was someone with the ability to describe the experiences of a slave in ways that Garrison’s almost entirely white audience was primed to receive. Douglass was the prime exhibit in Garrison’s moral argument against slavery—an embodiment of the brutality, violence and depravity of the slave system. However, with the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850, the Garrisonian approach had begun to show its weaknesses, at least to Douglass.  In the first place, the Garrisonian approach was never likely to reach the southerners who actually owned slaves, and by the 1850s the American Anti-Slavery Society was toying with the idea of disunion—splitting the Republic in two between the slave-supporting South and the slave-free North. Secondly, the expansion of the nation to the west raised thorny issues of political, legal and even military action with which the so-called ‘moral suasion’ of the Garrisonian camp was ill prepared to deal.

Douglass had first met Gerrit Smith through a letter welcoming him to Rochester in which the latter deeded Douglass land in the Adirondacks that would make the former slave eligible to vote under New York State election law. Born in Utica, Smith was part of an astonishingly wealthy and well-connected family from Madison County, NY, who had his fingers in nearly every radical and counter-culture movement afoot in the mid-19th century. His overarching passion at the time was slavery, and Douglass was a natural ally with his bona fides from America’s “Peculiar Institution” and his newspaper, The North Star, reaching a multi-racial audience. Smith not only bankrolled Douglass through some very hard times in starting and running his paper. He also encouraged Douglass to become an activist in the antislavery cause - not just an embodiment of slavery’s ills as he was for the Garrisonians, but as an organizer of the resistance to slavery. This was music to Douglass’ ears and suited his own ideas, which he made public in an 1851 essay suggesting an anti-slavery interpretation of the U.S. Constitution. Such a position was immediately decried as heresy by the American Anti-Slavery Society and Garrison, who was only a few years away from publicly burning that document as a deal with the devil.

Just as Douglass was evolving his personal approach and philosophy to the issue of slavery, Allegany County, too, was in transition. The county is a bit of a geographical oddity as it is at the conjunction of three watersheds supplying tributaries which eventually flow into the Genesee, the Susquehanna and the Ohio rivers. This would seem to place it at a nexus for 18th and 19th century waterborne navigation, but in fact the county was stranded high and dry with rivers that were barely streams in the summer and raging torrents in the spring and fall. 

That said, things were changing rapidly. Earlier that summer, the New York and Erie Railroad had opened, running east-west across the county and linking it to the wider world. In addition, the Genesee Valley Canal had reached the county border and would eventually cross the county north to south. These new links opened up the county and its residents to both wider markets for their agricultural produce and the ideas, especially religious and political, then current in the region and the nation. 

Douglass’ visit in 1851 would be a proving ground for him in his new (and thereafter permanent) role as an activist. However, he would encounter problems early on associated with the relatively raw state of the abolition movement in Allegany County. Arriving late on October 1, he was met by the Hon. Asahel N. Cole, who had arranged the dates, locations and publicity for Douglass, and also served as his guide across the shockingly bad farm lanes that made up most of the roads in the county. On the first full day of his visit, he stopped in the village of Friendship, where he noted the improvements made by the railroad and then moved on to Nile, a hamlet a few miles south. There he was forced to shed his newly earned activist role since the people had no idea who he was! Douglass noted in his writings of the tour that his guide sounded like the Garrisonians who introduced him during his European tour and had caused him some discomfort. “It was a little amusing to be introduced with so much reference to my being a fugitive from slavery, supposing the fact to be so generally known as to need to reiteration; but it is easy to find scores of persons in Allegany County, who had never heard of Frederick Douglass, nor of his fugitiveship. I was, therefore, a brand new article, and was observed with an unusual curiosity.”

Despite his being relatively unknown, the reception of Douglass’ message was enthusiastic. He spoke, as he often did early in his career, on the hypocrisy of Christians and especially the clergy, who supported slavery. He reported first outrage from his listeners, and then, “... to my surprise, I found the people so simple-hearted, as to doubt even the possibility that ministers of the gospel could have uttered the vile and blasphemous doctrines.” Douglass was able to mold their views towards abolitionist action through both his oration and a good number of books and pamphlets he left among the inhabitants, recalling in his newspaper, “I came away with the feeling that I had left the good seed of anti-slavery sown in good ground.”

The 1851 tour also illustrates how Douglass dealt with adversity and how he advocated abolition on a person-to-person basis, as opposed to the well-documented studies of his great speeches to crowded halls. In the town of Hume, Douglass, Cole and another local abolitionist named Searls took dinner at an inn, and afterward retired to the barroom so that Douglass and Searls could smoke an after-meal cigar. A local man walked in whom Cole described as a “stout, brawny and rather oddly dressed chap” of 25 or 30 years. Evidently, he did not see Douglass sitting in the corner, and thinking himself among friends, he proceeded to, “depict the blessings of slavery, the horrors that would result from emancipation, [tell] us that he had been all over the world, and part of South America, and very soon succeeded in satisfying all those present, that he was either a fool or a liar.” One can imagine Douglass, five days into a ten-day trip and far from home, simply walking out of the room for his own peace of mind. Or, perhaps more likely, standing up and intimidating the younger man with his stature, both moral and physical. Instead, when he addressed the man, he did so calmly. “When up stepped Mr. Douglass, asked a few questions which he [the young man] did not really like to answer… by which he flatly contradicted all which he had just been saying.”

Far from getting angry, Douglass approached the man as being unfortunately ignorant. It was possible that this was the first black person the man had ever seen, and thus the first time he had to face the real-world implications of the words he was parroting. Unsurprisingly, given Douglass’ wit, as well as the shock of being caught out saying something he probably would not have had he better judged the others sitting in the bar room that Sunday afternoon, the “young buck drew in his horns, double time,” according to Cole. Douglass was not satisfied with the man’s chagrin, however. He wanted to educate, so he continued with advice. “Talk a little more like a reasonable man… [and] cease advocating the slaveholder’s cause, who would never thank him for his extra efforts in [sic] their behalf…” The former slave then made a wholly remarkable comment. “...that the same men that would treat [Douglass] with courtesy and respect, would scorn to notice men who will stoop to do their dirty work, whether that work consist of ordinary labor, or catching n______s.” One can imagine the young fellow slinking out of the bar, cowed and with plenty to think about on the topic of what racism and slavery really meant to the poor, farming whites in Allegany County.

The 1851 tour of Allegany County may have been a whistle-stop for Douglass, or a convenient way to be out of sight should Federal Marshals show up in Rochester asking difficult questions about three men fleeing from a shootout in Christiana, PA. But it was also of lasting import to the people he met along the way. The impact he made on the local population during his visit to this out-of-the-way place is comparable to the large-scale influence he generated through the hundreds of speaking engagements held across antebellum America. Although this is hardly a shocking conclusion given his widespread contemporary fame, the mechanics of how his “retail politics” toward abolition worked have remained poorly studied and, consequently, been largely ignored by historians. Allegany County’s abolitionists, in the person of Asahel Cole, reached Douglass through his paper, which seems to have functioned as a clearinghouse for antislavery activists as much as it served as a news outlet. It is likely that Douglass frequently relied on local agents like Cole to judge the potential demand for his appearances and to lay the preliminary groundwork of advertising and planning. Cole was also a local guide for Douglass, helping him navigate what might otherwise be dangerous territory. 

The two articles on which this study draws heavily, one by Cole and one by Douglass, suggest that Cole provided another valuable function—that of an observer able to report on events in a light that would have been unseemly had Douglass self-reported. This is especially true of the encounter in the Hume tavern that was documented by Cole. How frequently Douglass met with that same thoughtless racism, said “just so” by a callow farm boy who thought he was “among friends,” can only be guessed. Yet far from exasperation, Douglass captured a teachable moment to talk to the young man, and in doing so demonstrated the ultimate in retail politics, as far from the mesmerized thousands hanging on his every word at his most famous and well-studied speeches as one can get.