Remarks as Prepared for Delivery
For the Honorable Dirk Kempthorne,
Secretary of the Department of the Interior
Frederick Douglass House Re-Opening
April 23, 2007
Imagine a boy about 13 years old standing on the banks of the Chesapeake Bay on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. The year was 1833. The boy was a slave. His father was a slave owner. His mother had been one of his father’s slaves.
It was common in those days for slave owners to separate mothers from their children, so his father – the slave owner – had sold his mother – the slave -- to another plantation. Sometimes his mother would take a long journey at night across the Maryland countryside simply to spend a few minutes with him before she had to return to her plantation. Her master required her to be in the fields at the break of dawn. To be late was to be punished by whipping.
Then a time came when she no longer visited. He eventually heard she had died. That was the last he knew of her.
This boy was a bright young man. As a slave, he could be loaned like a piece of property to other slave owners. He was loaned to a family in Baltimore. While he was there he convinced the local children to share their reading lessons with him. In this way, he taught himself to read and write. He did this secretly at the risk of punishment by being whipped if caught. Slaves were not allowed to learn how to read and write.
The boy found that the ability to read and write stirred in his heart an unquenchable desire for freedom. His life as a slave was miserable. The slave owner made him work in the fields from sunrise to sunset – and sometimes long into the night. He did not get enough food. He had few clothes and no shoes. He slept on the ground, often shivering through the night in winter. The overseer hired by his master frequently whipped him for no reason at all except he enjoyed inflicting pain on people who were powerless to resist.
Imagine as this boy stood on the banks of the Chesapeake Bay, watching the ships out on the water, their sails filled with wind. He envied their freedom and cried out to them, his words filled with the imagery of the gifted writer he would become.
“You are loosed from your moorings and are free,” He cried at the ships. “I am fast in my chains and am a slave! You move merrily before the gentle gale, and I sadly before the bloody whip! You are freedom’s swift-winged angels that fly around the world; I am confined in bands of iron. Oh that I were free! Oh, that I were on one of your gallant decks and under your protecting wing!”
Imagine now, if you will, a summer’s day 31 years later. The year was 1864. President Abraham Lincoln welcomed a distinguished man into his study at the White House.
At the time, the country was engaged in a great Civil War. Lincoln had freed the slaves throughout the Confederacy the year before, but freedom by no means meant equality even in the free states of the North. Lincoln spoke at length with his visitor about the progress of the war, about how to let all the slaves in the South know they had been set free, and about the pay and deployment of black soldiers serving in the Union Army.
Suddenly an aide rushed into the room and announced that the Governor of Connecticut had arrived for an appointment with the president. The aide expected President Lincoln to immediately dismiss his visitor. After all, the governor was a powerful man.
But Lincoln waved the aide off. 'Tell Governor Buckingham to wait,” he said. “for I want to have a long talk with my friend Frederick Douglass.”
The boy crying out on the shores of the Chesapeake Bay, of course, was Frederick Douglass, Three decades later, one of our greatest presidents would call him his friend.
The journey that took Frederick Douglass from slavery to national prominence and an audience with the president is one of the most remarkable stories of American history. He is truly one of our nation’s great heroes – a man whose life we should study and whose courage, integrity, and humanity we should emulate.
Today, it is my honor as Secretary of the Interior to officially commemorate the reopening of the Frederick Douglass house here on Cedar Hill. The house appropriately has a view both of the state of Maryland where Douglass spent his youth as a slave and his adopted city where late in his life he continued to wage a battle for equality and justice for those who had been held captive as slaves.
Visitors can once again tour this house and see it as it was in the days when he lived here. They can learn about the events of his life – how he escaped from slavery and became a leading abolitionist, orator, and publisher. How he became an example to all of us of how one person can rise above the worst affliction and, by the sheer power of an indomitable spirit, reach great heights.
Even more so, they can learn how Frederick Douglass became the conscience of a nation when it was struggling with issues of racial injustice and equality – just as Martin Luther King would become the conscience of the nation as it continued to face the same issues a century later.
Frederick Douglass held up a mirror to slavery and dared our country to look at it. Yet, he was willing to hold the same mirror up to his own heart and recognize the hatred and evil that slavery tempted him to embrace. As a genuinely religious man himself, he viewed everything that happened to him in life – even the suffering – as divine providence. He believed God had a plan for his life.
It is one thing to admire the genius of a man who could rise from the bondage of slavery to achieve great things. It is quite another to admire the man himself. As President Lincoln discovered, Frederick Douglas is a man worth admiring.
Today we celebrate the reopening of the Frederick Douglas home. This is a day that has been years in the making. Over the past several years, taxpayers and the National Park Service have invested more than $2.7 million to restore this home to the condition it was in when Frederick Douglass lived her.
More work needs to be done. The National Park Foundation has created the African Experience Fund to attract private donors to help parks that are part of the African-American experience. Funds will help restore Civil War battlefields and the Underground Railway. Private dollars will be used to restore the books that were part of Frederick Douglass’ massive library.
It is especially appropriate that we are marking the reopening of the Frederick Douglas House today. This is the first day of National Parks Week, a nationwide celebration of the 390 national parks, battlefields, seashores, monuments and other units of the National Park System.
From Maine to Hawaii, these places are more than simply places to visit. They tell the story of America – our history, our heritage, our culture, and our people.
Here at Cedar Hill, we remember a great struggle against injustice and the great man who waged it throughout his life. I hope that this place will inspire us all to learn about Frederick Douglass and to read some of his books and letters.
May the re-opened Frederick Douglass house serve as an inspiration to us all to continue to build a better America, remembering that he faced far greater obstacles in his life than we will ever know. In doing so, we will honor the memory of a great American.