About Douglass' Monthly

Douglass' Monthly

Douglass' Monthly was a monthly magazine edited by Frederick Douglass and published in Rochester, New York, from 1859 to August 1863. It was the third of Douglass's Rochester publications, following The North Star and Frederick Douglass' Paper, and it carried his abolitionist argument through the secession crisis and into the first half of the American Civil War. In its pages Douglass defended John Brown, demanded emancipation, and recruited Black soldiers for the Union Army, before closing the magazine — and ending sixteen years of newspaper publication — in August 1863.

A Note on the Founding Date: 1858 or 1859

Reference sources do not agree on a single starting year, and an honest profile must say so. The Library of Congress collection description dates Douglass' Monthly from January 1859 to August 1863 and explains that in 1859 Douglass added a monthly as a supplement to his weekly paper. The National Archives summary likewise lists Douglass' Monthly as 1859-63, and the National Civil Rights Museum account says that in 1859 he began publishing a monthly paper of that name. Other cataloguing, including a University of Geneva bibliography of American periodicals, lists the magazine as Rochester, 1858-1863, in five volumes. The difference is best understood as a difference between a supplement begun in late 1858 and a monthly whose first regular volume and January 1859 issues mark its independent life. The batch record for this outlet gives 1859, noting that some sources give 1858. Both dates circulate in reputable sources; 1859 is the date supported by the Library of Congress narrative, with 1858 appearing in periodical bibliographies.

From The North Star to Frederick Douglass' Paper

Douglass, who had escaped slavery and become a leading abolitionist orator and author, founded The North Star in Rochester on December 3, 1847, with Martin R. Delany as co-editor at the start. Its title referred to Polaris, the star by which people escaping slavery guided themselves north. Its motto proclaimed that right is of no sex and truth is of no color. Douglass stressed, from the first issue, that a paper under the complete control of those who had suffered slavery was needed, and that the paper would promote the moral and intellectual improvement of free Black people as well as the abolition of slavery.

In June 1851 The North Star merged with Gerrit Smith's Liberty Party Paper of Syracuse to form Frederick Douglass' Paper, still published in Rochester, with Douglass as editor and John Thomas, the former Liberty Party Paper editor, as corresponding editor. The merger marked Douglass's break with William Lloyd Garrison and the American Anti-Slavery Society over the Constitution, voting, and political action. It was that weekly paper to which the Monthly was first attached.

A Supplement That Became the Main Publication

The magazine format differed from the weekly newspaper style of Douglass's earlier publications. The first seven issues were published as a supplement to Frederick Douglass' Paper. By mid-1860, as the weekly ceased, Douglass' Monthly replaced it as Douglass's sole Rochester publication. The Library of Congress explains the shift by his growing focus on the impending Civil War and, once war came, on the recruitment and acceptance of Black troops.

As a monthly magazine rather than a weekly newspaper, the Monthly allowed longer essays, speeches, and sustained argument. It focused primarily on the abolitionist cause, promoting antislavery sentiment and advocating for the rights of African Americans, and it also ranged beyond that cause to women's rights, suffrage, and other matters of social justice — subjects Douglass had supported since he attended the Seneca Falls convention in 1848 and which The North Star had championed from its beginning.

John Brown and the Harpers Ferry Year

The Monthly's first year coincided with John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry in October 1859. Douglass knew Brown, had met and corresponded with him, and had declined to join the raid itself, judging it doomed, but he defended Brown in print. In November 1859 the Monthly published his piece arguing that Captain John Brown was not insane, praising Brown for attacking slavery directly. Douglass's association with Brown put him in legal danger after the raid, and he left for Canada and then for a planned lecture tour in England to avoid possible repercussions, with help from his Rochester friends Amy and Isaac Post. The episode is central to the Monthly's early history: the magazine was, in its first year, the platform from which the country's best-known Black editor justified Brown to a national audience while he himself was effectively in exile.

The Civil War and Emancipation

When the Civil War began in 1861, Douglass used the Monthly to argue that the war must become a war against slavery, not only a war for union. Early in the war he clashed with President Abraham Lincoln over the refusal to allow Black men, including formerly enslaved men, to enlist. He pressed the case that emancipation and Black enlistment were military necessities as well as moral demands, and that Black service would establish a claim to citizenship that could not afterward be denied. The Monthly stated the argument in terms of manhood and freedom secured through service, rather than through parchment guarantees alone.

That argument sharpened after the Emancipation Proclamation took effect at the start of 1863 and the Union began raising Black regiments in earnest. The Monthly then became an instrument of recruitment as well as persuasion.

Men of Color, To Arms: Recruitment

In early 1863 Douglass was paid by Massachusetts to recruit African American men for the 54th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment, the first Black regiment raised in the North during the war. He used Douglass' Monthly as a powerful communication tool, both to recruit Black men and to convince white readers who doubted Black men's ability and aptitude to fight. His recruiting appeals, including Men of Color, To Arms! and Why Should a Colored Man Enlist?, were published and circulated as broadsides displayed across northern cities.

His appeal was personal as well as public. Two of his sons, Lewis and Charles Douglass, were among the first to enlist in the 54th Massachusetts, which ultimately comprised more than a thousand men from fifteen northern states, while a third son, Frederick Douglass Jr., recruited for the regiment. Douglass traveled thousands of miles to recruitment meetings, often closing speeches by leading the audience in the Union song John Brown's Body. On May 28, 1863, he was in Boston to send off the regiment, including his own sons, as it marched through the city before sailing for South Carolina.

Unequal Pay and the End of Publication in 1863

Douglass did not suspend criticism once Black men were in uniform. Unequal pay and poor treatment of Black troops were continuing grievances, and he carried them directly to Washington. The Library of Congress account records that he ended the Monthly in August 1863 after meetings with Secretary of War Edwin Stanton and with President Lincoln about those grievances, at which Stanton promised him an army commission. The commission never materialized. With its closure, sixteen years of Douglass newspaper publication, beginning with The North Star in 1847, came to an end. Douglass's next newspaper venture, the New National Era in Washington, did not begin until 1870.

Survival, Loss, and Access

No complete collection of Douglass's newspapers is known to exist. In early June 1872, while Douglass was living in Washington, his Rochester home was destroyed by fire. All the family members living there survived, but most of their belongings were lost, including sixteen bound volumes of The North Star, Frederick Douglass' Paper, and Douglass' Monthly. That fire is one reason runs of the Monthly are incomplete.

The Library of Congress holds Douglass' Monthly for January 1859 to August 1863, but notes that it is not part of its online Frederick Douglass Newspapers presentation, which covers his three weeklies; issues of the Monthly are available in its Microform and Electronic Resources Center on microfilm and microfiche. Its cataloguing also notes irregular volume numbering, with numbers in the fifth volume repeated. Other digitized Douglass newspaper issues are available through New York Heritage Digital Collections at St. John Fisher College. Researchers therefore work with the Monthly in a more fragmented form than its importance might suggest.

Place Among Douglass's Newspapers

Historians and reference works consistently group Douglass's four newspapers in sequence: The North Star, 1847-51; Frederick Douglass' Paper, 1851-60; Douglass' Monthly, 1859-63; and the New National Era, 1870-74. Within that sequence the Monthly occupies the crisis years. The North Star established Douglass as an independent Black editor; the weekly Paper carried his political abolitionism through the 1850s; the Monthly, overlapping the weekly at first and then replacing it, concentrated his writing on the approach and first half of the Civil War, on John Brown, emancipation, and Black military service.

Its five volumes are consequently read today less as a general newspaper of record than as Douglass's wartime journal — the place where the argument that Black men should fight for their own freedom, and thereby secure their citizenship, was made month by month as the policy of the United States changed around it.

Legacy

Douglass' Monthly is remembered because its editor was Frederick Douglass and because its short run covered the transformation of the Civil War from a war for union into a war of emancipation. Its recruiting appeals helped fill the 54th Massachusetts and other regiments; its defense of John Brown preserved an abolitionist interpretation of Harpers Ferry at the moment of Brown's execution; and its demands for equal pay and fair treatment documented, from the start, the terms on which Black soldiers served. That it ceased in protest and disappointment, after a promised commission failed to arrive, is part of its record as well: the magazine ended not from lack of readers or material, but because its editor chose to press his case in Washington rather than in print.