About The North Star

The North Star

The North Star was a weekly anti-slavery newspaper published in Rochester, New York, from December 3, 1847, until June 1851. It was founded and edited by Frederick Douglass, who had escaped slavery, published his first autobiography in 1845, and become one of the best-known abolitionist speakers in the United States and Britain. His co-editor at the start was Martin R. Delany, a Black abolitionist who had previously published his own newspaper, The Mystery, in Pittsburgh. The paper's first publisher was William Cooper Nell, a Black abolitionist from Boston. In a little under four years, The North Star became, in the assessment summarized by Encyclopedia.com, the most influential Black newspaper of the antebellum period, even though it struggled financially for much of its life.

Founding in Rochester

Douglass and his family moved from Lynn, Massachusetts, to Rochester before launching the paper. The Library of Congress notes that Rochester was a thriving city on the Erie Canal and one of the last stops on the Underground Railroad before people escaping slavery could reach safety in Canada. The move also put distance between Douglass and his early mentor, William Lloyd Garrison, the Boston abolitionist whose newspaper, The Liberator, had published Douglass's early work. Garrison opposed Douglass's plan to start a rival paper. Douglass nevertheless believed that a newspaper controlled by Black editors themselves was necessary. The first issue, dated December 3, 1847, carried an opening statement titled "Our Paper and Its Prospects," which argued that the people who had suffered slavery's wrongs were the people best placed to demand redress for them. The paper was produced from the Talman Building in Rochester, and its stated objects included promoting the moral and intellectual improvement of free Black people as well as attacking slavery itself.

Where the money came from

Starting a weekly newspaper required capital that Douglass did not possess on his own. According to the Library of Congress, he raised much of the funding to establish The North Star during a long speaking tour of England, Ireland and Scotland that ran from late August 1845 to early April 1847, following the publication of his Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. British abolitionists contributed money and encouragement. One of them, Julia Griffiths, whom Douglass met during that tour, moved to Rochester in 1849 and worked to put the newspaper on a sounder financial footing, serving as its business manager and helping to organize fundraising fairs and lecture tours in Britain and the United States. Women's auxiliaries in several cities also organized antislavery fairs and bazaars on the paper's behalf. Even with that network of support, money remained tight, and the paper's survival over three and a half years was an achievement in itself for a Black-edited weekly of the period.

The name and the motto

The title referred to Polaris, the North Star, the bright star that people escaping slavery used as a guide toward the North and freedom. Douglass explained in the first issue that, to millions living in a land that boasted of liberty, that star was a star of hope. The motto printed from the beginning declared, in the paper's own capitalization, that right is of no sex and truth is of no color, and that all people are brethren. Those few words compressed the paper's program: abolition, racial equality, and women's rights were not separate causes for Douglass but parts of a single claim about human equality. The Library of Congress emphasizes that, while the paper focused on ending slavery and advancing African Americans, Douglass supported women's rights strongly from the start, and the motto announced that commitment on every issue.

What the paper published

The North Star followed the eclectic pattern of the antebellum reform press, but abolition came first. Its pages mixed editorial argument against slavery with news, correspondence, literary material, essays and poems, and material intended to encourage Black self-improvement and pride. Douglass directed his message beyond the Black community to the broader Anglo-American reform audience, arguing the case against slavery to readers who did not experience it directly. A number of Black intellectuals were associated with Douglass's Rochester papers over their history, including Martin R. Delany, William C. Nell, William J. Watkins and James McCune Smith. The paper gave Black writers a platform under Black editorial control, which was precisely the point Douglass had made in his first issue: a press permanently established under the direction of the victims of slavery themselves, rather than one that spoke about them from outside.

Women's rights and Seneca Falls

The paper's commitment to women's rights was tested and displayed within its first year. In July 1848 Douglass attended the first women's rights convention at Seneca Falls, New York. The Library of Congress blog records that he was one of 32 men, alongside 68 women, who signed the convention's Declaration of Sentiments, which asserted that all men and women are created equal. Douglass wrote about the convention in The North Star of July 28, 1848, and the convention's report was printed at the North Star office. Smithsonian Magazine likewise notes that Douglass used the paper to argue that there was no reason to deny women the vote or a hand in making and administering the laws. His presence at Seneca Falls made him, as several accounts observe, the only African American known to have attended the convention, linking the abolitionist and women's suffrage movements in the pages of his Rochester weekly.

Reach and readership

For an abolitionist weekly edited by a man who had been born enslaved, The North Star reached a strikingly wide audience. Google Arts and Culture, presenting material on the paper, states that Douglass built a circulation of more than 4,000 in the United States, Europe and the Caribbean. Smithsonian Magazine similarly reports that subscriptions grew to more than 4,000. Those readers were reached through the elaborate support network described by Encyclopedia.com: British abolitionist contributors, women's auxiliaries holding fairs and bazaars, and Douglass's own relentless lecturing. The paper's influence was therefore larger than a simple subscription figure suggests, because abolitionist papers were passed hand to hand, read aloud, quoted and reprinted by other reform publications on both sides of the Atlantic.

Break with Garrison and the 1851 merger

The North Star ceased publication under that name in June 1851, but it did not simply fold. It merged with Gerrit Smith's Liberty Party Paper, based in Syracuse, New York, to form Frederick Douglass' Paper, which continued in Rochester with the volume and issue numbering carried over from The North Star. John Thomas, formerly editor of the Liberty Party Paper, was listed as corresponding editor, and a letter from Smith appeared in the new paper's first issue on June 26, 1851. The Library of Congress explains that the merger marked Douglass's turn toward political abolitionism: he now held that the United States Constitution could be interpreted as an anti-slavery document and that abolitionists should work through politics and voting. That was a complete break with Garrison and the American Anti-Slavery Society, who rejected the Constitution as proslavery and favored non-voting and moral suasion. Douglass also put his own name on the successor paper, in part to show a skeptical public that a formerly enslaved man could master the editor's craft.

Successors and the end of the Rochester papers

Frederick Douglass' Paper continued the work begun by The North Star through the 1850s. In 1859 Douglass added a monthly supplement, and by mid-1860 Douglass' Monthly had replaced the weekly as he concentrated on the approaching Civil War and then on the recruitment and fair treatment of Black troops. He ended the monthly in August 1863, closing sixteen years of newspaper publishing that had begun with The North Star in 1847. Douglass later edited one more newspaper, the New National Era in Washington, D.C., from 1870 to 1874, but the Rochester papers remained the foundation of his career as a journalist. The sequence matters for understanding The North Star itself: it was not an isolated experiment but the first stage of a continuous publishing enterprise through which Douglass developed from a Garrisonian lecturer into an independent political abolitionist.

Survival of the record and legacy

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, and sixteen bound volumes of The North Star, Frederick Douglass' Paper and Douglass' Monthly were lost. The Library of Congress collection of Frederick Douglass newspapers nevertheless contains more than 575 issues of his three weekly titles, scanned from original paper issues and master negative microfilm, including 137 issues of The North Star from 1847 to 1851. That digital collection makes the paper available to any reader today. The North Star's legacy rests on three things: it demonstrated that a Black-edited newspaper could sustain itself and command a transatlantic readership; it joined abolition, Black advancement and women's rights under a single masthead motto; and it launched the journalistic career through which Douglass argued, week after week, that the people who had endured slavery should be the ones to demand liberty.