Looking at this photograph (previous page) one cannot help wondering if Douglass, his wife, and friends have not just gotten up from the dining room table after a delightful meal and are about to enter the parlor. Perhaps Douglass will pick up his violin and play a few favorite airs. Or they may just sit and talk about the events of the day or of some cherished project.

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Cedar Hill, the home of Frederick Douglass, sits high on the south side of the Anacostia River. From it the Douglasses enjoyed magnificent views of Capitol Hill.

The house is furnished with many pieces of furniture that Douglass and his family owned and used while they lived here. Some of the furniture was purchased by Douglass from the estate of Sen. Charles Sumner. The most important asset of the home is Douglass' library, which is intact with the books on the shelves as he kept them. The house had been built in the late 1850s by the Union Land Associates, who were subdividing a 96 hectare farm into building lots. The brick rectangular building may have been used as an office. About 1863 John Van Hook, one of the associates, moved into the dwelling which by that time had become a spacious, comfortable home. On September 1, 1877, Douglass bought the house and 3.9 hectares adjoining this property to the south. Douglass and his family began making improvements-fencing, outbuildings, and a two-story frame addition containing the kitchen and a bedroom-to the property almost immediately. In 1877 he added the library and the bedroom above it. And in the same year the two alcoves in the East Parlor on either side of the fireplace were built.

When the Douglasses first came to Washington, they had bought and lived in a house on Capitol Hill. That house, at 316 A Street, NE., is today the Museum of African Art and is open to visitors.

Bibliographical Readers interested in more information on the life and

Note

times of Frederick Douglass should consult a number of works. Fortunately, Douglass has attracted a host of biographers, beginning with the lightly researched studies of Frederic M. Holland, Frederick Douglass: The Colored Orator (New York, 1891), James M. Gregory, Frederick Douglass: The Orator (Springfield, Mass., 1893), Charles W. Chestnutt, Frederick Douglass (Boston, 1899) and Booker T. Washington, Frederick Douglass (Philadelphia, 1906). While a more scholarly approach was taken by Philip S. Foner, Frederick Douglass (New York, 1964), the most objective and revealing biography was written by Benjamin Quarles, Frederick Douglass (Washington, 1948).

There is, of course, no substitute for the writings of Douglass himself for an understanding of his thought. Philip Foner has collected many of these in his The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass (4 vols., New York, 1950-55). The best source of information on Douglass is his autobiographies: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (Boston, 1845); My Bondage and My Freedom (New York, 1855); and Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (Hartford, 1881). Many of his speeches and editorials can be found in the journals he edited, The North Star, 1847-51, Frederick Douglass' Paper, 1851-60, and Douglass' Monthly, 1858-63.

A number of books describe the events, people, and institutions which were of special importance in Douglass' life. Kenneth Stampp, The Peculiar Institution (New York, 1956) and John W. Blassingame, The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Ante-Bellum South (New York, 1972) are cogent and dispassionate discussions of slavery. Benjamin Quarles in Black Abolitionists (New York, 1969) and Leon Litwack, North of Slavery: The Negro in the Free States, 1790-1860 (Chicago, 1961), portray the milieu in which

Douglass worked in the North. The Civil War era is chronicled in Dudley T. Cornish, The Sable Arm (New York, 1956) and Benjamin Quarles, The Negro in the Civil War (Boston, 1953).

John Hope Franklin, Reconstruction (Chicago, 1961), W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction (New York, 1935), and Robert Cruden, The Negro in Reconstruction (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1969) are essential for unraveling the complexities of life in the United States in the 15 years following the Civil War. The post-Reconstruction developments and Douglass' role in them are considered in August Meier, Negro Thought in America, 1880-1915 (Ann Arbor, 1963), Rayford Logan, The Negro in American Life and Thought: The Nadir, 1877-1901 (New York, 1954) and C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow (2d. edition, New York, 1966).