Eastern Shore Writers, Part 1
Men and women from the Eastern Shore have made notable contributions to the field of literature. This article is the first of a series that will highlight these authors and their works of fiction and nonfiction. Part 1 will begin with two 19th century writers. Parts 2 and 3 will cover writers whose work was published in the 20th and 21st centuries.
Frederick Douglass (1817–1895)
Frederick Douglass was born into slavery as Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey in Talbot County. In 1826 Douglass became the property of Lucretia Auld, who sent him to serve her brother-in-law, Hugh Auld and his wife Sophia in Baltimore. Mrs. Auld began to teach him the alphabet when he was about 12, but was later convinced by her husband that education and slavery were incompatible. But Douglass continued to teach himself to read and write. In 1833, he was returned to the Eastern Shore to work on the farm of Edward Covey, who subjected Douglass to frequent beatings to the point that he fought back and the beatings stopped.
Douglass escaped slavery on Sept. 3, 1837, by boarding a northbound train. He went on to become a leading spokesman for the abolitionist movement. In 1845, he published the first of three autobiographies, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. This book became an immediate bestseller and within three years had been reprinted nine times and translated into French and Dutch. Also in 1845, he traveled in Ireland and England, where he was amazed at the feeling of freedom from racial discrimination. He spent two years there lecturing in churches. During this trip he became legally free when British supporters raised the funds to purchase his freedom.
After returning to the U.S. in 1847, he started publishing his first abolitionist newspaper, The North Star, in Rochester, N.Y. In September 1848, he published an open letter to Thomas Auld, his former master, criticizing him for his conduct and asking about members of his family. Also in 1848, he was the only Black person to attend the Seneca Falls Convention for women’s rights, at which he spoke eloquently. His second book, My Bondage and My Freedom, was published in 1855. His third autobiography, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, was published in 1882 and revised by him in 1892, three years before his death.
After the Civil War, he continued to work for full rights for African Americans and women. In 1889, President Harrison appointed him ambassador to Haiti. In 1892, he constructed rental housing for Blacks, known today as Douglass Place, in the Fells Point neighborhood of Baltimore. He died on February 20, 1895.
George Alfred Townsend (1841-1914)
George Alfred Townsend was the son of an itinerant minister and a native of Delaware. After graduating from college, he began a career as a journalist, working for the Philadelphia Enquirer. As the Civil War was beginning, he published a play, The Bohemians. During the Civil War, he was a war correspondent, traveling with the Army of the Republic during the Peninsula Campaign. He then went on a lecture tour in England, captivating the British with his tales of the war in the U.S. In 1865, he was once again working as a war correspondent, this time for the New York World. He wrote using the pen name GATH. He gained fame for his reporting on the assassination of President Lincoln; the articles were later published as The Life, Crime and Capture of John Wilkes Booth. Townsend was also the author of two novels, The Entailed Hat (1884) and Katy of Catoctin (1887), and a collection of short stories, Tales of the Chesapeake (1880).
Townsend died in 1914 and was buried at Laurel Hill Cemetery in Philadelphia. The large estate he had established in the Catoctin Mountains was given to the State of Maryland and became Gathland State Park in 1949.
Sources:
Frederick Douglass
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_Douglass
“The Original Bohemian: George Alfred Townsend,” Derek Maxfield, Aug. 6, 2020, Emerging Civil War.
https://emergingcivilwar.com/2020/08/06/the-original-bohemian-george-alfred-townsend/
A native of Wicomico County, George Shivers holds a doctorate from the University of Maryland and taught in the Foreign Language Dept. of Washington College for 38 years before retiring in 2007. He is also very interested in the history and culture of the Eastern Shore, African American history in particular.
Common Sense for the Eastern Shore
