Ottilie Assing to Frederick Douglass, July 12, 1877

OTTILIE ASSING TO FREDERICK DOUGLASS

Munich[, Germany.] 12 July 1877.

MY DEAR FRIEND:

I have your dear and interesting letter of the 25 of June,^{1Douglass’s letter to Assing has not survived.} and after getting it at the Post Office swallowed it in an omnibus. The meeting with your old master naturally was one of the chief points of interest and under the circumstances you met him <up>, loaded with honor, one of the most prominent men in the country, it must have been quite gratifying to you and rather an act of condescention on your part than otherwise.^{2At the invitation of a black friend, Charles Caldwell, Douglass returned to St. Michaels, Talbot County, Maryland, on 17 June 1877 after a forty-one-year absence. Upon his arrival, the newly appointed U.S. marshal of the District of Columbia received word that his former owner, Captain Thomas Auld, requested a visit. Douglass, who had desired such a meeting, saw the bedridden eightytwo-year-old man at the home of Auld’s son-in-law, William H. Bruff. During this brief reunion, Douglass struck a conciliatory pose with Auld. According to the Washington Evening Star, both men wept when they parted company that day. The visit was widely publicized. Washington Evening Star, 19 June 1877; Harper’s Weekly, 7 July 1877; Frederic May Holland, Frederick Douglass: The Colored Orator (New York, 1895), 342–43; Preston, Young Frederick Douglass, 180–89.} If I only for once could see the Eastern shore in your company! Now as we see that you can venture to go there, I dare to hope that I may yet have that pleasure. Your encounter with Schurz^{3Carl Schurz.} too is rather a pleasant affair, if— as I think it quite natural, you like each other’s society, why not do so? I do not object either to associate superficially once in a while with people of whose character and fidelity to principle I have not exactly the highest estimate, provided they are interesting company.—As a matter of course I am delighted that the malignant pro-slavery element of Washington has failed in the attempt to oust you from your position, once for the sake of principle and the precedent established for the first time, and further because I want you to keep the office as long as possible on account of its pecuniary advantages, and just as much because I cannot bear the idea of your going on lecturing trips any more to the far West in midwinter. There is nothing surprising in the fact of my being so soon informed of your troubles since I have had all the time the “Times”,^{4Assing probably refers to the New York Times.} our good and faithful ally to keep me posted up about affairs at home. Today however I received the last number of the semester and do not want to renew my subscription for the few weeks which I have yet to stay on this continent. I shall not fail to read Grace Greenwood’s letter^{5Assing likely refers to the 9 July 1877 article “The New Order of Things: A Few Personal Explanations. ‘Heresies’ and ‘Vagaries’ Accounted For—The Civil Service Reformation—Who Are ‘Taken’ and Who Are Left—The South’s Forgiving Spirit—Mr. Dick’s Kite,” by “Grace Greenwood,” the pseudonym of Sara Jane Clarke Lippincott. New York Times, 9 July 1877; ANB (online).} which doubtless is to be found in this number though I have not yet found time to look for it. It is great comfort to me that you take a hopeful view of the alteration. At a distance matters look terrible and I should give up Republicanism not exactly for dead but for paralyzed at least for many years, thanks to Hayes,^{6Rutherford B. Hayes.} Schurz and others of the same tendency if it were not for your hopefullness. Every number of the paper records new deeds of crime and violence.—Judge Hilton’s dastardly attempt against the equal rights of the Jews reveals prejudice of race in a quarter from which I suspected it least and I wonder what will be the result.^{7Henry Hilton (1824–99) was a wealthy New York judge and owner of the Grand Union Hotel in Saratoga, New York. In June 1877, Joseph Seligman (1819–80), a Jewish banker and successful clothing merchant, was denied entry to the hotel by Hilton, and widespread public criticism of Hilton ensued. Henry Ward Beecher gave a sermon in support of Seligman and others of the Jewish faith; Jewish-owned businesses and merchants refused to continue doing business with Hilton; several protests were led in San Francisco, California, and Cincinnati. Hilton argued that he was not opposed to Jews; rather, he was opposed to Seligman himself. New York Times, 19 June 1877, 25 August 1899; ANB (online).} It is an ugly feature in human nature that the lower the stage of development which either a race or an individual has reached, the more it is oppressed, the more it will yearn to oppress some one more humble in

its turn. The Jews and the Irish, so long downtrodden in their own country are foremost among the negro haters and the slaves used to vent their superiority on poor defenseless animals.

This has been a very rich day for me, quite aside from the daily revelling in works of art, in which this city is overrich.^{8Munich was an important European city for artists from 1850 to the early twentieth century. The Munich Academy was perhaps the most famous fine-arts teaching institution in Europe at the time, particularly for painting. Along with aspiring European artists, American realists flocked to study at the city’s art colonies in the 1870s. Robin Lenman, “A Community in Transition: Painters in Munich, 1886–1924,” Central European History, 15: 3–33 (March 1982).} First I received your letter and all the afternoon I had a call from the wife and the daughter^{9Ludwig Andreas von Feuerbach (1804–72) met his future wife, the wealthy heiress Bertha Löw (1803–83), in 1834. By the time the couple married in 1837, she had inherited partial ownership of both a porcelain factory and a castle in the small Bavarian town of Bruckberg. The couple made their home on the grounds of the castle, and the income generated by the factory allowed Feuerbach to pursue writing as a full-time career. Following an economic downturn in the late 1840s, however, profits from the porcelain factory began to decline, and by 1859 it was bankrupt. The Feuerbachs were forced to sell their property in Bruckberg, and they moved to the small village of Rechenberg (near Nuremberg), where they lived in significantly reduced circumstances for the remainder of their lives. Their daughter Leonore Feuerbach (1839–1923), who served as her father’s literary executor, published a collection of his sayings in 1879. In 1919, she donated her father’s papers to the university library in Munich. Ludwig Feuerbach, Ausspruche aus seinen Werken gesammelt von Leonore Feuerbach (Leipzig, Germany, 1879); Peter C. Caldwell, Love, Death, and Revolution in Central Europe (New York, 2009), 31–36, 144; William Raeper and Linda Smith, A Brief Guide to Ideas (Grand Rapids, Mich., 1997), 121; Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (online).} of Feurbach,^{10Ludwig Andreas von Feuerbach (1804–72) was a German philosopher who wrote The Essence of Christianity (1841), a highly influential materialist critique of religious belief, which Douglass and Assing read together. According to Assing in a letter to Feuerbach, their reading of his book “resulted in a total reversal of his attitudes,” namely, it converted Douglass into a freethinker and atheist. Douglass continually grappled with the hypocrisy of Christian doctrine and American churches but continued to use biblical and religious imagery in his speeches and writings, indicating that Assing may have overstated the newness and the extent of his “conversion.” Assing to Ludwig Feuerbach, 15 May 1871, in Lohmann, Radical Passion, 364; Diedrich, Love across Color Lines, 227–307.} who <are> spending some months of the summer in a country place in the neighborhood and had come to the city for the sake of making my acquaintance. It was a great treat to me, and I also felt quite gratified to think that it is largely owing to our exertions when they now can afford the luxury of going in the country at all. They are two very good, warmhearted and genuine women, intelligent and receptive though a little depressed and kept down by years of care and privation. I made them feel directly quite at home with me and we talked about everything. It is surprising how—entirely aside from opinion and principles we a[gre]e in taste and sympathies, they are about as great lovers of animals as I am and so too was Feurbach. Particularly he had a great liking for cats, large and little ones, and they all like myself too, liked to raise and fondle mice, frogs, lizards and all such little usually dispised people. They send you a hearty greeting and would be delighted <to> make your acquaintance. In Nürnberg^{11Nuremberg, Germany.} they are quite isolated and suffer from the lack of friends whose society would give them any gratification.

Did I or not tell you in my last letter that I had seen my old friend who had promised me disclosures about Ludmilla’s^{12Rosa Ludmilla Assing (1821–80) was the younger sister of Ottilie, with whom she had a tumultuous and fraught relationship. Ludmilla, like her sister, was a successful writer and journalist who wrote numerous biographies and edited a sixty-volume set of her uncle Karl Varnhagen von Ense’s personal papers. Following her uncle’s death in 1858, the bulk of his estate went to Ludmilla, incensing Ottilie and causing a greater rift between the two. Following the publication of her uncle’s papers, which proved controversial, Ludmilla was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment by the Prussian government. Ludmilla was visiting Florence, Italy, at the time and chose to stay in the country in order to avoid the sentence. Although she was pardoned in 1866, she remained in Florence, where she built a large mansion. In 1873, Ludmilla married Gino Reimelli, twenty years her junior, whom she divorced a year later. Ludmilla fell ill with meningitis in the late 1870s and was sent to a mental asylum, where she died in 1880. She left nothing of her estate to Ottilie. Henry and Mary Garland, The Oxford Companion to German Literature, (Oxford: 1997), 40; Diedrich, Love across Color Lines, 7, 59–61, 311–13, 354–55.} behavior towards me? I think I have, and won’t risk to tell you the same thing over again. If I am mistaken, let me know and I shall tell you.

I regret that I told you to direct next to Paris, because not expecting to be there before the first week of August, it will last a good while before I shall get it and now it is too late to mend or alter the matter. Safe it is at any rate, only that for a while it will lig lie at anchor. My stay in Hamburg ended as pleasantly as it began and it required a great resolution to tear me away from new and old friends. Everywhere kindness and attentions too from beginning to end. Mr. Susmann too, who first had been absent and whom I saw only one day before leaving, wants to be kindly remembered to you.

Good night this time! It is long after midnight, about five in the afternoon with you, and your nightowl has yet much to do in order to be ready in time tomorrow.

Yours ever

OTILLIA

[hand-drawn pictures of a cat, mouse, frog, lizard, and crab]

ALS: General Correspondence File, reel 3, frames 157R–60L, FD Papers, DLC.

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