Frederick Douglass at Cedar Hill: The View From Anacostia

The house sits on a hill in Anacostia, a fifteen-room Victorian with a porch that faces northwest across the Potomac. On a clear day, from the right angle, you can see the Capitol dome. Frederick Douglass bought it in eighteen seventy-seven for six thousand seven hundred dollars.

He had been to this city before. He first arrived in Washington in eighteen forty-seven as a free Black man, having escaped enslavement in Maryland nine years earlier. He came back many times over the following decades, testifying before congressional committees, meeting with Abraham Lincoln twice during the Civil War, serving as marshal of the District of Columbia under President Hayes, and as recorder of deeds under President Arthur. He was the most famous Black American of his century, and this hilltop in Anacostia was where he chose to live the last eighteen years of his life.

From Cedar Hill he wrote. He received visitors. He watched the city. The view across the Potomac, with the Capitol dome in it, was not a simple thing for a man who had been enslaved forty miles from where he sat. The city he looked at was the same city that had tolerated a slave market within sight of that dome until eighteen fifty, that had freed its enslaved residents only in eighteen sixty-two, and that still, in eighteen seventy-seven, excluded Black Washingtonians from most of its professional and civic life. He watched it, and he kept writing.

On February twentieth, eighteen ninety-five, Frederick Douglass attended a meeting of the National Council of Women in the afternoon. The speaker was suffragist leader Anna Howard Shaw. Douglass stood and embraced her. He returned home to Cedar Hill that evening and died of a heart attack at the age of seventy-seven.

His last act was attending a women's suffrage meeting. He had spent sixty years attending meetings about things that should not have required a meeting.