Frederick Douglass at Cedar Hill

In eighteen seventy-seven, Frederick Douglass purchased a house on a hilltop in Anacostia, on the southeastern edge of Washington, with a view that extended across the Anacostia River toward the Capitol dome. He named it Cedar Hill. He was fifty-nine years old. He had been many things by then: an escaped slave, a newspaper publisher, an adviser to Lincoln, a United States Marshal, a recorder of deeds for the District. He would live at Cedar Hill until his death on February twentieth, eighteen ninety-five.

The house is still there. The National Park Service maintains it as a museum. The view from the porch is still the same view, give or take the highway visible along the river.

Douglass used Cedar Hill as a working home. He wrote there. He received visitors. He gave interviews. In his later years he was a complicated figure in the politics of Reconstruction and its aftermath, a man who had more access to official Washington than almost any other Black American of his era, and who was also watching, from his porch across the river, the systematic dismantling of the rights that Reconstruction had briefly established.

His second wife, Helen Pitts, was white. She was twenty years younger than Douglass and had worked in his office at the recorder of deeds. Their marriage in eighteen eighty-four prompted outrage from both white and Black critics, though for different reasons. Douglass declined to elaborate on the subject. When asked by a reporter to explain himself, he is said to have replied that his first wife was the color of his mother, and his second wife was the color of his father. Whether he said this precisely, or whether the line grew in the telling, the sentiment has been attributed to him in multiple sources and fits the tonal register of his public speech.

The Anacostia neighborhood that surrounds Cedar Hill today is one of the most historically Black neighborhoods in Washington, settled substantially by freedpeople after the Civil War, and one of the most underinvested neighborhoods in a city of extraordinary contrasts.