Introduction

Scholars have focused on Frederick Douglass's work in the United States and his international endeavors in Europe, but they have given less attention to his relations with British Canada, just some 85 miles from his adopted hometown of Rochester, New York. (1) Douglass lived in Rochester for 25 years and worked across the American-Canadian border to propel change. There, Douglass had to negotiate a transnational identity and the overlapping worlds of the United States, Canada, Great Britain, and the African Diaspora. Douglass was connected with Canada through his newspapers, organizational networks, annual celebrations, and speaking engagements all of which required him to make frequent border crossings. He unmistakably developed a better understanding and relationship with Canada than historians previously believed. Still, little meaningful work has been done to link Douglass firmly to British Canada. In wake of the bicentennial celebration of Douglass's birth, these are the types of questions that need to be directly addressed.

This article explores the transnational orientation of Douglass with Canada and his ability to build relationships and networks across the international boundary, while still skillfully promoting the end of American slavery. Throughout his life, Douglass defied arbitrary social barriers, sometimes at considerable personal risk. He challenged constructed borders, whether racial, sexual, or national. Someone this multi-dimensional does not fit the simple notion of American nationalism. He was allied to a broader network of activism that transcended artificial national borders that separated people, instead of allowing Blacks in North America to grasp the intersections of their realities. His interactions with Canada, and the larger international community, reflected his wider philosophy of building solidarity and minimizing divisions.

The term transnational is carefully applied to Douglass to define his understanding that the border between the United States and British Canada separated political sovereignties, but it could not diminish social and cultural ties and the common cause to end bondage. By building upon the shared experience of Blacks, Douglass forged networks and economic links that transcended the roadblocks of national borders; he saw the superficiality of those divides as simply another attempt to fracture the Black community. (2) His intermitted comprehension of American-Canadian affairs and interaction across international lines constituted a deeper complexity of thought and active manipulation that was judiciously implemented by Douglass. He cultivated this ability to maneuver diverging zones in the "border state" of Maryland, he developed this mindset fully in the American-Canadian crossroads of Rochester during a critical pre-Civil War period; and he maintained this way of life in Washington, D.C., a junction of North-South interface. By investigating Douglass through a transnational lens with Canada scholars can begin to see him in a new light.

Misconceptions about Douglass's transnational outlook have materialized because he grew to support the principles of the United States Constitution, rejected mass migration outside of America, and opposed foreign colonization. However, the positions Douglass took in these areas cannot cloud his authentic transnational and international orientation and his global approach to ending slavery and other injustices in the United States....