Frederick Douglass: “Our National Capital” Lecture

“Our National Capital” was a lengthy speech delivered by the former slave Frederick Douglass on May 8, 1877, at the Douglass Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, just after his appointment by President Rutherford B. Hayes to the post of federal marshal for the District of Columbia. The speech was essentially the same as one he had delivered in Washington a year earlier but had not published. In the lecture, Douglass commented caustically on Washington’s antebellum days and the lingering effects of the city’s legacy of slavery in attitudes toward blacks.