Douglass Bar Cart

Details

The Douglass Bar Cart is a sophisticated and versatile addition to any dining room or entertaining space. Perfect for serving your favorite cocktails or displaying small bites, this beautifully designed bar cart offers ample space to store bottles, glassware, or decorative items. Featuring two fixed glass shelves, the wine bottle rack provides a stylish way to store your favorite wines, while the open compartments on the bottom shelf offer additional storage for serving trays or accessories. Built with a sturdy metal frame, the cart exudes elegance, while the handle and towel rack add both practicality and convenience. Supported by smooth-rolling caster wheels, the Douglass Bar Cart cart is easily movable, making it perfect for entertaining guests with ease and flair.

Editors' Note

The Douglass Collection is named in honor of the orator, activist and icon of 19th century America, Frederick Douglass. Born Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey, a child enslaved on Holme Hill Farm in Talbot county, Maryland by Captain Aaron Anthony — clerk and superintendent of overseers for the wealthy landowner Edward Lloyd V — Douglass was raised by his maternal grandmother, who had the responsibility of raising the plantation’s enslaved children. Throughout his life he remained unsure of his actual birthdate, placing 1817 as his best estimate, though scholarly accounts based on Anthony’s records state 1818 as the year. For the day, he chose February 14th, remembering that his mother, Harriet Bailey, liked to call him her little Valentine. He met her only a few times in his young life. Though captive on the same plantation, she was hired out to work daily on a farm more than 12 miles away, returning only for a few brief hours before beginning work again. “I do not recollect of ever seeing my mother by the light of day,” he recalled in the first of his bestselling autobiographies, 1845’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. Douglass was only seven when his mother died, though as intended, their long separation blunted much of the feeling Douglass had surrounding the event. She had been, he would later learn, the only literate Black person in the county. Douglass’ own education would begin when he was eight, starting with lessons from Sophia Auld, the wife of Hugh Auld, the brother-in-law of Aaron Anthony’s daughter. The short-lived lessons, which ended abruptly once Sophia’s husband became aware of them, were enough to spark a lifelong fascination with knowledge. Continuing to learn in secret — as literacy was illegal for people enslaved in Maryland at that time — Douglass would exchange food for lessons with poor white boys in the area. Between 1826 and 1838, he continued to change hands, whether through inheritance or hiring, becoming a skilled craftsman earning a salary for his work at shipyards, and meeting his eventual wife, Anna Murray, a forewoman of color. Yet he remained in bondage, and subject to the whims and rages of his so-called “masters” who were frequently physically and psychologically abusive. Douglass made his escape in 1838. Disguised as a sailor, he escaped Maryland via train and steamboat, eventually arriving in New York City. There he met the Black abolitionist, David Ruggles, who helped relocate Douglass and Anna — then married — to New Bedford, Massachusetts. It was there that Frederick chose the last name, “Douglass,” having traveled since his escape under the alias, Frederick Johnson. It was also in New Bedford that Douglass would begin his career as an orator, inspired at first by his frequent readings of The Liberator, a newspaper published by abolitionist, William Lloyd Garrison. In 1841, one of his speeches in New Bedford was attended by banker William C. Coffin, who invited him to speak at a convention of the Anti-Slavery Society being held in Nantucket that year. The success of the speech began his work with both the Anti-Slavery and the American Anti-Slavery Societies, and by 1845 he had published the first of his three autobiographies. The second, My Bondage and My Freedom, was published in 1855, while the third, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass was, released in 1881. His first narrative, however, was written largely with the purpose of disproving the idea that he had never actually been enslaved. The growing rumor stemmed from white audience members’ disbelief that anyone born into slavery could speak with the energy and intellect that he did. The book was successful in its endeavor, naming specific dates and figures from Douglass’ past. With that success however, came the threat of recapture as he was legally considered a fugitive slave. This prompted him to spend two years touring the United Kingdom, where he lectured in England, Ireland and Scotland between 1845 and 1847. His stirring speeches and riveting narrative garnered such support from British audiences that the Quaker abolitionists, Ellen and Anna Richardson, gathered the support of the community to purchase Douglass from Hugh Auld, allowing him to return to America a free man in 1847. Arriving in Rochester, New York, he founded a newspaper, The North Star, which after an 1851 merger with The Liberty Party Paper, circulated as Frederick Douglass’ Paper, until 1860. He would later found Douglass’ Monthly, which ran from 1859 – 1863, and New National Era, which circulated between 1870 and 1874. An early master of what would later come to be known as branding, Douglass made full use of his popularity and worked strategically to bolster it. This included the iconic hairstyle that he cultivated throughout his life, and his embrace of photography as a means to transform the narrative around Black people, often using his own incredible successes as a model. As a result, he is recorded as the single most photographed American of the 19th century, and among the most photographed in the world for his time. He employed his celebrity as expertly as he crafted it, using it to recruit young Black men — including his own sons, Lewis Henry Douglass and Charles Remond Douglass — both whom served with the 54th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment. However, he clashed with Lincoln over the issue of Black suffrage, and following Lincoln’s assassination, at the unveiling of the Emancipation Memorial, delivered a stirring yet frank appraisal of the man, noting that while his actions seemed “radical” to white Americans, to Black Americans he was “tardy.” Following the war, the range of his activism increased to include new issues, and he spoke in favor of Chinese immigration, naturalization and suffrage in 1869. He also continued to speak frequently for a woman’s right to vote, a topic he had been vocal on as early as early as 1848, when he was the only Black person in attendance at the nation’s first women’s rights convention in Seneca Falls. As active in Reconstruction as he had been during the war, Douglass ascended to increasingly lofty positions. Living in Washington D.C. by 1874, Douglass was appointed head of the Freedman's Savings and Trust Company, established by Congress in 1865 as a bank specifically for the savings of formerly enslaved people and Black Civil War veterans. Despite his best efforts, including informing Congress of missing funds, and using $10,000 of his own money to bolster it, the bank failed within the year, erasing the savings of thousands of Black families, totaling some 3 million dollars — equivalent to more than 85 million dollars today. Later, in 1877, President Rutherford B. Hayes appointed Douglass to be the U.S. Marshal of the District of Columbia, making him the first African American to ever hold the position. Twelve years later, in 1889, he became America’s Minister to Haiti, assigned to the task by President Benjamin Harrison. Frederick Douglass continued to travel, speak and advocate for American equality and freedom until his very last day. On February 20th, 1895, he took the stage at a Washington, D.C. meeting of the National Council of Women to a standing ovation. Hours later, he returned home and passed away from a heart attack. The Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church, where Douglass gave his last speech, The Lessons of the Hour, was the site of his funeral. Attended by thousands, including the Supreme Court justices and senators who served as pallbearers, Douglass was buried in Rochester, following the funeral. There he is remembered on his grave marker as the, “Founder of the civil rights movement in America.”