Frederick Douglass’s Rhetorical Legacy

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Figures of Speech: Coming-To-Voice in Frederick Douglass and the Amistad Rebellion

G. Granville Ganter

St. John’s University

Frederick Douglass’s 1845 Narrative continues to be a popular pedagogical text for high school and college curricula for the didactic reason that Douglass is a strong advocate for the benefits of reading and writing. Responding to the rumor that he might have been a well-educated freeman masquerading as a runaway slave, the educational elements of Douglass’s autobiography were partially intended to explain the source of his eloquence—tracing his beginning lessons in penmanship with neighborhood boys in Baltimore to his clandestine reading of The Columbian Orator. By including the letter he forged in his first escape attempt, he implies the message that literacy set him free. Setting a precedent for many African American literary figures who came after him, including Ralph Ellison’s fictionalized Invisible Man and the real-life President Barack Obama, Douglass fashioned a compelling explanation of his coming-to-voice, which even competes with, and eventually eclipses, the drama of his escape in the book’s final chapters.

One of the most dramatic emblems of Douglass’s literary education is the moment he becomes moved to address the ships on the Chesapeake Bay—it is a picture in words of his oratorical birth. In William Lloyd Garrison’s preface to Frederick Douglass’s 1845 Narrative, he celebrates the theatrical scene: Reduced to total abjection by the brutality of his slavemaster Covey, Douglass retreats to the Chesapeake shore on Sunday, and gives a moving speech to the white-sailed ships on the horizon. Performing as if he were on stage, Douglass laments his misery, questions whether there is a God, and concludes that since Covey is probably going to kill him anyway, he might as well try to escape. According to Garrison, Douglass’s oratorical tableau is the visual and literary epitome of the basic human desire for freedom—a “whole Alexandrine library of thought, feeling, and sentiment” (7). Like Garrison’s investment in The Liberator’s 1850 masthead, adapting Josiah Wedgwood’s image of a shackled and kneeling slave asking, “Am I not a man and a brother?,” Garrison points Douglass’s readers to this moving portrait of suffering with the hope that they, too, will vicariously experience the slave’s resolution for freedom.¹ Although Garrison seems to have hoped that the scene would principally inspire sympathy for Douglass among his white readers, in Douglass’s hands it also turns into a representation of literary agency with lasting significance for African American literature. Douglass’s figure of himself—embodied in words—as communicating with the nation is echoed in similar moments of coming-to-voice in African American literary figures to the present day, and has become one of the most enduring elements of his rhetorical legacy.

Douglass’s waterside speech is a curiously artistic milestone in antislavery testimony even beyond its anguished desperation. Garrison might have pointed to many other dramatic passages—such as the whipping of Aunt Hester, the slave auction, the abandonment of Douglass’s grandmother, or even the fight with Covey—but he chose instead to highlight this highly literary, if not overwrought, transformational moment in Douglass’s consciousness. In his essay on the aesthetic elements of Douglass’s Narrative, written over forty years ago, Albert Stone argued this speech was an expression of Douglass’s artistic impulses to imaginatively synthesize his thought processes concerning freedom (72).² But put more bluntly, he might have admitted that Douglass probably never gave this speech at all. Part of what makes Douglass’s first autobiography so effective is his ability to blend his largely factual account of slavery so seamlessly with the inventions of art. Like his deliberately falsified account of his grandmother’s abandonment and death, whose purple passages remained in his autobiographies even after he admitted that they were not true, Douglass’s speech is one of the more glaring examples of his departure from conventional fact in telling his story.³

Rather than indict Douglass for some sort of moral or literary misconduct, however, I’ll argue in this essay that Douglass’s decision to draw himself emerging as a speaker in print was part of a larger impulse to shape media representation of antislavery rhetoric through what theater historian Peter Reed has called “print-performance culture” where theater and reality blend (6). Focusing on the interplay between stage, public ritual, and class politics in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a number of Anglo-Americanist scholars over the past decades have been investigating how tropes of theatricality shaped national experience. Working-class Americans were not only fans and patrons of popular theater, with strong tastes and stylistic preferences, they also acted out these performative styles in public parades, oratorical occasions, and confrontations with authority. These reenactments were mirrored and mediated though publications which, in turn, inspired further evolutions of their roles and identities in the public sphere. Even more, as sociologist Pierre Bourdieu has shown, these expressions of political voice were themselves a battleground over differing views of the function of art: Symbols of the resistance and agency of the common people, as well as their containment and their aesthetic regulation by the middle and upper classes. Representations of African American identity were importantly shaped by these reciprocal practices of print and performance in the early nineteenth century.⁴ When Douglass drew himself on the page, he was both responding to traditions of racialized (stereo)typing as well as making an intervention into those discourses.

Two hundred years after Douglass’s birth, the importance of his speech on the Chesapeake is not simply its existence as an artifact of the alleged golden age of American oratory, a dynamic statue of the eloquent slave, but also Douglass’s self-conscious manipulation of print technology to assist him as a public lecturer. Carla Peterson, Shelley Fisher-Fishkin, and Sarah Meer have all importantly analyzed Douglass’s skill as a multimedia propagandist—like Garrison himself—who deeply understood the potential of print and speech to reinforce each other.⁵ If earlier generations of Douglass critics, such as Henry Louis Gates and Houston Baker, were careful to emphasize Douglass’s difficult authorship of himself, in his attempt to break free from the expectations of both his enslavers and patrons as a literate being of his own creation, contemporary history-of-the-book scholarship might reflect on his synthesis of media forms: Douglass’s speech on the Chesapeake is a re-staging of his emergence in a new shape, a literary avatar or meme of himself as an African American orator.⁶ This image is not only a significant racial intervention into the norms of American culture (move over Daniel Webster), but a doorway to appreciating the aesthetics of antislavery propaganda. If Douglass’s book imagines his literacy as fighting the lies of slavery with truth, his theatrical epiphany on the Chesapeake is paradoxically an index of sincerity and showmanship at the same time.

Douglass’s decision to represent himself oratorically upon the page was in many ways scripted for him directly after his escape in 1838. Although the influence of the story of Madison Washington’s 1841 rebellion on the slave ship, Creole, is well known to scholars of Douglass’s novella, The Heroic Slave, the influence on Douglass of “Joseph” Cinqué’s rebellion two years earlier is less well documented.⁷ In early September 1839, the country was riveted by the story of the slave rebellion on the ship, Amistad, where the slaves successfully overthrew their captors, took possession of the ship, and while attempting to sail home to Africa, ended up off the tip of Long Island. They were soon recaptured by the U.S. navy, however, put in jail, and over the following two years, the American courts tried to decide whether they were kidnapped African freemen fighting for their lives (deserving freedom), or murderous chattel owned by the Spanish government (to be returned as slaves). Although they were eventually freed by U.S. courts, their trials occupied the interest of the nation for several years just after Douglass had escaped from slavery. As Marcus Rediker has documented, within days of their capture, the New York Sun published numerous articles and broadsides about the rebellion’s captured leader, Cinqué, where he was represented as giving several heroic speeches to his mates (99–122).⁸ In one of the first speeches published by the Sun on August 31, 1839, Cinqué declared to his shipmates that he did not fear being hanged, and that it was better to die free than live as slaves, a statement resulting from his failed attempt to escape arrest by swimming:

Friends and Brothers—we would have returned but the sun was against us. I would not see you serve the white man, so I induced you to help me kill the Captain. I thought I should be killed. —I expected it. It would have been better. You had better be killed than live many moons in misery. I shall be hanged, I think every day. But this does not pain me. I could die happy, if by dying I could save so many of my brothers from the bondage of the white man. (qtd. in Rediker 273)

The following day, after promising his navy captors that he would retrieve more of the ship’s gold coin if they let him go below decks, he gave another speech to his men upon getting into the ship’s hold, proposing an immediate rebellion that would probably end in all their deaths:

My Brothers, I am once more among you, having deceived the enemy of our race by saying I had doubloons. I came to tell you that you have only one chance for death, and none for Liberty. I am sure you prefer death, as I do. You can by killing the white man now on board, and I will help you, make the people here kill you. It is better for you to do this, and then you will not only avert bondage yourselves, but prevent the entailment of unnumbered wrongs on your children. Come—come with me then—. (Rediker 273)

Because Cinqué was Mende, and spoke no English, the initial source for all his published speeches was the interpretation of a Congolese cabin boy, Antonio, who had picked up Spanish while living in Cuba for a decade. Still faithful to his master, Antonio served as an important witness in court during the first days of the investigation. Beyond problems of translation, however, these published speeches show two forces at work—the journalistic impulse to “frame” Cinqué theatrically, and the desperate reality of Cinqué’s actions—his oratorical conduct was no mere “act.”

It is not necessary to exactly establish the period when Douglass heard about the Amistad, or even that he read particular accounts of the Amistad case, because numerous articles and broadsides were so widely reprinted from New Hampshire to the Carolinas. The Liberator began covering the case on September 6, 1839, and in New Bedford, where Douglass had been living since his escape the year before, the New Bedford Mercury began reprinting articles on September 9, with both papers covering the case extensively over the following year. By November of 1841, just after Douglass formally became an antislavery lecturer in Massachusetts, Cinqué was also giving advertised public addresses in Boston to raise money for the Amistad captives’ return to west Africa. Douglass’s knowledge of the case probably would have been also piqued by the fact that he worked as a ship caulker in the same city, Baltimore, where La Amistad (originally christened, The Friendship) had been built just six or eight years earlier.⁹

The Amistad rebellion was a national sensation, with a Bowery district melodrama appearing within a week of the Africans’ capture. Variously entitled The Black Schooner, or, the Pirate Slaver Armistad [sic], or The Long Low Black Schooner, it ran for two weeks and featured scenes of the captive slaves, their revolt, and Cinqué’s oratory, likely scripted verbatim from the newspaper coverage. Douglass would have heard about the Amistad case from any number of sources, and in particular, Cinqué’s physical description as a stoic hero. In a color plate of Cinqué, the Sun has him standing proudly on deck in a half-open red shirt, clean white trousers, with one hand on his hip and the other casually holding a machete, head turned shipward in calm resolve, and captioned with his final speech about resisting to the death (see Rediker, plates between 114–115).

Cinqué’s image had power even two years later in the autumn of 1841 when the escaped slave, Madison Washington, arrived at Robert Purvis’s home in Philadelphia, who had recently hosted Cinqué at his house in May. Purvis, an African American antislavery activist who had assisted in Cinqué’s defense, had just received a large portrait he had commissioned of Cinqué and which was later put on public display. As Purvis told the story to a news reporter in 1889, Madison Washington was greatly impressed by the painting, and Purvis then told him the story of Cinqué’s revolt. Washington responded by telling Purvis that he was headed back south to help his wife escape slavery, a dangerous mission that Purvis vainly tried to dissuade him from undertaking. Unfortunately, by November 1841 Washington had been recaptured. While being taken to New Orleans on the slave ship Creole, however, he followed Cinqué’s precedent, and he too escaped his restraints and led a successful slave insurrection which landed the ship on the free British territory of Nassau in the Caribbean (Purvis; Rediker 224–25; Douglass, Heroic Slave, 168–77). Douglass would later memorialize Washington’s rebellion in his own novella, The Heroic Slave, following the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in 1852. As he imagined Washington’s forest-oratory scenes at the beginning of the novel, however, he was doing so for the second time. He had experimented with a similar tableau when he drew himself speaking on the Chesapeake.

When Douglass adapts the signification of Cinqué’s oratory to his own condition in the Narrative, he makes several shrewd modifications. The most significant difference is the displacement of his own rebellion to later in the chapter with Covey. Here, Douglass uses the speech to mark the mental and literary origin of his surprising resistance to Covey and eventual escape. In this sense, he appropriates Cinqué’s nobility without the bloodshed. The speech illustrates the unexpected agency brought by his literacy—the process of speaking brings him to his decision to escape or to die trying. Initially trained as a speaker by reading schoolbook oratory, Douglass’s performance represents the end of his apprenticeship and the beginning of his literary maturity, conceptualizing his own agency but not yet acting on it.

The scene’s exaggerated theatricality is another important element of Douglass’s portrait. Brought to his lowest point by Covey’s abuse, he questions the existence of God with Hamlet-like postures of self-interrogation and woe. As Lawrence Levine’s work has shown, Douglass is both signifyin(g) the high culture of Shakespeare as well as playing the noble renegade of popular melodrama. Douglass is self-consciously fusing both traditions of high and low art in his earnest soliloquy but is careful to cast himself as authentic virtue in blackface.

The key is that Douglass is no highwayman, rogue, or insurrectionary leader: He is an ordinary human being from whom something unexpected emerges, returning us to a modified version of Cinqué. Drawing from tropes of melodramatic disclosure such as the moment of vindication before a courtroom judge (or other handy symbols of the cultural super-ego, like parents), where an unlikely hero or heroine proves her innocence before Authority, Douglass reveals his true inner value to the reader. He is not a beast, he is an ordinary man undergoing an extraordinary transformation through speech, and the only other people who witness this unlikely birth at that moment are those holding his book.

Beyond Douglass’s simple account of how he took his education in moments stolen from his masters’ control, an equally important part of Douglass’s literacy narrative is a sketch of the dawn of his sense of agency—how he learned to make words do things for him. By boldly appropriating the principal rhetorical model of his schoolbooks, the righteous speaker, Douglass discovered a meme of self-presentation where his theatricalism actually becomes a means of transformation and empowerment. That’s a slightly more complicated drama than his ingenuity in learning his ABCs because it so deftly manipulates the world of the imagination and artistic convention to shape its significance.

And it is his melodramatic trope of oratorical emergence which has had such a long lasting imprint on African American literature since Douglass: Sojourner Truth’s accounts of her first speeches at the Millerite camp meeting in Northampton (as told in 1850); the Invisible Man’s surprising eruption into speech at the eviction and eulogy scenes; Janie’s courtroom “speech” at the end of Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God; and even Barack Obama’s account of his first public speech on apartheid divestment where he discovered a sincere belief in oratory despite his own cool skepticism (Dreams 106-07; Ganter). This expressive moment in “print-performance” is widely available in American culture more generally, from the oratorical myths surrounding the Revolutionary generation, to Edwin Whipple’s account of the Daniel Webster Supreme court speech on behalf of Dartmouth College (xxi), and to numerous “as told about” stories of Native American orators like Logan, Red Jacket, or Chief Joseph. Douglass’s influential place in this tradition was to author his own avatar of the moment he emerged as a speaker.

Thanks to Douglass, his portrait of coming-to-voice is widely grasped as one of the defining moments of agency even to the present day. In a fitting return to Douglass’s adaptation of Cinqué’s heroism on the Amistad, Steven Spielberg’s 1997 film, Amistad, also draws from well known slave narratives, most notably Olaudah Equiano’s, as well as the infamous story of the slave ship Zong, whose captain drowned several scores of slaves for insurance money in 1781.¹⁰ The film’s debts to Equiano’s vivid account of his capture and experience on the middle passage is unmistakable, but its credit to Frederick Douglass is equally important, if less obvious. The film also focuses on Cinque’s emerging literacy: After being branded a murderer, he seeks to make himself understood despite the fact that no one speaks his language.

Significantly, the film does not represent any of Cinqué’s heroic speeches to his men which so enthralled nineteenth-century audiences, but it nonetheless fetishistically restages the unveiling of his literacy several times. In one of the climactic moments of the first court trial of the captives, the film focuses on Cinqué’s frustration at a key moment in his case. He is chained in the middle of the prisoners’ gallery and still unable to understand the words of the prosecution and the defense, but he can read from the body language of people in court that his defense has stalled. Determined to do something to help himself, he tentatively puts together some English terms he gathered from his captors, and interrupts the court testimony by repeating versions of the phrase, “Give us … free … Give us … us free.” The prosecution orders that he be silenced, but he suddenly stands up, (as choral background music begins to swell), and his plaintive tone changes to a demand. He raises his shackles and outstretches his hands, shouting, “Give us, us free!” The camera slowly pans across the audience’s reaction in court, his accusers angry at his insolence, but the great majority of faces express astonishment, wonder, and pride at his rude eloquence: For the first time, they glimpse Cinqué’s humanity. In melodramatic terms, this tableau is the moment of unveiling—the camera pulls back revealing Cinqué silhouetted by sunbeams from behind, a man wrongfully enslaved, and the entire court recognizes it. Like Douglass on the Chesapeake, it is a portrait of Cinqué’s virtue emerging simultaneously with his speech.

After Cinque has learned English, the film continues to develop his agency as a literate being—it shows him reading court papers and working with his lawyers to develop his defense at the Supreme Court. The second climax of the film is built around Cinqué’s transmission of that literacy. Just before the film’s conclusion, when John Quincy Adams confesses to him that they may not win the case, Cinqué responds by assuring him that the Mende believe that in times of struggle a person is able to reach back into the past to summon the power of one’s ancestors for help. When Adams gives his peroration to the Supreme Court, he retells Cinqué’s story standing in front of the courtroom’s decorative busts of the Revolutionary generation, which includes one of John Adams, his own father. As the younger Adams argues the case to victory in front of the ghostly statue of his parent, simultaneously redeeming his own reputation as a failed former President, the film fuses Cinqué’s story with his in a sublime spectacle of national redemption. As much as the climax pays tribute to the agency of the Revolutionary generation, however, Douglass also becomes the ancestor here—and he would probably be pleased about the recirculation of Cinqué’s legacy though him.

In an extraordinary essay on the limitations of celebrating Douglass’s use of the literacy myth, Wendy Ryden points to the ways in which many high school and college students cleverly regurgitate Douglass’s story back at teachers in order to get a better grade. Indeed, there is a formidable contemporary scholarly industry attached to the teaching and writing of modern day “literacy narratives” in which Douglass is featured as a prominent role model. Ryden quotes several examples from the literacy narratives of students who, after reading Douglass, “discover” that literacy is universally empowering. Even worse, she laments the way some faculty use the narrative as a morality tale, shaming lazy students for not working as hard as Douglass did (9, 12). For those of us who frequently teach the Narrative, it is a wince-worthy Foucauldian lesson of the dangers of pedagogy—a text that is supposedly about the discovery of discursive freedom being used as mind control. Toward the end of her essay, however, she turns to an appreciation of Douglass’s narrative as a product of crisis, transculturation, and uncertainty. Rather than promoting the text as a simple formula for success, Ryden asks us to “proceed cautiously” about digesting its complex lessons for our students.

As I’ve sketched here, the theatrical elements of Douglass’s speech on the Chesapeake enable us to see him fashioning new public identities for African Americans in a complicated rhetoric where truth and illusion meet. Having responded to his prosecutorial critics about the bare facts of where he learned to read and write, he takes us to a different sort of venue, or theater, to show us what his literacy could achieve—the birth of a human being—a legacy so well absorbed by American society that it seems like it has always been ours.

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“So Soon as They Are Worthy”: Frederick Douglass and the Rhetoric of Educational Exclusion

Michael J. Steudeman

University of Memphis

To a Congress coping with a recently-concluded Civil War, the young Representative James A. Garfield issued a call to expand voting rights to former slaves. “I will never,” he declared, “so long as I have any voice in political affairs, rest satisfied until the way is opened by which these citizens, so soon as they are worthy, shall be lifted to the full rights of citizenship” (Appendix to the Congressional Globe 68). For the black citizens in the congressional galleries, Garfield’s words surely struck a chord. Amid the violence and continued unrest in the postbellum South, suffrage offered a potential means of security and civil rights. Nonetheless, a caveat lingered in Garfield’s argument that belied his boldness: “So soon as they are worthy.” Enfranchising the worthy meant, for Garfield, “giving the suffrage to every citizen qualified, by intelligence, to exercise it” (68). The notion of “intelligence”—and by extension, education—offered Garfield a convenient rhetorical escape route should his adversaries have accused him of moving too fast in the pursuit of freedpeople’s political rights. In an era when “intelligence” meant many things, it offered a prospect of infinite deferral. Suffrage could be conferred in law, but denied until the nebulous milestone of “worthy” had been reached.

Frederick Douglass knew, too well, the contortions by which black intellect could be denied. Speaking to the newly-opened Douglass Institute in Baltimore in September 1865, he warned incoming students of the ways their academic accomplishments would be minimized. He lamented that “it is the misfortune of our class that it fails to derive due advantages from the achievements of its individual members, but never fails to suffer from the ignorance or crimes of a single individual with whom the class is identified” (“The Douglass Institute” 91). When men like Benjamin Banneker or Robert Smalls demonstrated mental acumen that undermined racial prejudice, he continued, a “metamorphosing power” attributed that intellect “to the white race by contract or association” (91). In this way, he argued, “hesitation to extend suffrage to the colored people finds its best apology in our alleged incapacity” (90).

Douglass’s speech evinced a sobriety about the limits of education for the freedpeople in their quest for self-determination. It demonstrated a keen awareness of what Kirt Wilson has called the racial politics of mimesis, a politics that impugned black political actors—including Douglass—as merely imitating the authentic aptitude of white men. More fundamentally, Douglass identified a flexibility to the notion of “intelligence” that made it a moving target for those trying to prove their “worth.” In the nineteenth century, a whole array of interpretive practices were employed to read others’ internal character—then thought to be the primary product of education. By Reconstruction, the concept of character (and, thus, education) became more malleable, seen as an “inherently ‘plastic’ substance that hardened by habit into its final shape” (Salazar 88). As Douglass realized, this ambiguity offered a powerful hermeneutic for justifying the denial of civil rights, including those formally granted by law. By the 1890s, education thus became the rationale used by many Southern states to disenfranchise black voters (Johnson 116–43). To borrow a distinction from Robert Asen, as “the what” of citizenship became equalized in law, arbiters of civic exclusion embraced “the how” of its dispositional enactment (194). It did not matter that one casted the ballot, but what happened inside their minds as they did so.

For scholars of rhetoric, public address, and composition, it is unusual to focus on Douglass’s moments of unease about the prospects of education. More often, Douglass offers a mascot for literacy as a mode of self-formation and route out of hardship. For instance, Wendy Ryden argues that the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, a staple text in English courses at both the secondary and postsecondary level, is often taught in ways that uphold meritocratic myths while diluting Douglass’s more nuanced engagements with literacy. Problematically, this version of the narrative contributes to notions of education as a determiner of civic “worth,” notions that Douglass struggled against in his own era. As Robert S. Levine observes, Douglass lived numerous complex “lives” after the publication of the Narrative, constantly revising his autobiography and rhetoric during the last thirty years of his life (25–30). During that period, Douglass witnessed education’s convergence with an ideology that rationalized de facto limits on black men’s political participation, even after the right to vote was formally won. Though he flirted with straightforward, mythic formulations of education’s potential during the high crest of Reconstruction Era optimism, he nuanced his views as he watched freedpeople and their children collide with demeaning judgments.

As scholars concerned with civic education, it is essential that we consider the ways education has, historically, been used as a rationale for deferred rights and a way to obfuscate acts of racial discrimination. To this end, I offer an account of the famed orator’s evolving views on education before and after the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment. During the Civil War and early Reconstruction period, Douglass exhibited a clear awareness of how education could be used to delimit civil rights. Seeking to expand black voting rights, he sought to mitigate talk of educational limits as an unfair burden on former slaves. With the conferral of black voting rights by the Fifteenth Amendment, Douglass quickly identified that educational exclusion could still be cited to defer political participation. Seeing the storm to come, he thus warned black communities to pursue education while agitating to expand opportunities for integrated formal schooling. As the promise of Reconstruction faded, however, Douglass grappled with the double-edged nature of schooling as both a method of racial uplift and a mode of legitimizing racial prejudice. His message, I conclude, offers an important historical warning for rhetorical scholars as we grapple with the role of education in a democracy.

1865–1869: Suffrage or Schooling

After Appomattox, Northern policymakers engaged with the question of their responsibilities to recently emancipated slaves. Their decisions and rhetoric were driven by the logic of what Saidiya V. Hartman calls the “burdened individuality of freedom,” a discourse that rapidly shifted questions of civic duty onto the freedpeople themselves (117–18). Amid these arguments, a recurring tension emerged between education and enfranchisement as the most efficient means of rendering freedpeople “self-sufficient.” Both the ballot and literacy offered the promise of shifting the nexus of civic responsibility—and, thus, blame for hardship—onto the former slaves. But the question kept recurring of which panacea, schooling or suffrage, should “come first” in the expansion of provisions and expectations for freedpeople. In particular, opponents to suffrage stressed that education was a necessary prerequisite to the exercise of the ballot—a doctrine Frederick Douglass strictly opposed.

Joining this debate, Douglass firmly critiqued the notion that illiteracy can offer a way to rationalize a denial of voting rights. As the Civil War neared its close in February 1865, Douglass compelled an audience at the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society in Boston to set aside questions of literacy when contemplating the suffrage question. “It is said that we are ignorant; I admit it,” he conceded, before reciting his oft-repeated argument:

But if we know enough to be hung, we know enough to vote. If the negro knows enough to pay taxes to support the Government, he knows enough to vote … If he knows enough to shoulder a musket and fight for the flag, fight for the Government, he knows enough to vote. If he knows as much when he is sober as an Irishman knows when drunk, he knows enough to vote, on good American principles. (“What the Black Man Wants” 66)

Despite the argument’s nativism, Douglass’s point was not to deny the Irish voting rights, but to suggest that questions of education, literacy, or psychological capacity should not be determining criteria when deciding the moral question of voting rights. Black men deserved the right to vote, Douglass emphasized, “because it is our right, first of all,” something that should not be subject to disproportionate demands of education (63). Taking this claim a step further, Douglass reversed the common argument that illiteracy justified a denial of black voting rights. On the contrary, suffrage logically preceded education: “By depriving us of suffrage, you affirm our incapacity to form an intelligent judgment respecting public men and public measures.” The ballot, an affirmation of civic value, thus provided “a means of educating our race” (63).

Douglass regularly sang paeans to education, and made it central to his own narrative. His apprehension about tethering literacy to voting rights was found in the complex ways “education” could be read into a person’s behavior. “Education is a large word,” he said, “and means much more than some men imagine” (“Collection of Funds” 358). As he had observed at the Douglass Institute, the same acts could have a wide range of dispositions ascribed to them by others. Particularly in the mid-1860s, Douglass confronted emerging theories of scientific racism, which had significant interpretive potential for evaluating the mental acumen of black men and women (Carson 11–74). For instance, in an 1867 speech in St. Louis, Douglass chastised the “ethnologists … on their knees and measuring the human heel to ascertain the amount of intelligence he should have,” contending that their illiberal tendencies ran counter to the spirit of equality (“Sources of Danger to the Republic” 153). In this remark, Douglass reinforced his broader contention that efforts to interpret or evaluate intellect should have no bearing on whether someone receives formal political rights like suffrage (Shklar 53–54).

As efforts to expand suffrage rights accelerated, the argument to deny black voting rights due to illiteracy found new life in the racialized appeals of women’s suffrage activists (Free 133–61). Until the end of the 1860s, many women’s suffragists had advocated a universal suffrage amendment that would have enfranchised all adult men and women. During the debate over the Fifteenth Amendment, however, Congress gravitated toward language that granted black men the ballot without extending rights to women. As a result, a schism emerged between Douglass and activists like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, who appealed to education to advocate putting white women first. Debating Douglass at the American Equal Rights Association in May 1869, Anthony argued, “[I]f you will not give the whole loaf of justice and suffrage to an entire people, give it to the most intelligent first … [I]f intelligence, justice, and moralities are to be placed in the government,” she continued, “then let the question of women be brought first and that of the negro last” (“We Welcome the Fifteenth Amendment” 217). Douglass, taking umbrage with this position, saw the question of political rights in starker material terms. “I must say that I do not see how one can pretend that there is the same urgency in giving the ballot to women as to the negro,” he explained, calling it “a question of life and death” (216). Again, Douglass prioritized a concern for suffrage over schooling, refusing literacy as a requirement for citizenship.

Ultimately, Douglass spent the five years following the Civil War with a focus on securing suffrage rights, at every turn contesting efforts to assert intelligence or education as a prerequisite for citizenship. To be sure, Douglass did not deny that “gradations of intelligence” emerged through individual effort, nor that they lacked political implications in the struggle against prejudice (“Let the Negro Alone” 203). Education played a significant role in his philosophy of racial uplift and individual self-exertion. Nonetheless, he recognized the malleability of “education” as a concept, remaining critical about the ways white leaders could burden a recently-freed population to “prove” their educational worth. Even after the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment, he still came to understand that the constitutional right to vote was no guard against the nimble forms of educational exclusion.

1870-1875: Not Yet Worthy

During the congressional debate over the Fifteenth Amendment, Senators clashed over the question of literacy. Massachusetts Senator Henry Wilson, testing the body’s will to protect suffrage rights on a broad scale, proposed language that would prevent discrimination based on “race, color, nativity, property, education, or religious belief” (Congressional Globe 1029). His colleagues fixated on the educational implications of the change. Opposing Wilson, James W. Patterson of New Hampshire insisted on a state’s right to deny a population from “self-government” until they “have advanced somewhat in civilization” (1097). Patterson’s argument won the day, with the Senate rejecting Wilson’s amendment and leaving it open to the states to decide the education question. Quickly, schooling emerged as a prospective way to justify limits on black civic participation. On the day of the amendment’s ratification, Ulysses S. Grant warned Congress of the need to promote education for former slaves, to ensure that their newfound power to vote became “a blessing and not a danger.” To freedpeople, he urged that they strive “to make themselves worthy of their new privilege” (“Special Message”). By the Constitution, black men had rights; but by education, they were still, it seemed, not “worthy.”

In the month after the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment, Douglass offered a mixture of enthusiasm and apprehension about newly-granted voting rights. Speaking on April 9, 1870 at Apollo Hall in New York City, Douglass explained, “The only thing that makes me solemn on this occasion is the fact that the black man is now absolutely thrown on his own responsibility … he is stripped of every apology for any sort of lack of manhood or of usefulness in society” (“A Reform Absolutely Complete” 262). Nine days later in Albany he elaborated that “the black man has no longer an apology for lagging behind in the race of civilization … Character, not color, is to be the criterion” (“At Last” 271). To some extent, Douglass seemed to embrace Grant’s connection of civic worth to individual self-improvement. As Peter C. Myers compellingly argues, though, Douglass also faced a difficult rhetorical situation demanding that he rebuke racist theories of black “dependence” at every turn (115–19; 146–47). Consistent with his position in the late 1860s, Douglass’s arguments articulated how logics of civic exclusion would quickly be employed to rationalize the tacit denial of legal rights. Even now that suffrage had been granted, he recognized that the ignorance fostered under conditions of slavery could still be invoked.

In the three years that followed, Douglass nuanced his claim that formal rights of suffrage alone eliminated “every apology” for blacks’ struggle to attain social status and respect. In April 1873, he told an audience in Louisville that “the school-houses are open, and we, we betide our race if we fail to embrace the opportunities for the cultivation of our minds, for the improvement of our intellects” (“Recollections of the Anti-Slavery Conflict” 372). He then made clear that his argument was not a normative one—not a statement of how, in 1872, black communities should be perceived—but rather an observational word of warning. “I am not reproaching you for being poor … I am simply warning you that you may better your condition” (374). That September in Nashville, Douglass again warned rather than reproached his black audience. The address acknowledged the dire status of black citizenship in the South, contending that the white mantra of “[L]et the negro starve!” was, in effect, “still felt” (“Agriculture and Black Progress” 385). Cultivating intelligence was, for Douglass, above all a matter of refuting the faulty theories that limited conceptions of black intellect. Rather than “confirm the opinion that the negro is, by his very nature, limited to a service condition … we shall prove that, like all other men, we are capable of civilization” (393).

As Douglass sought to inspire his black audiences to disprove theories of racial inferiority, he also agitated for universal education as a responsibility of government (Buccola 148–55). Arguing for integrated common schools on a national scale, he proposed “that the colored child have the same common school right that any other child has … Until this is done,” he continued, “there will be no such thing in this country as a common school system” (“Schools are a Common Platform” 302). Schooling offered the “common platform of nationality,” a way to equalize conditions and strike out prejudices (302). Indeed, Douglass embraced equal educational opportunity as the next logical step for the nation to follow on the heels of granting suffrage. Black men had, he told an audience in New Orleans, been admitted to “the cartridge box, then to the ballot-box, then to the jury box, and now, he hopes, is to be admitted to the knowledge box” (“The Republican Party” 297). Even as Douglass spoke of individual responsibility to pursue education, he recognized that those without access to education could not rightly be blamed for failing to pursue it.

Douglass’s denunciations of educational exclusion grew more pronounced as the optimism of radical Reconstruction came to an end. The mid-1870s brought a series of death knells for civil rights: Supreme Court decisions limiting federal authority, the reassertion of white supremacist governments across the South, and the formal end of Reconstruction with the Compromise of 1877 (Foner 512–82). As civil rights vanished as a national priority, prevailing discourses “shifted the burden of duty onto the freed” (Hartman 118). Education played a critical role in this displacement, as the expansion of (limited and unequal) schooling provided a way for policymakers to purport that all black men had an opportunity for self-improvement. Speaking in Philadelphia in April 1875, Douglass decried the limits still facing black citizens in their educational effort: “Talk of having done enough for these people after two hundred years of enforced ignorance and stripes is absurd, cruel, and heartless” (“Celebrating the Past” 413). So long as freedpeople’s schoolhouses were set ablaze and teachers murdered, he contended, it would be naïve to declare that freedpeople’s challenges had passed.

To be sure, Douglass embraced aspects of the literacy myth after the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment. He did so not out of an agreement that all problems facing black citizens had been solved, but rather as part of a sober recognition of how their actions would be interpreted in the years and decades that followed. As he reiterated tenets of liberal individualism, he implicitly recognized that grafting his own story of educational pursuit onto the narrative of every emancipated slave would be folly. Education was a double-edged sword in freedpeople’s efforts to combat prejudice—a crucial means of self-preservation, but also a malleable way of justifying their further omission from public life.

Having Done Enough

Through the tumult of the ensuing twenty years, both the optimistic and apprehensive halves of Douglass’s position only strengthened. Recognizing that the nation had failed to fulfill its promises to empower black citizens, he maintained strong support for federal education policies and universal education laws (Myers 144–46). At the dedication of the Manassas Industrial School in 1894, he elaborated on his educational convictions, challenging the premise that “we have done enough for the Negro”:

For these terrible wrongs there is, in truth, no redress and no adequate compensation. The enslaved and battered millions have come, suffered, died and gone with all their moral and physical wounds into eternity. (“Liberty and Education” 623–24)

To claim former slaves had “made but little progress,” or that the nation had fulfilled its obligations, was to begin from what Douglass considered a faulty view of responsibility (624). Policymakers had been framing the question of education for black citizens in terms of doing “enough.” The debate fixated on where the line could be drawn, a point at which a person could be left to their own devices. Douglass recognized matters as more complicated. Contrary to all logic, becoming educated tended to invite more, not less, prejudice and persecution. “It is not the negro, but the quality of the negro that disturbs popular prejudice. It is his character, not his personality, which makes him an offense or otherwise” (628). With education and uplift, he observed, had come not greater respect and autonomy, but a visceral backlash to those moving beyond their station. There was, Douglass argued, no clear-cut way to prove that black citizens were “worthy” of their rights, no line of education that, once crossed, would alleviate prejudice. Without a way to be “worthy,” there could be no “enough.”

As scholars of rhetoric, we share with Douglass a passion for education as a vehicle for self-formation, for potent expression, for intellectual emancipation. Yet we have also, historically, harbored the inegalitarian view that education dictates one’s capacity to participate in a democracy. Embedded in contemporary American social theory is an inherently exclusionary assumption “that, lacking education, the ‘people’ are fated to be inherently incapable of governing themselves” (Aronowitz 76). Rhetorical scholars have historically shared this position, connecting their calls for democratic expansion to “the subsequent education that would be required for citizens to participate” (Gehrke 33, emphasis added). Still today, rhetorical scholars disconcertingly employ the term “citizen” as a shorthand for ignorant, apathetic, and disconnected members of the polity—those the Ancient Greeks called “idiots” (Rufo and Atchison 199–200). Crucially, these evaluations of civic preparedness rely upon tacit judgments about others’ dispositions, judgments that are undergirded by myriad logics of exclusion. As in Douglass’s day, education offers a seductive possibility to distinguish between the worthy and unworthy, those “fit” for exercising the ballot and those who are not. It is true that our current political moment demands a revitalization of civic education (Kahlenberg and Janey). But this beckoning call cannot descend into all-too-familiar patterns of denigrating those who lack formal education. As scholars with a vested interest in education as a method for combatting civic exclusions, we must remain vigilant against invoking education as an instrument of exclusion in its own right.

Douglass’s remarks on education during the postbellum era should give pause to those who, like the three most recent U.S. Presidents, define education as the “civil rights issue of our time” (Brown). Education, Douglass understood, is an ambiguous thing, and no silver bullet for prejudice. Still a malleable concept, the goalpost of what constitutes proper “education” can be continually moved as arguers see fit. The logic of educational meritocracy would dictate that a graduate of Columbia and Harvard should, regardless of race, be recognized as having attained an unquestionable accomplishment. Yet for Barack Obama, a whole range of discourses were developed to discredit his degrees. Some argued he attained the wrong kind of education, becoming a snobbish, out-of-touch elitist (Stiehm). Others drew on Obama’s college associations as evidence of a budding radicalism that only reified his “other”-ness (Negrin). Others still—including his successor in the White House—even insinuated that Obama’s entire time in college was a hoax (Farley). In his own day, Douglass witnessed (and experienced) similar discursive backflips from those who would deny the intellect of black citizens. Contemporary scholars can learn from the rhetoric he developed in response, a discourse that balanced schooling’s emancipatory promise with its discursive limits.

For our contemporary moment, Douglass’s legacy rests in the clear distinction between reproach and warning for marginalized students. Without casting judgment on those who lacked education, he provided a sober assessment of the ways education had transformed the language of civic inclusion. He recognized education’s emergence as the designated vessel for social mobility, but rejected calls to pretend that disparate educational opportunities provided a social equalizer. And he contested the debate over how much education is “enough,” decoupling the logics of formal citizenship from educational credentials. To manage the double-edged sword of educational emancipation and exclusion, Douglass left modern-day rhetorical scholars with a perspective that navigates between the poles of peril and promise. A person’s education can be denigrated, undermined, and delegitimized, he knew. But, he counseled, it must be pursued anyway.

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“Taking Their Rights” During Reconstruction: Susan B. Anthony’s and Frederick Douglass’s Performances of Identity

Julie Husband

University of Northern Iowa

In a women’s rights meeting in 1850, Frederick Douglass implored women to learn from his experience. He said that their opponents would ridicule them because it was the only strategy left when they could not counter well-reasoned arguments. He advised women to respond through performance as well as words: “Let Woman take her rights, and then she shall be free” (“Let Woman Take Her Rights” 249).

Douglass’s advice alerts us to the interplay between performance and word and between repertoire and archive in the African American civil rights movement and women’s rights movement, especially during the unprecedented changes in Reconstruction Era citizenship rights. Equal rights leaders after the Civil War self-consciously used their bodies and scripted their speech acts to advance their causes, especially those leaders most closely identified with their movements. In her seminal work on performance studies, Diana Taylor asks an important question for examining these equal rights movements: “If … we were to reorient the ways social memory and cultural identity … have traditionally been studied, with the disciplinary emphasis on literary and historical documents, and look through the lens of performed, embodied behaviors, what would we know that we do not know now?” (xviii). If we were to consider the scenario, for example, of a speech act—we would note not only traditional literary elements like plot, narrative, and perspective, but also gestures, generic conventions, physical typing of the speaker, and choreography of the audience (Taylor 28–30). The repertoire of such performances, Taylor argues, is passed down through multiple iterations of ceremonies and acts that are “select[ed], memoriz[ed] or internalize[ed], and transmit[ted]”—but not generally studied as extensively as the archive of spoken words (21). Taylor endorses an approach to performance studies that values both the archive—the written records—and the repertoire.

If we examine both the performance and the archive of two representative leaders of the Equal Rights Association, which split in 1869 over the formulation of the Fifteenth Amendment, we discover long-lasting traditions in the use of humor, physical display, private versus public spaces, and speaker-audience interaction. Intensely aware of their performative potential, of what Steven Mailloux calls “identity as interpreted being,” Frederick Douglass and Susan B. Anthony consciously choreographed their written and speaking selves to project politically effective personae and to foster sustainable, felt identities (85). They spoke to their culture’s preconceptions of how women or African American men would change political culture. Are African American men self-controlled enough to resist reprisals against their former masters if empowered by the ballot? Was Frederick Douglass? Would women raise the moral tone of public life by voting? Would Susan B. Anthony?

Comparing what we can find regarding their repertoire of performances to the archive of their written self-representations yields a more nuanced picture of their decisions than previous studies of just the repertoire or the archive. There are no studies that I find comparing Douglass’s or Anthony’s self-representation in their writings in comparison to their speech performances. However, there are a number of scholars who have examined either figure separately. Most importantly, rhetorical studies of Douglass’s speeches demonstrate his skill at ventriloquizing the positions of others to ridicule them, and to appropriate discourses as varied as Social Darwinism and the Puritan jeremiad, to undermine the dominant culture “common sense” that upheld racial discrimination (Ganter; Leeman; Howard Pitney). Nan Johnson’s study of how Elizabeth Cady Stanton crafted Anthony’s image in her biographical sketches starting with Eminent Women (1868) and proceeding through multiple books in the Anthony archive, shows the centrality of Anthony’s public image to the women’s rights movement. Donna Harrington-Lueker’s examination of Stanton’s efforts to find the largest and most politically important audience for The Revolution similarly suggests the need for marketing Anthony and other leaders. What I propose to add to these conversations is an examination of each leader’s two-pronged strategy, carefully modulated for his or her reading audiences versus live audiences.

In public speech Douglass drew attention to his body and was compared to the great orators and tragedians of his day. Anthony built upon the plain-spoken style in public speech, often speaking from the floor instead of a podium, as if to dramatize her marginalization. On the other hand, Douglass’s articles in the New National Era, which he edited between 1870 and 1872, were self-effacing, while Anthony allowed herself to be repackaged in the pages of The Revolution, the weekly newspaper owned by Anthony and edited by Stanton and Parker Pillsbury, as “the intrepid Susan” (“Personal Gossip”). She was shown in scenes where she challenges and wins political battles against male leaders in industry and politics. My conclusions are drawn from speeches Anthony and Douglass delivered in the Reconstruction Era, the complete run of The Revolution (1868–1870), the New National Era during the years Douglass edited it, and a broad range of newspapers published during Congressional Reconstruction.

Frederick Douglass: Balancing Comedy and Condemnation

Creating a spectacle amplified Douglass’s message as articles on his speeches moved from physical observation to reprints of his speeches, often in their entirety. For example, in one article, “A Curiosity in Plastic Art,” The National Republican gives extensive attention to Douglass’s appearance, noting his “striking intellectuality of the face and forehead” (2). His performance on the lectern, the writer claims, destroys racial stereotypes of passivity or vengefulness through “his extraordinary command over the passions, and his profound knowledge of human nature,” making him “the ablest champion of human rights this or any other country has ever produced” (2). Robert Fanuzzi rightly concludes that Douglass’s physical power and self-restraint at the podium confirmed his fitness for Republican citizenry (31).

Douglass embraced traditional masculine standards for public speaking, while drawing on black humor traditions. As Granville Ganter shows in his ground-breaking essay on Douglass’s humor, his sermon parodies and ventriloquism made him a “lively commodity” that competed well in the entertainment market both before and after slavery. Nonetheless, in this minstrelsy era when black entertainers, and white entertainers imitating them, played buffoons to entertain crowds with negative stereotypes, Douglass was wary of doing too much entertaining and not enough converting to an equal rights agenda. He remarked of his speaking career: “One of the hardest things I had to learn when I was fairly under way as a public speaker was to stop telling so many funny stories. I could keep my audience in a roar of laughter … but I was convinced that I was in danger of becoming something of a clown” (qtd. in Blassingame lxiii).

Douglass found his biracial appearance an advantage, too, for aligning himself with a variety of demographic groups. When he pointed to his audience, he generally did so as part of a larger “we” that encompassed Douglass. He sought to project a hybrid identity, at once black and white, southern and northern, statesman and jokester. For example, in an 1872 Republican Party stump speech delivered in Richmond, Virginia, Douglass invokes and then deflects potential hostility between he and southern whites. He opens by noting that this was his first political campaign and “the first time too that I ever took part in a public demonstration in the late capital of the Confederate States of America” (“Which Greeley” 303). Although a “stranger” to Virginia, he points out he was no “carpetbagger” because, as his audience well knew, he had fled his home in the South as a fugitive slave. He jokes that he is “to the manner born” (303). Both of these references draw attention to his unusual position as an African American speaker before a racially mixed southern audience of approximately eight to ten thousand (Frederick Douglass Papers 303). He continues in this vein, drawing attention to his body and asking to be excused for “talking about myself, for when a man has no other subject he will talk about that,” until he surprises his audience by suddenly seeming to change his affiliation. He says of his first vision of the North: “I expected to see the people living like we poor white people in the South that had no slaves lived. I include myself with you partly by permission and partly by circumstances over which I had no control” (“Which Greeley” 304).

In reading Anthony’s speeches, one seldom finds a reference to her own appearance or even her physical position before crowds. She does not allude to her personal experiences, her home, her gender, or her race. She seldom uses the pronoun “we,” apparently preferring to speak of women as a to class which she may or may not belong. Anthony went to such great lengths to earn her audience’s respect as an authority and, perhaps, to efface her physical presence, that she seldom pointed out that she was a member of the class on behalf of which she advocated. Where Douglass pointedly and craftily uses “we” to establish various coalitions, Anthony tended to speak as if bodiless, appealing to abstract ideals of justice rather than partisan affiliations.

In another stump speech the next day in Raleigh, North Carolina, Douglass explored an assortment of affiliations in order to arrive at a rough universality, calling himself a “black man,” “fugitive slave,” “mulatto man,” “carpet-bagger from the South,” “thief” (of himself), and finally “a man and a citizen” (“Vote” 314, 317). He presents himself as a bridge to his audience, pointing to their bodies as well, though not in the challenging way in which Anthony pointed to audience members. “My friends, let me tell you—I am now speaking to the fifty white gentlemen the newspapers will tell you were here, although I have counted two hundred of them—I am not, as I said before, an enemy of any class of American citizens” (317). As both Waldo E. Martin and Wilson J. Moses have shown, Douglass has been celebrated as an integrationist hero by middle-class Americans across the racial spectrum, but in his explicit rejection of racial separatism—separate black institutions and voluntary segregation—he has not been a representative black man to all African Americans. His success at generating support from white men for black male suffrage owed much to this willingness to use his body to suggest porous divisions between racial and class categories, even when rival black leaders pursued a strategy based more on racial pride and black separatism.

While he might point to his body in speeches and play with various alignments, Douglass avoided this in his role as editor or writer. Consider, for example, the contrast between his representation of “social equality” in the following 1875 speech and then the sober 1872 editorial on the same topic. Through this humorous address, he chips away at the prejudices that undermined political equality and civil rights. Speaking before a full house in Concord, New Hampshire, Douglass deconstructed the term “social equality,” a euphemism for African American civil rights that connoted racial intermarriage and “forced” integration. Newspapers paraphrased his comments:

What is social equality? In what does it consist? Where does it begin and where does it end? He confessed he hardly knew. He knew what social inequality was, and had known it for a good while. They had a great deal of it where he came from. A great deal of the social, but no equality … Out of that social inequality there had come a million and a half of intermediates. (Laughter and applause.) Now he never heard of any objection to social equality while that was going on. It was all right, perfectly proper. That was social inequality. I am not here to find fault with this. I accept the inevitable. It places me in a position where I can speak impartially, at any rate. (Loud laughter and applause.) … [A]ll that the colored race demanded was a guarantee of civil rights, and social equality would then take care of itself. (“New Hampshire” 405-06)

Once again Douglass foregrounds his own “intermediate” position between black and white and uses humor to undermine the common argument against African American civil rights: that it would promote miscegenation and put white women in danger. The subtext of Douglass’s comment here is that it is not black men who have sexually exploited and raped white women but white men who have created a biracial population, and precisely because of the tremendous social inequality under slavery. Moreover, by choosing a humorous rather than denunciatory tone he allays fears of vengeance on the part of black men humiliated by “social inequality.” Finally, he turns the discussion back to civil rights in order to distinguish the defense of fundamental democratic rights from the recasting of these rights as sexual coercion.

Douglass treated this very theme in his paper. An article in a rival newspaper attacked a black clerk from the Freedman’s Bank for trying to enjoy ice cream in a restaurant patronized by white people, calling it an “attempt to enforce social equality.” Douglass’s response has none of the humor or playful self-positioning of the speech on this issue. He denounced the paper and the restaurant for their discriminatory treatment, questioning why they did not refuse service to white people of dissipated character. Moreover, he questioned the claim that the “best colored people” would disapprove of the clerk, saying “the thrifty, industrious, educated, and thinking colored people with whom we meet are a unit in the desire to be treated exactly as all other respectable and decent people are treated” (“The Evening Star on Social Equality”). He ends with none of the up-beat, bridge building that characterize his speeches but with the final claim, “We firmly believe that the Star’s definition of social equality will not stand the test of reason” (301).

In fact, Douglass’s editorials are rigorously logical, efficient arguments without personal references. He uses the first-person plural to introduce claims as above and when he must refer to himself, he does so as “your Editor and Chief” or “the writer of this.” When he chooses to identify himself racially it is exclusively as a black man: “We look at this question as a black man” (“The New Party Movement”). The editorials are essentially position papers that tersely build arguments that might be employed by his readers in debate. The readership is assumed to be fully sympathetic. Interestingly, he writes no extended profiles of black leaders, unlike the many profiles of female leaders that pepper The Revolution. In his two and a half years as Corresponding Editor and then Editor-in-Chief, he pens only one very brief description of an African American, Peter H. Clark, who was running in Ohio as a Congressman. There are, however, a host of articles on international affairs that impact African Americans and human rights more generally, including the use of Asian “coolie labor” in the British West Indies, the British treatment of the Irish, and the rise of Benito Juarez in Mexico. There are several substantial editorials endorsing woman’s suffrage as well as many proto-Marxist analyses of “cheap labor.”

Susan B. Anthony as Representative Woman

Ellen DuBois has argued that the abolitionist movement served as a training ground for the first generation of women’s rights activists where they developed their analysis of women’s condition, honed their organizational skills, and experimented with political strategy. As colleagues in both the abolitionist movement and the women’s rights movement—Frederick Douglass famously signed the “Declaration of Sentiments” at the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention and subsequently spoke at later women’s rights conventions—Douglass, Susan B. Anthony, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton learned their craft of activism, writing, and oratory together. All three, moreover, became active following the Civil War in the American Equal Rights Association (AERA), with the common objective of winning universal adult suffrage.

The AERA sent a delegation of six to Kansas in fall 1867 to speak on behalf of two amendments, one extending suffrage to African American men and one extending suffrage to women. While the organization was independent of the Republican Party, it had close ties to the radical wing of the party. When Kansas Republicans openly spoke out against the woman’s suffrage amendment, Stanton and Anthony broke from the other four AERA delegates to campaign for woman’s suffrage with George Francis Train, a wealthy Democrat (Davis 136). This proved to be a very controversial decision because Train was known for race-baiting. Stanton and Anthony did not publicly challenge his depiction of African Americans during the campaign and eventually accepted his funding for their newspaper.

Stanton and Anthony turned from an abstract belief in natural rights and universal suffrage to a program for educated suffrage, with Anthony becoming the most important representative of an educated woman. Stanton picked up Train’s nativist rhetoric, and developed comparisons meant to demonstrate the superior preparation for voting white women had as compared with immigrant and African American men. Anthony, Stanton’s partner in campaigning and in their newspaper, did not voice any objection when Stanton said at the 1869 meeting of the AERA:

If American women find it hard to bear the oppressions of their own Saxon Fathers, the best orders of manhood, what may she not be called to endure when all the lower orders of foreigners now crowding our shores legislate for her and her daughters. Think of Patrick and Sambo and Hans and Yung Tung, who do not know the difference between a monarchy and a republic, who cannot read the Declaration of Independence or Webster’s spelling book, making laws for Lucretia Mott, Ernestine L. Rose, Susan B. Anthony or Anna E. Dickinson. (“Address of Elizabeth Cady Stanton”)

The address was republished in The Revolution, owned by Anthony, and can reasonably be understood as a reflection of their joint strategy for women’s voting rights.

With educated suffrage as the goal, it became increasingly important to develop a set of images of women showing they could contribute something distinctive to the nation’s political culture and empowering women to support this controversial cause. The representation of Anthony, already the movement’s most visible leader, became integral to inspiring such courage. Stanton regarded Anthony as “the connecting link between me and the outer world” and, as such, Nan Johnson argues that Stanton constructed Anthony’s public reputation through biographies of her (qtd. in Johnson 138). I agree and would argue this process began even earlier as she sketched Anthony in The Revolution. Stanton, by far the more prolific writer of the two, developed Anthony as a character in the pages of the newspaper. If, as Johnson posits, Stanton eventually settled upon an image of Anthony as a “noble maid” taking on a traditional female role by mothering the nation, she first experimented with a much pluckier image of Anthony.

Many of the more positive articles featuring accounts of woman’s rights conventions began much like the following, with a survey of women’s appearances:

At just a quarter to 11 a side-door from the platform opened and some of the shining lights of the “cause” came into view. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, majestic and beautiful as a snowy landscape, came forward with that grace as indescribable as it is incomparable … . Susan B. Anthony was there in black silk, with soft white lace around her throat, but even lace, frothy as sea foam, failed to relieve that practical face; just what a gnarled oak is amongst the trees, Susan B. Anthony is to her sex, hard, obdurate, uncompromising … . But the ornament of the platform was Miss Phebe Cozens, of St. Louis, a young law student of that distinguished city. Her elegant outfit … . (“Personnel of the Woman’s Rights Convention” 1)

Much like even the most positive reports of woman’s rights conventions, this journalist pays almost no attention to what was said at the convention. If physical display amplified Douglass’s message, it tended to eclipse Anthony’s. The journalist compares Anthony to more conventional women, a contrast Stanton responded to by depicting Anthony among a wide variety of poorly performing men in The Revolution.

Having the role of women’s rights’ warrior imposed a terrible psychological burden on Anthony. In her diary, she expressed fear of facing hostility: In September 1871 she wrote that she “never dreaded, trembled so at prospect before—fear of the Press skinning me alive again” (qtd. in Selected Papers 450). At the same time, Stanton’s representation of Anthony in The Revolution was somewhat at odds with Anthony’s own performance style on the lectern. While Anthony, taking a page from the abolitionists as well as sentimental writers, could play the public martyr, Stanton discouraged such performances and depicted Anthony as a cool, exacting woman in public and private.

Anthony chose to “take her rights,” as Douglass advised, when she exercised what she believed to be her right to vote and was arrested. In an act of civil disobedience, she, her three sisters, and her neighbor voted in Rochester, New York in November 1872; three weeks later, on Thanksgiving day, Anthony made a scene as the U.S. Marshall arrested her for voting illegally and took her on a public street car to the police station. While Ida Harper, under Anthony’s guidance, devotes nearly forty pages of her Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony to this episode, Stanton skips the moment of arrest in her article on the vote. Instead of depicting Anthony’s martyrdom at the moment of arrest, Stanton casts Anthony as an intellectual trumping slower-witted lawyers. She creates a court drama in her published letter to The New York Times:

When [Anthony] first applied to Henry R. Selden, one of the ablest lawyers in the State of New-York, to defend her in the Courts, he said, “you have no law to stand upon, and I do not like to go into Court with any client whose case is not backed by law.”

“You are mistaken, Sir,” said Miss Anthony; “I have law, Constitution, and the opinions of able Judges and lawyers on my side, and here are the documents for your thoughtful consideration, and $100 fee for your trouble. I will call again in a few days, after you have had time to read [an extensive list of legal materials]. (Selected Papers 587)

This was a common technique for Stanton; she depicts Anthony through dialog and scenes rather than simple narration. She was loathe to characterize Anthony, “the Napoleon of the women’s suffrage movement,” as a suffering, sentimental heroine; instead, she shows Anthony to be brilliant and powerful, converting the most powerful men to her cause (Oachita Telegraph). She reinforced this ideal by offering many biographical sketches of women who embodied domestic virtues as well as the resolve to champion women’s rights. These profiles served as counter-stereotypes to the negative stereotypes other papers circulated of Anthony.

The Revolution featured a humorous extended account, reprinted from the New York Sun, of how Susan B. Anthony won half-price train tickets for western women to be delegates at a women’s rights convention in New York in 1869. The article begins by describing the financier Jay Gould; the aristocratic president of the Erie Railway Company, James Fisk; and Fisk’s headquarters, “a combination of the ancient donjon and the modern soap factory.” Then the article introduces the main character: “Some few days ago, about 10 o’clock in the morning, a woman was seen rushing down Chambers street … [A] sharp pair of gray eyes flashed … [as] she dexterously avoided the greasy barrels of pork, mackerel, and hams lining the lower end of Chambers street” (“Miss Anthony Among the Brokers” 326). Sounding like the plucky working girl from the new genre of women’s dime novels, Anthony is shown brushing past Gould’s barber and into the “Den of Lions,” a sumptuously decorated private apartment to meet the still more sumptuously dressed Jay Gould. She lays a copy of The Revolution before him and appeals to his legendary vanity:

We know that you are the friend of every movement that tends to elevate and purify the morals of society. This is the greatest reform of the age. It throws into the shade the question of negro suffrage and the Young libel suit. I come to see if you would not reduce the rates of fare on the Erie road for those attending this Convention. (326)

Gould’s secretary reminds him of the damage The Revolution has done to their interests with its Wall Street reporting and asks her if she is the “queen of the strong-minded” (327). She responds that she is glad that the paper has done them so much injury as it “is a sure indication that it can do the Erie road as much good, when that road is put on a sound basis” (326). She twice drops her shawl and Mr. Gould twice replaces it on her “extended arm” in a gesture showing she has tamed him. She wins free return train tickets from New York and is silent thenceforth “regarding affairs on the Erie road” (326).

The article is in keeping with the high-spirited, sardonic tone of the entire newspaper. Anthony is shown as a sharp observer and a savvy negotiator, a model for women who needed to turn indirect influence over the men in their families into direct power. Reversing gender stereotypes, she behaves as a foil to the supercilious Gould who is more vulnerable to manipulation than the business-like Anthony. The Revolution encourages its readers to “take their rights” by defying, with confidence and dignity, the limits placed on their spheres. As Donna Harrington-Lueker has remarked, The Revolution initially experimented with a number of women’s rights subjects and target audiences as the editors sought to raise subscriptions and advertising. Ultimately, the editors courted a “community of the privileged and the powerful” and Anthony was constructed as their self-assured representative (133).

Stanton attempted to recruit women who might surreptitiously pick up the paper but be reluctant to openly endorse such a controversial cause. The paper includes article after article showing how various women were converted to the cause and how their efforts had been rewarded with recognition and success. With the exception of those on Train’s business, almost all articles are directly concerned with women’s rights; The Revolution trades the breadth of The New National Era for a more intimate depiction of the movement’s principle leaders. The New National Era encourages its readers to adopt particular political positions on a range of subjects, fostering a Republican citizenry among African American readers. The voice in Douglass’s papers is uniformly serious and erudite, a marked contrast to the range of tones—playful, acerbic, measured, declamatory—in The Revolution.

Anthony’s speaking style was quite different from Douglass’s insofar as she did not remark upon her own appearance and stopped using written addresses in 1857, working only from notes and preferring a plain-spoken style (Sherr 137). Her extemporaneous speeches were frequently laced with clever reversals on her opponents that served to make their appearance and bearing the subject of scrutiny. For example, when Horace Greeley, editor of the New York Tribune, claimed in 1867 that “the bullet and ballot go together” and asked Anthony if she was “ready to fight,” Anthony quickly countered, “Certainly, Mr. Greeley, just as you fought the late war—at the point of a goose quill” (Sherr 69). When abolitionist men claimed “business to attend to” and neglected to send letters of support for women’s rights to Kansas in 1867, Anthony characterized them as too cowardly to either take a stand for woman’s suffrage or forthrightly refuse her request (Selected Letters 107). In the same speech, she characterized Republican men, more generally, as “afraid” to speak for woman’s suffrage in Kansas (106).

While Douglass built bridges between his allies and more passive or reluctant members of his audience, Anthony parried the skeptical and sometimes hostile members of her speaking audience. Douglass could, in Houston Baker’s terms, “master the form” of classical oratory and riff on black face minstrelsy to “deform the mastery” of African American men. Anthony had to first create the form of the public woman; women in theater or on the speaking platform were still regarded as sexually promiscuous or masculinized. She met the challenge by breaking rather than mastering the form of many speaking scenarios. Stanton encouraged other women to do the same, using the newspaper character of Anthony she had created to provide a model for her female readers trying to imagine “taking” their rights in both public and private spaces.

Performing Identity and the Fifteenth Amendment

On May 12, 1869, Douglass attended the American Anti-Slavery Society meeting, delivering his famous “Let the Negro Alone” speech, and then the next day he went to the American Equal Rights Association meeting, presided over by Elizabeth Cady Stanton.

The New York Herald reported the proceedings of May 13 under the headline “Equal Rights. The Ladies on a Rampage. A Reverend Brother and Belligerent Sister on Their Muscle.” The “reverend brother” was white abolitionist Stephen Foster and the belligerent sister was Anthony. Foster launched an extended attack on Stanton and Anthony, accusing them of undermining passage of the Fifteenth Amendment and misspending association funds when campaigning in Kansas with George Francis Train against the Fifteenth Amendment. Several people defended Anthony’s accounting (she returned her one-thousand dollar stipend for the disputed expenditures) and tried to conciliate the two sides. Then Douglass came forward to criticize The Revolution’s attack on black men and to insist that the vote “is a question of life and death” for black men and not of similar urgency for women. Lynchings of Republican black men in the South made this imminent danger clear, but he balanced his criticism of Stanton and Anthony with humor and personal references: “I am in favor of Woman’s Suffrage … Let me tell you that when there were few houses in which the black man could have put his head, this wooley head of mine found a refuge in the house of Mrs. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and if I had been blacker than sixteen midnights, without a single star, it would have been the same. (Applause)” (“Annual Meeting” 306). In responding to Douglass, Anthony pointed to the crowd and not herself: “When Mr. Douglass mentioned the black man first and the women last, if he had noticed he would have seen that it was the men that clapped and not the women” (306). The meeting ended with a fissure in the Equal Rights Association. Stanton and Anthony established the National Woman’s Suffrage Association. The American Woman’s Suffrage Association captured those like Lucy Stone, Lucretia Mott, Frances Harper, and many of the male abolitionists who supported the Fifteenth Amendment and woman’s suffrage.

On display in this pivotal meeting were many of the performance strategies Anthony and Douglass used during the Reconstruction Era. Unable to redefine conventional femininity in a way that permitted her to inveigh against her opponents, Anthony effaced her physicality where she could and drew attention to her audience’s revealing physical responses. Douglass used his body as a bridge between camps. While surely temperament had much to do with their presentations of self, we might speculate, nonetheless, about how they hoped to impact their contexts.

At this moment, the current of public opinion in the North was moving toward Douglass’s objectives. He enjoyed a respectful audience and could afford to let them cut loose in laughter and then recover their attention. Anthony had no such assurance and the laughter was often directed at her rather than with her. Moreover, Douglass’s audiences were primed by their exposure to minstrelsy to expect humor from a black man; he responded by pairing humor with sophisticated rhetorical techniques and references. He never plays the Sambo but signifies upon such expectations to make his audience self-critical. In “Let the Negro Alone,” the speech he delivered the day before this pivotal meeting, he protests employment discrimination:

We are restricted to two or three employments. We do all the whitewashing. We are great on white! (Laughter) I saw a colored man the other day and says he, “As to this thing you call learning, book learning, I ain’t much at that; but that thing you call laying whitewash on the wall, I am dar.” (Merriment.) We are there. We have been ruled out of the workshop. It is easier to-day to get a negro boy a seat by the side of a lawyer to study law, than it is to get him a place at a blacksmith’s anvil, to hammer iron. (203)

Douglass links employment discrimination and minstrelsy; minstrel humor and dialect whitewashes employment discrimination by making the relegation of blacks to low-skill work seem natural. Douglass’s ability to code-switch, using and then rejecting dialect, registers the unnaturalness of the Sambo role.

Anthony and Douglass made different decisions regarding their self-presentation and their interaction with written and speaking audiences in part because of their dispositions, but in larger part because of their different audiences and objectives. In confronting speaking audiences, Anthony began from a disadvantaged position with little precedent and without the natural political allies in the Republican Party that Douglass had. She frequently positioned herself on the margins of a room to dramatize her political stance and then pointed to the hypocrisy of those in the room who applied a double standard to women. Often the spectacle of speaking women interfered with their ability to be heard, so Anthony chose a self-effacing, direct address to keep her audiences focused on message, though this wasn’t necessary in written presentations of Anthony. So notable was Anthony’s self-effacing style that Fannie Howland, a writer for the Hartford Courant reporting on Stanton’s and Anthony’s testimony on behalf of local voting rights for women in Washington D.C., wrote: “Mrs. Stanton was followed by Miss Anthony, morally as inevitable and impersonal as a Greek chorus” (qtd. in Harper 339).

Douglass addressed the “in group” of African American and anti-racist white citizens in his paper, encouraging a political program but not a particular mode of behavior. He did not coach his newspaper readers through examples either of himself or others in how to insinuate themselves into powerful organizations or how to negotiate with power brokers. Nor did he take the risk of speaking publicly about self-presentation strategy, telling one Louisville black audience in 1873, “I would like to talk to you when there were no white people listening to me” (“Recollections of the Anti-Slavery Conflict” 372).

Anthony and Douglass had long careers and faced tremendous hostility at various points, Anthony perhaps most forcefully during the Reconstruction Era when she opposed the Fifteenth Amendment. For Douglass, the era of Reconstruction marked the height of his direct political power, but he faced serious challenges to his leadership from former allies in the abolitionist movement in the 1850s and from African Americans disappointed by Republican betrayals in the post-Reconstruction period. Both were sustained by their thoughtfully developed “interpreted beings,” that is the selves they cultivated in print and on the lectern in conversation with cultural norms (Mailloux 85). These Reconstruction Era personas—the “intrepid Susan” and “your Editor and Chief”—offered clearly marketable public performance possibilities while allowing for a certain private freedom that protected them and helped them to sustain long careers. Anthony, in particular, used her persona as a protective cover, a screen revealing little of her internal feelings. For all of Douglass’s seeming comfort in revealing himself, he has little to say of his family life or friendships in his autobiographies, speeches, or journalism. While his performances seem more revealing of his inner sense of self than Anthony’s, they nonetheless channeled his feelings in allowable directions and camouflaged less useful feelings. When he says he is “not here to find fault” with the history of “social inequality” and then alludes to his own origins, we can be sure he’s not sharing his inner thoughts and feelings (“New Hampshire” 405). Anthony’s and Douglass’s public personas, in print and performance, provided guides for future activists and means of projecting and protecting these activists’ felt identities.

We might see Anthony’s heirs in the work of the Silent Sentinels who protested President Woodrow Wilson’s refusal to act on behalf of woman’s suffrage as president, despite his soft support for it. For six days per week, between January 1917 and June 1919, they effaced their individual identities by wearing the same purple, white, and gold sashes and by silently communicating their messages on large banners they held in front of the White House. The banners targeted Wilson personally, as Anthony often targeted individual men in her audiences; one read, “Mr. President, how long must women wait for liberty?” Like Anthony, the sentinels performed their marginalized identity and projected a disciplined and yet radical image that drew attention to the President, who was forced to drive by them daily, his comfortable drive in a luxurious car standing in contrast to their cold vigil.

Many have attempted to claim the Douglass mantle, and yet in the generation following Douglass, major black leaders tended to adopt one or two writing, oratorical, or self-management strategies but leave others out. Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. DuBois adopted elements of Douglass’s program and his writing—Washington in his autobiography, a neo-slave narrative, and DuBois in his journalism. However, as an orator, DuBois lacked Douglass’s versatility in tone and dialect. Washington, on the other hand, was expert at building bridges between northern and southern as well as black and white constituencies, evidenced by his 1895 “Atlanta Compromise” speech. He was an organic intellectual who peppered his speeches with stories from his youth shaped to play into the dominant discourse of American self-reliance. Yet the strain of his work tolled on him and he died at only fifty-nine of heart failure. James Weldon Johnson, writing before Washington’s death and yet aware of the strain of a life devoted to “the race problem” has the first-person narrator in Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man say: “If the mass of Negroes took their present and future as seriously as do the most of their leaders, the race would be in no mental condition to sustain the terrible pressure which it undergoes; it would sink of its own weight” (495). Douglass’s resilience rested in part on long-term friendships but also on a distinctive self-protective strategy that relied on a certain kind of privacy, detached irony, and humor. Douglass’s and Anthony’s long careers as activists attest to the thoughtfulness with which they developed their written and spoken selves.

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All Lives Matter?: Frederick Douglass’s “John Brown” Address and the Challenge of Hidden Racism

Gary S. Selby

Milligan College

In a disturbing scene caught on camera by a CNN reporter in early 2016, several black protesters who had interrupted a campaign rally with the “Black Lives Matter” chant were forcibly removed while angry white onlookers drowned them out with shouts of “All Lives Matter” (Diamond). That exchange, for many, captures the state of racial justice in the U.S. For blacks, the phrase, popularized after the 2013 Trayvon Martin case, demands that society recognize the ongoing reality of injustice, whereas the retort of “All Lives Matter,” even uttered with the best of intentions, glosses over persistent racist attitudes and structures. In philosopher Gordon Marino’s words,

[p]rayerfully intoning “all lives matter” is an oblique way of muting the hard truths of Katrina, Ferguson, Waller County Texas, Baltimore, Cleveland, and Charleston. It’s a way of dismissing the special burdens that African Americans have endured in the biased, harrowing machine of American justice. (6)

Critical theorist Judith Butler put it more tersely: “If we jump too quickly to the universal formulation, ‘all lives matter,’ then we miss the fact that black people have not yet been included in the idea of ‘all lives’” (“What’s Wrong”). That “all lives matter” is frequently uttered with indignation or even vehement anger simply underscores the dominant culture’s resistance to acknowledging the legacy of white supremacy.

In the decades following the Civil War, few voices spoke against that era’s racism with greater insight or force than African American leader and statesman, Frederick Douglass. He denounced the depiction of blacks in popular culture, even in the North, as ignorant and unintelligent or worse, as “moral monster[s], ferociously invading the sacred rights of woman and endangering the homes of the whites” (“Lessons of the Hour” 7). He charged the nation never to forget that the Civil War had been fought to liberate their country from the curse of “the hell-black system of human bondage” so that the “star-spangled banner” might “float … over free citizens in every quarter of this land” (“Address at the Graves”). He condemned the nation’s hypocrisy in claiming to be a “Christian country,” while tolerating Southern mobs who subjected blacks to “blood chilling horrors” and then “gloat[ed] over and prey[ed] upon the dead bodies” of their victims (“Lessons of the Hour” 5).

Douglass was especially vexed by the indifference of Northerners, whose prejudice prevented them from standing against racial injustice. For all their claims to be “friends of the Negro,” Douglass recognized that they had excluded blacks from the category of “free citizens,” and thus turned a blind eye to blacks’ suffering in the post-war South, effectively saying to “the lynchers and mobocrats of the South, go on in your hellish work of Negro persecution. You kill their bodies, we kill their souls” (“Why is the Negro Lynched?” 18).¹

Douglass’s “John Brown” address, delivered on Decoration Day, May 30, 1881, in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, represents one striking example in his campaign to confront Northern prejudice. As Blassingame and McKivigan pointed out, Douglass originally wrote the speech in 1873 and had “subsequently delivered it across the nation” (7). On this occasion, however, he gave the speech just blocks from Brown’s 1859 raid, before a large crowd from the surrounding counties of Maryland, Virginia, and West Virginia which had gathered for the commencement exercises of Storer College, one of the nation’s first historically black colleges—a setting Douglass would later reminisce had caused him to feel some apprehension (Douglass Papers 7). The speech was intended to eulogize Brown while also raising money through its publication to support an endowed professorship in Brown’s honor. As I argue in this essay, however, Douglass also used the occasion to compel his audience to face the injustice of black suffering. His address offers an incisive critique of the dominant culture’s blindness to its own racism, a condition that the “Black Lives Matter” movement has sought to challenge. In what follows, I offer an overview of the speech and then analyze the ways Douglass embedded irony and narrative depiction within the generic form of commemoration in order to overcome his audience’s resistance to facts about themselves and their society that they wished not to face.

Commemorating John Brown

On the surface, Douglass adhered to the conventions of commemorative public address by giving his hearers “such recollections, impressions and facts, as I can, of a grand, brave, and good old man.” He recounted stories of Brown’s “heroic character” from the Kansas anti-slave skirmishes and recalled memories of Brown as a husband, father, and merchant. His efforts to eulogize Brown, however, faced one glaring obstacle—the memory of Brown’s infamous raid, which made him, in John Stauffer and Zoe Trodd’s words, “one of the most contentious figures in American culture” (xix). He was demonized in the South, while among Northern pro-slavery Democrats, his name became a staple of anti-abolition rhetoric.

Although they eventually came to see the raid as a necessary prelude to the Civil War, as their era’s “Bunker Hill,” many Northern Republicans still condemned it as an act of unlawful violence, even as they lauded Brown’s courage (Hall 455). Republican editor Horace Greely called Brown’s raid the “work of a madman,” yet also praised Brown and his fellow insurrectionists for having “dared and died for what they felt to be right” (77). In a sermon to Brooklyn’s Plymouth Church, Henry Ward Beecher mourned Brown’s “obscuration of … reason” and disapproved of the “bloody foray,” though he at the same time hailed Brown as “the manliest of them all” (103-04). In his poem, “Brown of Ossawatomie,” Quaker poet John Greenleaf Whittier celebrated that it was “not the raid of midnight terror, but the thought which underlies” (191). Although some Northerners, notably Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, did embrace the raid, many remained ambivalent about its violent character, a fact that made commemorating Brown problematic.

Not surprisingly, Douglass’s overarching strategy for overcoming this taint was to frame the raid as the first battle in the Civil War, insisting that it could no more be viewed in isolation than “Sherman’s march to the sea.” He persistently identified his hero with a military title, “Captain Brown,” and when he initially narrated the attack, his language suggested a military “expedition”—they “invaded,” “took possession,” and “held the ground” until they were finally “overpowered … by a body of United States troops.” Finally, he ended with an explicit claim that Brown’s invasion, if it “did not end the war that ended slavery … did at least begin the war that ended slavery.” Thus reframed, the raid became not a brutal surprise assault on innocent civilians, but the courageous act that unleashed the irrepressible conflict.

Douglass recognized, however, that this ambivalence toward Brown’s raid gave him opportunity to address the deep-seated prejudice which denied blacks the full dignity of personhood. After all, only if blacks were “property” or in some other sense beneath whites could a raid to liberate them from forced captivity be called a “crime.” Failing to grasp the full extent of slavery’s evil, moreover, Douglass’s hearers had not felt the moral outrage they should have felt at the suffering of their fellow humans. By addressing these attitudes, Douglass could not only remove the obstacle to unreservedly celebrating Brown, but also awaken in his hearers the fervor they would need to stand against oppression in their own day.

Ironic Reversal and Self-Knowledge

Because he addressed hearers who saw themselves as “friends of the Negro,” Douglass needed to confront them without alienating them, a dilemma for which irony was well-suited. Discussions of irony typically emphasize how it juxtaposes incongruous ideas or perspectives as a way of challenging an audience’s perception. In its most basic sense, as a stylistic trope, that juxtaposition takes the form of “statements that imply something other than their literal or ostensible meanings” (Jaskinski 550).² Thus, Wayne Booth noted that “we are alerted [to the presence of irony] whenever we notice an unmistakable conflict between the beliefs expressed and the beliefs we hold and suspect the author of holding” (76). As Kenneth Burke put it, “What goes forth as A returns as non-A” (517). Burke also emphasized what he called the “ironic twist,” that crucial moment of revelation when the audience “gets” the presence of that competing image or idea now set against the initial image or idea they had already been invited to hold. Burke highlighted this “twist” as central to irony, calling it “the ‘peripety,’ the strategic moment of reversal” when the audience sees themselves and their world with new eyes (517).

As a way of provoking this self-awareness in his audience, Douglass twice drew them into a form of ironic reversal that exposed the hypocrisy of their view of Brown’s raid and, more deeply, their own racism. At first, he gave the impression of simply acknowledging the raid, giving only the “facts in that extraordinary transaction,” as if intending to move quickly to other, more positive examples of Brown’s achievements and qualities—a strategy his audience would have expected in a commemorative speech. Douglass, however, did the opposite. He began to amplify the raid in a way that accentuated its most ruthless and criminal aspects, as a story that “fill[ed] the imagination with wild and troubled fancies of doubt and danger.” He called to mind the vision of the town’s residents in the public consciousness:

They had retired as usual to rest, with no suspicion that an enemy lurked in the surrounding darkness. They had quietly and trustingly given themselves up to “tired Nature’s sweet restorer, balmy sleep,” and while thus all unconscious of danger, they were roused from their peaceful slumbers by the sharp crack of the invader’s rifle, and felt the keen-edged sword of war at their throats, three of their number already slain.

Unlike his more clipped version, Douglass now depicted vivid scenes of an enemy lurking in the darkness, a sword at the throat, against a contrasting picture of innocent, unsuspecting people asleep in their beds, a contrast that accentuated the innocence and vulnerability of the supposed victims. His depiction seemed calculated to arouse anger and shock at such a ruthless violation of human freedom and dignity. Indeed, he said, “Every feeling of the human heart was naturally outraged at this occurrence, and hence at the moment the air was full of denunciation and execration.” He lauded these strong emotions, calling the passion for human rights that lay behind their outrage a “holy feeling”: “We are indebted to this tender sentiment of regard for human life for the safety with which we walk the streets by day and sleep secure in our beds at night.” To what end would Douglass highlight the raid’s viciousness and praise the “regard for human life” that provoked outrage at such attack on innocent civilians?

That purpose became clear in the passage that followed when, in suddenly direct and forceful terms, Douglass invoked familiar biblical imagery of sowing and reaping to turn the outrage he had just aroused back on his audience:

The bloody harvest of Harper’s Ferry was ripened by the heat and moisture of merciless bondage of more than two hundred years. That startling cry of alarm on the banks of the Potomac was but the answering back of the avenging angel to the midnight invasions of Christian slave-traders on the sleeping hamlets of Africa. The history of the African slave-trade furnishes many illustrations far more cruel and bloody.

Here was the reversal, or peripety, on which irony as a rhetorical form turns. Having brought before the eyes of his listeners the image of an enemy lurking in the darkness, suddenly putting the sword to the throats of defenseless, innocent victims sleeping in their beds, and having encouraged the sense of outrage that such images aroused, he now applied that imagery to the experience of Africans violently stolen from their own beds and forced into cruel enslavement against their wills. That his hearers could feel such strong emotion in the face of Brown’s attack on the slaveholding citizens of Harpers Ferry, while feeling nothing in response to the far greater injustice of slavery itself, was the true outrage.

This association between Brown’s raid and the slaveholder’s invasion of sleeping hamlets in Africa symbolically placed the black slave on equal footing with the white citizen of Harpers Ferry, a reconfiguration of the social hierarchy forced by Douglass’s use of parallel language and imagery. In both cases, his hearers saw innocent people, sleeping peacefully, attacked by hostile invaders. What they granted to one—the freedom from such violations as a fundamental human right—his discourse logically compelled them to grant to the other. But that association would also have exposed the hypocrisy that led them to condemn rather than extol the raid. The raid’s consequences were nothing compared to the cruel suffering inflicted upon the slaves for two centuries. Clearly, his listeners had failed to extend to the slave the “tender sentiment of regard for human life” for which he had just praised them, for otherwise they would have responded with proportional outrage to atrocities “far more cruel and bloody” suffered by blacks.

In his second use of irony, Douglass exploited Northerners’ inconsistent reactions to the raid. He first attributed their failure to grasp the raid’s true meaning to the “moral atmosphere” in which they lived: “The fault is not in our eyes, nor yet in the object, if under a murky sky we fail to discover the object.” The sensibilities of even Northerners had been so benumbed by slavery that they simply could not see the “true martyr and hero” that John Brown was. Indeed, how hard it was “for an American tainted by slavery to do justice to the Negro or the Negro’s friends.” But then Douglass pretended to reconsider that verdict: As it turns out, many in the North had praised Brown despite his “crime.” Although they still accepted the popular view of Brown as an outlaw creeping “upon his foe stealthily, like a wolf upon the fold,” they also discerned in him “the greatest and best qualities known to human nature.” Indeed, Douglass said sarcastically, “Many consented to his death, and then went home and taught their children to sing his praise as one whose ‘soul is marching on’ thorough realms of endless bliss.”

Douglass now unleashed the full force of his second ironic reversal by asserting that there had been one group of people who understood the raid—the slaveholders of Virginia. They alone “understood the significance of the hour.” He implied that Virginians understood the moral pollution slavery had brought on them, which they desperately desired not to face:

Conscious of her guilt and therefore full of suspicion, sleeping on pistols for pillows, startled at every unusual sound, constantly fearing and expecting a repetition of the Nat Turner insurrection, she at once understood the meaning, if not the magnitude of the affair.

He seemed to suggest that slaveholders realized they were oppressing human beings who were capable of seeing its injustice, who seethed at its cruelty, and who, in the full capacity of personhood, possessed the agency needed to rise up in rebellion against it. Virginia understood that behind slaves’ servile obedience boiled a rage that only humans could feel, and which they deserved. Brown’s attack thus struck at more than an economic system or the state’s sovereignty. It “shook the whole social fabric of Virginia.” By invading on behalf of the slaves of Virginia, Brown “added to his war power the force of a moral earthquake … Of his army of nineteen her conscience made an army of nineteen hundred.”

Here was Douglass’s second reversal. Whereas the raid struck the conscience of the slaveholder, most Northerners had been blind to its significance. He chided them for attributing ulterior motives to the raid, whether that of fomenting “nothing less than a wide-sweeping rebellion to overthrow the existing government,” or among the smaller minded, “nothing higher than a purpose to plunder. To them John Brown and his men were a gang of desperate robbers.” How easily they believed that someone “might do something very audacious and desperate for money, power or fame,” when the possibility “that nineteen men could invade a great State to liberate a despised and hated race” was to their “intellect and conscience, too monstrous for belief.”

What lay at the heart of this blindness? To answer that question, Douglass pointed to Brown’s essential character. Unlike the Northern sympathizers, Brown truly believed in “the sacredness and value of liberty,” and he “loved liberty for all men, and for those most despised and scorned, as well as for those most esteemed and honored.” In his first ironic reversal, he had praised his audience for their “tender sentiment of regard for human life,” but now he made clear that they had excluded blacks from the category of “human life.” Here lay the root of the North’s blindness: Unlike Brown, they simply did not believe a black life could ever merit such risk or sacrifice. Whereas slaveholding Virginians saw the raid’s true meaning, Northerners could not imagine anyone giving up life and safety in order to secure the Negro’s freedom. Such possibility was “too monstrous for belief.”

As to how Douglass’s rhetoric might have affected his hearers, Burke suggested one possibility when he called humility “the proper partner of irony” (512). With biting irony, Douglass had exposed, first, their misplaced outrage for the “victims” of the raid who were actually perpetrators of slavery’s oppression, and then, the racism which had blinded them to the raid’s true meaning—something that even Virginia’s slaveholders grasped. The result, at least potentially, was the kind of humility that not only elevated Brown, but much more, made Douglass’s listeners susceptible to instruction. Chastened by the truth of their own blindness, they were now prepared to see the full evil of racial injustice.

Narrative and Conviction

Having dealt with Brown’s raid, Douglass next took up the task, apropos to commemoration, of “studying the character and works of … [the] great man” in order to “learn in what he was distinguished from others and what … [were] the causes of this difference.” That central distinguishing quality, in contrast to Douglass’s hearers, was Brown’s ability to see “the evil through no mist or haze, but in the light of infinite brightness, which left none of its ten thousand horrors out of sight.” This clarity derived, Douglass continued, from a formative incident that occurred in Brown’s boyhood:

He had for some reason been sent into the State of Kentucky, where he made the acquaintance of a slave boy, about his own age, of whom he became very fond. For some petty offense this boy was one day subjected to a brutal beating. The blows were dealt with an iron shovel and fell fast and furiously upon his slender body.

Like most Northerners, Brown had been born in a free state and was “unaccustomed to such scenes of cruelty.” Thus, his “pure and sensitive soul revolted at the shocking spectacle and at that early age swore eternal hatred to slavery.” Even the passing of years had not “obliterated the image,” so that, as with Moses, who had similarly witnessed “the beating of a Hebrew bondsman by an Egyptian,” Brown’s encounter with this “outrage on a helpless slave boy in our own land may have caused, forty years afterwards, a John Brown and a Harper’s Ferry Raid.”

Several things are significant about this brief but poignant narrative. First is its shocking vividness. Douglass brought before the eyes of his listeners the blows from an “iron shovel” falling down “fast and furiously” upon the “slender body” of this child. As Chaïm Perelman and Lucie Olbrects-Tyteca noted, such vivid description had the power to endow scenes with “presence,” an essential dimension of persuasion in which a speaker, “by verbal magic alone,” takes an audience into an almost visceral, imaginative and emotional experience of some event in the past (116–17). The effect is that the scene no longer exists simply as an abstract idea but rather, as a psychological event in the consciousness. Of course, part of that visualization was also of Brown as a young boy, innocent and naïve, unaware of how slaves were abused by their white owners. Again, that this story was embedded as a predictable element in a commemorative address explaining John Brown not only invited the audience to see Brown in a new way, it also drew them to the point where they looked squarely at the experience of a defenseless slave, completely at the mercy of the master’s capricious cruelty.

As to how that narrative might have impacted them, Paul Ricoeur’s narrative hermeneutics, particularly his conception of the three-fold mimesis, is instructive. Ricoeur described an audience’s encounter with narrative as a circular process that involves three levels of mimesis, or representation (71–76). Mimesis1 is the reader’s preunderstanding of the world which entails not only a grasp of the basic elements of narrative structure that one must possess in order to follow the story, but also the “whole set of conventions, beliefs, and institutions that make up the symbolic framework of a culture” (58). Audiences bring their imagination of the world to their encounter with story. Mimesis2 is the representation offered in the poetic work itself, consisting of all of those elements of plot and character that, in Ricoeur’s words, open up “the kingdom of as if” (64). Mimesis3 is the new representation of the world that grows out of “the intersection of the world of the text and the world of the hearer” (71). To enter the world of the narrative is, as Lance Pape put it, “not just to understand it at arm’s length but to understand oneself and one’s relation to reality anew before it, and thus to put it to work in the world of action” (97).

Remarkably, this brief episode mimics that three-fold process in a way that guides the audience’s hearing of the story. Brown brings to the experience a prefigured imagination of the world that is naïvely oblivious to the life of this child he simply takes to be a friend; he is ignorant of the dramatic gulf that yawns between their life circumstances. But then, he is wrenched into witnessing his young playmate viciously beaten by the white master. Brown returns to the world with a newfound hatred for slavery and an “argument against contempt for small things.” Brown’s experience provided a paradigmatic path to comprehension that, Douglass hoped, his own listeners would follow. Like Brown, in their prefigured representation of the world, they were naïve to the realities of slavery and blind even to their own bias against blacks. But then, like Brown, they were drawn into mimesis2, entering the world of the story so vividly recounted by Douglass, where they witness the iron shovel coming down repeatedly on the slender body of the helpless child. The story challenged his hearers to continue following the narrative’s flow, returning to the world, as Brown did, with the new conviction of mimesis3. It provided an appropriate focus for the emotions Douglass had earlier aroused and then condemned in response to the “outrage” suffered by slaveholding citizens of Harpers Ferry, symbolically transferring those emotions to blacks who were the true victims of the nation’s crime. Thus, this brief episode seems deliberately crafted to take Douglass’s hearers into a transformative experience modeled after Brown’s, where they are shaken from their naiveté and ignorance. Just as Brown came away with a life-long hatred of racism and injustice, Douglass’s audience, drawn in and confronted by a spectacle from which they might otherwise have looked away, could now return to their world with new vision and conviction.

Conclusion

Almost two centuries ago, Frederick Douglass understood how profoundly racism permeated the soul of the nation, even among Northerners who had supported the Union cause—how completely, in the language of the Black Lives Matter movement, the nation had excluded blacks from the category “all lives.” Indeed, his rhetoric was prescient in its diagnosis of the nation’s problem with race: Whites had failed to embrace or even to recognize the full personhood of their African American sisters and brothers. Douglass’s “John Brown” address skillfully challenged that racism for the audiences who heard it in person or who read it in print. Using ironic reversal, he first exposed the prejudice that had led them to express outrage on behalf of the “victims” of Brown’s raid while ignoring the far greater suffering of the slaves whom they held in cruel bondage. He showed how that same prejudice had made it inconceivable to them that a white person might actually risk imprisonment or death on behalf of a black life, a possibility that even Virginia’s slaveholders had grasped. Using vivid depiction, he then confronted them with the image of a child savagely beaten by his master in order to help them see the horror of racial oppression.

Douglass’s address is remarkable for its insight into the problem of racism and its skill in confronting those who fail to recognize it in themselves. It highlights the potential of irony for provoking self-awareness among reluctant listeners, and of narrative for changing perceptions and reorienting emotions. But perhaps most striking is its hopefulness, which held out the possibility that his society still had a conscience susceptible to being pricked by images of black suffering and injustice. Accounts of the audience’s reaction to Douglass confirm that power. As one newspaper reported, “[t]he audience became fairly wild with enthusiasm,” and Andrew Hunter, who had prosecuted Brown and who was a platform guest during the speech, reportedly approached Douglass, “extended his hand, and said, ‘Were Robert E. Lee present he would grasp the other’” (Douglass Papers 7).

More broadly, the speech points to Douglass as a model of prophetic engagement with the dominant culture, a model with which the contemporary Black Lives Matter movement shares significant continuity. Certainly, Douglass’s irony was severe and penetrating, leaving its victims humbled by the stinging rebuke of a black man. Yet that irony drew upon values he shared with white audiences centered on the “regard for human life,” which transcended their differences. It was only because he believed his hearers truly held those ideals that he could rebuke whites for failing to live up to them. The Black Lives Matter movement stands within that same tradition of prophetic engagement. Rather than reject the dominant culture and the possibility of racial healing, the movement employs its own form of irony to engage the culture by paradoxically declaring as “fact” what should be so obvious as to go without saying. The movement’s declaration invites a stance of humility on the part of the dominate culture at their need to be “informed” of what they should already know. But underlying that rebuke are values held in common between the movement and the dominant culture about the dignity of human life.

This continuity underscores the vital importance of Douglass’s rhetorical legacy in responding to ongoing racial injustice. Indeed, Douglass’s model of prophetic engagement is needed now as perhaps at no other point in the nation’s history. In his penetrating analysis of race in America, Cornel West asserted that the ultimate threat to black America is not oppression or exploitation, but a nihilism which grows out of blacks’ lived experience with “horrifying meaningless, hopelessness, and … lovelessness.” The “frightening response” to such conditions is “a numbing detachment from others and a self-destructive disposition toward the world” (6). To succumb to that impulse, West believed, would be disastrous for black America. In the face of that existential threat, Douglass stands uniquely as one who suffered the injustice of white supremacy firsthand, and who condemned the increasing terrorism being unleashed on blacks in his own day. Yet he also recognized the practical reality that the history of blacks and whites in America was inextricably linked, so that regardless of what atrocities had brought blacks to this continent, the U.S. was their home. But much more, he believed that the ideals and values of the nation held out the possibility for living together in a just society. From that vantage point, he was able to condemn racial injustice without succumbing to nihilistic hopelessness. His rhetoric, like that of Black Lives Matter, held out the hope that if his hearers could only see racial injustice as it was, if they could simply be present, with their defenses lowered, to an unclouded glimpse of its full cruelty, then like Brown, they would be possessed by the same abhorrence toward oppression that drove him to give his life to liberate the slaves of Harpers Ferry.

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Frederick Douglass’s John Brown Problem

Jeffrey B. Kurtz

Denison University

“Douglass remembers no beard. Not wearing one himself, nor a beard on Brown’s gaunt face. Certainly not the patriarch’s thicket of white flowing—no, a torrent—today halfway down John Brown’s chest. He misremembers me.”

—John Edgar Wideman 74

Frederick Douglass’s influence as a reformer cannot be overstated. His popularity surely was, as Gary Selby has described, “dramatic and overwhelmingly positive” (“Mocking the Sacred” 337). Quoting from a newspaper account of one of Douglass’s early speeches on religion, Selby found that the audience judged the former slave as the “living, speaking, startling proof of the folly, absurdity, and inconsistency … of slavery. Fluent, graceful, eloquent, shrewd, sarcastic, he was with making any allowances, a fine specimen of an orator” (qtd. in “Mocking the Sacred” 337). Yet popularity and influence should not be confused, and the truth may be that Douglass’s influence is not easily grasped. Part of the problem may lie with the question itself: Just which Douglass do we actually mean? The determined escaped-slave and author-orator-abolitionist par excellence? Earnest disciple of the morally rigid William Lloyd Garrison and his pacifist perfectionism? Easy confidant of the well-connected and well-financed Gerrit Smith, he among Garrison’s most vocal critics? Civil War recruiter, admirer of Lincoln? Mature elder statesman?

While these roles seem closely related, they gesture to distinct psychological and rhetorical complexities beneath Douglass’s advocacy. Celeste-Marie Bernier illuminated these well, observing a common impulse across Douglass’s corpus “to experiment with form and language to dramatize the otherwise hidden histories of Black male iconic figures,” an ethic of experimentation students have recognized in his uses of irony, humor, and prophetic anger (252). Selby amplifies the point, noting especially about Douglass’s use of parody, and the ways that it “represented a creative response to what, before Douglass’s emergence, had been the proslavery cause’s virtually unassailable case, that the Bible sanctioned slavery” (“Mocking the Sacred” 333). John Stauffer complements Bernier’s examination of Douglass’s complexity, noting the ways his transformation highlights the “unreliable nature of social rank, status, and hierarchy.” This transformation, Stauffer maintains, spurred Douglass to turn “inward, away from material conditions and social conventions” as he fulfilled his trajectory of reform, relying “on [his] spiritual instincts and passions of the heart” (Black Hearts of Men 15).

Yet it also seems that students of Douglass’s oratory have—unintentionally—muted this complexity by trapping him in the pyrotechnics of the antebellum era. John Louis Lucaites, for example, recognized him as “one of the most important spokespersons for a burgeoning African-American identity in the antebellum period,” and the temporal designation may precisely be the problem (49). Gregory Lampe, while acknowledging that “Douglass overwhelmed white audiences with his oratorical brilliance and intellectual capacity,” confined his own study to the years 1818 to 1845 (viii). Zoe Trodd’s examination of anti-lynching protest literature in the decades after the Civil War provided a sweeping pass of Douglass’s “abolitionist aesthetics” (307). Given Douglass’s long arc of reform, his postbellum rhetoric merits fuller attention in response to Omedi Ochieng’s invitation to continue to “reinvestigate the intersections of tradition, ideology, ethos, and agency” Douglass critiqued (183).

This essay specifically considers Douglass’s 1881 address commemorating the fourteenth anniversary of Storer College in West Virginia, in which he paid tribute to John Brown. Douglass’s commemoration reveals what I will term his “John Brown problem,” a problem with ramifications for contemporary social justice advocacy. In the text’s praise of Brown’s courage, intellectual honesty, and commitment to racial solidarity, we also are invited to reflect on the insufficiency of these qualities for contemporary social justice work. While Douglass’s speech seems to embody what Peter C. Myers recognized more generally within Douglass’s corpus as a “rational hopefulness,” I will argue that this hopeful center struggles to hold itself together (14). I offer this assessment not to diminish the significance of Douglass’s speech, but to encourage students of Douglass and social justice to critically examine how Douglass remembered John Brown, and what these efforts suggest for a contemporary vocabulary with which to work through the challenges of advocacy on behalf of social justice. Central to that vocabulary must be recognizing and articulating how we may see our way through the profound polarization in which we are mired.

Central to the character of Douglass’s remarks about Brown is this: The speech crafts and sets apart a deliberative space in which citizens may reconcile Brown’s unadulterated violence with the potential to make anew social and political worlds following the horrific aftermath of Reconstruction. Douglass’s act of veneration is not merely an exercise in praise. Rather, as Brad Vivian reminds us: “The historical character of historical interpretation thus indicates that history is scripted in accord with discernible motivations shaped by existing human relations, that historical wisdom is never an end unto itself but a medium of collective decision-making in present-day public affairs” (94). Keen to Douglass’ motivations was fashioning a scaffolding with which to help construct fuller understandings of Brown’s deeds, understandings that might shore up those deeds against abolition’s crumbling aesthetic, understood here as a collection of rhetorical sensibilities with which reformers argued not merely for slavery’s eradication, but for a new world wherein the principles and practices of equality, freedom, and justice not only were zealously defended but also embodied.

Yet Douglass’s commemorative text surely did struggle against the full-throated terror of Reconstruction’s shadow, a terror that exposes our own contemporary anxieties about reform, violence, and the debilitating complacency of liberalism. Following closely the insights of Vivian regarding idioms of forgetting, as well as the work of Kristen Hoerl and Kirt Wilson on the politics of memory within the crucible of civil rights, I will suggest why Douglass’s homage to Brown invites a counter-reading attuned to the aesthetics of abolition’s legacy. Douglass is not merely trying to appropriately remember Brown; he is also insisting on an ethic of reform inflected by Brown’s deepest commitments. Yet my interpretation will wonder: Are these commitments enough? This counter-reading should not be judged antithetical either to the speaker or the cause he celebrated. Instead, Douglass modeled both remembering and forgetting over the arc of his text. This tension was significant, as Vivian recognized, because remembering and forgetting are “densely interwoven dimensions of larger symbolic or discursive processes” that provoke us “to recognize the inherent selectivity of normative public memories and imagine anew, with each passing generation, what our objects of memory should be,” and why (10). Memory-work, then, should be understood as a key element for contemporary social justice advocacy. Over the remainder of this essay I first consider the study of Douglass’s oratory, and especially the narrow frame of that study among rhetorical scholars. Then I turn to a consideration of the intersection of rhetoric, public memory, and race, drawing specifically on the work of Wilson and Hoerl to unpack the tensions and opportunities found along the continuum of sentimentality and traumatic collective memories. Finally, I will turn to a fuller consideration of Douglass’s address, one that will strive to mine the “John Brown problem” at its center and suggest its meanings for contemporary social justice work.

The Problem of Douglass’s Oratory

Part of Douglass’s John Brown problem may lie with the ways Douglass is trapped in our intellectual history. While Robert Levine has recently noted the ways Douglass earnestly strove to articulate his “status as the country’s great and most representative black leader through his three major autobiographies … the fact is that during the nineteenth century, and even decades after his death, [he] was best known for the sheer power of his oratory” (9). Yet public address critics have focused somewhat myopically on the narrowest slices of that oratorical corpus. Much of the rhetorical scholarship, for example, circles around Douglass’s July 5, 1852 address. Lucaites, for instance, remarked on the text’s “ironic reversal [to reconstitute] America’s lived present in an egalitarian future … that embodies culture differences as an essential element of a free and open society” (57). James Jasinski highlighted the ways Douglass “engages in a complex process of generic subversion and reconstitution: He acknowledges the generic norms, calls its authenticity into question, but then affirms a reconstituted version of the norm” (80). More recently, Robert Terrill has characterized the speech as an “exemplar of rhetorical irony” that balanced invitation and judgment/condemnation (217). Though not concerned specifically with the 1852 address, Selby nevertheless keyed on the antebellum oratory of Douglass, noting of his speeches concerned with religion, the ways Douglass “violated the boundaries of social hierarchy, forcefully appropriated revered cultural identities, and undermined the religious authority that legitimized the entire system” though a sterling use of parody (“Mocking the Sacred” 338).

These critical judgments, while rich and insightful, nevertheless underscore that we seem not yet to have accounted fully for the ranging significance of Douglass’s oratorical legacy, particularly after the Civil War. Philip Foner, among the most careful stewards of Douglass’s ideas, participated in a curious (if unintended) circumventing of the legacy of those ideas, particularly with regard to Douglass’s ambivalent relationship with Brown. Though Foner’s introduction to Douglass’s writings following the Civil War remark on Douglass’s regard for Brown, the speech at Storer College is conspicuously absent. One consequence of that absence is that we are left with an unfinished understanding of Douglass’s legacy for contemporary questions about social justice, reform, and advocacy within the crucible of twenty-first-century liberalism.

Myers perhaps came closest to working through some of these questions as they concern Douglass’s speaking after the Civil War. About his 1876 “Freedmen’s Monument” speech, for example, Myers contends that the text should be understood foremost as a “seminal affirmation of the integrationist mainstream of African American protest thought” (“A Good Day” 223). Yet if Myers is correct in his praise of Douglass’s “Freedmen’s” speech as “a masterpiece of moral and political oratory,” surely it is also the case that other texts from Douglass’s post-Civil War corpus merit attention (“A Good Day” 223). To paraphrase Levine, we would do well to consider Douglass’s oratory beyond his July 5th address so that we might rethink “what it is that we’re reading” when we read later examples of Douglass’s oratorical prowess. The address at Storer College seems a useful place to turn. First, though, I want to consider the ways that remembering and forgetting suggest insights for students of social advocacy and for social justice work more broadly. In particular, Wilson’s meditations on sentimentality and civil rights as well as Hoerl’s incisive examinations of race, public memory, and trauma both provide frameworks through which to reexamine the ways Douglass remembers Brown.

Resisting Sentimentality and Trauma: Memory, Rhetoric, and Civil Rights

Reflecting on what he termed the “explicitly epideictic moments” that began in the early 1990s as part of the “sustained and frequent acts of public rhetoric about race in the American experience” in commemorations of the civil rights movement, Wilson offers the heuristic of sentiment to work through understanding the stakes involved in memory, race, and civil rights (22). Scholarly conversations about sentiment, Wilson readily acknowledges, are long, hearkening back to Daniel Webster’s oratory and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, to cite just two instances. More recently, though, sentiment has emerged as a concept important to reflections on memory, race, and social advocacy because, as Wilson notes, the “evolving characteristics of nineteenth-century sentiment—the cultivation of sympathetic personal and social relations, a ‘ready emotionality,’ the use of cultural rather than explicitly deliberative discourses, and a rejection of those emotions that destroy empathy—are quite apt” to our contemporary moment (23). For Wilson, the problems with sentiment stem not from the bonds of genuine empathy that may be realized nor even the privileging of affect (feeling) over reason and deliberation. Instead, sentiment’s work within memory politics is more insidious and its ramifications for race and social advocacy more profound. Stated succinctly, sentimental acts of commemoration in acts of public memorializing of the civil rights movement disable other kinds of responses to the movement’s legacies, particularly as those responses might challenge or disrupt the logic of (often) banal, sentimental commemoration. As Wilson writes, “Unless we fashion a rhetoric that allows for both the epideictic celebration of civil rights’ successes and the confrontational deliberative rhetoric of speaking truth to power, the future of black civil rights in America will be stymied by an increasingly anemic public discourse” (23). Vigilance against the anesthetizing effects of sentiment remains profoundly important: In the critical work of remembering the past, we must not become numb to difficult challenges and deliberative opportunities at the expense of shared good feelings.

Like Wilson, Hoerl counsels vigilance against easy acceptance of commemorations of the civil rights movements, particularly as these unfold within the logic of documentary films. For Hoerl, the problem with such films that ostensibly strived to disrupt or challenge taken-for-granted assumptions about race, civil rights, and social advocacy rests with the ways such films (specifically the Eyes on the Prize series and the documentary Black Power Mixtape 1967–1975) circulate in cultural trauma, and thus fail to equip citizens for the hard work of citizenship. Hoerl understands cultural traumas as “the disrupture of dominant ideological belief systems … [that] disrupt the common sense of narratives foundational to national or cultural identity as they portray the experiences of people who have been silenced or ignored” (80). Judging such films as akin to a “specific brand of counter-memory,” these instances of cultural trauma expose “contradictions between narratives of national identity and experiences of subordinated groups” (80).

On their face, then, wouldn’t these kinds of documentary films, keen to disrupt, challenge, and expose the contradictions at play across U.S. culture, be a good thing? Hoerl is rightly skeptical, namely because the work accomplished by cultural trauma within these films ultimately functions to forestall or constrain political agency. As she writes, “[These documentaries] evoke a different kind of crisis of knowledge in which hegemony of liberal capitalism is neither sustained nor actively challenged; rather, the critical questioning of national ideology is enshrined within traumatic cultural memory. The subjectivity of would-be activists is thus ground in past political action” (82).

Relegating political agency to the past cannot abide, of course, and thus the ways both Wilson and Hoerl have articulated rhetoric to memory presents a profoundly important platform on which to build a set of reflections about Douglass’s address about Brown. That work, that address, for me, raises questions about the relationship between virtue and structure, between individual agency and the weight, power, and force of cultural norms (or, in shorthand, hegemony). Borrowing once more from Levine, I want to examine the ways in which Brown consumed Douglass’s political and moral imaginations, as those imaginations were put on rhetorical display in his Storer College address, to understand better how Douglass argued for a proper understanding of Brown’s legacy that deftly navigated between hagiography and resignation. Douglass shows contemporary students of social advocacy both how to praise fundamental virtues and how to acknowledge contemporary social conditions that conspire to oppress. The result of this union is not indifference or the incapacitation of one’s intellectual or moral faculties; instead, Douglass equips us with the intellectual wherewithal to, as Ochieng astutely noted, redefine the terms of radicalism (177).

Remembering John Brown, Rightly

Upon delivering his address at Storer College, Douglass seized the occasion to instruct his audience in the finer arts of remembering—arts listeners may have been somewhat unwilling or unable to grasp—given the lingering specters of war and Reconstruction that still gripped the nation’s conscience. Indeed, Douglass is quick to pronounce what his speech will not do: He seeks neither to stir animosity nor needlessly rouse enthusiasms but to undertake the careful work of trying to remember and praise Brown, as remembering rightly may be a way to “pay a just debt long due” and thereby “promote a better understanding of the raid upon Harper’s Ferry” (6). That raid and Brown’s role as its chief architect, Douglass recognized, was a subject that—save for the Civil War itself—“in its interest and importance will be remembered longer, [and] will form a more thrilling chapter in American history” than virtually anything else that might be broached within abolition’s pantheon (6). How, then, did Douglass undertake to remember Brown and his raid, and what might those gestures to remembering (and a corresponding forgetting) suggest about the ways the rhetorical dynamics of veneration potentially disable the very values they seek to uplift?

At the heart of Douglass’s efforts to remember Brown is a commitment to celebrating the man: Who he was, how he lived, and the ways those qualities and experiences served an uncompromising commitment to slavery’s abolition. Douglass framed that celebration this way:

Science now tells us when storms are in the sky, and when and where their violence will be most felt. Why may we not yet know with equal certainty when storms are in the moral sky, and how to avoid their desolating force? But I can invite you to no such profound discussions. I am not the man, nor is this the occasion for such philosophical inquiry. Mine is the word of grateful memory to an old friend; to tell you what I knew of him—what I knew of his inner life … and thereby give you a clear view of his character and services. (8-9)

Yet surely Douglass is acting coyly here, for it was precisely the philosophical, moral, and civic challenges Brown presented to the work of antislavery reform that serve to inflect his commemorative remarks with troubling, contradictory gestures: Brown merits listeners’ veneration, yet Douglass laments that no one can see precisely why abolition’s most polarizing figure is so deserving. The problem is one of perspective: “Though more than twenty years have rolled between us and the Harper’s Ferry raid,” Douglass reflects, “… we yet stand too near the days of slavery, and life and times of John Brown, to see clearly the true martyr and hero that he was and rightly to estimate the value of the man and his works” (10). It is this context—its twisted threads of time, morality, and character—that comprise the heart of Douglass’s John Brown problem. How to rightly remember a man whose zeal compelled murder, whose fervor spurred the promise of unrepentant violence? On what grounds could the promise of liberalism and its alleged hopefulness possibly stand, given the tenor of Brown’s righteous resistance?

These questions compel judgment of and assent to a benign dismissal—really, a forgetting—of Brown’s acts against slavery, in favor of praising the motives from which those acts stemmed. Douglass put the matter this way: “Did John Brown fail? He certainly did fail to get out of Harper’s Ferry before being beaten down by United States soldiers; he did fail to save his own life, to lead a liberating army into the mountains of Virginia” (27). But this question about Brown’s supposed failure serves to provide grounds on which to pivot, for any answers to it cannot be tied to the judgment of mere deeds, or whether peculiar actions were, finally, successful. Instead, Douglass inverts entirely the framework in which to judge Brown by insisting on the necessity of asking an altogether different question: Brown, he insists, “did not go to Harper’s Ferry to save his life. The question is, Did John Brown draw his sword against slavery and thereby lose his life in vain? and to this I answer ten thousand times, No! No man fails, or can fail who so grandly gives himself and all he has to a righteous cause” (27–28).

On the one hand, this is easy tonic to swallow. Douglass stood before his Storer College audience intent, it would seem, on redeeming the meaning and legacy of Brown as that legacy may have suffered gross misinterpretation, a kind of deliberate suffocation of the abolitionist aesthetic at the clumsy yet murderous hands of Reconstruction. Douglass, in other words, strived—rightfully—to redeem Brown’s vision and to craft a space in which audiences might reflect on that vision as the racist heat of the blistering nineteenth-century continued unabated. The principal work of the speech, then, flows from a kind of rightful forgetting, akin to Vivian’s assertion, that the rhetoric of forgetting “does not negate the past but, true to the deep intimacy of memory and forgetting, crafts for public audiences an extensively altered and arguably worthier moral and political version of it” (166).

On the other hand, should Douglass’s refusal to condemn Brown’s violence trouble us? Myers reflects on this refusal, contextualizing it as part of Douglass’s Janus-faced relationship with violent resistance itself. Douglass’s antebellum militancy reflected “his realist understanding of the character and motivations of the slaver power” (Frederick Douglass 68). This understanding, however, did not mean, according to Myers, that Douglass countenanced violence uncritically or with absolute zeal. “Vicious in their tendency to destroy rather than to build, the martial qualities could become virtues only so far as they were prudently deployed to defend or prepare the construction of genuinely civilized society” (Frederick Douglass 71).

Of Rhetorical Legacies and Social Justice Advocacy

“Frederick Douglass is an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job and is getting recognized more and more, I notice.”

—President Donald J. Trump (qtd. in Graham)

In working through Douglass’s Storer College address, I find myself torn over the ways he seems to deflect Brown’s history of violence and valorizes the spirit and character of his cause. The consequence of such valorization, it may seem, is to leave an audience incapacitated insofar as making judgments when violence is concerned. Douglass foregrounded this valorization and its corresponding incapacity in his explicit veneration of Brown’s bravery prior to his execution by the state of Virginia.

With the Alleghany mountains for his pulpit, the country for his church and the whole civilized world for his audience, he was a thousand times more effective as a preacher than as a warrior, and the consciousness of this fact was the secret of his amazing complacency. Mighty with the sword of steel, he was mightier with the sword of the truth, and with his sword he literally swept the horizon. He was more than a match [for all his critics], who could rise against him. They could kill him, but they could not answer him. (18)

Yet perhaps what I’ve stipulated as Douglass’s John Brown problem really wasn’t a problem for him at all. In venerating Brown’s legacy, raising up his character and subsuming his deeds beneath a cloak of meaningful forgetting, Douglass reminds us why attention to the past, to the words and acts of the women and men who shape that past, matter for the present. Perhaps Douglass adhered precisely to what Vivian imagined in acts of public forgetting, the ways that such forgetting is desirable “when it reflects open and voluntary procedures of judgment” (177). Douglass’s speech presented its audience with an alternative: Rather than dying for a cause, could we find the means—through rightful remembering—to work our way toward a future not yet known? Elsewhere I have stipulated about Brown’s fanaticism that it distinctly asked everything of him, and that he, in turn, insisted from others that they give everything for slavery’s abolition (Kurtz 387). A civil war asked everything of a nation, and Reconstruction proved a wholly insufficient response to the profoundly difficult work of sewing equality and dignity and justice after the war. More was required. And perhaps it is true that on the occasion of the College’s celebration, Douglas gave all he could.

What, then, does Douglass’s rhetorical legacy ask of students of social justice advocacy? Waldo Martin framed Douglass’s legacy within an “inveterate” optimism, noting that he “firmly believed that the righteousness of the Negro’s cause in concert with enlightened and progressive tendencies of the day ensured that conditions would improve; that one day soon, the Negro really would be free” (73). David Blight observed that “[b]y intellectual predilection and by experience, Douglass was deeply conscious that history mattered … [He] understood that peoples and nations are shaped and defined by history, which he knew was both burden and inspiration, something to be both cherished and overcome” (223). Elsewhere, Blight maintains that “[e]ven in the twilight of his life, when his leadership and his ideas seemed, at times, selfishly out of touch, there was no greater voice than Douglass’s for the old shibboleth that the Civil War had been a struggle for union and liberty” (239). In our contemporary culture where we seem especially given toward absolutes, Douglass’s Storer College speech reminds us of ways to articulate commitments that encompass the fragility of our most profound intellectual ideas (equality, democracy, human dignity) and recognize the fierce insistence to resist the trammeling of historical memory in indifference to those ideas. Douglass’s legacy is one of unapologetic rhetorical courage coupled with profound humanity, a humanity that chose to recognize—despite evidence to the contrary—that the U.S., as an idea, was worth defending, as were its people.

I’ve tried in this symposium piece to inquire whether there is something wanting about Douglass’s praise of John Brown, whether Douglass was burdened by what I’ve chosen to call his “John Brown problem.” This burden is characterized by the inability to move out from under the weight of fawning historical memory, to not reckon freely and openly with the vagaries of the past as these vagaries may suggest wellsprings for substantive critique. Brown’s legacy put that burden front-and-center, as Larry J. Reynolds has observed. Brown, after all, recognized in total uncompromising fashion that race and racism went hand-in-hand. Douglass during and after the Civil War, however, may have been hobbled by what Reynolds casts as a “perspective (and ambition) [that] allowed the Republicans to exploit him for their own political ends, all the while ignoring the injustices suffered by the blacks he supposedly represented” (110). “Douglass,” Reynolds continues, “sought for himself not the martyrdom of a rebel leader but a place of honor within an integrated nation free of racial categories, where men and women, whatever the color of their skin, would treat one another with respect and civility” (111). Foner likewise asserts that “[i]n addition to his lack of understanding of the class forces during the closing years of Reconstruction, Douglass’ failing as a leader in this crucial period was mainly because he was completely out of touch with [the African-American] masses” (104).

These judgments may be fair, but they strike me as incomplete. Closer to the commitments of this symposium, I am struck, finally, by the rhetorical complexity of Douglass’s legacy, a legacy that over its arc was always characterized by “puzzling complexities,” as Meyers wrote about in the 1876 “Freedman’s Monument” speech (“A Good Day” 209). These complexities challenge us to think carefully about advocacy, reform, and violence in our contemporary moment. This cocktail perhaps never has been more volatile than now, and while we surely are a long way from civil war, it is all too apparent that across our civic and institutional spaces, we are mired in a kind of war of polarization. It is tempting to treat our current moment as an opportunity to withdraw, to wait out the seeming chaos unleashed by the election of the forty-fifth President until circumstances realign themselves, when we know that our work on behalf of social justice may find greater traction; to wait out, too, the sheer historical ignorance of this moment, at least as connoted by the President’s remarks during Black History Month, captured in the quotation that opened this section of the essay. Such withdrawal, though, such capitulation to ignorance, forsakes the depth and meaning of Douglass’s rhetorical example, an example that remained rich and substantive well after the Civil War, even as he struggled to find himself in a new, uncertain world. That world, as Stauffer noted, was rather quite similar to “other black and white abolitionists” who collectively “saw the end of the war as the endpoint of an era and of [their] life’s work” (Giants 307). “I felt that I had reached the end of the noblest and best part of my life,” Douglass reflected. “My school was broken up,” he lamented in reference to his abolitionist comrades. “My church disbanded, and the beloved congregation dispersed, never to come together again” (qtd. in Giants 307). These are the reflections of a man struggling to learn from a past as he stares into an uncertain future. In this way, Douglass is and will always be our rhetorical and intellectual kin.

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Frederick Douglass’s “Lessons of the Hour” and the Ethos of the Sage

Glen McClish

San Diego State University

On January 9, 1894, Frederick Douglass, the most famous African American rhetor of the nineteenth century—whose career as a civil rights activist had extended for over half a century—delivered “The Lessons of the Hour” at the Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church in Washington, D.C. First presented the previous fall in Detroit and subsequently in other American venues before and following the Washington performance, the speech was clearly important to this veteran of so many human rights campaigns. Although the key target of the oration was Southern lynch law, Douglass featured other pressing issues as well, including threats to the African American franchise.

Douglass was drawn into the campaign against Southern lynch law by the rising African American activist Ida B. Wells. The intrepid young chronicler of American lynching and the aged veteran of half a century of civil rights struggles interacted in Chicago in 1893 while the latter served as the Commissioner of the Haitian Pavilion at the Columbian Exposition. Also that year, they collaborated on The Reason Why the Colored American is not in the World’s Columbian Exposition—Wells’s innovative, controversial pamphlet exposing the racist underpinnings of the Exposition and, more generally, the severe oppression of African Americans in late-nineteenth-century America.

For indeed, the racial politics of the 1890s had, in the words of Randy Prus, “taken on a regressive, savage inequality” (72). Three decades after the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery, prejudice and acts of outright terrorism against African Americans persisted and even increased, especially in the Southern states. Blacks endured an epidemic of lynching as well as systematic assaults on their educational facilities, business enterprises, and civil and political rights. Most of the progress achieved during Reconstruction was eliminated by the presence of Jim Crow. Historians Rayford Logan and David Blight both characterized the period as the “nadir” of the African American experience (Logan 52–53; Blight 105).

Douglass’s oration, which William McFeely dubs his “last great speech,” was reviewed positively in the white press (377). The Washington Evening Star provided favorable comments, emphasizing the approval expressed by the majority African American audience. “As he looked out from the rostrum,” it is reported, “his gaze fell upon a sea of upturned faces of his own color, earnest, intelligent countenances of men and women, who followed his words with deepest attention and frequently evidenced their understanding and appreciation of his remarks.” Describing Douglass “with voice unshaken … with brain still teeming with practical ideas for the advancement of the colored race; with the same old fire and fervor proceeding from his great big heart,” the article places considerable weight on the projected character or ethos of the speaker (“The Negro”). The African American press also praised Douglass’s lecture. The Cleveland Gazette called it “the grandest effort of his life” and “an exceptionally fine oration, as all who heard it agree” (Untitled). The speech’s favorable reception demonstrates the power of Douglass’s words, as well as the ethos that inhabits them.

This study examines the distinctive ethos Douglass constructs on behalf of “The Lessons of the Hour” as a function of his position in life, his unique history, the social conditions of the time, and his specific arguments. In my treatment of ethos, I follow Julie Nelson Christoph who reminds us that although “completely controlling one’s ethos is not possible,” the constructed character of a rhetor remains a vital element of rhetorical agency (666). Like Christoph, I seek to show through the example of Douglass that

to better understand how ethos and the personal function in arguments, it is crucial to look closely at the particular ways in which writers establish authority for themselves through defining and redefining their evolving positions in particular communities—that we look not only at texts but also at material, social, and political contexts. (668)

The result of Douglass’s self-fashioning in “The Lessons of the Hour,” I argue, is a powerful sage ethos that—as it constitutes African American civic consciousness—reveals the kinds of pressures and possibilities for the construction of rhetorical character afforded traditionally marginalized rhetors both in the late nineteenth century for Douglass and in the twenty-first century for speakers of color such as Barack Obama.

The Ethos of the Sage

Douglass’s early career as a rhetor troubled the white abolitionists with whom he worked because the former slave was eager and able to transition from an exhibit—or artless witness to the horrors of slavery—to a full-blown orator, a role they found more suitable for white men. “Give us the facts,” Douglass reports that his white colleague John A. Collins, general agent of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, instructed him, “we will take care of the philosophy” (My Bondage 207). Never one to abide condescension or to bow to authority, Douglass soon rejected such directives and characterizations, embraced “the philosophy” and all that term constituted for his rhetorical practice, and became the most important African American advocate of the century. “Intermixing philosophical musing on humanity with his own testimony about the life of slaves and the experience of racism,” Terry Baxter explains, Douglass established a celebrity ethos that drew Americans to his speeches and, subsequently, to the antislavery movement (22). And his rhetorical character continued to evolve. Protean and adaptable to changing audiences, political contexts, and intellectual developments, Douglass’s ethos was consistently crafted to meet the developing needs of African American advocacy in the nineteenth century. Wilson J. Moses writes, “The ability to manufacture a public personality was Douglass’s bread and butter” (69).

In his final discursive efforts, Douglass developed a rhetoric both fully antithetical to the mechanical witness demanded of him over fifty years before and distinct from Baxter’s construct of antebellum celebrity. He cultivated a philosophic ethos suggested by the unofficial titles bestowed upon him such as the “Sage of Anacostia,” the “Sage of Cedar Hill,” and the “Nestor of Freedmen.” Michael Leff suggests this sage presence when he wrote: “No longer an agitator, Douglass often lectured on themes of general interest and while his style sometimes showed flashes of his radical and biting irony, the tone had shifted in a direction consistent with the role of a respectable citizen and senior statesman” (142). Douglass’s 1890s rhetoric was crafted to complement his eminent status and long experience within African American and women’s activism, to enable his lifelong efforts to influence parties and movements, and to express his own positions as an independent-minded free agent. To this end, Douglass deemphasized the personal, specific details of individual injustices or acts of brutality in order to focus on general arguments, identify key lines of reasoning, and scrutinize the nature of evidence as well as the assumptions undergirding arguments. He assumed the role of general advocate or dialectician, rather than eyewitness or aggrieved party, skillfully employing metadiscourse to highlight for his audience the intellectual trajectory of his rhetoric. Explicitly embracing a long view on human experience that featured synthesis, continuity of character, and universal human qualities rather than extended personal narrative, he marshaled proverbs and aphorisms that aligned his arguments with the common sense and folk wisdom of the day. Douglass’s “imperial disregard for external authorities,” which Baxter argues characterizes the antebellum phase of his rhetoric, continues into his late career, enabling him to disagree without restraint with those whose positions differ from his, regardless of their race, class, gender, or political standing, even if they profess to be allies in the greater cause (140).

Although the deliberately sculpted eloquence, the emotional appeals, and the scathing irony that distinguish Douglass’s antebellum career as a rhetor remain to the last, they are complemented by his distancing of himself from the role of the direct witness to specific events, actors, and scenes of struggle. Douglass’s sage invites his black audience to acquire an activist African American consciousness by demonstrating how an African American practices what he termed “manhood” within the particularly challenging social conditions of the late nineteenth century. Furthermore, he seeks to erode his white audience’s prejudicial tendencies by acting as an equal, the outsider as intellectual, civic, and moral peer.

“The Lessons of the Hour”

Nowhere is Douglass’s sage rhetoric more richly realized than in “The Lessons of the Hour.” He begins by boldly declaring his explicit intention “to speak for, and to define, so far as I can do so within the bounds of truth, a long-suffering people, and one just now subject to much misrepresentation and persecution.” On the subject of lynch law, Douglass reports, the Southern and Northern white perspectives dominate public discourse. He then notes that although “[t]his kind of evidence may be considered by some as all-sufficient upon which to found an intelligent judgment of the whole matter in controversy,” he will, nonetheless, “fearlessly submit [his] testimony to the candid judgment of all who hear [him]” because “experience has taught us that it is sometimes wise and necessary to have more than the testimony of two witnesses to bring out the whole truth, especially in this the case where one of the witnesses has a powerful motive for concealing or distorting the facts in any given case” (3).

Several elements of these initial remarks demonstrate Douglass’s sage ethos. First, he adopts the strategy of explicitly framing the debate over lynch law as a trial featuring competing evidence, marshaling metadiscourse to provide a larger recognizable rhetorical structure that he has deliberately imposed on the controversy. Second, Douglass immediately focuses on the specific nature of the evidence relevant to the case, thus calling attention to his skill in making sophisticated rhetorical distinctions. Third, his comment about what “experience has taught us” reveals his strategy of highlighting gnomic statements that function as warrants underlying the structure of the argument. Many times, as in the case of this premise, such wise sayings are used to counter ostensibly reasonable oppositional positions or narratives. Thus, because the discourse of Northern and Southern white apologists for lynch law is “presented with abundant repetition and with startling emphasis” and is “tempered by time, distance from the scene, and his higher civilization” respectively, it is important for African Americans to provide a corrective perspective (3).

Douglass begins by speaking directly in the first person (“I am honored,” “I have the qualifications,” “I am here to speak for,” “I propose to give you,” and so forth) and claims for himself the role of provider of “testimony” or witness (3). However, he does not testify personally or specifically about the victims of lynch law and the atrocities of Southern racists. Instead, he enacts the role of disembodied general counsel in an imagined court, scrutinizing evidence from a more removed level of involvement. The trial he conducts does not summon actual witnesses of the crimes but operates at the level of metanalysis. He features deliberate explication of the overall argument, rather than rhetorical strategies intended to bring vivid details before the eyes of the audience. With this approach, Douglass casts himself not merely as a particular aggrieved party, or as the friend of one, but as a masterful, learned spokesperson for an entire people, an experienced advocate uniquely positioned to expose the false stratagems of his opposition.

Thus, when Douglass, continuing to operate within his trial frame for the speech, takes up the “special charge against the negro”—namely his alleged assault of white women—he characterizes the rhetorical situation faced by the Southern African American in overtly rhetorical terms: “[A]ll presumptions are against him” (5; 6). As Douglass suggests, whites’ charges about black crime are generally believed, placing an unreasonable burden of proof upon accused African Americans. Whereas American law operates on the principle that the accused is innocent until proved guilty, Southern blacks are assumed to be guilty, and lynch law provides no opportunity for disproving such assumptions. Revealingly, Douglass declares that he will not take up the mantle “as the defender of any man guilty of this atrocious crime,” thus suggesting that although he is a seasoned advocate for his people, principles of truth and justice transcend mere partisanship. Thoughtful white as well as black members of his late-nineteenth-century audience can trust Douglass’s sage. “Speaking for the colored people as a class,” Douglass “plead[s] not guilty and shall submit [his] case with the confidence of acquittal” to his listeners in the hall and to the national audience beyond it, the “good men and women North and South” (8).

As he builds this case, Douglass explicitly conjures up the sense of general humanity to which all people should adhere: “Every honest man will see that this point is well taken … It has for its support common sense, common justice, common honesty, and the best sentiment of mankind, and it has nothing to oppose it but a vulgar popular prejudice against the colored people of our country” (10). Appealing to these common principles and values over the particular biases of a discredited faction in a given time and place, Douglass invokes what Chaim Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca later identify as the “universal audience,” that rhetorical construct of timeless rationality and right values that is equipped to distinguish good from flawed, prejudicial argumentation (31–35). Through such appeals to the universal audience—appeals that conform to the broad-minded, seasoned rhetoric of the sage—rhetors such as Douglass seek, as Francis J. Mootz has argued, “not only to shape their discourse, but also to entreat the concrete audience before them … to imagine themselves as part of such an audience.” The construct of the universal audience, in other words, “serves as a check on the parochial concerns of the actual audience” (391). In this way, Douglass’s sage appeal to the philosophical pull of a universal standard of reasoning serves as a potent invitation to audience members to elevate their thinking on the subject at hand in order to align with this argument.

To complete a principal line of defense against the charge of rape, Douglass emphasizes that during the Civil War, when male slaveholders vacated their homes and plantations to serve as soldiers for the Confederate cause, leaving their wives, sisters, mothers, and daughters vulnerable to assault from their slaves, no such crimes were claimed. “During all those long four years of terrible conflict,” Douglass declares, “when the negro had every opportunity to commit the abominable crime now alleged against him, there was never a single instance of such crime reported or charged against him” (11). Then, drawing overtly on a premise concerning the relative constancy of human nature—an important component of his sage rhetoric—Douglass suggests that African Americans could not experience a dramatic change in character over the course of a mere three decades. “I do not believe the charge” of assault against white women by black men, he argues,

[b]ecause it implies an improbable, if not an impossible, change in the mental and moral character and composition of the negro. It implies a change wholly inconsistent with well known facts of human nature. It is a contradiction to well known human experience. History does not present an example of such a transformation in the character of any class of men so extreme, so unnatural and so complete as is implied in this charge. The change is too great and the period too brief. (11)

Douglass’s repetition of this general principle of human nature contributes to a rhetoric of long experience and deep understanding of the world, as well as to a knowledge of rhetorical practice itself.

Having presented his case against lynch law, Douglass continues to define his sage character as a speaker by discussing a set of related arguments concerning the late-nineteenth-century oppression of African Americans and the so-called “race problem.” First, he refutes proposals to limit African American suffrage in the South advocated by—among others—prominent black leaders who “have taken up an idea which they seem to think quite new, but which in reality is as old as despotism and about as narrow and selfish” (20–21). As sage, Douglass calls out revered fellow African American leaders with whom he differs, praising their accomplishments while identifying salient areas of disagreement. Declaring that these figures have become distracted by mere erudition, Douglass highlights the difference between what is incidental and what is essential to personhood: “Education is great, but manhood is greater. The one is the principle, the other is the accident. Man was not made as an attribute to education, but education is an attribute to man” (21). By thoughtfully breaking with these revered fellow African Americans, Douglass demonstrates that he places right principles above racial partisanship, thus demonstrating to both his African American and white audience members the role of a just, trustworthy, independent-minded black activist.

In attacking the contention that African Americans’ lot was better under slavery, Douglass asserts that “the champions of this idea” are essentially claiming “that darkness is better than light and that wrong is better than right” (27–28). Exposing this kind of argument as “the American method of reasoning in all matters concerning the negro,” Douglass challenges white America to examine its attitude toward race relations, which “inverts everything; turns truth upside down and puts the case of the unfortunate negro wrong end foremost every time” (28). This is not the ploy of a politically facile politician to win easy friends or to shore up white relationships with African Americans through flattery, but the strong words of a worldly advocate, compelling his white audience members to rethink their lines of reasoning, primary assumptions, and beliefs about their marginalized fellow citizens while exemplifying for fellow African Americans a confident, unapologetic method of arguing with the dominant race.

Douglass’s desire to confront the big picture concerning race relations and to interrogate the destructive premises and assumptions of white America leads him to his final topic, “the so-called, but mis-called ‘Negro Problem,’ as a characterization of the relations existing in the Southern States” (29). Astutely building on Lord Byron’s phrase “words are things,” Douglass grounds his case in the key rhetorical understanding that terms and phrasings do not simply describe reality, but constitute what in the following century Kenneth Burke characterized as terministic screens—filters that shape one’s perception of the world (44–62). The rhetorical construction in question, which is “of Southern origin” and which “has been accepted by the good people of the North … without investigation,” craftily reduces “a great national problem” to a narrow issue concerning a minority population (29–30). Once again assuming the long view of humanity, which changes little from age to age, Douglass declares of such rhetorical operations, “The device is not new. It is an old trick. It has been oft repeated, and with a similar purpose and effect” (30). The orator reveals both the artfulness and the continuity of the South’s dramatistic construction of race relations, which infiltrates the discursive constructions of Northern whites, the African American press, and some black activists with the result of perpetuating the oppression of African Americans. This revelation cements Douglass’s ethos as a sage, highly worthy of emulation by his fellow African Americans and of respect from whites.

The Nineteenth Century and Future Consequences of Douglass’s Sage Ethos

In “The Lessons of the Hour,” Frederick Douglass’s ethos culminates his fifty-year rejection of the rhetorical constraints he faced as a fugitive slave who dared to raise his voice against the peculiar institution. His journey from the insensitively managed witness to the horrors of bondage to the worldly sage of this speech is a personal triumph, a fulfillment of his half century of efforts to transform his slavish, objectified persona into a venerable character that inspires and commands consideration. As McFeely aptly puts it, “The trip from Tuckahoe, from Nantucket, was complete” (381).

Along with representing the fulfillment of Douglass’s personal and rhetorical goals, his sage persona performs vital activist work in the 1890s context and beyond. As Baxter asserts about African American abolitionists, so, too, in the waning years of the nineteenth century Douglass demonstrates that “the power of ethos once established was nearly impossible to counter” (89). For if, in Prus’s words, lynch law and disenfranchisement “constitute a disavowal of the black citizenship that had been gained during Reconstruction,” Douglass’s sage character as manifested in “The Lessons of the Hour” thus embodies the power of such late-nineteenth-century citizenship in action (71). This worldly wise character—who exposes the tragedy of Southern violence against African Americans, defends the black franchise, and reframes racial issues in America—models for African American audience members the very black identity that demands trust, respect, and consequently, full citizenship and constitutional rights. In this sense, Douglass’s ethos, which constitutes the successful African American activist at this low point in the struggle for black rights and opportunities in the U.S., is ultimately as important as his specific arguments about the social, political, and legal issues of the day. It is a perfect anecdote for white efforts to “to blast and ruin the negro’s character as a man and a citizen” (15).

This constitutive function of Douglass’s ethos helps to account for the deep understanding and appreciation recorded in the faces of Douglass’s African Americans listeners, as well as the praise of the orator’s speech and platform presence in the black press. The rhetor invites African Americans to assume the powerful black character and consciousness that are formidable weapons against white oppression. For his white audience, Douglass’s sage presence, which comprises perseverance, keen insight into the human condition, and great dignity, embodies the essential equality of black and white. Hence, I would like to extend Baxter’s conclusion that Douglass’s ethos “was itself a critique of American racism,” vividly illustrating for late-nineteenth-century white audiences the ongoing positive trajectory of African American activism in the face of staggering oppression (27). More generally, thus, “The Lessons of the Hour” reminds us of the importance of ethos to the work of constitutive rhetoric and demonstrates that rhetorical critics evaluating the success or failure of a given artifact should, in addition to considering its direct impact on policy or law, carefully consider its potential constitutive effects, which are often incremental, rather than dramatic.

In the over one-hundred and twenty years following Douglass’s speech, racial relations in America have significantly improved, yet tensions and inequalities remain. It is no surprise, thus, that the relevance of the sage ethos persists for African Americans, including for Barack Obama, whose marginalized racial status required particular attention to the character he portrayed in his oratory. Briefly consider, for example, his remarks concerning two very different occasions in the second half of his second term: the Supreme Court decision on Marriage Equality and Donald Trump’s election. In both presentations, Obama—like his predecessor Douglass—speaks authoritatively with the worldly, controlled air of an orator committed to, but ultimately above, the fray, an advising sage more than a mere partisan. He takes broad historical perspectives on the issues at hand, arguing for celebration on the one hand and stoic acceptance on the other based on larger principles that comprise the human experience. His remarks on Obergefell begin by reaffirming foundational principles of American equality before rehearsing the following commonplaces about positive change on which he builds: “Progress on this journey often comes in small increments, sometimes two steps forward, one step back, propelled by the persistent effort of dedicated citizens. And then sometimes, there are days like this when that slow, steady effort is rewarded with justice that arrives like a thunderbolt.” Likewise, in his worldly-wise comments concerning the election of the Republican nominee one year later, Obama presents contextualizing common wisdom in order to help liberal members of his audience make sense of the outcome and to suggest to his more conservative listeners that he can see beyond partisanship to accept the impending change in political power: “The path that this country has taken has never been a straight line. We zig and zag, and sometimes we move in ways that some people think is forward and others think is moving back. And that’s okay.”

In both speeches, although Obama names specific figures involved in the legal case and in the election, he does not engage in extensive storytelling or anecdotes. Furthermore, he marshals emotion, yet his remarks are distinguished by explicit evenhandedness and reasoning, which appeal to the universal audience. Seeking to quash the temptation to demonize advocates of traditional marriage laws, for example, Obama evokes fairness as well as broadly held general values and principles to exhort the winners in the struggle to respect the losing side: “Opposition in some cases has been based on sincere and deeply held beliefs. All of us who welcome today’s news should be mindful of that fact; recognize different viewpoints; revere our deep commitment to religious freedom.” In his post-election remarks, similarly, he argues for a nonpartisan spirit of cooperation with neither example nor story, but a direct enthymeme containing a clearly stated minor premise concerning essential democratic principles: “The point, though, is, is that we all go forward, with a presumption of good faith in our fellow citizens—because that presumption of good faith is essential to a vibrant and functioning democracy.” Such strategies and appeals, which highlight Obama the wise man, contribute to an ethos that suggests to an African American audience that their participation in civic life—even at the highest level—is possible, thus constituting a black political consciousness that mitigates against traditional marginalization. To the white audience, Obama’s sage character is a powerful argument for equality that erodes age-old stereotypes about black people, including their rhetors.

What are the potential costs or limitations of an African American rhetor such as Douglass or Obama striving to overcome the rhetorical constraints of persistent cultural racism by embodying the sage ethos as I have briefly outlined above? Clearly, both men were able to influence racial consciousness through their eloquent speaking and writing, yet the sage’s emphasis on universal standards of reason and deliberation, broad perspectives, and general truths and principles could potentially distance the speaker from distinctly African American ways of arguing, self-presentation, and community. Although such sages have made their mark in American discourse, their performances may possibly reify white normative standards of decorum and respectability over rhetorical perspectives and styles ostensibly more representative of the communities from which they arise or on which they depend for their political success.

In her study of Shonda Rhimes and respectability politics, Ralina Joseph argues that although Rhimes’s “Black women protagonists signify as the pinnacle of Black womanhood,” their membership in the African American community or their reliance on African American standpoints are clearly deemphasized. “None of them has a cadre of Black women surrounding them,” Joseph writes, “and therefore no Black women are dragging them down. Each flourishes in being the only, the special, the one who has transcended the imagined boundaries of Black womanhood. This is how Black women enter into and maintain respectability.” She contrasts Rhimes’s women with female protagonists from the television show Being Mary Jane, which features a character “whose community of women of color holds up a mirror to her, calls her out, and lifts her up” (316). It could be argued that Douglass’s and Obama’s sage personae function as “the only, the special, the one who has transcended the imagined boundaries of Black [man]hood,” which could in turn militate against the arguments, social change, and consciousness raising essential to their lives and work.

Yet I hesitate to push the argument too far, since the notion of an authentic or natural public identity for African American women and men is itself enigmatic. From the days Douglass first dared to “take care of the philosophy” himself, his ethos was deemed troublesome, even by many of his supposed supporters, yet he persisted for half a century in demonstrating many effective ways to perform black rhetoric. As Henry Louis Gates reveals in Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man, his study of seven groundbreaking twentieth-century African American men, the role of representing African American masculinity that inevitably falls to those who embody “narratives of ascent” is inherently vexed. For such figures, when faced with the prospect of fashioning public identities, their ethe one might say, “[s]omehow the choice is always between alternate inauthenticities, competing impostures. Another approach toward the question: How does it feel to be a paradox?” (xix). Drawing on Stuart Hall, Gates argues: “Identities are the names we give to the different ways we are positioned by, and position ourselves in, the narratives of the past. Every black man, then, has had his own gauntlet to run. Each has been asked to assume the position” (xiv). If necessarily dogged by ineluctable specters of inauthenticity and paradox, both Douglass and Obama craft sage ethe, positioning themselves with eloquence and power.

In his recent study of Douglass’s autobiographical writing, Robert S. Levine concludes: “Perhaps the most heroic aspect of Douglass’s efforts to write himself into being is his faith in writing itself” (306). A counterpart of this claim—with a constitutive twist—can be drawn from Douglass’s oral performances: His determination to speak himself and his audiences into being highlights his admirable faith in the civic value of oratory, a belief that remains relevant to the present. The worldly persona crafted by Barack Obama—which resonates with the sage ethos distinguishing Douglass’s “The Lessons of the Hour”—testifies eloquently for this complementary conclusion.

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Frederick Douglass’s “Ever-Living Now”

Robert Fanuzzi

St. John’s University

Frederick Douglass’s legacy as an orator imbues our public spaces, social mediascapes, and educational spaces with the unmet potential of civil rights movements and demands for social justice. Perhaps more than any other nineteenth century public figure, he was able to rip the civic, commemorative, recursive function from the traditions of oratory and make his rhetoric live and breathe in the present. For my contribution to this commemorative symposium, I seek to understand and share more deeply his commitment to an oratory that rejected any sequential model of history which would allow either veneration of civic republican traditions or self-congratulation for civil rights missions accomplished. His rhetoric parts the curtains of the past, presenting the historical tableau and dialectic of the nineteenth century—enslavement and abolition—as modern dynamics we must confront. It was Frederick Douglass’s profound and history-changing contention that racism in the U.S. resides in what he called in “What to a Slave is the Fourth of July” as “an ever-living now”: A feedback loop through which nightmares and dreams of American history intersect with the flow of time as we know, live, and experience it.

Perhaps as no other time in our recent history, Americans are grappling with the permanence—the physical monumentality—of nineteenth century white supremacist ideology in the U.S. Even as Confederate memorials are razed, “alt-right” movements rise in their place. Patterns of police shootings of unarmed black men seem to perpetuate the sad pathology of legally sanctioned violence, fear, and paranoia formed in the cauldron of slavery. With the rise of Black Lives Matter and other campus movements, universities are no longer neutral institutions and instruments for recalibrating social, historical, and intellectual inequities but themselves sites of public memory through which students, faculty, and often besieged administrators explore institutional and epistemological ties to slaveholding and other racially discriminatory practices. If Trump is right that Douglass is doing an “amazing job,” it is because his century is not over and his job is not done.

In actuality, it is our work that is not done, especially given that Douglass’s goal—abolition—has become an imperative keyword for breaking the institutional chains that bind educational disparities, economic inequality, household and student debt, and declining economic opportunity into an “ever-living” racially discriminatory modern order.¹ Inevitably, “abolition” has also become an operative term within the academy, joining the legacy of 1960s civil rights-inspired campus movements and 1970s institutional critiques and reforms initiated by practitioners of composition and rhetoric programs with scholarly critiques of the university’s increasingly corporatist labor policies recently categorized as “critical university studies.” Looking back upon higher education’s entwined history with both slavery and territorial expansion while taking stock of its contemporary alliance with the economic policies of neoliberal global capitalism, critical university studies identify what Curtis Marez calls “raced and gendered hierarchies of value, or … raced and gendered settler colonial capitalism specific to universities” (268). Marez punctuates his own contribution to this emerging critical archive with a historical reference meant to recalculate and elevate higher education’s public purpose: “Our hopes and desires for knowledge and justice will depend upon our abilities to turn imperial universities into schools of abolition” (280).

As a self-emancipated graduate of slavery’s regime and self-educated professor of abolition, Douglass belongs to this ongoing effort to undo the effects of slavery on our educational systems and make them equal to the promise of abolition. To be sure, he has long held a prominent place in academic departments that honor African-Americans’ contributions to U.S. history, literature, and politics, but the proper recognition of his rhetorical legacy can never be a subject for history. His commitment to speaking from an “ever-living now” affiliates him with the black radical traditions and alternative pedagogies of composition and rhetoric that have deconstructed the academy and generated alternate educational spaces and praxes for seeking and producing knowledge since the 1960s. The heritage to which Douglass belongs is responsible for a wide range of institutional reforms that include the formalization of African American studies disciplines, the counter-institutional work of Black Studies, SEEK educational access programs, and transformative, democratic pedagogies introduced by the work of composition and rhetoric instructors and artistic practitioners that were designed to straddle the academy and the community.² Although this essay is too short to recreate the full history of these educational transformations, I mean to pay tribute to the interstitial position of rhetoric and the study of rhetoric within our educational system when I claim that Douglass’s rhetorical legacy lies within a nexus of institutionalized racism, formal pedagogy, and expressive performance that has opened both the public sphere and the space of the university to memories and expressions of pain, anger, defeat, and power. As articulated by Douglass, these expressions are backward looking, originating from the plantation’s “scenes of subjection,” to use Saidiya Hartman’s phrase, from which he emerged, but still in their essence forward looking—disruptions in our public memory that point us toward the unfinished work begun by the abolition of slavery and the enfranchisement of what he called the “slave’s point of view.”³ Constantly transforming the full range of African Americans’ historical experience—from extraction and enslavement to emancipation and exclusion—into an “ever-lasting now,” Douglass’s rhetorical legacy grows more radical with each passing year that fails to achieve the promise of abolition.

My argument for Douglass’s legacy suggests that we move beyond the paradigm that scholars of my generation used to formulate and preserve it. In my case, I used the construct of an “abolitionist’s public sphere” in the way that literary scholars of the 1970s and 1980s used African American slave narratives: As a dialectical construct for expressing the tensions between formerly enslaved blacks and educated whites within white-dominated liberal democratic political discourse and for articulating the creative difference that race makes.⁴ In retrospect, this approach reproduces and reifies boundaries that are often poor spatial metaphors for capturing the work that social movements and African American rhetoric do. The abolition movement to which Douglass contributed can be historically contextualized within longer and broader efforts to create institutional structures for perpetuating, formalizing, or alternately, reforming racial epistemologies of social subjugation and economic extraction. Some of these efforts produced universities that were directly funded by the profits of slaveholding, as recounted in the pathbreaking book Ebony and Ivy. As Craig Wilder has shown, the economic and social infrastructure of American universities, rooted in the colonial policies of settlement and enslavement, created institutions of learning that seamlessly reproduced the economic privileges of white male property owners and leveraged them for intellectual capital. As I have argued, these trans-Atlantic colonial policies were also responsible for creating formalized epistemologies that were alternately charged and burdened with the need to know the racial other. The early American curricula and disciplines of natural history and medicine, for instance, are fundamentally racial discourses that attempt to explain the gap and difference between dominant and colonized or subjugated peoples. In early American studies, Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Rush are familiar examples of researchers whose academic and intellectual focus lay with creating racial taxonomies required for American nationality and evaluating prospects for racial integration.⁵ The strong institutional, economic, and intellectual connections between the profits and privileges of the plantation and the educational mission of higher education warrants the use of the term “racial capitalist university” to explain the closed circuit between intellectual life and racial stratification.

The nineteenth century abolition movement created a truly productive tension between the intellectual principles of formalized university education and the civic role of classically trained rhetoric. Although theology departments, the bulwark of universities’ professional curricula and proving ground for college presidents, regularly took aim at the “infidel” or “Jacobin” effect of an integrated abolition movement, abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison wisely grasped that classical rhetoric could provide a meritocratic alternative to anti-abolitionist universities and pulpits. (The Lane Theological Seminary debates are a famous instance of white student liberal campus protests forging their own co-curricula). Creating a “para-university” of speakers’ series, racially organized assemblies, reading groups, literary circles, contemporary literature, and petition movements, abolitionists forged a democratic pedagogy that aimed at racial equality yetwhich also appropriated the structures and goals of classical rhetoric from the university, and typically housed them in languages and literature departments.

In the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Douglass made a convincing case for the egalitarian purpose of oratory and classical rhetoric outside of formalized, private educational institutions. He reports that he read carefully The Columbian Orator, a popular rhetoric handbook of his time, and faithfully applied the ethical and grammatical standards of its instructions to his complaints and situation. Although he underreported his experience as a Sunday School preacher among his fellow slaves and disguised outright his experience as a lay preacher in the African Methodist Episcopal Zion church in the Narrative, he laid the groundwork for inclusion and recognition within formal standards of learning when he mastered the art of oratory. Susan Jarratt’s insightful history of the rise of historically black colleges and universities and their embrace of classical rhetoric curricula is an indication of the symbolic and instrumental value of oratorical traditions within race-conscious educational institutions.

Though he may have narrated his education as an orator to coincide with historical and institutional standards for literacy, Douglass dedicated his rhetorical praxis to remaining excluded and to reproducing the experience of exclusion. In Abolition’s Public Sphere, I attempted to explain this rhetorical effect through an eighteenth century rhetorical vocabulary of the sublime. In theory, the aesthetic category of the sublime was the perfect trope with which to capture both the performative nature of Douglass’s most accusatory, confrontational speeches and their stormy, powerful imagery. Douglass’s method, as exemplified in “What to a Slave is the Fourth of July,” was to make the fragile position of the “unlettered African” within the civic tradition and honorific demands of oratory transparent and self-conscious so that it could become an existential feature of an abolitionist public sphere. “I do not remember ever to have appeared as a speaker before any assembly more shrinkingly, nor with greater distrust of my ability, than I do this day” he began, though he had spent over a decade in churches and abolitionist assemblies (109). He then proceeded to export his own discomfort into rhetoric that disabled and prevented his listeners from forming a civic consensus about the historical lessons they were expected to remember and apply. Instead of producing a self-satisfying correspondence between classical text or republican precedent and the contemporary occasion, Douglass’s rhetoric generated a troubling comparison between past and present that alternatively placed and exposed the ethical burden of historical judgment on the white people in the room in real time:

Are the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice, embodied in that Declaration of Independence, extended to us? And am I, therefore, called upon to bring our humble offering to the national altar, and to confess the benefits and express devote gratitude for the blessings resulting from your independence? Would to God, both for your sake and ours, that an affirmative answer could be truthfully returned to these questions. Then would my task be light, and my burden easy and delightful. (116)

When Douglass finally unleashed with the familiar excoriation—“O! Had I the ability, I would today pour out a fiery stream of biting ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm, and stern rebuke”—the audience must have felt relief that the suspense was over and they knew they were, like him, not up to the burden placed upon them by the occasion (118).

Because it was contemporary with the rhetorical curricula of Douglass’s day and consistent with the “New Rhetoric” theory of sensibility espoused by Hugh Blair, the sublime is a good trope for explaining Douglass’s discomfort and displacement among his fellow abolitionists but a poor way to explain his legacy in our time. Douglass’s speeches are not just challenges to white people but records and aesthetic recreations of the life of black people. They come fully loaded and armed with the anger and violence of knowledge as it is produced on the plantation. And they credit the plantation with being an institution of learning that forged, in the most elemental way, the iron link between discipline, self-criticism, and selfhood. The harsh legacy of Douglass’s rhetoric is a picture of the slaveholding plantation as a parallel, indispensable educational system for producing what we value about modern subjectivity, not a reactionary hiatus from it. Despite his obeisance to the formal curricula of The Columbian Orator and the meritocratic promise of oratory, Douglass’s story of rhetorical education in the Narrative imports the memory and economy of slavery’s institutionalized violence. His resolve to outdo Lloyd and to punish Covey make Douglass not only a man but an enslaved subject alive with rhetorical, self-conscious ability to manipulate his environment and remake himself.

Though it is to oratory, freedom, and the abolition movement that he claims a debt, Douglass’s subject position within this modern economy of personal advancement is owed to the applied and abstracted violence of the plantation; he is a graduate of the branch campus of the racial capitalist university. I follow recent scholarship in positing the full extent of slavery’s horrors, from the African slave trade, to the Middle Passage, to the slave market, and the brutal violence of the plantation as a far-flung, interdependent, interlocking network of epistemologies and practices that inscribed the buying and selling of Africans into the self-definition of the modern person by enabling the commodification, the abstraction, and regulation of personhood.⁶ As Elizabeth Dillon has shrewdly observed in her update of the Habermasian model of the liberal public sphere, the trans-Atlantic systems and institutions of the slave trade were so powerful, intertwined, and omnipresent within Euro-American modernity that they proliferated sites of violence, fear, and provisional freedom across countless geographical locations, engaging audiences and participants with the common experience of living under the aegis of slavery. Though slavery’s formal and informal racial epistemologies might be recreated through theater or fashion or festivals or oratory, Dillon does not credit these performative recreations of slavery’s racial order with convening a public. Substituting the term “assemblages” to explain the varieties of provisional, heterogeneous affiliations between a variety of races, Dillon makes it impossible for us to examine social, spatialized constructs of liberal democracy without the underlying structure of slavery. By this measure, Douglass’s rhetorical performances do not establish an inside and an outside relative to the boundaries of the public sphere so much as they interject slavery’s profitable, itinerant, and attenuated modes of sociality into oratory’s protocols for establishing similitude and correspondence.

To place slavery before freedom in our contextualization of Douglass should not diminish our appreciation of his rhetorical legacy. If Douglass’s most well-known and arguably successful speeches were not governed by the rhetorical guidelines that underwrite fictions of a liberal public sphere or colorblind liberal democracy, they are better suited to a black radical tradition that has in fact carried on the abolitionists’ cause well beyond the emancipation of slavery in 1863 into our time and onto our campuses. W.E.B. Du Bois gave an emergent intellectual tradition its ethical warrant with the term “abolition democracy,” which has been embraced by Angela Davis and subsequent generations of scholar activists as an imperative for continual, radical, and systematic commitment to breaking the chains of the plantation’s structures of racial capitalism. Du Bois formulated the term “abolition democracy” in Black Reconstruction to contest the periodization of the very struggle for equality that he was historicizing. His crucial insight—that the deep roots of enslavement, plantation economies, and commodified labor in the genesis and structures of Euro-American modernity did not just doom Reconstruction but generated modern forms of global imperialism that subjugated a “colored proletariat,”—has inspired foundational works of black radical scholarship such as Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism that in placing race-based slavery at the center of Euro-tradition and the legacy of the Enlightenment, make what Douglass called the “slave’s point of view” normative and required for understanding our world.

Fully enfranchised as a U.S. citizen, employee of the federal government, and canonized member of a liberal white abolition movement that had already canonized itself, Frederick Douglass could have abandoned the subject position he occupied so memorably in “What to a Slave is the Fourth of July,” and devoted the last years of his career to bridge-building, institution building, and arc-building narratives of antislavery progress. Instead, Douglass devoted himself to rhetorical performances intended to turn the wheel of history back to the slavery he had always known and reproduced by time as black people knew it. In the spellbinding and radical “Lessons of the Hour,” Douglass conclusively turned his entire rhetorical legacy toward the work of memory and prophecy by alighting on the racial politics of periodization and historiography.

The aptly named speech “Lessons of the Hour” is as much about time as it is about lynching: It is an object lesson in his black rhetorical art of temporality. As in “What to a Slave is the Fourth of July,” he makes visible and transparent his reckoning with the politics of the occasion for the speech, and righteous indignation at his role in commemorating the occasion, but “Lessons of the Hour” lays out guides for making the temporal connections that allow us to know history as he does. Though Douglass is razor sharp in organizing the speech around the crisis of the occasion, his method is to teach us that beyond the scandalous crime of lynching lies all the acts of racial violence that proceeded it and that will be authorized by it. This loop of memory and prophecy lies at the center of Douglass’s rhetorical art, and his legacy. Without it, Douglass’s listeners might have checked off lynching as just another regrettable southern horror.

Douglass’s pedagogy starts with his recategorization of the “so-called negro problem,” a white supremacist trope that has so effectively problematized post-slavery African American existence in the U.S. Douglass recognized that an anti-lynching speech should be not only an apologia and defense of African Americans’ alleged criminal culpability but also an indictment of language—of the shopworn clichés and dead letters that still lived in the hearts and minds of defeated southerners but which had been revived with their political ascendance. Slavery, as southern whites had known and enjoyed it, was still the lesson of his hour; it was the ever-present-condition that turned everything but enslavement into a “negro problem”:

When these false reasoners assert that the condition of the emancipated is wretched and deplorable … I agree with them … To my mind, the blame for this condition does not rest upon emancipation but upon slavery. It is not the work of the spirit of liberty, but the work of the spirit of bondage, and of the determination to perpetuate itself, if not under one form, then under another. It is due to the folly of endeavoring to retain the new wine of slavery in the old bottles of slavery.

Douglass’s rhetoric required courage from him beyond most of our comprehension, for it forced him to surrender everything he had accomplished through his long oratorical career and project the abolition of slavery into a distant future.

Because Douglass’s rhetorical art created a transparency between everything we know about our own time and the lessons of racial past, it is impossible to miss the signs of our twenty first-century existence in his summation of the late nineteenth century:

Strange things have happened of late and are still happening. Some of these tend to dim the lustre of the American name, and chill the hopes once entertained for the cause of liberty. He is a wiser man than I am, who can tell how the moral sentiment of this republic yet may fall. When the moral sense of a nation begins to decline and the wheel of progress to roll backward, there is no telling how low one will fall or the other may stop. The downward tendency already manifest has swept away some of the most important safeguards. The Supreme Court has surrendered. State sovereignty is restored. It has destroyed the Civil Rights Bill, and converted the Republican party into a part of money rather than a party of morals, a party of things rather than a party of humanity and justice. We may well ask what next.

Modern implications that speak for themselves; historical parallels that force hard thinking; confusion about whether our history moves us backward or forward: These are the legacies and signifying features of rhetoric that intend to confound our grasp of when and where we are. Douglass’s genius, and his legacy, are owed to the performative dimension of rhetoric that creates its meaning in real time and lends to every act of historical reflection, recovery, and commemoration its own temporality. His rhetoric has set our clocks to incidents of racism; he has helped us understand slavery as deep time, in our own time. If, like him, we ask “What next?,” it is not only because we see the world as he did but because he taught us that prophecy might well be the fugitive slave’s true art.

I close this essay with questions about where this rhetorical legacy places Douglass within the institution and professoriate that honor him. Inevitably, he remains an institutional figure, a veteran of the era’s formalized curricula and avenues for advancement. He served on Howard University’s Board of Trustees, which gave him special insight into the role of classical rhetoric and liberal education in shaping the post-Emancipation generation. And yet it is clear that the proponents of epistemologies and fields of inquiry that introduced rhetoric, and by extension, Douglass’s rhetorical legacy into the modern university have also intersected higher education’s institutional development with histories of slaveholding and racism and by extension, the promise of abolition. Creative writing and innovative rhetoric composition programs created under federal mandates for educational and institutional outreach also operate under the democratic principles of critical pedagogy, enfranchising the excluded and minority as the producer of knowledge, not the object of instruction or inclusion. As we are seeing now, underrepresented students and contingent faculty, many of them working from the space of composition departments and writing centers, consequently serve as co-teachers and guides for what universities must become in order to turn the university’s not-for-profit corporation into “schools of abolition.”⁷

And yet as radical as critical pedagogy might become, Douglass’s rhetorical legacy, I submit, does not place him within institutional boundaries; his rhetoric does not belong within any space demarcated by boundaries of inside and outside, qualified and unqualified. In repositioning his rhetoric within traditions of black radicalism and performance, it becomes the model of what educational theorists today call “black study”: A critical reflection on the discourse of inclusiveness that universities—and institutions of liberal democracy—have used to remain above and free from the history of enslavement and the continuing saga of racial capitalism. In her introduction to The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study Jack Halberstam turns the discourse of inclusion inside out:

If you want to know what the undercommons wants … what black people, indigenous peoples, queers, and poor people want, what we (the “we” who cohabit in the space of the undercommons) want, it is this—we cannot be satisfied with the recognition and acknowledgement generated by the very system that denies a) that anything was ever broken and b) that we deserved to be the broken part. (6)

As valuable as it is elusive, The Undercommons is an appropriate benchmark for charting the full range of educational models that might accommodate or encompass Douglass’s rhetorical legacy, from the rationalist ideals of the Enlightement to the modern multicultural university and its formalized African American studies departments, and finally to the promise of “fugitive planning.” Authors Stefano Harney and Fred Moten deliberately choose the term to extend critiques of exploited teaching, contingent labor, and student professionalization into an historical, aesthetic register:

In that undercommons of the university one can see that it is not a matter of teaching versus research … to enter this space is to inhabit the ruptured and enraptured disclosure of the commons that fugitive enlightenment enacts, the criminal, matricidal, queer, in the cistern, on the stroll of the stolen life, the life stolen by enlightenment and stolen back, where the commons gives refuge, where the refuges gives commons. (28)

Aesthetic, performative, and poetic in the best traditions of African American rhetoric, Harney’s and Moten’s “undercommons” will never be mistaken as a blueprint for a writing center, or generate that cardinal institutional value of composition and rhetoric programs: “critical thinking.” If we are to remember Douglass’s rhetoric as the beginning of black study, then let the departments, programs, journals, archives, and collections that honor his name become the work of “fugitive planning” that finally opens our world to Douglass’s worst, and best prophecies.

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Prophetic Witness(es) in the Speeches of Frederick Douglass

C. James Trotman

West Chester University

“Prophetic witness” is my phrase for the social identity and personal revelation that we find upon examining the complexities of language and rhetoric Douglass used in his oratory. “Prophesy,” a term with layers of meanings from biblical to private revelations, stretching from the seen to the unseen, allows for an analysis of both the natural and supernatural components. “Prophesy” allows us to say that there is truth here but it cannot always be explained nor its source(s) easily identified. It is also a path to take into account our social and religious inheritance as a Christian nation. “Witness” is a term best understood as a word for the audience generally, a private listener sometimes, just as Douglass was his own audience occasionally, but it always suggests a participant in some form or another. Most of the time, a “witness” is sympathetic to the form of the speech and the speaker but not always. There was no guarantee that the audience for this abolitionist would be open to the deeper meanings of his insights into the consequences of chattel slavery, the rhetorical traditions, or to other possible uses of public speaking customs. We know that he must have reached many, some willingly and with applause; others, however, threw eggs and other items when the truth he spoke about slavery and the slave masters’ transgressions fell on deaf ears. Most importantly, Douglass himself used the terms “prophesy” and “witness” as we shall explore during the course of this discussion.

Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey was born a slave, maybe on February 14, 1818, on the Wye Plantation in Talbot County on the eastern shores of Maryland. He died on February 20, 1895 of a heart attack at Cedar Hill, his second home in Washington, D.C. By then, he was the most important African American of his time, known throughout the U.S. and around the world as an orator, writer, journalist, social reformer, public servant, and a critical voice in the abolition of slavery.

Because of his stature, some of Douglass’s speeches will be more familiar than others in highlighting a career in public speaking that changed the discourse on slavery and the covenant between the republic and its citizens. As he spoke about our political system over time, Douglass became a defender of our ideals and values, in spite of the experiences of chattel slavery. His rhetorical tools and techniques were varied but throughout his career as a public speaker his success was due in part to an awareness of what was familiar to his audience. Nevertheless, there appears to have been no substitute for being at one of his lectures, listening to his magnificent voice and presence.

The historian Benjamin Quarles wrote: “His voice was created for public address in a pre-microphone America. In speaking he sounded every degree of light and shade. His powerful tones hinted at a readiness to defy faulty acoustics. His rich baritone gave an emotional vitality to every sentence” (60).

Quarles also wrote that Douglass not only held the attention of his audience but that

[p]eople liked to see him on the platform. There was a dramatic presence about his very appearance—his superb physique, his thick, black hair, and his well- formed nose that seemed to inhale sensitively, critically, as if admitting the possibility that color prejudices extended to the world of nature and that the air itself, if vigilance were relaxed, would offer to black nostrils an inferior oxygen content. (60)

One of Douglass’s earliest speeches was a template for explaining the causes of slavery. Entitled “The Right to Criticize American Institutions,” the speech was delivered in New York City on May 11, 1847, less than three months after his return from Europe. Recall that his abolitionist friends arranged for him to go to England after threats had been made on his life after the publication of the Narrative (Quarles 35). This was Douglass’s welcome home speech after his exile in England, Scotland, and the British Isles. I also like to think of it as a “graduation” speech. He was moving on after a dedicated mentorship with William Lloyd Garrison and his brand of abolitionism. He may have left America a fugitive but he returned a free man, thanks to the female British abolitionists of the Anti-Slavery League who bought his freedom for one hundred and fifty pounds sterling (about $711.36) on December 5, 1846. His confidence was high. His focus in the British Isles on the chains and whips of slavery expanded to include the treatment of women. He had become a reformer.

The speech is a critique of both slavery and of Garrisonianism. Douglass challenged his mentor on the premises and definition of patriotism. Garrison was very powerful and influential. He inspired many, even his son George who, not a pacifist like his father, served as an officer in the all-black Fifty-Fifth (not the famed Fifty-Fourth) Massachusetts Regiment. In contrast to Garrison, Douglass took a different approach to patriotism which was much more personal and subjective. Speaking of slavery’s isolation led him to realize its destructiveness, and thus made this speech an early statement of how his social vision became a basis for his prophetic witnessing. Douglass wanted his audience to include in any definition of patriotism his identity, which was lost in their thinking because of slavery and the color of his skin. In England, he said, there is “Liberty there, not only for the white man but for the black man also” (“The Right to Criticize” 77). In public disagreement with Garrison, Douglass asserted that the irony of this condition was that it removed him spiritually from the land of his birth and his allegiance to it. This was his view of America:

I cannot agree with my friend Mr. Garrison, in relation to my love and attachment to this land. I have no love for America, as such, I have no patriotism. I have no country. What country have I? The institutions of this country do not know me, do not recognize me as a man. The only thing that links me to this land is my family, and the painful consciousness that here there are three millions of my fellow creatures, groaning beneath the iron rod of the worst despotism that could be devised, … This, and this only, attaches me to this land, and brings me here to plead with you, and with this country at large, for this disenthrallment of my oppressed countrymen, and to overthrow this system of Slavery which is crushing them to the earth. (“The Right to Criticize” 77)

Turning from this analysis of what is and is not the basis of patriotism, Douglass then discussed his tone that others have challenged. He had been told that he was irritating by those who had been in his audience but had not been supporters of his ideas. Yes, he replied, and they needed to be irritated because “where, pray, can we go to find moral power in this nation sufficient to overthrow Slavery?” (“The Right to Criticize” 78). He then named the cultural powers that could eradicate slavery but did nothing: the church, politicians, political parties. This critique also previewed his later use of the American jeremiad. The point typically made by the jeremiad is a warning to its audience that it is headed for a bad place, a dark destiny—Hell as it were, if slavery is not eliminated (Pitney-Howard 17).

In short, the audience were his fellow countrymen whom he felt needed to be reminded of his experiences “in another land” as a black man. He was in the U.S. but not of the U.S. It was not home and it was by no means a sanctuary. Coming home as a free man and no longer an unwavering follower of Garrison empowered Douglass to offer his testimony—his witness—from exile to call attention to the forgotten and misplaced standards for judging the country. Essentially, the question was rhetorical and prophetic: Have I the right to criticize American institutions? Unequivocally, yes. Douglass’s dominant rhetorical approach? Argument. Prophetic? He did so by showing that the transgressions were witnessed by other human beings, he was their representative voice in his compelling narratives and brilliant editorials. They described and explained how the exclusion of blacks left them with a future in the Republic as carcass of usable bones fit only for labor, branded inferior, and programmed for social death.

In 1848, a year later, two events proved vital to the intellectual growth of Douglass the reformer. In February, he met with John Brown in Brown’s home in Springfield, Massachusetts. In July, Douglass attended the historic meeting at Seneca Falls where he joined with women to support their campaign to have the right to vote. These events not only sharpened his perspective on truths and approaches to presenting them but also stimulated him to address the fault lines of race, class, and gender. Frederick Douglass was faultless in exploiting and exposing the social fault lines and the rhetorical legacies of his time. These events led him to embrace women’s rights, a movement bundled up in the gender constraints of sexism and bigotry of the day.¹

Two presentations stand out on the Woman’s Suffrage Movement. The first was not a speech but a statement first printed in the North Star, on July 28, 1848, not long after the Seneca Falls Convention: “While it is impossible for us to go into this subject at length, and dispose of the various objections which are often used against such a doctrine as that of female equality, we are free to say that in respect to political rights, we hold woman to be justly entitled to all we claim for man” (“The Rights of Women” 102). It is a theme presented through a series of group comparisons between the struggle for women’s freedom and, by extension, to other creatures in the universe. The implication is clear—freedom is a right in nature. He started his discussion by using the example of animals, saying that a discussion having to do with animals would have brought about more determination. He then reminded his audience of the dissimilarities between women’s rights and those of the enslaved by stating that while Negroes have some rights, many still consider the fact that women are not “entitled to any” (Douglass, “The Rights of Women” 102).

The longer and more detailed assertions are found in his 1888 address before the International Council of Women. He maintained that he is not going to argue about women’s rights. This was not that kind of discussion. He stated:

The demand of the hour is not argument, but assertion, firm and flexible assertion, assertion which has more than the force of argument… Let those who want argument examine the ground upon which they base their claim to the right to vote. They will find that there is not one reason, not one consideration, which they can urge in support of man’s claim to vote, which does not equally support the right of woman to vote. (Douglass, “The Woman’s Suffrage” 707)

The assertion was another way of looking at the character of the witnesses that gave Douglass the editor his right to make a claim, an ex-concessis, about the authority he challenged. By what principle did Douglass employ the challenge? One was memory. One of the chief attributes of Douglass’s personality was his focus on events that needed to be remembered collectively. The act of remembering became part of the “prophetic witness.” Through his own subjectivity and, importantly, through actions he saw, his rhetoric now combined social protest and religion, thus attaching civil religion to an understanding of the meaning of a “prophetic witness.” Here, he stated, “I have been thinking, more or less, of the scene, presented forty years ago in the little Methodist Church at Seneca Falls, the manger in which this organization was born” (708). The allusion is to the Christian narrative of the birth of Jesus. He extended this image of a new beginning and a new birth to the work of other peace makers who with “strong conviction, the noble courage, the sublime faith in God … ” opposed the war and were opponents of slavery (“The Woman’s Suffrage” 708). They were “witnesses” of a different order because they belonged to transactions that are part of an eternal connection: promises between mankind and God. It was not a challenge to logic, because most of us could see the depravity in chattel slavery, the suffering caused by war. It was an expression of the conflict within humanity, the soulful cry of the oppressed and the willful ignorance of the oppressor.

The point of this section was that women had no markers, no witnesses if you will, because their real experiences as women did not exist in the minds of most men. On the contrary “everything in her condition was supposed to be lovely, just as it should be. She had no rights denied, no wrongs to redress” (“The Woman’s Suffrage” 708). And then in a marvelous use of romantic imagery, he wrote that this was an expectation not only held by her but that “[s]he floated along on the tide of life as her mother and grandmother had done before her, as in a dream of Paradise. Her wrongs, if she had any, were too occult to be seen and too light to be felt” (708). And his sensitivity is present in one of the often quoted final remarks of his life: “When I ran from slavery, it was for myself; when I advocated emancipation it was for my people, but when I stood up for the rights of woman, self was out of the question” (“The Woman’s Suffrage” 709).

The intellectual and spiritual courtship that Douglass carefully outlined came from the great separation that was to take place only a few years earlier when he decided to push in favor of passage of the Fifteenth Amendment. This Amendment gave black men the right to vote at a time when the political pressure forced Douglass to choose between men having the right to vote at the expense of women, particularly white women. I do not believe he regretted the decision to choose men, but I do believe he struggled with its moral adjustments, moving one segment of the marginalized in front of another. He said as much himself. “All good causes are mutually helpful” (“The Woman’s Suffrage”). It is our inheritance to be shared by all and is a promise to all. He stated that this was not only an example but a,

… prophesy of what can be accomplished against strongly opposing forces, against the time-hallowed abuses, against deeply intrenched error, against world-wide usage, and against the settled judgement of mankind, by a few earnest women, clad only in the panoply of truth, and determined to live and die in what they considered a righteous cause. (“The Woman’s Suffrage” 710)

In closing this speech, he again asserted women’s equality:

She was born with it. It was hers before she comprehended it. It is ascribed upon all the powers and faculties of her soul, and no custom, law nor usage can ever destroy it. Now that it has got fairly fixed in the minds of the many, and be supported at last by a great cloud of witnesses, which no man can number and no power can withstand. (“The Woman’s Suffrage” 710)

One of the most important but least studied presentations by Douglass was his speech about John Brown. Douglass spoke about him at Storer College, which is not far from Harper’s Ferry. To Douglass, many descriptions had been used to describe Brown’s famous assault on the armory at Harper’s Ferry on October 16, 1859, when he and nineteen men—five blacks and fourteen whites—aimed to take munitions from the armory and began an armed rebellion against slavery. Douglass decided to use the occasion at Storer College to pay what he called a “debt” to the event and particularly to reconstruct and “vindicate” a great historical character in an attempt to better understand the man and his mission.

Douglass is transparent in his relationship to Brown, as well as with the divisions of thought that separated them. Brown intended to use violence to eliminate slavery; Douglass was committed to liberation but not on Brown’s way.

With Brown, Douglass played a high stakes game of moralizing a criminal act, an attack on the government of the U.S., and so it was the reformer’s task to reinterpret for his audience’s popular understanding of the event a different picture of both John Brown and the event itself. Douglass asserted that they haven’t heard the truth. He gave them the journalist’s rubric by outlining the who, what, where, and when of the events which took place on October 16, 1859. What followed was his concern for context, when Harper’s Ferry needed to be seen not as an isolated event, over and done with, but as one belonging to the transformation of national history. If not, then Harper’s Ferry was “cold-blooded and atrocious” (Douglass, “John Brown” 635). Where was this missing context? Where else but in slavery. The event was in fact part of the hue and cry (a call and response, as Douglass shaped the speech) that began in Africa and was being answered by the cries along the Potomac. How then shall we understand this cry?

The sections that follow were personal in several respects. One was to exonerate himself from the events of Harper’s Ferry. “I could live for the slave, but he could die for him” (Douglass, “John Brown” 636). Brown was a martyr and hero. Douglass traced Brown’s character as martyr back to the Biblical figure of Jesus, while outlining Brown’s work in Kansas. The description was more than just praise. It was Douglass’s way of drawing attention to the purity and uncompromising focus of Brown’s resolve. Brown sought to free the slave—period. There was no other gain in his actions, no other profit but the satisfaction of seeing the end of two hundred years of bondage. Many could not believe that freeing slaves… “that nineteen men could invade a great State to liberate a despised and hated race, was to the average intellect and conscience, too monstrous for belief” (“John Brown” 639)

So bold and “audacious,” the act was clearer than anything the nation was prepared for even after the Nat Turner insurrection of 1831. How great a man was he, Douglass asked? By comparison to others, he was not exceptional. What was special was his resolve to eliminate slavery. By every other standard he was ordinary. Douglass explained that his basis for these personal judgements was the time they spent together almost forty years ago in 1848. They talked and reflected upon the thirty years that Brown had been discreetly discussing plans of liberation with a select number of men and women he thought would be worthy and, of course, Douglass was but one of a rising number of black men Brown thought would be looking for this approach.

In the closing sections of the speech, Douglass asked if John Brown had failed. Douglass said no. Ralph Waldo Emerson answered similarly. At a meeting in Boston on November 18, 1859 to raise money to help the family of John Brown, Emerson said of Brown that “[h]e is a man to make friends wherever on earth courage and integrity are esteemed, the rarest of heroes, a pure idealist, with no by-ends of his own.”²

To that end, Douglass left us the prophetic witness of the legacy of Osawatomie Brown:

If John Brown did not end the war that ended slavery, he did at least begin the war that ended slavery. If we look over the dates, places and men for which this honor is claimed, we shall find that not Carolina, but Virginia, not Fort Sumter, but Harpers Ferry, and the United States Arsenal, not Major Anderson, but John Brown began the war that ended slavery and made this a free republic. Until this blow was struck, the prospect for Freedom was dim, shadowy and uncertain. (“John Brown” 639)

The principle at work, a principle that would help us to understand the truth of these events was, for Douglass, “the universe, of which we are a part, is continually proving itself a stupendous whole, a system of law and order, eternal and perfect” (Douglass, “John Brown” 648). So Brown did not fail? No, declared Douglass, because no man can fail who grandly gives himself to so righteous a cause.

No discussion of American speeches, or declarations of human freedom is complete without “The Meaning of the Fourth of July For The Negro.” Given in Rochester, New York, in the famed Corinthian Hall, on July 5, 1852, this lecture is the signature abolitionist piece of Douglass. Maybe we understand the concepts of “freedom” and “democracy” more fully, maybe more specifically, maybe more personally, but its influence on us as “witnesses” is undeniable. For those who have difficulty with the word “slavery,” simply substitute another oppressed group. One will then find that Douglass’s words have lasted this long because of his profound vision of democracy through the eyes of its oppressed, ignored, or marginalized.

The core of the speech reflected the reformer’s careful reading and reflection of the Constitution, his understanding of slavery as a transgression, his kinship with women’s rights and selected uses of Garrisonian ideas of moral suasion. Perhaps the most important reflection was his realization that abolitionism and the suffrage movement, as powerful as they were for him, could conceivably move along at a snail’s pace rather than with a sense of urgency. One danger is that the memory of these movements, as he understood them, could be decreased or diminished, save for a critical voice needed, and needed now. I would also argue that there is a spiritual emphasis in Douglass’s rhetoric not only in this speech, but also in the speeches of the 1850s. There are far more references to religion, to God, and to clusters of words connected to a spiritual subjectivity that go deeper than just using the first person pronoun to refer to the self.

The speech stung his listeners with shame and outrage, as he critiqued democracy and warned them about God’s wrath over the fact that the country was ignoring the existence of slavery by dismissing the country’s roots in rebellion and religion. He said, “My business, if I have any here today, is with the present. The accepted time with God and His cause is the ever-living now” (“The Meaning,” Selected Speeches 193). Then in the prophetic language, claimed by many in the black rhetorical tradition that the speech is known for, he proclaimed:

What to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are to Him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy—a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. (“The Meaning,” A Biography 76)

The moral depth of the speech and its continued relevance can be understood another way: What happens to all of us where slavery exists? Through this layer of subjectivity, Douglass devoted his time to the idea of separation, the alienation that he and others like him experienced from being cut off from the nation’s creed or, more precisely, from its declaration that all men [and women] are equal with rights and within a stated covenant relationship with the supernatural. God is named twenty-four times in the speech. Douglass reminded listeners that slavery corrupts and depresses the human soul or, as he quoted from Ecclesiastes, “Oppression makes a wise man mad” (“The Meaning,” Selected Speeches 191). How did Douglass try to make the connection between the audience, the message and the moment? These were, after all, his supporters. He had published the North Star in Rochester, he lived with Anna and all five of his children by this time, and they were active conductors on the Underground Railroad. To many the remarks might have been seen as an act of ingratitude.

The place to start is with language itself. It is the logos for this critique because it appears that the reformer knew something more about the preparation of his “witnesses” to this celebration than they knew about themselves. Douglass’s audience depicted the nation and he challenged them to see their fellow countrymen. They were absentee relatives who had lost relatives (slaves) entitled to come to the family reunion but remained out of sight. When they are present, they are invisible. So there is no connection. They don’t know their relatives and he sensed that they did not care about the condition of these family members either. What they lacked, he thought, was a story line for the experience of the slave in their minds. The slave as a person has been left out of the national narrative. The reformer stressed the outrage from this perspective of this neglect by turning to the possessive pronoun, pointing significantly to the words used for both individuals and groups. He referred to your Fourth of July, your celebration, and your holiday. The point is not that he was simply asking them to go home and reread their school books about the origins of the republic. The goal was more daunting, more self-effacing, more humbling, and again more challenging but essential: He wanted them to reimagine history with the slave in it, not out of it, so that they might understand the slave’s experiences, the daily struggle to live without a future, to face the psychological slip into madness, the slave’s psychological dungeon of despair. To make this message plain, he invited his audience to understand that the slave was not a metaphor for the stain of democracy, but a living, breathing insider/outsider marking the nation’s deficient moral character, its false economic promise of capitalism, and its refusal to live up to the Constitution. The truth is that the nation lived in its own shadows and not in its rhetorical illuminations as set forth in the Declaration of Independence. What better use of “aporia,” the rhetorical device used to express deep, deep doubt, than in discussing the nation’s fate.

My last focus is on the final speech associated with the great reformer, “The Lesson of the Hour.” Given on January 9, 1894, before the historic Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church in Washington D.C., the speech continued the oracular content of a democratic sage and a cautionary Republican. This was not just one speech but the published version was a culmination of several addresses that Douglass made under this title. Inspired by Ida B. Wells Barnett, the journalist/social critic, the last version and most quoted is “Why is the Negro Lynched?” While only a little more than a year prior to his death, the speech retained the power of the great orator and some of his most compelling themes: white supremacy, the attacks on the integrity of the black person, especially the black man, and lastly, the fever of racism that resurrected the idea, that the answer to racial discord was to send the black people back to Africa.

“The Lesson of the Hour” was a response to the public criticisms Douglass received from his publication of “Lynch Law in the South” and its attack on one of his favorite antagonists: The wealthy white classes who in Douglass’s view ignored lynching. Douglass’ opening line in the lecture carried both the tone and substance of his thesis: “Not a breeze comes to us from the late rebellious states that is not tainted and freighted with Negro blood” (“The Lesson” 750) As the prophet giving testimony to his own witness, Douglass offered a sobering reminder of the roots of lynching. Its goal was to disenfranchise black people generally and to emasculate the black man as a social menace. The social trappings around these charges were that black people were bestial and the black man sought to rape white women. (Ironically black women don’t enter into this discussion because they have their own private nemesis, the white man). His message was to debunk the notion that there is a “Negro Problem.” And his perspective from which to do this was from “a colored man’s view of this subject at large in the press, in the pulpit and on the platform” (“Why is the Negro Lynched” 750).

Douglass said the great trouble with the Negro in the South is that all presumptions are against him. The defense that the aging but resilient reformer brought to this perspective was a claim—a warrant, as the logicians would call it—that had everything to do with the truth and social reality. Just a few examples should provide the flavor of his remarks.

First, history demonstrates that the Negro was never accused of assaulting the whites ever—in fact during slavery. Douglass asserts, “He was never accused of assault upon any white in the whole South. Why was the Negro lynched?” This was his answer:

… It was intended to blast and ruin the Negro’s character as a man and a citizen. I need not tell you how thoroughly it has already done its work. The Negro may and does feel its malign influence in the very air he breathes. He may read it in the faces of men among whom he moves. (“Why is the Negro Lynched” 760)

The aim of the accusers, mobocrats as Douglass called them, was not a verdict but an execution. And thus we are better able to understand why he chose to use the tools of language that would illustrate the tension between justice and injustice, between liberation and bondage. This is the place for the famous use of the chiasmus that enters into his discussion. Why use this rhetorical device? Because it served to dramatize the contrasts he wanted to teach with his prophetic voice for the ages. “Man was not made as an attribute to education, but education as an attribute to man. Do not make illiteracy a bar to the ballot, but make the ballot a bar to illiteracy” (“Why is the Negro Lynched” 765).

These figures intended to prod his audience into making suffrage more inclusive than exclusive. It should not only include the elite but, as he put it, the lowly as well. Women? Of course, so as to make our government in reality, as in name, a government by the people, of the people, and for the all people.

The Negro Problem? It does not exist.

… It is not a Negro problem, but in every sense a great national problem. It involves the question, whether after all our boasted civilization, our Declaration of Independence, our matchless Constitution, our sublime Christianity, our statesmanship, we as a people, possess virtue enough to solve the problem in accordance with wisdom and justice, and to the advantage of both races. (“Why is the Negro Lynched” 772)

What is finally beyond logic and proof of this prophesy, according to Douglass? Put away race prejudice. The mission of the nation was the redemption of the world from the bondage of the ages. Our goal as a nation was to “recognize the fact that the rights of the humblest citizens are as worthy of protection as are those of the highest and your problem will be solved—based upon the eternal principles of truth, justice and humanity, with no class having cause for complaint or grievance, the Republic will stand and flourish forever” (“Why is the Negro Lynched” 776).

And so, in the year of the bicentennial of his birth, the intellect and spirit of Frederick Douglass remain critical to our past and future. His use of language and rhetorical devices enabled a nation to continue a long but inevitable journey toward justice by overcoming the “noise” of bigotry, bias, slavery, and racism. As a man of faith who was profoundly spiritual, he drew from language and rhetorical strategies a vision of truth and life. As a result of his prophesies, Douglass’ legacy through these speeches is that we might be witnesses to the promises and fulfillment of freedom for all.

Works Cited

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Notes

1 Garrison’s explanation of the detailed iconography of his new masthead, unveiled on May 31, 1850, appears on page two of that edition of The Liberator.

2 Some of the collections that address the specifically artistic and literary elements of slave narrative include Davis and Gates, eds., and Sekora and Turner, eds.

3 See Sundquist (6), Riss (109), and Levine (292–94) for a brief overview of the allegations of Douglass’s dissimulation concerning his grandmother. Levine argues that Douglass’s apology for his deceit is part of a larger urge to heal the wounds of slavery during Reconstruction. What I find puzzling is that if Douglass’s apologies in 1849 and 1881 were genuine, why did he keep the passage, relatively unchanged, in the final versions of his autobiography?

4 Some of the works that have shaped discussion about print-performance culture and the underclasses are Sean Wilentz’s 1984 Chants Democratic, a study of working class culture; Bruce McConachie’s 1992 Melodramatic Formations, a study of antebellum American melodrama; Joseph Roach’s 1996 Cities of the Dead, on musical and theatrical performance in London and New Orleans; David Waldstreicher’s 1997 In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes, a study of early American festival culture; Heather Nathans’s 2009 Slavery and Sentiment, on African American characterization in early American theater; and most recently, Elizabeth Maddock Dillon’s 2014 New World Drama, which paints a broad canvass of representations of indigenous and African American identity over two centuries. I’m drawing from Bourdieu’s discussion of high and low arts (13–50).

5 For the relationship between orality and print, see Sandra Gustafson, who has argued against a crudely deterministic view of the difference between print and orality in the work of Walter Ong and Marshall McLuhan.

6 See Houston Baker’s essay in Davis and Gates, eds., The Slave’s Narrative, “Autobiographical Acts and the Voice of the Southern Slave.” For compelling criticisms of Baker’s view that Douglass’s literacy is somehow “white,” see Sisco and Royer.

7 See the excellent recent edition of Douglass’s The Heroic Slave, edited by Robert Levine, John Stauffer, and John Kaufman-McKivigan (2015), which also reprints influential earlier criticism on the novella.

8 Like most names rendered in another language, Cinqué’s name is variously represented as Sinque, Sengbe, Senge, and so forth. My understanding is that his name was probably pronounced along the lines of “Sengbe,” but for continuity with most of the historical literature about the Amistad written in English, I’ve used Cinqué.

9 For Cinque’s speeches in Boston and New York, sometimes given in Mende, see Wyatt-Brown, Lewis Tappan (218–20); also Boston Daily Atlas, Nov 9, 1841 (2); and the Norwich Courier, Dec 1, 1841 (3).. Douglass spoke about Cinqué’s rebellion in his Aug 3, 1857 speech on Emancipation in the British West Indies (Frederick Douglass Papers, 206). Although I do not know if Douglass actually worked as a caulker on the Friendship-Amistad, the boat was widely reported in 1839 as a Baltimore sloop estimated to be about six years old. Douglass tells us he learned to read letters while at Durgin and Bailey’s shipyards, in the early 1830s, before he went to Covey’s in January 1833. For a list of a dozen other Baltimore shipyards of this period, see Calvin Schermerhorn (86–87).

10 The film’s principal screen writer, David Franzoni, admitted to having had some screen-doctoring help from Steven Zaillian, but he credited the film’s producer and principal sponsor, Debbie Allen, as his greatest help (Los Angeles Times, Dec. 15, 1997). Allen got the idea from reading a William A. Owens’s 1953 novelization of the story, Black Mutiny, and spent a decade getting the film made (Chicago Tribune Dec. 7, 1997).

1 “Why is the Negro Lynched?” is a slightly different published version of the address better known as “Lessons of the Hour.” The quoted passage reflects the wording Douglass used in the “Why is the Negro Lynched?” version.

2 On Douglass’s use of irony, see Terrill.

1 In “Abolition,” I describe the contemporary inflections of the historical term “abolition” that have generated new objects for antiracist movements.

2 Ferguson’s analysis of civil-rights battles to rewrite the university’s self-certifying standards of excellence includes illuminating accounts of the origin of the new generation of composition and rhetoric programs and new para-academic gateways at University of California and City College (41–109).

3 My rethinking of Douglass’s training regimen is owed to Hartman’s analysis of the recursive effects and recreation of the plantation’s violence within nineteenth century African American slave narratives.

4 The example of this approach is found in Gates and Andrews, who formulated dialectical approaches between ideals of literacy and aspirations of “unlettered slaves.” My phrase “the difference that race makes” is a reference to Gates’s deconstruction-influenced essay, “Race and the Difference it Makes.”

5 Takaki’s valuable account of Rush’s medical philosophy and practice, and Jordan’s reading of Jefferson’s racial Enlightenment are now supplemented by Iannini’s Trouillot’s analysis of slavery’s impact on Euro-American intellectual life.

6 See Baucom, Smallwood, and Johnson for examples of this innovative scholarship.

7 I draw here on critiques of institutional diversity strategies such as Ahmed’s, Melamed’s and Ferguson’s, which examine the stakes of neoliberal capitalism and state-sponsored educational institutions in creating racial-ethnic identity categories. Ferguson’s work is particularly keen on the instrumental role of Black Arts movements in creating new educational beachheads and spaces that functioned independently of formalized curricula (76–93). Although Friere’s work is rightly credited with creating new models of pedagogy, bell hooks and Kynard call attention to the centrality of race relations in the formation of new curricular spaces and praxes.

1 See, for example: McFeely, William S. Frederick Douglass. New York: Norton and Co., 1991.

2 See: Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “John Brown—Speech at Boston on November 18, 1859.” Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Complete Works. Volume X, Par. 1, on Bartleby.com.