“A New Vocation before Me”: Frederick Douglass's Post-Civil War Lyceum Career

ABSTRACT

This article examines the oratorical strategies adopted by Frederick Douglass in the late 1860s and early 1870s when he joined the ranks of professional lyceum speakers. Douglass's speaking shifted away from the long-established topics of slavery and civil rights to appeal to a broader audience. Douglass also shifted from a spontaneous speaking style, honed in years of abolitionist campaigning, to rely upon written texts prepared in advance and delivered repeatedly. A close analysis of those lyceum addresses, newspaper reports of their delivery, and Douglass's personal correspondence reveal that he retained many elements of his older performance style and facilely adapted his topic, sometimes in mid-lecture, to suit many audiences' demand to hear him address the “race question.”

KEYTERMS:

• African American studies
• ethnicity
• race

Notes

1. After reminiscing about his youthful career in Baltimore as a caulker, he continued, “My public life and labors had unfitted me for the pursuits of my earlier years, and yet not prepared me for more congenial and higher employment. Outside the question of slavery my thoughts had not been much directed, and I could hardly hope to make myself useful in any other cause than that to which I had given the best twenty-five years of my life. A man in the situation I found myself, has not only to divest himself of the old, which is never easily done, but to adjust himself to the new, which is still more difficult (Douglass, 1881/2012, p. 292).

2. Also see a similar judgment by abolitionist Samuel J. May (Ernest, 2014, p. 41).

3. Douglass wrote his friend Gerrit Smith, “I have been engaged in writing a Speech for the 4^th July which has taken up much of my extra time for the last two or three weeks” (Douglass, 1852/2009).

4. Although Douglass continued speaking regularly at political and reform meetings, he discovered that he also could use his paid lyceum performances to advances those causes he supported (Ray, 2002, pp. 628–629).

5. Douglass established his credentials on the subject by subtly reminding his audience through a third-party reference to himself the speaker as a former slave (Ray, 2002, p. 630).

6. At least one delivery provoked controversy, when an Ohio priest accused Douglass of taunting Catholics in the audience about the alleged role of Pope Gregory XIII in the assassination of William (Blassingame & McKivigan, 1991, pp. 614–616).

7. Douglass also demanded that halls where he performed drop their restrictions on African American attendance (Ray, 2002, p. 629).

8. Redpath observed that Douglass as the only African American lecturer capable of drawing in large white audiences (McKivigan, 2008, p. 122).

9. In 1875, Douglass justified his choice of a lecture topic that year based on his recollection of the lack of success with the “William the Silent” address (Ray, 2002, p. 629).

10. For example, Douglass had planned to deliver his “The Recollections of the Anti-Slavery Conflict” lecture in Louisville, Kentucky, on 23 April 1873, but abandoned that subject to address recent reports of a massacre of Black Republicans in Colfax, Louisiana (Blassingame & McKivigan, 1991, pp. 360–361).

11. It is significant that Gregory said Douglass's “reader” not listener (Ernest, 2014, pp. 161–162).

12. These latter lectures also might reveal Douglass returning to the models of his childhood, the classical and British addresses he read in Bingham's Columbian Orator for his evolved style of argument (Mailloux, 2002, pp. 102–110; Walker, 2002, p. 93).