Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and the Art of Persuasion

ABSTRACT

Frederick Douglass was a master rhetorician who regularly told stories about his life history. Those stories changed, depending on the rhetorical occasion. This article examines his various accounts of Abraham Lincoln over an approximately 30-year period. At times Douglass presents Lincoln as the Great Emancipator; at other times he presents him as a racist. Douglass is interested less in documenting the historical truth about Lincoln than in using him to make arguments for racial justice.

KEYTERMS:

• Frederick Douglass
• Abraham Lincoln
• rhetorical persuasion
• civil war
• race
• reconstruction

Notes

1. Most studies of Douglass take some account of audience and thus implicitly address rhetorical matters. For books that more self-consciously address Douglass and rhetoric, see Colaiaco (2006) and Lampe (1998). And for a recent example of a more traditional Aristotelian-based rhetorical approach to Douglass, see McClish (2015), who over the past two decades has established himself as arguably the leading rhetorical analyst of Douglass's writings.

2. See Levine (2016, chapter 5).

3. For more on Douglass and Lincoln, see Stauffer (2008), and Kendrick and Kendrick (2008).

4. On Douglass's criticism of the sculpture, see Levine (2016, pp. 226–228).