The Call to Women's Activism in Frederick Douglass's "What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?": A Rhetorical Analysis (original) (raw)
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Echoing Greatness: Douglass’s Reputation as an Orator
New North Star
Possibly one of the most revealing facts about Frederick Douglass's public career is that Douglass burst upon the scene with a powerful oration that we know only by the reactions it provoked. Douglass's speech in Nantucket in 1841 was by all accounts deeply moving and memorable, and it launched one of the most remarkable careers in American history, but it is not a speech available for careful study. It is appropriate, though, that we approach this speech through the eyes and ears, the reconstructions and recollections, the memories and memoirs, of people like William Lloyd Garrison, James N. Buffum, Samuel Joseph May, or John A. Collins, and that we encounter the speech, indirectly but with real power, in the ongoing legends of Douglass's modest beginnings and in accounts by such writers as R. R. Raymond or James McCune Smith. 1 This speech, and its subsequent legend, remind us that a significant aspect of Douglass's career as orator involved not only his eloquence and rhetorical skills but also the occasions and forums for his public performances, the social environment in which they operated, the print culture in which they were recorded, celebrated, or dismissed, and the responses they generated. Something important is lost about Douglass's oratory when his public speeches are removed from their public dynamics, from the oratorical performance itself, for Douglass himself was deeply attentive to those dynamics, and deeply aware of the extent to which the significance of each speech had to do with how it reframed not only the speaker but even the platform on which he spoke. To fully appreciate Douglass's career as orator, then, we need to pay attention to those who witnessed and responded to his performances on the public stage. 2 We can begin with someone who claims to have anticipated Douglass long before he ever spoke in public. Douglass's presence was so powerful that R. R. Raymond, a White Baptist minister very active in abolitionist and other reform efforts in Syracuse, anticipated it even before he ever actually encountered Douglass in person. Looking back to the "castle-building daydreams" of his youth, Raymond recalls, "A favorite image of my creation was an Africo-American for the time,-a colored man, who had known by experience the bitterness of slavery, and now by some process free, so endowed with natural powers, and a certain degree of attainments, all the more rare and effective for being acquired under great disadvantages,-as to be a sort of Moses to his oppressed and degraded tribe." 3 Raymond emphasizes the unlikelihood of ever encountering such a being, one "gifted with a noble person…and refinement of manners, and some elegance of thought and expression," observing that "by what unprecedented miracle such a paragon was to be graduated through the educational appliances of American slavery, imagination did not trouble 1 Responses to Douglass's inaugural antislavery speech are included in John Ernest, Douglass in His Own Time (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2014), 49, 109-111, 177. 2 I agree with Andrea Deacon concerning the strange absence of a full body of scholarship focused on Douglass's career as an orator, and I agree to some extent as well that "although this dearth of critical analyses, coupled with Douglass' reputation, is indeed curious, one possible reason for this lack of serious attention may stem from Douglass' rhetoric being perceived merely as epideictic or ceremonial in nature.
To Narrate and Denounce: Frederick Douglass and the Politics of Personal Narrative
Political Theory, 2016
What political problem can autobiography solve? This article examines the politics of Frederick Douglass's antebellum personal narratives: his 1845 slave narrative, the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, and his 1855 autobiography, My Bondage and My Freedom, written at the opposite ends of Douglass's transition from the abolitionist politics of William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips to Douglass's defense of political action and the Constitution as anti-slavery. Placing the two texts alongside Douglass's distinction "to narrate wrongs" and "denouncing them," I argue that Douglass writes My Bondage and My Freedom as a mode of denunciation: an autobiographical critique of injustice that balances analysis of collective oppression with advocacy for communal emancipation. Whereas to narrate wrongs encouraged readers to judge Douglass's story alongside popular criteria of justice, to denounce wrongs is to implicate readers within the structures that create antebellum subjects on and off the plantation, by revealing the coercions and conditionings of society that make not simply slaves but slaveowners, sympathizers, and abolitionists. This article claims that autobiography is a distinct genre of political theory, one that challenges present relations between the individual and the collective by representing not simply its author but an expanded view of "the people."
Communication Studies Vol. 48, 1997
Frederick Douglass spoke to a multiracial public sphere by engaging in "antagonistic cooperation" with white and black abolitionists. He served as an "integrative ancestor" for all those trying to help build a multiracial democracy. Douglass' interracial rhetoric was developed to engage the different constituents of his multiracial audiences. I examine some rhetorical strategies Douglass employed in his "What to the Slave is the 4th of July?” speech order to communicate with the different constituents of his multiracial audience. Since many of these strategies were derived from Bible stories and Enlightenment/ "natural rights" philosophy, I focus on the streams of Christian and political egalitarianism which fed Douglass' vision, with three main goals: 1) to give a sense of Douglass' stature in his own time; 2) to deepen our understanding of Douglass' biracial identity and political philosophy, and of how this makes him an "integrative ancestor"; and 3) to illustrate the continuing timeliness of Douglass' critique of American racialism.
Frederick Douglass (~1818-1895) was one of the most famous African American of the 19th century. He was a slave, a writer, orator, editor, activist and social reformer, and an abolitionist leader. In 1845, he published – at the Anti-Slavery Office in Boston – his well-known work, "Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written By Himself". It is considered one of the most important slave narratives released before the Civil War. In general, slave narratives represent a literary corpus that was greatly popular in the 19th century America. Written in first-person narrator, slave narratives show the everlasting challenge produced by the dichotomy freedom-slavery. In addition, slave narratives – as in the case of Douglass’ Narrative – focus on the human sides of slaves, providing a way to recuperate their own identity in the daily and terrible reality of slavery. For this reason, one of the slave narratives’ ultimate purposes is to convince the reader that slavery had to be denounced and abolished at once. This paper will focus on the analysis of the "Narrative" of Frederick Douglass as both a vehicle for the search of freedom and the search of identity, providing an explanation on how Douglass is able to define his “self.”
Light or Fire? Frederick Douglass and the Orator's Dilemma
Light or Fire: Frederick Douglass and the Orator's Dilemma, 2022
Most scholarship on political rhetoric views it as an exercise in changing the minds of an audience. However, we see numerous examples of political speech aimed at those who already agree with the speaker, to motivate them to act on judgments they have already made. This kind of discourse is often dismissed as pandering, or the "red meat" rabblerousing that contributes to polarization. I draw upon Frederick Douglass to render a more complete account of this speech, which I term "hortatory rhetoric." Douglass draws upon the prophetic tradition of Black Christian preaching to develop an alternative for when persuasion has reached its limit. This kind of speech raises a set of normative difficulties that differ from those raised by the rhetoric of persuasion, which Douglass helps us to think through. He provides a framework for understanding when it might be permissible or even desirable to abandon persuasion for exhortation.
Comparative American Studies, Vol. 13 No. 3, 2015
Frederick Douglass' reframing of monuments about American slavery is prophetic. This revisionist view applies an “interracial turn” lens to Douglass’ 1876 Freedmen's Monument Speech. After sketching interracial dynamics in Douglass' career, visual rhetoric in this oration is examined. Read through a history of Douglass’ relationships with white men, the speech constitutes a performative resolution of Douglass’ “white man problem.” A historically situated reading of Douglass’ rhetoric reveals the maturity of his political thought, which calls on future audiences to reassess Douglass' identity, and legacy. A “revised Douglass” charted a path by which we could revise our own “white male problem.” Douglass’ model is timely, given recurring episodes of interracial violence, and the unrest they spark. As a figure who battled racialism and lived a “more attractive alternative,” Douglass legitimates an “interracial turn” in fields including American Studies, communication, ethnography, rhetorical studies, and literary criticism.