"It is all a Thing of the Past": An Interview with Frederick Douglass, 1886 (original) (raw)
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A Negro Hercules: Frederick Douglass in Britain
Black stardom is a burgeoning field, and the fame of formerly enslaved African Americans in Britain during the mid nineteenth century offers an intriguing case study. In 1846, one British newspaper described the ex-slave turned abolitionist Frederick Douglass as a 'Negro Hercules'. During his British sojourn, Douglass travelled thousands of miles from Exeter to Edinburgh and contemporary newspapers waxed lyrical about his commanding stage presence and 'eloquent' lectures. Douglass created a sensation in Britain, and his celebrity rested on his status as a formerly enslaved individual, his powerful oratory and strong, commanding physical presence, as well as his talent at influencing and exploiting contemporary debates to help the anti-slavery cause. He gave renewed vigour to tense debates over non-fellowship with slave-holding American churches and controversies such as the Evangelical Alliance had international consequences, vividly exposing the influence of American slavery on British society. I will discuss the controversies, complications and consequences of Douglass' celebrity, which provided a stepping-stone towards fame and success in America.
This paper examines how Frederick Douglass developed as both a public figure and a private citizen during the years before and after the American Civil War. It looks at how his reality of being a black man in the United States who was advocating for major social, political, and economic change contributed to a unique identity that required him to take on different roles depending on the setting in which he found himself. Finally, it explores how his contemporaries and scholars today vary in their analyses of him as a writer, orator, and political philosopher.
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.
Frederick Douglass and the 1846 Dublin Edition of His Narrative
New Hibernia Review, 2001
The year was pivotal for Frederick Douglass. With urging from friends in the Anti-Slavery Society in Boston, he published his autobiography The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. Although already recognized as the preeminent antislavery authority on the abolitionist lecture circuit, when Douglass issued his life story as a book, he gave his life a further measure of lasting influence. Without a doubt, publication further advanced Douglass's reputation as a formidable campaigner for African-American freedom. Despite such acclaim, however, his capacity to be a leader was hard won. In Douglass was also embroiled in circumstances aggravated by both proslavery and antislavery proponents that hampered his ability to move the United States in the direction he envisioned. Eventually, physical attacks by the public, unjust organizational practices of the Anti-Slavery Society, and fugitive slave laws, which instigated and codified prejudicial behavior and beliefs, necessitated Douglass's departure from the United States for Europe to continue his work for slavery's abolition. Douglass hoped to win Europeans over to the abolitionist cause in greater numbers and they, in turn, could exert an influence on American domestic policy that sanctioned slavery.
The World’s Eye, the World’s Heart: Frederick Douglass and the Transcendence from Slavery
2018
In nineteenth-century America, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay “The American Scholar” finds a satisfying manifestation in Frederick Douglass’ autobiographical Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself. A careful examination reveals Douglass to be the epitome of Emerson’s “Man Thinking,” a distinction which allows Douglass to escape slavery in a thoroughly transcendental way. In “The American Scholar,” Emerson expounds upon the deficits in the American education system, in particular, passive knowledge consumption. In an attempt to correct this deficit, Emerson enumerates the qualifications necessary to achieve the pinnacle of American scholarship, which he calls “Man Thinking.” Emerson claims that a man must be in touch with nature, he must explore the past through books, he must activate his soul, and he must use his new knowledge to take action and produce change. Douglass reaches each of the essential phases and meets all necessary requirement...