Frederick Douglass and Robert Ingersoll -- From Religious Argument to the Appeal to Reason (original) (raw)
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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.
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."
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.
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...
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.”