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The Nation, MARCH 14, 2017
The Enduring Struggle
For Frederick Douglass, the work of democratic politics was never-ending.
By Matt Karp
The Lives of Frederick Douglass
By Robert Levine
The Portable Frederick Douglass
By John Stauffer and Henry Louis Gates Jr., eds.
“AFTER FRED. DOUGLASS.—” barked an October 1850 headline in the
Mississippi Free Trader, the state’s leading Democratic newspaper. The
article below it went on to note: “We are very much pleased to learn
that a party of Marylanders are in pursuit of the sweet pet and fragrant
expounder of the white negroes of the North. He is a fugitive slave, and
the intention is to reclaim him under the late Fugitive Slave Law.”
This was an outstanding antebellum example of what we have lately come
to call “fake news.” After eight years as a fugitive, Frederick Douglass
had been legally emancipated in 1846 when a group of British
abolitionists collected funds to purchase his freedom. No party of
Maryland slave-hunters was headed north to pursue him, even after the
passage of the Fugitive Slave Act. The Free Trader wasn’t reporting on
events; it was indulging in a kind of vicarious hate crime.
Yet in its mix of gossip, malice, and braggadocio, the Free Trader’s
false report was characteristic of the opposition that Douglass faced in
his lifetime of political struggle. For Mississippi’s Slave Power,
Douglass presented an existential threat in two dimensions. First, his
physical person, as an ex-slave turned celebrity abolitionist, was a
dramatic personification of his radical belief in human equality. To
adapt what W.E.B. Du Bois once said of John Brown, Douglass didn’t just
use argument, he was himself an argument. Second, Douglass was feared
because his oratory had dangerous implications: It might help generate a
popular political movement against the slaveholding South. Thus the
Mississippi Free Trader reserved equal scorn for the “white negroes of
the North”—Douglass’s anti-slavery allies and the larger Northern public
that they hoped to awaken.
The power of the antebellum slaveholding class, after all, resided not
only in its direct domination of black slaves, but in its ability to
divide and exploit an even larger multiracial working class. Douglass
knew how well this system worked from bitter personal experience: As a
hired slave in Baltimore, he was assaulted by white dockworkers with
bricks and handspikes. Yet he remained clearheaded about who benefited
from this racial violence. As he wrote in 1855: “The slaveholders, with
a craftiness peculiar to themselves, by encouraging the enmity of the
poor, laboring white man against the blacks, succeeds in making the said
white man almost as much a slave as the black slave himself…. Both are
plundered, and by the same plunderers.”
To uproot these plunderers required democratic organization in both the
North and South. The obstacles were enormous, Douglass knew, for he
seldom underestimated the tenacity of American racism—the prejudices and
powers wielded by those Americans “who happen to live in a skin which
passes for white.” Nevertheless, the basic premise of his career was
that slavery and white supremacy, for all their fearsome might, could be
defeated through a political struggle that transcended racial and
regional divisions. Only a broad popular movement, led by an
abolitionist vanguard but embracing “the masses at the North,” could
overthrow “the slave-holding oligarchy” and establish a government truly
devoted to liberty and equality for all.
Douglass had no patience for those in the antislavery camp who argued
for withdrawal from a hopelessly tainted Union, or for the abandonment
of a hopelessly degraded democratic politics. “If I were on board of a
pirate ship,” he declared, “I would not clear my soul…by jumping in the
long boat, and singing out no union with pirates.” Instead,
abolitionists must dig in and fight, trusting in their ability to build
a democratic alliance against slavery across the free states. “[T]he
slaveholders are but four hundred thousand in number,” he noted, “and we
are fourteen millions…we are really the strong and they are the weak.”
For Douglass, political effort without radical moral principle was
futile, doomed to a slow, unwholesome demise amid “the swamps of
compromise and concession.” But moral courage without political
engagement—and without movement-building—was equally barren. “If there
is no struggle, there is no progress,” Douglass declared in 1857. The
apothegm is justly famous as a defense of left-wing agitation, but it is
worth remembering that both of its keywords received equal weight.
Douglass did not celebrate struggle for struggle’s sake. He struggled
because he believed he would win.
In our own troubled times, with reaction regnant and the formal
opposition frail and confused, Douglass’s belief in progress may strike
readers as something of a quaint anachronism. But two new books—The
Lives of Frederick Douglass, by Robert S. Levine, and The Portable
Frederick Douglass, edited by John Stauffer and Henry Louis Gates
Jr.—help underline just how urgently his vision of political struggle is
needed today.
Both books pay tribute to Douglass’s immense literary talents. In three
decades, he went from the dirt floor of a Maryland slave cabin to a
private audience in the White House, where he helped recruit slaves into
an army whose mission was the destruction of the master class. His was
one of the most remarkable and revolutionary lives of the 19th century,
and he did not shy from writing about it: first in Narrative of the Life
of Frederick Douglass (1845), published seven years after his escape
from slavery; then in My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), written after
his break with William Lloyd Garrison; and finally in The Life and Times
of Frederick Douglass (1881 and 1892), which brings his story through
the Civil War and Reconstruction.
Levine’s book, which takes these autobiographies as its primary subject,
retraces Douglass’s lifelong effort to tell and retell his own
astonishing story. Pushing back against the idea that Douglass’s early
intimacy with Garrison means that the Narrative should be read as a
“black message” inside a “white envelope,” Levine shows how their
collaboration—not at all a simple student-teacher relationship—gave the
Narrative much of its power.
Levine also chronicles the dissolution of this collaboration. By the
late 1840s, Douglass had become dissatisfied with Garrison’s brand of
abolitionism, in part because it abjured electoral politics in favor of
a nonviolent form of resistance that placed moral principle above
political competition. Levine shows how My Bondage and My Freedom
reflects Douglass’s growing sense that the battle against slavery
required ballots, and might ultimately demand bullets as well. Above
all, he describes the antislavery firebrand as a mind in constant
motion: “identity is never stable in Douglass; it is tied to the
contingencies of the historical moment.” Politics, ultimately, was about
timing, and Douglass subordinated his quest for autobiographical
self-understanding to his desire to make political change.
In the introduction to their new volume of Douglass’s writings, Stauffer
and Gates extend this argument, discovering in his shifting
self-representations something of a philosophical principle. Just as
Douglass “rejected the idea of a fixed self, so too did he repudiate
fixed social stations and rigid hierarchies.” With his own family tree
shrouded in mystery—he never knew the identity of his father—Douglass
responded by actively embracing fluidity, change, and the wholesome
convulsions of a life devoted to struggle and progress.
Born into slavery on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, Douglass learned that he
could shift his shape, in a fashion, by imitating the voices around him.
He preached barnyard sermons on the plantation, affecting the style and
cadence of white ministers and addressing his master’s pigs as “Dear
Brethren.” His talent for verbal mimicry evolved into a lifelong gift
for satirical public speech. Later, on the abolitionist lecture circuit,
Douglass would leave crowds in stitches with his canting impression of a
hypocritical Southern preacher.
Among their selections, Stauffer and Gates include a previously
unpublished 1864–65 speech, “Pictures and Progress,” that highlights
Douglass’s own dual sense of himself as an activist and an artist,
always striving to remake the boundaries of his world. “Poets, prophets,
and reformers,” Douglass argued, “are all picture-makers—and this
ability is the secret of their power.”
Douglass himself was especially attracted to the new art of photographic
picture-making—a form in which the sitter, as much as the camera
operator, could shape the portrait. It was no coincidence, as Stauffer
and Zoe Trodd have noted in a recent collection of Douglass’s portraits,
that he became the most photographed American of the 19th century.
As a former slave who claimed his psychic freedom in the course of a
two-hour fight with the slave-breaker Edward Covey, Douglass well
understood the connection between the physical and the political. It was
a duality that demanded both heroic acts of courage and tremendous acts
of primping. “A man is ashamed of seeming to be vain of his personal
appearance,” he observed in “Pictures and Progress,” “and yet who ever
stood before a glass preparing to sit or stand for a picture without a
consciousness of some such vanity?”
Paying close attention to his own person—a regime that involved
meticulous grooming, fashionable dress, and even weight training late in
life—wasn’t just Douglass’s concession to Victorian notions of
self-improvement: It was a core element of his political character. With
his body continually in danger, Douglass responded not by withdrawing
into private life, but by carefully fashioning an ever stronger and more
confident public physical presence.
For Douglass, while politics flowed inevitably through the private and
the personal, it always returned to the public and the collective.
“Neither self-culture, nor any other kind of culture, can amount to much
in this world,” he asserted, “unless joined to some truly unselfish and
noble purpose.”
This is the danger in approaching Douglass as a primarily
autobiographical writer. Most Americans today know him through the 1845
Narrative, the single-most-assigned book in US history surveys,
according to a 2005 study. But a focus on Douglass’s individual odyssey
shouldn’t cause us to forget that he devoted his life to a shared
struggle against oppression.
Douglass’s own career would be unthinkable without his collaborations
with activists and politicians, from Garrison and Martin Delany and
Susan B. Anthony to Charles Sumner and Abraham Lincoln. In his popular
antebellum lecture “Trials and Triumphs of Self-Made Men,” Douglass
began by acknowledging that there was no such thing: “all had begged,
borrowed, or stolen from somebody or somewhere.” As Levine shows, even
his autobiographies were chiefly political documents. They were less
concerned with exploring his private identity in formation than with
exposing public crimes and inspiring a mass movement against them.
It is fitting, then, that Stauffer and Gates have put Douglass’s
speeches and journalism at the heart of their new volume. Douglass
himself considered his time as a newspaper editor the most important
period of his career. “If I have at any time said or written that which
is worth remembering,” he concluded in Life and Times, “I must have said
such things between the years 1848 and 1860, and my paper was a
chronicle of most of what I said during that time.”
Douglass founded his newspaper, The North Star, in Rochester in 1848, on
the heels of his ideological split with Garrison and his Massachusetts
Anti-Slavery Society. Douglass had grown skeptical of Garrisonian
nonviolence, but the essence of the disagreement was about electoral
politics: While Garrison and his allies thought abolitionists should
boycott elections organized under a pro-slavery Constitution, Douglass
came to believe that the ballot box could and must become a vital tool
in the struggle against slavery. “Garrison sees in the Constitution
precisely what John C. Calhoun sees there,” he wrote—an impregnable
fortress against antislavery political action in the United States. But
Douglass believed that abolitionism must reject such rigidities, and he
insisted that it become a movement that was as creative, forceful, and
open to possibility as democratic politics itself.
A great theme in Douglass’s antebellum writing was the necessary
subordination of the past—dead, frozen, irrevocable—to the present:
alive, fluid, subject to change. Politics must keep up with its times.
“We have to do with the past only as we can make it useful to the
present,” he declared in his famous 1852 address on slavery and the
Fourth of July. “To all inspiring motives, to noble deeds which can be
gained from the past, we are welcome. But now is the time, the important
time.”
Douglass aimed his remarks at the conservative cult around America’s
founders, already well in evidence by the 1850s: “men seldom eulogize
the wisdom and virtues of their fathers, but to excuse some folly and
wickedness of their own.” But his words were also, in their way, a
message to his comrades in the antislavery struggle. If abolitionism was
to grow from a moral position into a political movement, its advocates
could not let themselves be paralyzed by the weight of past horrors. The
bloodstained history of slavery in America—200 years of pillage,
torture, and domination—did not drive his thoughts upward, toward the
promises of a peaceful heaven, or inward, toward the safety of a
beautiful despair. Instead, Douglass turned outward, toward the daily
rigors of struggle and the political possibilities of what he called
“the ever-living now.”
For Douglass, the American future was not foreclosed. Seldom beguiled by
the mythology of national exceptionalism—“Americans are remarkably
familiar with all facts which make in their own favor”—Douglass
nevertheless rejected the view, as fashionable then as it is now among
some quarters of the left, that his homeland was somehow
constitutionally impervious to change. “I know of no country,” he
declared in 1857, “where the conditions for affecting great changes in
the settled order of things…are more favorable than here in these United
States.”
This confidence in that dark hour stemmed from a specific political
calculation. Reaction, he believed, had overreached itself. The Fugitive
Slave Act, the Kansas-Nebraska Bill, and the Dred Scott decision, all
“measures devised and executed with a view to allay and diminish the
anti-slavery agitation, have only served to increase, intensify, and
embolden that agitation.” The advance of the Slave Power, red in tooth
and claw, had torn up the old rotten compromises, exposed the bankruptcy
of the old party system, and given new vindication to slavery’s most
radical opponents. “Hence, the wolfish cry of ‘fanaticism,’ has lost its
potency,” Douglass declared in 1855, “indeed the ‘fanatics’ are looked
upon as a pretty respectable body of People.”
A new organized power in American politics, the Republican Party, had
emerged from the ruins of the antebellum party system. For Douglass,
“the great Republican Movement, which is sweeping like a whirlwind over
the Free States,” showed that the North was ready to “bury party
affinities…and also the political leaders who have hitherto controlled
them; to unite in one grand phalanx, and go forth, and whip the enemy.”
Even so, Douglass never became an unconditional supporter of the
Republican Party, and often, before the Civil War, he appeared as one of
its most scorching critics. Yet in a deeper sense, the electoral triumph
of Abraham Lincoln and the Republicans in 1860 fulfilled one of his
fundamental premises: that slavery in the South could only be challenged
through a democratic alliance with “the masses at the North.”
When Southern slaveholders responded to Lincoln’s victory with armed
rebellion, Douglass understood it as a reaction to the emancipatory
potential of this new alliance. The “war of the Rebels,” he declared in
1863, “is a war of the rich against the poor. Let Slavery go down with
the war, and let labor cease to be fettered, chained, flogged, and
branded…and then we shall see as never before, the laborers in all
sections of this country rising to respectability and power.”
Douglass lived to see his cross-sectional alliance of laborers—what Du
Bois later called “the abolition-democracy”—successfully crush the
rebellion, destroy slavery, and drive the most profound social
revolution in American history. He lived, too, to see that alliance
undone, and many of its achievements rolled back, by the resistance of
white Southerners and the connivance of a Northern leadership that, as
he wrote in 1894, had “converted the Republican party into a party of
money rather than a party of morals.”
Struggle begat progress, and progress begat more struggle. This was the
work of politics, of public agitation and democratic organization: It
never ends. Douglass himself never tired of the fight or lost sight of
his horizon—a political force “broad enough, and strong enough, to
support the most comprehensive plans for the freedom and elevation of
all the people of this country, without regard to color, class, or
clime.” For Douglass, that meant ceaseless resistance to all forms of
entrenched hierarchy, including the exclusion of women from politics.
When he died suddenly on a February evening in 1895, his final day had
been spent with Susan B. Anthony and Anna Shaw at a women’s suffrage
meeting in Washington, DC.
Douglass devoted his life to eternal war on both “the system” and “the
spirit of slavery.” The system went down in 1865, but the spirit, of
course, lives on with us today, reorganized and remastered with all the
perennial shrewdness of the ruling classes. It lives in every social
order that contrives to elevate one group at the expense of another,
every economic order that exalts capital and degrades labor, and every
political order that denies the possibility of great change.
“This doctrine of human equality,” Douglass wrote in 1850, “is the
bitterest yet taught by the abolitionists.” The struggle for that
doctrine remains the central struggle of our day. It requires political
as well as moral action, organizing as well as orations. Just as in
Douglass’s day, we can only prevail if we believe we will win.
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