Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom

“He found ways to convert the scars Covey left on his body into words that might change the world. His travail under Covey’s yoke became Douglass’s crucifixion and resurrection.”

This quote reinforces the previous quote. While Douglass uses the positive experiences that come his way to further his ends, he is even more adept at transforming negative experiences into something useful. He will use this same maneuver repeatedly in the future to exploit racist attacks to gain public sympathy for his cause.

“He was the ornament, the object, a former piece of property who could speak and write, who could match wits and logic with even his most determined critics.”

While much has been made of Douglass’s abilities as a wordsmith, observers fail to recognize the value of his physicality. He is a living, breathing embodiment of the slave system. As such, he contradicts all manner of White supremacist stereotypes by being attractive and articulate. 

“Eventually their quest for purity of motive and strategy would drive the Garrisonians into a self-destructive isolation.” 

As Douglass will find out later, the Garrisonians are idealists. While their views look well enough on paper, their unwillingness to recognize the real political landscape will be their undoing. In Douglass’s mind, absolutist moral ideology will never further the cause of abolition; it can only be a launching pad for more practical social reformers. 

“In nearly every waking hour, if with people, he provided the object for their curiosity and gaze: he had to be the black man who was really a pleasing brown and partly white, the slave who was also so eloquent, the genius that bondage could not destroy, the embodiment of a story that kept on giving.” 

While this quote reinforces previous remarks about Douglass’s physicality as a major component of his charisma, it highlights another equally important characteristic. Throughout his life, Douglass espouses ideological contradictions. This quote describes him as a walking paradox whose ideas are as contradictory as his appearance. 

“It has happened to me . . . often to be more indebted to my enemies than to my own skill.” 

In making this statement, Douglass reveals his conscious awareness that there is no such thing as bad publicity. Every time he faces racism, he records the incident in print. The result is sympathy for his cause and condemnation of the pro-slavery faction. 

“And as the Jewish theologian Abraham Heschel wrote, ‘Prophets must have been shattered by some cataclysmic experience in order to be able to shatter others.’ By this standard, Douglass qualified.” 

This quote highlights the orator’s qualification for his job but hints at his identification with biblical prophets. Douglass was deeply influenced by the Bible and saw the fiery Old Testament prophets as his role models. His attack on slavery is both a moral and a political crusade. 

“All great autobiography is about loss, about the hopeless but necessary quest to retrieve and control a past that forever slips away. Memory is both inspiration and burden, method and subject, the thing one cannot live with or without.” 

Douglass’s past is anything but pleasant. Yet he returns to that desolate landscape to write three autobiographies. He is less interested in reporting facts because those don’t change. Instead, he reshapes his interpretation of what those events meant to him and to the nation. 

“Douglass’s millennialism was forward-looking and activist. Waiting for the ‘jubilee’ of black emancipation and the fulfillment of America’s national destiny required patience, but also struggle; it demanded faith, and suffering.” 

Douglass is steeped in the lore of the Bible. He literally believes in a Second Coming and sees America as the New Jerusalem. A golden age can only be purchased with blood sacrifice; therefore, he views the Civil War as the next natural step in God’s plan for the nation. 

“To black audiences Douglass could preach as stern a brand of conservative self-improvement as any black voice of his era. In rhetorical moves representative of a brand of black nationalism, Douglass often turned attacks on white racism into angry rebukes of black lethargy.” 

Douglass is not blind to the faults of his own people when it comes to emancipation. He continuously preaches the doctrine of self-reliance to an audience recovering from centuries of slavery. One of his greatest ideological contradictions is his simultaneous support for personal independence and government assistance.

“Among the most driving compulsions of Frederick Douglass’s public life was his quest to alter, shape, or change history. He craved those moments and opportunities to gain access to real political power, to bend wills, and to be a creator of events and not merely their interpreter.” 

During his early years as a speaker and author, Douglass spends much of his time describing his miserable past. He then uses those descriptions to drive public sentiment in the direction of abolition. It isn’t until the Civil War that his words have enough power to cause people to take up guns to change the course of a nation. 

“He was not a warrior himself, as he had discovered in his struggle with John Brown. But he was more than ready to wield his pen and voice to send millions to destroy slavery, slaveholders, and anyone shouldering arms in their defense.”

From a spiritual standpoint, Douglass is absolutely convinced of the providential nature of the Civil War. While his words are incendiary, his actions generally are not. Among the young men that Douglass recruits to fight the battle for him are two of his own sons. A third volunteers to recruit soldiers in the Deep South, which is an equally risky occupation. 

“The outbreak of the war allowed him to cultivate a long-standing psychological need to find a real-world outlet for an inner vengeance against slavery and slaveholders.”

While previous quotes described Douglass’s religious basis for urging the Civil War, this one highlights the very personal nature of his campaign. Slavery is an institution and an ideological construct. By sending soldiers and guns to attack Confederates, Douglass is able to cast his spiritual and ideological foe as a corporeal one. 

“In thus sacralizing the killing of Southern soldiers and of the Confederacy itself, Douglass found the war’s meaning.” 

Many Union soldiers believe that they are fighting to preserve the union and not end slavery. Douglass, grounded in a biblical interpretation of world events, takes a more spiritual approach to the conflict. He can justify the killing of thousands in the name of a great moral cause. For him, the Civil War becomes an abolitionist jihad.

“With differing style and scope, Lincoln and Douglass shared an outlook of millennial nationalism—America as a nation with a special destiny, fraught with contradictions, and living out a historical trajectory under some kind of providential judgment.”

Despite Douglass’s early attacks on Lincoln’s cautious policies, he is surprised to learn how many of his views are shared by the president. When the two men finally meet and converse, Douglass reverses his negative opinion. He sees in Lincoln an embodiment of his own values, instilled in a man who can effect political change on a scale that he cannot.

“In common grief with his mostly white fellow citizens, the black orator felt a sense of belonging. The war had provided a common sense of nationhood, Lincoln’s death virtually a common sense of family.” 

Once Douglass comes to appreciate Lincoln as a person, he is shattered by the assassination of the president. In the Civil War, Douglass finds a means to unite in a common cause with white Union supporters. The death of Lincoln allows him to share the nation’s collective grief. After decades of feeling like a man without a state, Douglass has become an American patriot. 

“She too, perhaps even more than he, understood the meaning of holding together and protecting a black family in racist, hostile America. Her garden for self-sufficiency, mothering skills, and stern personality made ‘the hill’ on South Avenue possible as much as her husband’s speaking fees and book royalties.” 

Because of Douglass’s reticence on the subject, it becomes almost impossible for the reader to understand his wife, Anna. The biographer is repeatedly forced to speculate on her motives and thought process. In this quote, he attempts to see her as something more than a docile servant to her husband. 

“Douglass saw Reconstruction’s egalitarian promises—the end of slavery, equality before law, birthright citizenship, and the right to vote—as catalysts and justifications of American expansion. A new America—the new Jerusalem—presented itself to the world.” 

This quote helps to explain Douglass’s seemingly paradoxical support of American expansion. He is enlisted as a diplomat to establish an American foothold in Haiti. This behavior seems to fly in the face of foreign national sovereignty. However, by this stage of his life, Douglass has become an American patriot, and his holy war has been successfully won. 

“At this stage of life, his class status seemed easily offended. Such were the contradictions of his chosen path of leadership. The paragon of respectability found some of the fun-loving habits of the recently emancipated unsavory. Douglass much preferred violins to banjos.” 

As Douglass achieves fame and national respect, he comes to identify more with his social class than with his race. While he continues to fight for the rights of the emancipated, he doesn’t enjoy socializing with them when their manners are uncouth, in his opinion. The ex-enslaved person from Maryland believes he no longer shares a common culture with the recently freed. 

“‘Mother was the post in the center of my house,’ he said to Sarah Loguen, ‘and held us together . . . the main pillar of my house has fallen.’” 

Douglass’s choice of words in this quote is significant for a few reasons. He refers to the dead Anna as “Mother.” She may have fulfilled more of a maternal role in his life than a romantic one. He also uses the terms “post” and “pillar” to describe her. While these metaphors are meant to be flattering, they refer to inanimate objects rather than a human being. Douglass seems most of all to regret the loss of her utility. 

“In some ways, though, that Douglass could not quite face, Assing’s last letters to him may have in effect been her suicide notes. For his part, he simply repeated that the death in Paris was ‘a distressing stroke to me.’” 

In this quote, as in the one referencing Anna’s passing, Douglass seems most distressed by how these losses will affect him. He appears insensitive to Ottilie’s state of mind when she killed herself. Even though this relationship may have held more emotional resonance for him than his marriage to Anna, he views it in terms of utility as well. 

“Released from the ever-grinding American obsessions with race, the former slave sought ways in his imagination, and in returning to Paul’s heroism, to recollect his own quest for self-creation and universal recognition. Douglass never sought to be a martyr, although he spent a lifetime admiring them.” 

During Douglass’s trip to Europe with Helen, he spends much of his time retracing the steps of his biblical heroes. St. Paul is a particular favorite. Douglass identifies with both Old Testament prophets and New Testament apostles. In either case, he sees his life’s work as guided by providence.

“Douglass criticized Haitian politics, all the while performing as a kind of protector of its history. This became a balancing act he could not sustain.” 

This quote foregrounds one of the many ideological contradictions of Douglass’s career. He holds up Haiti as a shining example of a successful slave revolt that gives birth to a nation. The fact that this nation has trouble governing itself long after its birth is an awkward fact he cannot reconcile.

“Like few others, Helen had taken on the role of custodian of the legacy. In domestic terms, Douglass was a lucky man; with Helen he had found a stable intellectual and spiritual partner.” 

Helen is the embodiment of two sets of traits that Douglass never succeeded in finding in a single person before. In some sense, all his previous emotional connections with women were fraught with the same ideological contradiction as his politics. Whether or not Helen is the great love of his life, she certainly is more useful to him than either Anna or Ottilie were individually.