Frederick Douglass: an outside/inside agitator for freedom

The book-reading world has swooned over Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom by David W. Blight. The Yale professor's magnum opus won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize, a slew of historical profession association awards, and was named one of the best books of 2018 by just about all the major media.

I don't get it. I found this exhaustive and exhausting (36 hours when read by ear) volume profoundly unsatisfying. Usually I refrain from writing blog notices about books to which I respond by feeling that I wish the author had written the book I wanted, rather than the one the author wanted. Blight's Douglass is such a volume. But it is being touted as so important I just have to vent my frustration.

The first thing to understand is that Douglass is biography, only tangentially a history. This despite the fact that its principal was at the center of the most significant turning point in the country's trajectory. But this is about the man himself, far less about his role and particular contribution to the long struggle toward African-American and human freedom in the United States. It focuses on intimate details, on the formerly enslaved activist's inner conflicts, his complex relationship with a loyal wife he seems to have taken for granted, and with a series of white women donors who helped keep him and his work afloat financially, his ongoing economic and family struggles, his oscillation between injured pride and confidence, his feuds and his generosity.

That's all interesting enough, but I wish Blight had centered what made Douglass a giant in our history rather than the colorful, even tabloid-worthy, fluff around the edges of a life.

So on what do I think the story of Douglass ought to center? The man, actually and consciously and with political intent, embodied the trajectory of the movement to end slavery in the emergent United States. He honed his oratorical talent into a political instrument for the abolition fight and for decades made himself a weapon of struggle. In the role, he explored all the twists and turns of what we can think of as the "Long Civil War over Slavery" from about 1840-through 1876 and beyond.

His story illustrates the development of abolition strategy. Beginning as a Garrisonian moral pacifist, he preached a prophetic jeremiad against the slavery-accomodating U.S. Constitution and against ordinary politics:

I have no love for America as such. I have no patriotism. I have no country. The institutions of this country do not know me as a man, except as a piece of property.

The 1850s saw the last convulsion of that Slave Power in fights over extending of slavery to western territories and the right of "owners" to capture their fugitive "property." In that decade Douglass became close to John Brown who eventually led a doomed raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, aiming to inspire an insurrection by enslaved people. Douglass had to flee the country for a bit after that.

Yet throughout his life he flirted with other approaches and reformers who hoped to craft more conventional political solutions which would bring down the Slave Power. He participated in the first women's rights convention at Seneca Fall, New York in 1848. Meanwhile, he had begun to warm to the idea that the Constitution was not "a covenant with evil" (per Garrison) but rather "if strictly construed" it was "not a proslavery instrument." Consequently for the next decade he involved himself with a series of electoral initiatives -- Liberty Party, Free Soil Party and eventually the new anti-slavery Republican Party -- which were trying to articulate a legal path to abolition. He spoke and worked to make the contest between slavery and freedom manifest in politics. His upstate New York base in Rochester where he published several small agitational newspapers was a hot bed of these currents. Electoral engagement departed from the purity of the anti-slavery crusade -- but it just might set people free.

Blight summarizes Douglass's apparent gyrations.

Douglass's 1856 endorsement of the Republican Party conformed to a pattern he had established in 1848 and 1852 when he supported the Free Soil Party. In the Liberty Party and its doctrinal successor, the Radical Abolitionists, Douglass always had a party for his principles, but in the Republicans, as with the Free Soilers before, he found a party for his hopes. ... It would hardly be the last time Douglass cast his vote for hope in the general elections, then in off-year contests retreated to his principles among the radicals. ... for the rest of his life, Douglass voted for a Republican for president ...

For Douglass, as for many I think the most effective of justice advocates, elections were one tool in a wider array of tools for making the changes we need. This is the sort of essential lesson from this giant that gets buried in Blight's approach.

After emancipation and during the terrible rollback of democratic (small "d") possibility that was Reconstruction, Douglass continued to use his oratorical gift in support of freedom for Black people. He became something of an honored relic of more principled times in the white culture of industrial capitalism triumphant, trotted out to speak for Republican presidential candidates -- who he believed, for all their many faults, continued to be lesser enemies of Douglass' people than the southern-based Democrats. Republican presidents gave Douglass appointments on which he was dependent, since none of the rest of his huge family seemed to be able to support themselves. Yet principle remained. In 1893 he served as the Republic of Haiti's representative to the Chicago Worlds Fair -- and, along with Ida B Wells who had taken up the anti-lynching cause, denounced the fair's putrid racism.

“Theoretically open to all Americans, the Exposition practically is, literally and figuratively, a ‘White City,’ in the building of which the Colored American was allowed no helping hand, and in its glorious success he has no share ...”

Douglass died two years later, still complex, still principled....David W. Blight's biography makes it clear that Douglass' antebellum life was very much a Western New York story. Blight told a reviewer that one of the things his research had taught him was that "it is likely that more Americans heard [Douglass] speak than any other figure of his time." Since both my great-grandfathers were among the activists organizing the new Republican Party in that area, I feel sure that they, and possibly even their families, must have heard Douglass thunder against slavery. It's a heart-warming thought.