Slavery and Sentiment: The Politics of Feeling in Black Atlantic Antislavery Writing, 1770-1850

5 | The Case of Frederick Douglass

Frederick Douglass’ 1845 Narrative shows some influence of his schooling in republicanism, from his familiarity with The Columbian Orator to his close collaboration with the Garrisonians in the years between his escape from Baltimore in 1838 and the moment he sat down to write it in 1844. It is true that, as William Andrews points out in Searlian terms, Douglass uses the “expressive” mode of speech extensively, letting the reader know “how to feel” (To Tell 103) about events. But precisely “how” he wants readers to feel is a complex question, not easily subsumed under a narrative of increased individualism. Indeed, it seems that his closeness to his experience as a slave in these early fugitive years allowed him to display a unique ideological mix, inspired both by his own history and by his gradual acquaintance with abolitionist ideas. Eric Sundquist praises Douglass’ second autobiography, My Bondage and My Freedom, published in 1855, over the first, pointing out the “definite limitations” of the Narrative “as a revelation of his identity and his thought” (88), calling it “something of a memorized lecture performance transferred to paper,” in contrast with the “more sophisticated ‘American’ identity” he constructs in the second. My Bondage and My Freedom reveals an attachment to the founding fathers and to the ideals of the American Revolution, an “entry into America’s revolutionary tradition of liberal individualism” (89), and Chapter 5 u The Case of Frederick Douglass an “embrace of the principles of autonomy, property, and equal rights” (89–90). So in addition to what he sees as a stylistic improvement, an area in which he differs from several critics,1 Sundquist positively assesses Douglass’ attainment of the liberal ideal. While I agree that the 1855 autobiography enters the realm of liberalism with more self-assurance, I would argue that this step does not make the Narrative less interesting, let alone less radical, in its political thought. In the few speeches from his early years that have remained extant, Douglass took a unique approach meant to awaken his audience’s sympathy while at the same time maintaining a certain distance from it. As John Blassingame argues, Douglass later presented “a contradictory and sometimes misleading picture” of the restrictions placed on him as a lecturer . In My Bondage and My Freedom, Douglass explains that he chafed under his white colleagues’ admonitions to keep his tale factual and simple: “It did not entirely satisfy me to narrate wrongs; I felt like denouncing them” (220). But, says Blassingame, Douglass “denounced wrongs at the very beginning of his lecturing career” (lii); he seemed quite familiar with many issues at the heart of abolitionism, such as freedom of speech or the right of petition, and broached them freely. In fact, the passage just cited, in which Douglass criticizes his abolitionist friends, lacks logical coherence. He first describes the abolitionists’ efforts to convince him to speak plainly: “‘Better have a little of the plantation manner of speech than not’” (220), he was told. The passage establishes paternalistic treatment. When he starts the next paragraph by stating that “at last the apprehended trouble came” (221), the reader feels sure he is about to explain why he broke from the group. But here he goes on to describe how audiences started to doubt he had ever been a slave. The logical slip blurs the distinction between racist audiences and his abolitionist collaborators , shattering the dream that “for a time I was made to forget that my skin was dark and my hair crisped” (219).2 In spite of this stated hope, though, reading his early speeches gives a sense of a budding black orator, eager to elicit audience sympathy yet also ready to remind them of the world that separated them. It seems as if Douglass started his speaking career with a strong urge to assert his blackness and his difference, and to try and force the audience to do its emotional work within that premise. Most striking in Douglass’ emotional approach in his early speeches is his creation of a gulf between himself (and, through him, the slave community ) and his audience. The abolitionists know a lot about slavery, he says in his first fully recorded speech, given in Lynn, Massachusetts, in The Case of Frederick Douglass 227 October 1841, but they “cannot speak as I can from experience” (Frederick Douglass Papers [hereafter FDP] vol. 1, 3); his audience “cannot feel the...