A “Voice from the Enslaved”: The Origins of Frederick Douglass’s Political Philosophy of Democracy

But ask the slave what is his condition—what his state of mind—what he thinks of enslavement? and you had as well address your inquiries to the silent dead. There comes no voice from the enslaved.

Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom

There are times in the experience of almost every community, when the humblest member thereof may properly presume to teach.

Frederick Douglass, “Lecture on Slavery, No. 1”

On 20 April 1847, Frederick Douglass returned from his long sojourn in Britain planning to found and edit a newspaper aimed at both white abolitionists and the free black community in the North. Not entirely to his surprise, his colleagues in William Garrison’s Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society were unenthusiastic: “My American friends looked at me with astonishment!” Douglass reports in his 1855 My Bondage and My Freedom (390). “‘A wood-sawyer’ offering himself up to the public as an editor! A slave, brought up in the very depths of ignorance, assuming to instruct the highly civilized people of the north in the principles of liberty, justice, and humanity! The thing looked absurd” (390).

Indeed it did, but only to his “American friends.” As we shall see (and as his palpable irony here suggests), by 1855 Douglass had come to think of himself as a political philosopher who had valuable instruction to offer his nation about the practice and principles of its democracy precisely because he had been a slave. In the following pages, I focus on two aspects of the intellectual disposition Douglass believed he had acquired within slavery. First, he several times indicates that while he was still a slave, he came to see thinking and knowing as mediated by point-of-view and universalist claims as therefore suspect. Secondly, Douglass also depicts (ambivalently) the knowing and thinking he undertook while a slave as ineluctably embodied and thus as implicitly casting doubt upon the mind/body dichotomy largely taken for granted in the antebellum period.

These dispositions, which Douglass believed he could helpfully bring to bear upon antebellum political and philosophical controversies, also shed light on several pivotal but confounding episodes in his career, including his break with Garrison, his volte-face on the constitutionality of slavery, and his inconsistent espousal of both moral suasion and violent resistance. Finally, they undergird Douglass’s theorizing about democracy from the standpoint of a former slave, a perspective that challenges all theories of democracy produced by persons able to take their own personal freedom as a given. Indeed, there are moments in his writings when Douglass seems to be self-consciously inaugurating a distinctively African-American tradition of political thought about US democracy.¹

1. The Point from Which a Thing Is Viewed

To date, scholars have located the beginning of Douglass’s career as an autonomous intellectual in his break from Garrisonian abolitionism, or perhaps a few years earlier, when he travelled in Britain, or perhaps even earlier, when he wrestled with Covey, or when he learned to read and write in Baltimore. All of these moments were indeed milestones in Douglass’s intellectual biography, but to appreciate his distinctive work as a philosopher we might begin with his reflections on his childhood and early youth in slavery. As Steven Hahn especially has argued, a great many slaves were political beings who engaged in political thought and communication; yet, as he also points out, recovering the political activity and agency of these slaves requires us to rethink to what counts as “the political.”² Thus, we should not be surprised that Douglass’s deepening interest in his childhood and youth as a slave—a development William Andrews and others have explained as an affirmation of his individual personhood—was motivated also by his desire to recover the origins of his political thinking within slavery.³

Early in My Bondage and My Freedom, Douglass tells the story (not included in the Narrative) of his initiation into “the realities of slavery” (150). He was taken by his grandmother on a journey from the margins to the very...