“A MORE PERFECT LIKENESS”: FREDERICK DOUGLASS AND THE IMAGE OF THE NATION

1 4 5 R ‘‘A M O R E P E R F E C T L I K E N E S S’’ F R E D E R I C K D O U G L A S S A N D T H E I M A G E O F T H E N A T I O N L A U R A W E X L E R We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union . . . – Preamble to the Constitution of the United States Prologue Frederick Douglass paid particular attention to photography. Throughout his life, he sat for numerous photographic portraits and circulated them as widely as possible. He also wrote a number of articles and lectures on the subject in which he expressed ideas about the uses of photography that di√ered from those articulated by many of his contemporaries, who were chiefly concerned with how well the camera reflected and cemented existing social relations . Like others of his generation, Douglass was interested in pictures of family sentiment, but at his most intense he looked to photography for kindling, rather than kinship. During the slave era, Douglass had heard in the click of the shutter a promise of the shackle’s release: if black people could appropriate by means of the camera the power of objectification that slavery wielded, photog- 1 4 6 W E X L E R Y raphy would become an agent of radical social change. After Emancipation, Douglass thought that photography could become a tool for remaking the American imagination. Such photography was a visionary force, o√ering an important avenue for change over time. Scholars have only recently begun to attend seriously to Douglass ’s contributions to the theory of photography. Most of what Douglass wrote on the subject has not been widely read; much has not yet been published but remains in manuscript form in the Douglass Papers. In the present essay, I trace some of what is to be discovered about Douglass’s ideas about photography by comparing his published lecture of 1861 ‘‘Pictures and Progress’’ with his major revision of that essay in 1865, which still exists only in manuscript. In particular, I believe that by closely reading and comparing these lectures we can see how Douglass engages in a conversation with Lincoln over the image of the black man and the image of the American union; and photography is central to that conversation. Each lecture contains a timely response to one of Lincoln’s inaugural addresses. In the first, written at the outset of the Civil War, Douglass is troubled by Lincoln’s hesitation to arm black troops. He proposes that the new technology humanizes the image of the enslaved: by means of photography black men might be more widely seen as suitable recruits to the Union forces. In Douglass ’s 1865 revision, he encourages Lincoln and the country to anticipate the successful end of the war and turn toward rebuilding the nation, a task in which photography could aid by disseminating a prophetic image of America. Photography could make a likeness of the ‘‘more perfect union’’ the Constitution had originally failed to deliver. This is a distinctly di√erent approach to the potential of photography from the one that currently occupies scholars. In Camera Lucida (1980, translated into English 1981), Roland Barthes de- fined the three positions from which many critics today analyze the institutions of photography: that of the operator of the camera, the spectator of the photograph, and the spectrum (or target) of the image. This last includes ‘‘that rather terrible thing which is there in every photograph: the return of the dead.’’ But in his pre- and post-slavery engagement in the 1860s with Lincoln’s inaugural ‘‘A M O R E P E R F E C T L I K E N E S S’’ 1 4 7 R addresses, Douglass in e√ect excavated and occupied a fourth position : that of the revenant, one who himself returns from the dead. The word revenant derives from the French revenir, ‘‘to come back,’’ ‘‘to come again,’’ ‘‘to return.’’ Historically...