Preaching the Gospel of Black Revolt: Appropriating Milton in Early African American Literature

4. Of Might and Men: Milton, Frederick Douglass, and Resistant Masculinity as Existential Geography

149 4 of Might anD Men Milton, Frederick Douglass, and Resistant Masculinity as Existential Geography With the publication of Walker’s Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World, 1829 proved to be an acceptable year for preaching the gospel of Milton in furtherance of the antislavery cause.1 With its satanic appropriations of Paradise Lost and Milton’s hyperbolic rhetoric, Walker’s Appeal made intertextual affiliations with Milton’s satanic epic more popular for succeeding generations of abolitionists and antislavery proponents. Milton’s epic, as Forsyth explains, is all about “the heroic Satan and his sublime grandeur.”2 Walker’s Appeal tapped into the epic’s satanic appeal, contributing to modes of reception that eventually made Boston a Miltonic epi(c)enter of political revolt. This regional capital of Miltonic influence would inspire scores of abolitionists and “race men” of the long nineteenth century to forge incendiary affiliations with the infernal hero of Paradise Lost for messianic purposes of freedom . William Lloyd Garrison’s antislavery newspaper, the Liberator , was especially crucial in helping to spread Milton’s satanic influence relative to the abolitionist cause. According to J. Saunders Redding, when Garrison “founded the Liberator in Boston,... the Negro recognized the voice of a champion raised in his behalf.”3 In time, Garrison’s weekly newspaper inspired one of the most thunderous voices in abolitionist and antislavery discourse. 150 Preaching the Gospel of Black Revolt A fugitive slave who spoke uncompromisingly in rhetorical tones of might and resistant masculinity, Frederick Douglass found his messianic voice by championing the antislavery cause on demonic grounds hallowed by Milton’s satanic epic. Douglass’s earliest autobiographies and several of his orations complete and complicate Milton on the existential grounds of a male-centered reception. On these existential grounds of being, Douglass performs a geographical rupture in that he psychologically withdraws from a concrete understanding of his present circumstances in slavery in order to produce a “double nihilation where one posits an ideal state of affairs as a pure present nothingness.”4 To rupture hegemonic geography on these existential grounds, according to Jean-Paul Sartre, is to transform the landscape beyond the self. Activists invested in transforming hegemonic landscapes engage oppressive structures and the sufferings they produce, drawing upon their rebellious might as “motives for conceiving of another state of affairs in which things would be better for everybody.”5 Douglass expresses this will to revolt through his “rhetoric of resistance,” a mode of discourse filled with “militant images” that, according to Ella Forbes, “more accurately reflected the reality of African American agency and the quest for Black manhood.”6 Milton’s autobiographical presence also contributes to Douglass’s rebellious speech acts in the Narrative. His influence serves as an intertextual testament of the Milton Douglass was increasingly coming to know and acknowledge within himself. As evidenced in Douglass’s earliest autobiographies and select speeches from his long oratorical career, this rhetoric of resistance aids the former slave in expressing and affirming himself as a heroic man of self-made proportions. Milton functions as an iconic exemplum for Douglass’s poetics similar to “early modern writers” who, as Machacek notes, “wrote of prior authors less as providing them with the means for enriching the significance of their works and more as providing them with models for composition.”7 Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself (1845) and elements of his revised autobiography , My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), follow this model of interpoetic affiliation. In both works, Douglass either critiques slavery in infernal, supernal, or Edenic terms or fuses all three to suit his political purposes. Of Might and Men 151 This synthesizing of Milton’s satanic epic in his first two autobiographies reflects what was probably his earliest encounter with Paradise Lost. His initial encounter with Milton most likely occurs on the pages of Caleb Bingham’s The Columbian Orator (1797) a popular text of the period that William Andrews identifies as “an eloquence handbook.”8 Among its more than 80 selections appears an excerpted passage from book 6 of Paradise Lost. The passage appears under the heading, “Christ Triumphant over the Apostate Angels.” Although Douglass does not comment on this selection from Bingham’s handbook, his Narrative reveals his scholarly devotion to reading and studying its contents. Obtaining a copy during an impressionable moment of his adolescence, Douglass relates, “every opportunity I...