John Stauffer Responds

John Ernest is one of the foremost living scholars of abolitionism and African American literature and culture, and I much appreciate his illuminating and nuanced review. He wonderfully distills the central themes of GIANTS, and in the process elucidates larger points I hoped to evoke through the form and structure of my narrative. For instance, he describes the dialectic between “great men” and “great moments,” and he includes examples of the divergences and convergences of Douglass’ and Lincoln’s lives amid a structure of unstable parallels, showing how such tensions constitute “a certain mode of cultural history.”

In addition, Ernest is sympathetic to two main challenges I faced in GIANTS: how to write empathetically about characters who believed in heroes and lived in an era saturated by romanticism without romanticizing them? And how does one write a story primarily for general readers (most of whom know virtually nothing about Frederick Douglass and are ignorant about most details of the era) while also appealing to scholars?

Ernest is right to note that for scholars “what matters most [in GIANTS] are the stories hinted at between the lines, the American history revealed in the tensions between white and black hagiology,” and that I “expose those tensions quietly.” Given my primary audience, these quiet tensions were intentional, and I’m grateful that someone of Ernest’s stature would appreciate and draw attention to them. Indeed, GIANTS would be a better book had I been able to read Ernest’s review at the manuscript stage.

W. Caleb McDaniel is an assistant professor completing his first book on transnational abolitionism, having received his Ph.D. in 2006. He doesn’t like GIANTS, largely because he likes neither my quiet tensions nor my understanding of the past as ambiguous and ironic. My focus on Douglass’ and Lincoln’s parallel lives “often leaves too much to the power of suggestion,” he says. Then he proceeds to misinterpret GIANTS, arguing that my “main concern” is dissolving Douglass’ and Lincoln’s differences. He thus ignores a structure and content that emphasizes a dialectic of divergence and convergence. If “dissolving binaries” were my “main concern,” I wouldn’t have spent most of the book highlighting Douglass’ and Lincoln’s dissimilarities and Douglass’ antagonistic attitude toward Lincoln.

Douglass’ and Lincoln’s similarities were not shared by “numerous others,” as McDaniel asserts. Indeed, he ignores those traits I give most weight to: Douglass’ and Lincoln’s extraordinary power of language and ability to use words as weapons, despite having had no formal education. They grew up in vicious communities and defined a fight as a turning point in their young lives; and they married up, the women in their lives being instrumental in their rise. McDaniel dismisses as “incidental” such traits as Douglass’ and Lincoln’s physical strength, ignoring my claim that as “scrawny weaklings they never would have been able to rise in their vicious worlds.”

McDaniel even ignores my stress on the utilitarian nature of Douglass’ and Lincoln’s friendship. Utilitarian friendship is both a power relationship and based on mutual respect and affection. It is ambiguous, and McDaniel doesn’t like ambiguities.

“Who counts as a ‘self-made man’ in GIANTS is ambiguous,” McDaniel bemoans. True, but I tried to be clear about the ambiguities of self-making. Douglass and Lincoln believed that “true” self-made men sought to reform their society, and they conceived of both self and society as fluid concepts, with self-making fueling reform. They ascended from the dregs of society to respectability, but wealth was ancillary to their understanding of self-making. The other form of self-making focused chiefly on material gain; men such as Edward Covey and Nathan Bedford Forrest rose up and got rich on the backs of slaves.

In a number of instances, McDaniel flagrantly misreads GIANTS. He says I equate “‘self-making simply with ‘becoming’ or ‘constant evolution.’” No. I equate Douglass’ and Lincoln’s self-making with their faith in continual evolution and social reform. He argues that “it is hard to find in GIANTS the Christian Douglass,” calling my account of Douglass’ evolution “a romantic triumph of self...