Declarations in Dialogue Frederick Douglass: Orator, Writer, Abolitionist

1. Declarations in DialogueFrederick Douglass: Orator, Writer, Abolitionist

2. Goals • Another social movement tests Enlightenment ideas • Toward an analysis of the speech • Narrative as background and also as a powerful 19th-century text • Ethos in two genres and two media: • slave narrative, epideictic speech • speech, writing

3. For today: Narrative Genre: crafting a story A slave’s experience: human as property, as “brute” Literacy The rhetoric of Douglass’ Narrative in the context of the abolitionist movement

4. Telling stories about slavery • Discovery Task 4: Oral histories of former slaves Rhetorical perspectives: As you listen, think about the circumstances under which life stories are produced. What is different about Douglass telling his story while he is, in his own words, not an ex-slave but a fugitive slave in 1845 within the context of the abolitionist movement and these informants telling their stories in 1932 (or later) to a historian for the Library of Congress? (You might keep in mind that some of these interviewees were only a decade or so younger than Douglass.)

5. Genre • Autobiography: a crafted story • Slave narrative: a familiar genre • Both genres located between history and literature • Rhetorical purposes: for self-reflection, to create a public picture of the self and the life, to advance a cause through the narrative of a life experience

6. American autobiography • Puritans as God’s elect; preoccupation with the self -- diaries, journals, meditations • Jonathan Edwards, “Personal Narrative” (c. 1740) • Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography (1771-88) • Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance” (1841): “Man is his own star” • Enlightenment focus on the individual: responsibility for actions, autonomy, “striving,” isolation • America: an exceptional land; a new and empty land; opportunities for creativity: “the American, this new man” (Crèvecoeur)

7. Slave narratives • As history and literature: powerful documentary contributions requiring literary interpretation • Very popular form: over 100 book-length slave narratives • Relation between speeches and print texts: narratives as “structured formal revisions of spoken works organized and promoted by anti-slavery organizations” (Davis and Gates xvi) “It was the face of the race that the slave narrators painted, so as to give it a voice. It is this notion of the presence of voice and self-creation through representation, transferred to writing through the metaphor of voice, which motivated the ex-slaves to produce hundreds of testimonies of their enslavement . . . ” (Davis and Gates xxxi). Davis, Charles T., and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., eds. The Slave’s Narrative. New York: Oxford UP, 1985.

8. Some slave narratives 1760-1845 • 1789, Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narratives of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, written by Himself. London. • 1831, Mary Prince, The History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave, Related by Herself, With a Supplement by the Editor, to Which is Added the Narrative of Asa-Asa, A Captured African. London. • 1833, Richard Allen. The Life, Experience, and Gospel Labors of the Right Reverend Richard Allen. Philadelphia. • 1836, Jarena Lee, The Life and Religious Experiences of Jarena Lee, A Coloured Lady, Giving an Account of Her Call to Preach the Gospel. Revised and Corrected from the Original Manuscript, Written by Herself. Philadelphia. • 1840, Juan Francisco Manzano, Poems by a Slave in the Island of Cuba, recently liberated, translated from the Spanish, by R. R. Madden, M. D., with the History of the Early Life of the Negro Poet, written by Himself . . . London.

9. Abolitionist movement(s) Extensive history in England, France, and American 1775, Society for the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage, Philadelphia (Quakers) 1775, Thomas Paine, “African Slavery in America” Gradual elimination of slavery in the North: Northwest Ordinance, 1787 1833, American Anti-Slavery Society, founded by William Lloyd Garrison, Theodore Weld, and Robert Purvis • The Liberator, newspaper, 1831-1865 • Tenets of Garrison’s abolitionism: • Immediate emancipation • Disaffiliation with the U.S. government: the Constitution as a pro-slavery document • Pacifism

10. From the first issue of The Liberator, January 1, 1831 “To the Public” (page 1) Assenting to the ‘self-evident truth maintained in the American Declaration of Independence, ‘that all men are created equal, and endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights--among which are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,’ I shall strenuously contend for the immediate enfranchisement of our slave population.” "I am aware, that many object to the severity of my language; but is there not cause for severity? I will be as harsh as truth, and as uncompromising as justice. On this subject, I do not wish to think, or speak, or write, with moderation. . . . I am in earnest -- I will not equivocate -- I will not excuse -- I will not retreat a single inch -- AND I WILL BE HEARD.” All issues available online through UCI Library: 19th Century U.S. Newspapers

12. Frederick Douglass, c. 1818-1895 First autobiography of three: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, 1845 • My Bondage and My Freedom, 1855 • Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, 1881 • Representative Man/Rhetorical Man

13. Representative Man

14. The problem of the life and body as evidence • “IT WAS AT ONCE DEEPLY IMPRESSED UPON MY MIND, THAT, IF MR. DOUGLASS COULD BE PERSUADED TO CONSECRATE HIS TIME AND TALENTS TO THE PROMOTION OF THE ANTI-SLAVERY ENTERPRISE, A POWERFUL IMPETUS WOULD BE GIVEN TO IT, AND A STUNNING BLOW AT THE SAME TIME INFLECTED ON NORTHERN PREJUDICE AGAINST A COLORED COMPLEXION” (Garrison 32-33). • “There is in him that union of head and hearts, which is indispensable to an enlightenment of the heads and a winning of the hearts of others” ( Garrison 33).

15. Douglass, Narrative • Chapter I: birth, childhood, family • “want of information” (41) • sexual exploitation; “a very different-looking class of people” (44) • violence • Chapters II-IV: economic, social, and legal conditions of plantation life: “To be accused was to be convicted, and to be convicted was to be punished; the one always folloing the other with immutable certainty” (56).

16. Narrative continued • Chapter V, to Baltimore • Douglass’s feelings on leaving (60) • The work of Providence; “deep conviction” (62) • Chapter VI, literacy interrupted: “From that moment, I understood the pathway from slavery to freedom” (64) • “What he most dreaded, that I most desired. What he most loved, that I most hated.”

17. Chapter VII, The Columbian Orator • Heard students reading from The Columbian Orator on the docks; bought a copy • Dialogue between master and slave • Sent back to plantation: taught other slaves to read the New Testament on Sundays

18. “The slave is represented as having been recaptured, . . . and the master opens the dialogue with an upbraiding speech, charging the slave with ingratitude, and demanding to know what he has to say in his own defense. The slave rejoins, that he knows how little any thing that he can say will avail, . . . and with noble resolution, calmly says, ‘I submit to my fate.’

19. “Touched by the slave's answer, the master tells him he is permitted to speak for himself. Thus invited to the debate, the slave made a spirited defense of himself, and thereafter the whole argument, for and against slavery, was brought out. The master was vanquished at every turn in the argument; and seeing himself to be thus vanquished, he generously and meekly emancipates the slave, with his best wishes for his prosperity. . . . I could not help feeling that the day might come, when the well-directed answers made by the slave to the master, in this instance, would find their counterpart in myself.”

20. The master does not take away the liberty of the slave he purchases; the issue of consent “It is in the order of Providence that one man should become subservient to another”; masters not to blame for the custom they did not originate The good master: generosity is owed for kind treatment The good master can provide support in old age for the slave. If I freed you, you should appreciate the favor. That liberty was lost by force not right Providence can just as well warrant theft, escape, and retaliation No such relations are possible under the condition of master/slave Death would be preferable to old age in the condition of slavery Granting liberty to a slave is only righting a wrong--not deserving of praise and gratitude. Arguments about slavery

21. Slave as animal • From the “Dialogue” in Columbian Orator: “You have reduced them to the state of brute beasts; and if they have not the stupidity of beasts of burden, they must have the ferocity of beasts of prey. Superior force alone can give you security. . . . Such is the social bond between master and slave!” (131) • “I envied my fellow-slaves for their stupidity. I have often wished myself a beast . . . Any thing, no matter what, to get rid of thinking!” (68).

22. Chapter X • Covey, the slave-breaker (83): “behold a man transformed into a brute” • Apostrophe to the ships (83-84) • “Glorious resurrection” (89) • Escape: Patrick Henry (97) • Race and labor (103-04) • Labor and thinking (106)

23. Freedom • Secrecy: the conditions of authorship of the slave narrative • Insecurity and loneliness (112) • Reading The Liberator; connection with anti-slavery cause; speaking, a “severe cross” taken up reluctantly (119)