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Where Honor is Due: Frederick Douglass as Representative Black Man

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2009

Wilson J. Moses
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Extract

Frederick Douglass may or may not have been the greatest African American abolitionist and orator of the 19th Century, but he was certainly the most accomplished master of self-projection. His autobiographical writings demonstrate the genius with which he seized and manipulated mainstream American symbols and values. By appropriating the Euro-American myth of the self-made man, Douglass guaranteed that his struggle would be canonized, not only within an African American tradition, but within the traditions of the mainstream as well. He manipulated the rhetoric of Anglo-Saxon manhood as skillfully as did any of his white contemporaries, including such master manipulators as Abraham Lincoln, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Phineas T. Barnum. I mention Douglass along with these wily exemplars of American showmanship, not because I want to drag out embarrassing cliches about making heroes more human, but in order to address the truly monumental nature of Douglass's accomplishments. Douglass, like Lincoln, Emerson, and Barnum, was abundantly endowed with the spiderish craft and foxlike cunning that are often marks of self-made men.

Type
Research Article
Information
Prospects , Volume 17 , October 1992 , pp. 177 - 189
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1992

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References

NOTES

1. Douglass, Frederick, Narrative of the Life of Frederick (Boston: At the Antislavery Office, 1845)Google Scholar; My Bondage and My Freedom (1855; rept. New York: Arno, 1969)Google Scholar; and The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1892; rept. London: Collier, 1962)Google Scholar. The possibility that Douglass may have collaborated with Otilla Assing on the German translation of My Bondage and My Freedom is suggested by the treatment of their relationship in McFeely, William S., Frederick Douglass (New York: Norton, 1991), pp. 184–86.Google Scholar

2. Quarles, Benjamin, Frederick Douglass (Washington, D.C.: Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, 1948).Google Scholar

3. Dickson J. Preston was the first scholar to address the contradictions in the autobiography of Douglass. See Preston, , Frederick Douglass: The Maryland Years (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980)Google Scholar. Preston's work inspired the psychological analysis of Davis, Allison in Leadership, Love and Aggression (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983)Google Scholar. Gates, Henry Louis in Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the Racial Self (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987)Google Scholar, correctly observes that “Preston has given us in his major biography a more three dimensional, more human Frederick Douglass than has any other biographer” (p. 114).

4. See the chapter “Political Nationalism and Cultural Assimilation,” in Moses, Wilson J., The Golden Age of Black Nationalism (1978; rept. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. 15–31.Google Scholar

5. Washington, Mary Helen quotes Valery Smith in Washington, Mary Helen, ed., Invented Lives: Narratives of Black Women, 1860–1960 (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1987).Google Scholar

6. McFeely, , Frederick Douglass.Google Scholar

7. Douglass, Frederick, The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass, ed. Foner, Philip S., 4 vols. (New York: International, 1950–1955), vol. 4, p. 507.Google Scholar

8. McFeely, , Frederick Douglass, pp. 185, 321–22.Google Scholar

9. Martin, Waldo, The Mind of Frederick Douglass (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984), p. 158.Google Scholar

10. Douglass, Frederick to Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, 05 30, 1884Google Scholar, Life and Writings, vol. 4, p. 410.Google Scholar

11. Davis, Allison, Leadership, Love and Aggression (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983), pp. 17–101.Google Scholar

12. Davis, , Leadership, Love and Aggression, p. 58Google Scholar. However, Davis interestingly sees Garrison as having confused and complex feelings toward Douglass, who, Davis suggests, played dual roles as both dominant and subordinate male figure in Garrison's unconscious thinking (p. 69).

13. Quoted in McFeely, , Frederick Douglass, p. 121.Google Scholar

14. Dick, Robert C., Black Protest: Issues and Tactics (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1974), p. 62.Google Scholar

15. Douglass, Frederick quoted in Simmons, William J., Men or Mark (Cleveland: George M. Rewell, 1887), p. 1007.Google Scholar

16. For Douglass' meeting with the President, see David Brion Davis' review of McFeely, William, Frederick DouglassGoogle Scholar, “The White World of Frederick Douglass,” The New York Review of Books, 05 16, 1991, pp. 12–15Google Scholar. Delany told his biographer of a meeting with Abraham Lincoln. See Rollin, Frank A., Life and Public Services of Martin R. Delany (Boston: Lee and Shepherd, 1868)Google Scholar. Victor Ullman, in support of Delany's claim that he obtained an interview, cites a note to Secretary of War Stanton, in Lincoln's handwriting, but Ullman's idiosyncratic avoidance of footnotes makes the claim difficult to trace, and in any case the note simply reads: “Do not fail to have an interview with this most extraordinary and intelligent black man. A. Lincoln.” See Ullman, Victor, Martin A. Delany: The Beginnings of Black Nationalism (Boston: Beacon, 1971), p. 294.Google Scholar

17. Cheek, William and Cheek, Aimee Lee, John Mercer Langston and the Fight for Black Freedom, 1929–65 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press), pp. 154, 159.Google Scholar

18. Douglass, , Life and Writings, vol. 4, p. 87.Google Scholar

19. Douglass, , Life and Writings, vol. 2, p. 361.Google Scholar

20. The profound importance of Dumas, Alexander's novel, Georges, or the Planter of the Isle of FranceGoogle Scholar, was brought to my attention by Prof. John Wright, who conducted a seminar at the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute on the subject of Dumas's racial consciousness during March, 1991.

21. Douglass, Frederick, “African Civilization Society,” Douglass Monthly (02 1859): 19–20Google Scholar, is a response to the challenge of Henry Highland Garnet to defend himself with respect to African interest.

22. Douglass, , Life and TimesGoogle Scholar. This is a reprint of the revised edition of 1892 with a new introduction by Logan, Rayford W., pp. 14–24Google Scholar. For Douglass's defense of his marriage, see p. 534.

23. Douglass, Frederick to Johnson, Oliver, Life and Writings, vol. 4, p. 427.Google Scholar

24. Douglass, Frederick, “The Future of the Colored Race,” North American ReviewGoogle Scholar, reprinted in Brotz, Howard, ed., Negro Social and Political Thought, 1850–1920: Representative Texts (New York: Basic, 1966), pp. 316–17.Google Scholar

25. Douglass, Frederick, “The Nation's Problem,” a speech delivered before the Bethel Literary and Historical Society in Washington, D.C., 04 16, 1889Google Scholar; this was originally published as a pamphlet (Washington, D.C., 1889). It is reprinted in Brotz, , Negro Social and Political Thought, pp. 316–17.Google Scholar