In this Conversation with Authors, we spoke with Dr. Emma Saunders-Hastings about her recent APSR article, “‘Send Back the Bloodstained Money’: Frederick Douglass on Tainted Gifts.” Here, Dr. Saunders-Hastings discusses research during COVID, the difficulty of editing, and the problem of “bloodstained money” in the present day.

APSR: Can you discuss the aims of your paper, where the idea for it came from, and what is the ultimate goal or message of the paper?

Emma Saunders-Hastings: The goal of the paper is to reconstruct Douglass’ criticism of the Free Church of Scotland for accepting “dirty money,” or “blood money,” from American slaveholders: to understand his rhetorical strategies in the campaign that he led protesting it, and to show how his criticisms can speak to contemporary concerns about dirty money. So, what I argue in the paper is that people who are resistant to the idea that dirty money is a serious moral concern often portray criticism of dirty money as puritanical or fetishistic or hypocritical, and that Douglass’ intervention shows that there’s a more constructive and politically important dimension to criticism of dirty money that has to do with bringing attention to the ways that social and political relationships constitute which money is treated as clean or dirty.

APSR: Where did the idea for this article come from?

Emma Saunders-Hastings: I’ve been writing about philanthropy for some time now, and I have a book on philanthropy and democratic equality coming out next year, so that’s a long-standing interest of mine. But I hadn’t really thought much about dirty money before, in part because I think I was a little bit in the grip of (what I call in the paper) the puritanical critique, or the idea that dirty money is a distraction from more politically important relationships and concerns.

But then, a little while back, I was rereading Douglass’ autobiographies when I was preparing to teach a course on 19^th-century political thought. I was reminded of Douglass’ “Send Back the Money” campaign, which I vaguely remembered but last read about before I was working in philanthropy. And then, alongside Douglass’ autobiographies, I was reading David Blight’s recent biography of Douglass, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom, which unlike Douglass’ retelling of the Scottish campaign, actually includes excerpts from Douglass’ speeches. That was what really grabbed me. Douglass himself in his later biographies kind of downplays his own centrality and importance in the campaign. Blight’s account led me to go back and read the speeches themselves, and from past work I’ve done on philanthropy, I felt confident that Douglass was doing something interestingly different than what other people have done with the idea of dirty money. From then, it was a matter of reading all the speeches, issues of The Liberator, and other accounts of abolitionist debates at the time to try to distinguish Douglass’ concerns from those of other Garrisonians who were involved in the campaign.

APSR: What did you find most difficult researching or writing about this topic?

Emma Saunders-Hastings: Probably the most challenging was cutting words from the speeches for the paper itself. I could have filled three articles with passages that I thought were interesting and worth reproducing in full. That part was more excruciating than normal.

I think, like everybody, the Covid pandemic affected my work. I was lucky that I had most of the materials I needed before everything shut down, although it was a close call in some cases. And I’m also lucky that important resources like The Liberator have been digitized and are available online. I think the pandemic made it more difficult than usual to get feedback on drafts. But it was lucky that I found alternative venues to present and get feedback, and that I received some really helpful and constructive reviews from the APSR, as well.

APSR: What was the big thing that surprised, confounded, or excited you as you were conducting research, writing the article, or doing revisions?

Emma Saunders-Hastings: One thing that excited me in researching and that was challenging to get across in the article was the performative, oratorical element that comes through in the speeches. When you read the speeches in order, it’s amazing because he’s one night in Dundee and the next day in Glasgow and then he’s in London. You really do get the sense of this being a campaign that was waged all over Great Britain, and his rhetoric is very sensitive to the places he’s speaking. So, typically, in a Scottish town, he’ll identify the local minister, if they’re connected with the Free Church, and call them out and in some cases imagine that minister personally soliciting money from slaveholders. The contextual and performative aspect was something that I really didn’t want to flatten out in retelling it. I try to get that across with quotations and with some inclusion of narrative elements, but I think it’s hard to reproduce in an academic article.

In terms of surprises, there were just so many great little details that I could have picked up on and run with and choosing between them was hard at times. I’m a Shakespeare lover, and there’s this Macbeth connection and motif to some of the speeches and debates that I found really interesting and gripping. There’s also incredible use of humor and ridicule in the speeches – incredible passages where he stands up in Cork and says, I want the Americans to know that in the good city of Cork I ridiculed their nation—I attempted to excite the utter contempt of the people here upon them. Douglass uses shame and ridicule in really interesting ways, which I go into a little bit but didn’t have space to fully develop. Making choices about what which elements to focus on, of rhetorical strategies that evolve over the two years of the campaign and that shift depending on the context he’s speaking in, I found challenging and interesting.

APSR: How does this research connect to the present-day world and politics?

Emma Saunders-Hastings: Questions about dirty money are ones that universities encounter a fair bit. There were a lot of examples that were on my mind when I was writing – cases like Georgetown University, where there’s debate about money specifically from slavery, although the question of reparations for historical injustice is a bit different than the kind of case that Douglass is looking at. But I think it brings up some similar issues. Universities have also faced questions about whether to accept money from the Koch brothers and their foundations. Just as I was beginning the project, there was a new round of controversy about Jeffrey Epstein and donations that he had made to MIT. Something I was struck by in some institutional responses to those controversies was the impulse to try to distinguish clean from dirty money. So there were fact-finding reports that suggested that part of what institutions need is clearer rules about which donors are okay and which donors aren’t okay. I think that represents the kind of rule-making impulse that Douglass is really distrustful of. Part of the lesson we got from Douglass’ intervention is that there’s no set of institutional rules that can fully substitute for moral and political engagement – no rule that would mean you don’t need to open yourself to criticism from activists.

I use the Salesforce example as one that I think illustrates something closer to Douglass’ position, which is: we’re not going to try to reduce a political intervention to a moral rule that dictates when an individual or an institution is guilty or not guilty.

APSR: Is there anything else you would like readers to know about your article, or where you see this work moving forward?

Emma Saunders-Hastings: I guess the main thing I will say is that people who are interested in the article should read Douglass’ speeches themselves, because there is so much in there that didn’t come across in the article. I think that the speeches from this period are a little bit less known than canonical speeches from the 1850s and 1860s that people tend to be more familiar with, so I would recommend them. They’re wonderful reading. As hopefully comes through in the article, they really speak to contemporary concerns. This is what I love about writing about 19^th-century political thought and teaching it. I think there’s a vibrancy, especially in people like Douglass who are explicitly trying to reach a much wider audience, not just speaking to academics but trying to shape the political thinking of a wider public.

In terms of where this research is going, I’m also interested in Douglass’ evolving views on moral responsibility and the ways that he invokes it rhetorically in his speeches and in his writing. So, the period that I’m talking about in the article is all before his break with Garrison and his turn to political abolitionism. I am interested in following this story through into later periods of his thinking about issues like reparations for slavery and whether our views about money and the propriety of accepting it changes once the institution is dead.

– Emma Saunders-Hastings, Ohio State University

– Dr. Saunders-Hastings’ APSR article is available free of charge until the end of November 2021