SLAVERY AS A UNIQUELY EVIL FORM OF ARBITRARY POWER: DOMINATION AND DEHUMANIZATION

While the term “natural rights” encompasses a family of Enlightenment-era philosophies, a widely shared idea was freedom from arbitrary power and, by extension, the unlawfulness of slavery.Footnote ⁹ “Freedom from Absolute, Arbitrary power, is so necessary to, and closely joined with a Man’s Preservation,” writes Locke, “that he cannot part with it, but by what forfeits his Preservation and Life together” ([1689] Reference Locke2008, ch. 4, §23). Douglass of course shared Locke’s philosophical opposition to slavery. To hand oneself over fully to the control of another violates one’s inalienable right to freedom. At the same time, Douglass sought to evince, in vivid and raw detail, how such violations tore away at bodies and souls—not only the slave’s but the master’s as well. He wanted his readers and listeners—mostly white, and accustomed to an abstract discourse of rights—to gain some inkling of slavery’s moral degradation. “I now saw in my situation,” Douglass writes of this dynamic, “several points of similarity with that of the oxen. They were property, so was I; they were to be broken, so was I. [My overseer] Covey was to break me, I was to break them; break and be broken—such is life” ([1855] Reference Douglass2014, 170). For Douglass, such degradation has two core elements: domination, the experience of being wholly under another’s power; and dehumanization, the reduction of human existence to its merely animalistic aspects. Embodying these elements via slave narratives allows Douglass to clarify their conceptual relationship. It also helps him redefine the meaning of “slavery” in natural rights philosophy, marking chattel slavery as distinct from, and distinctively worse than, all other forms of unjust subservience, including political domination, hereditary hierarchy, and industrialized wage labor.

Among Douglass’s aims, especially in his autobiographies, is to help white Americans apprehend (to the extent possible) the slave experience of racial domination, to elicit how what Locke called “arbitrary power” is actually felt from the victim’s point of view ([1689] Reference Locke2008, ch. 4, §23). On a physical level, slaves cede total control over their time and bodies. All normal human distinctions vanish, and labor—or its transitory absence—becomes the only relevant marker:

On a psychological level, slaves must cultivate a dark form of empathy. To avoid the lash, they must train themselves to anticipate the whims and wishes of their masters:

Slaves are forced to internalize the “consciousness of being whipt for no cause” ([1852] Reference Douglass, Stauffer, Levine and McKivigan2015, 14). They must stifle any sense of an objective right and wrong, bow to their total dependence on power, and accept the utter caprice of their master’s will. Here, for example, is how Douglass describes the reaction of a slave named Barney, falsely accused of some minor mistake: “Listening to complaints, however groundless, Barney must stand, hat in hand, lips sealed, never answering a word. He must make no reply, no explanation; the judgment of the master must be deemed infallible, for his power is absolute and irresponsible” ([1855] Reference Douglass2014, 92).

Slaves’ domination is necessarily accompanied, for Douglass, by their dehumanization, which likewise has both material and nonmaterial dimensions. On the one hand, slavery reduces human beings to their mere physicality; it assumes nothing of them beyond creaturely needs and desires and consigns them to rule by the stronger. “What an assemblage!” Douglass exclaims, describing a slave auction, “Moral and intellectual beings, in open contempt of their humanity, leveled at a blow with horses, sheep horned cattle, and swine!” ([1855] Reference Douglass2014, 142). Douglass invokes the swine metaphor again in illustrating the conditions of meal time as a child:

On the other hand, Douglass emphasizes slavery’s psychological dimensions, or what Buccola calls its “metaphysical cruelty” (Reference Buccola2012, 26). It actively strips individuals of the norms, affections, and institutions that define their humanity. Children—“that they might early be without ties of kindred”—are systematically and forcibly separated from their mothers (Douglass [1844] Reference Douglass and Blassingame1979). Female slaves are often raped, bestowing on owners a “double relation of master and father” ([1845] Reference Douglass and Blight2016, 42). And the elderly, having outgrown their utility, are “turned out” from the community, consigned to loneliness, isolation and near-certain death ([1844] Reference Douglass and Blassingame1979). Douglass summarizes the situation tersely: “behold a man transformed into a brute!” ([1845] Reference Douglass and Blight2016, 81).

Describing slavery’s domination and dehumanization allows Douglass to embody the content of natural rights ideas which, left to philosophy alone, would remain overly abstract. Beyond this aim, I now show, Douglass also quietly amends those ideas. In particular, he overturns the standard way that philosophy conceives of the relationship between dehumanization and domination.

Typically, dehumanization is seen as the cause of domination: a person deprived of human status can be more readily subjected to arbitrary power; human rights require “human” beings.Footnote ¹⁰ Douglass is not averse to moral abstractions; he frequently invokes the “common humanity” of whites and Blacks, for instance ([1857] Reference Douglass and Blassingame1986a). Yet to analyze dehumanization in such ideational terms, he suggests, misapprehends its basic psychological dynamic. It confuses cause and effect: white slave owners do not usually start out by seeing their Black slaves as less than human; they dehumanize them only as they become accustomed to dominating them. Dehumanization, in other words, does not (usually) lead to domination, but just the opposite: domination, counterintuitively, leads to dehumanization. Depriving Black slaves of their humanity offered a way for masters to rationalize their oppressive behaviors after the fact. It justified their economic stake in slavery.

On this point, Douglass anticipates W. E. B. Du Bois’s arguments in his landmark Black Reconstruction in America. Du Bois points out that white slave owners had every material incentive to keep slavery going; it was in their clear economic interest. But how, morally, could they account for freed Blacks? After all, these were people who lived and worked and thought and had families just like whites (to the extent they were permitted to do so). How could slave owners get around America’s belief, or professed belief, in human equality? Wasn’t slavery an affront to the Declaration of Independence? The answer, explains Du Bois, was to deny slaves’ humanity. For economic reasons, slaves had to cease to be human beings (Du Bois Reference Du Bois1935, ch. 1). It was necessary for their personhood to be negated. Domination was the cause; dehumanization was the effect.

Douglass marshals this novel understanding of dehumanization to sharply distinguish American slavery from other forms of political and economic servitude, redefining natural rights doctrine in the process. Locke opens his First Treatise by declaring that “Slavery is so vile and miserable an estate of man” ([1689] Reference Locke2008, Book 1, ch. 1, §1). But what is slavery, for Locke? Against readers who believe Locke supported chattel slavery, Holly Brewer has shown that such arguments find little textual or historical support.Footnote ¹¹ At the same time, it is true that Locke’s rejection of the practice grew out of the same normative trunk as his philosophical opposition to certain forms of power more generally, including hereditary hierarchy, indentured servitude, and the subjugation of white Englishmen to arbitrary rule. He often used the term slavery interchangeably to describe each of these varieties of oppression. Thus for Locke, Brewer explains, “James II’s efforts to strip his subjects of rights grew from his absolutism, which made all subjects into slaves; such slavery was part of a continuum that ended in slavery in the Americas” (Reference Brewer2017, 1054–5).

Likewise, some thinkers in Douglass’s time extrapolated from what they took to be Locke’s own or implied views in order to equate economic subjugation with chattel slavery. Among Locke’s most dramatic claims, in his Second Treatise, was that humanity’s moral worth can be put in terms of a concept of property: just as we rightfully acquire the things we make, God, our maker, acquired us; and because human beings are God’s property, we are not at liberty to destroy others or ourselves ([1689] Reference Locke2008, ch. 2, §6). To be clear, there is no evidence that Locke himself reduced a human being’s value to his labor value. Quite the contrary, he repeatedly insists that “all men by nature are equal,” further elaborating that this refers to the “equality, which all men are in, in respect to jurisdiction or dominion one over another” (ch. 6, §54). Even so, the rhetorical connection Locke drew between property and human nature helped inspire efforts by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Karl Marx, and other Left thinkers of the nineteenth-century to envision a continuum of oppression between slave and capitalist economies (Marx [1863] Reference Marx2000; Proudhon [1840] Reference Proudhon1994). If human beings are essentially defined by their labor value, such thinkers proposed, then members of the industrial working class are “wage slaves”: Although free in principle, they are effectively “bound,” like slaves, by their long hours, low wages, dismal conditions, and limited alternatives.Footnote ¹²

Douglass also opposes forms of arbitrary political rule and unjust hierarchy, and he agrees that the labor situation of poor whites in Northern factories is deeply exploitative; yet he vehemently rejects that they belong in the same category as Black chattel slavery. What is most essential to our nature, he writes, is not the “property in man.” It is our capacity for rational thought and choice, those qualities which distinguish us from other animals. Thus while wage labor may unjustly deprive “one right or property in man,” slavery takes “man himself.” It “dooms him a degraded thing, ranks him with the bridled horses and muzzled ox, makes him a cattle personal, a marketable commodity” (Douglass [1845] Reference Douglass and Blassingame1979). Slavery’s distinctive evil is its dehumanization. It not only deprives us of some abstract right, or binds us within an unmerited hierarchy, or forces us to bow to an illegitimate ruler. It is an ontological violation. It is an affront to our very nature. “The Irishman is poor,” Douglass concludes, “but he is not a slave. He may be in rags, but he is not a slave” ([1855] Reference Douglass2014, 359).Footnote ¹³

Douglass, in sum, wants to emphasize that slavery is a uniquely evil form of arbitrary power. Real, chattel slavery—not political domination, not economic subservience—must be reserved a special place in the philosophy of natural rights. To make this claim, he offers vivid illustrations of two of slavery’s core elements: domination and dehumanization. And he contends, further, that the standard way of thinking about their interrelation is incorrect. Most of the time, domination is not the product of dehumanization, but its cause. We enslave others and then deprive them of their humanity. From here, we can see Douglass’s rhetorical–conceptual method at work: by narrating the experiences of slavery’s victims, he can embody, and subtly redefine, a key principle behind natural rights philosophy.

SLAVERY’S SELF-DEFEATING EFFECTS: RECIPROCAL MORAL DEGRADATION

Douglass also employs techniques of embodiment and redefinition to recast the act of enslavement itself, illustrating that slavery’s moral degradation is not confined to the slave. In the Second Treatise, Locke famously compares a person who attempts to enslave another to a “wild beast, or noxious brute,” a creature who has “quitted reason, which God hath given to be the rule betwixt man and man, and the common bond whereby human kind is united into one fellowship and society” ([1689] Reference Locke2008, ch. 15, §172). Consequently, just as one may rightfully defend himself against a “lion or a tyger,” so too can a person rightly resist an aggressor, including with violence (ch. 2, §11). “He who makes an attempt to enslave me,” Locke summarizes, “thereby puts himself into a state of war with me” (ch. 3, §17). Douglass likewise believes that slavery amounts to a “state of war.” Simultaneously, he goes beyond Locke in describing enslavement’s brutalizing effects. While Locke compares slavers to animals in order to normatively justify resistance, Douglass suggests that slavers are bestial not only in a metaphorical sense but also because of their profound psychological disfigurement. Dehumanization cuts two ways: in the same stroke that the master denies the humanity of his slave, he thereby degrades his own. Douglass certainly intends no equivalence between oppressed and oppressor. The slave’s fate is uniquely, and unqualifiedly, evil. Still—and bearing in mind his target audience—he wants to suggest that the “brutalizing effects of slavery” pose a problem for white citizens as well (Douglass [1845] Reference Douglass and Blight2016, 70). From the perspective of natural rights, slavery should be seen not only as wrong, but as self-annihilating; it deadens the soul of the master too.

Slavery dehumanizes the master most directly by hardening his natural affection. The default reaction of most people to another’s suffering, Douglass argues, is sympathy—a desire to alleviate that other’s pain, or at least to provide him with comfort. The master-slave relation suppresses this reaction, substituting harshness and anger in its place. Douglass’s most dramatic example is Sophia Auld, a white woman who, alongside her husband, became his master in Baltimore:

Slavery injects what Douglass calls the “fatal poison of irresponsible power” into our interpersonal behavior (62). Having related to another as a mere object of our will, and encountering no barrier to doing so, we come to conceive of all social experience in the same way. This was Auld’s fate: granted arbitrary power, a woman who Douglass describes as “preserved from the blighting and dehumanizing effects of slavery,” someone who treated him “as she supposed one human being ought to treat another,” was disfigured into a “demon,” her face “red with rage,” and her voice filled with “harsh and horrid discord.” “Slavery,” he concludes, “proved as injurious to her as it did to me” (61–4).

At the same time, Douglass argues that slavery’s dehumanizing effects do not remain confined to the master–slave relation, but inevitably contaminate our relationships more generally. Sophia Auld, he explains, did not embrace her role as master. She came to oppress slaves only reluctantly, and only on the orders of her husband. But as Douglass points out, this is itself highly revealing: dominated by the gender hierarchies of her day, Sophia was forced to redefine her own relationships in similarly hierarchical terms. She was, in effect, compelled to compel others. Such a dynamic, Douglass argues, permeates the South’s entire social structure. Power—who has more, who has less, and in what domains—is the only relevant factor in relating to others. Domination tinges every human relationship, whether public or private, political or familial, class or race-based. Human connections are seen through the prism of dependence, advantage, and fear (Douglass [1855] Reference Douglass2014, 53).

One example Douglass offers is white labor. On face, one might expect that Southern white workers would join forces with Black slaves, uniting against the ruling aristocracy to push for economic and political reform. In fact, the opposite was the case. Most commonly, white laborers were openly hostile toward Blacks, both enslaved and free. Why? One reason was economic: white workers refused solidarity with freed blacks because they were concerned about competition (Du Bois Reference Du Bois1935, ch. 2). Douglass also offers a second, more subtle, but arguably more important reason: poor whites feared Black equality because it threatened their social position. It endangered their place in the public hierarchy. However low their status might be in Southern society, poor whites could take pride in the fact that they were not the lowest of the low. They could at least claim superiority—and power—over one other class of people. They could still hold the whip, often literally, over their Black neighbors. “The impression is cunningly made,” Douglass writes, “that slavery is the only power that can prevent the laboring white man from falling to the level of the slave’s poverty and degradation. To make this enmity deep and broad, between the slave and the poor white man, the latter is allowed to abuse and whip the former, without hindrance” ([1855] Reference Douglass2014, 247). This was the situation in the South. But as Du Bois would later show, a similar dynamic took shape in the North. As the labor leader John Campbell declared in 1851:

In a social structure defined entirely by power, all that matters is one’s ability to dominate others.

Domination, moreover, can quickly become an end in itself. Douglass frequently observes his masters’ sadistic gratification in exercising power through a combination of fear and psychological coercion. As he writes about his sometime master Captain Anthony, “He would at times seem to take great pleasure in whipping a slave….No words, no tears, no prayers, from his gory victim, seemed to move his iron heart from its bloody purpose” (Douglass [1845] Reference Douglass and Blight2016, 44).Footnote ¹⁴ Slaves were sometimes sold further South—where conditions were known to be harsher—not for lack of suitable local buyers, but out of “revenge,” a desire to punish the supposedly impudent (Douglass [1852] Reference Douglass, Stauffer, Levine and McKivigan2015, 221). “A single word” at a slave auction, Douglass explains, was sufficient to “sunder forever the dearest friends, dearest kindred, and strongest ties known to human beings” ([1845] Reference Douglass and Blight2016, 70). More often, however, power was expressed more directly. There was an ever-present possibility of an explosion of brutal violence: “I have often been awakened at the dawn of a day by the most heart-rending shrieks of an own aunt of mine, whom he used to tie up to a joist, and whip upon her naked back till she was literally covered with blood” (Douglass [1845] Reference Douglass and Blight2016, 44).

Here, then, is a second way in which Douglass embodies and subtly redefines key features of natural rights philosophy. Slavery, for Douglass as for Locke, is certainly a “state of war.” Yet it is also a form of reciprocal moral degradation, brutalizing masters as well as slaves. As Douglass illustrates, in a social structure defined entirely by power, all that comes to matter is one’s power over others. We are given the false impression that domination is the highest, or perhaps only, good. Other forms of relating to others, like sympathy, reciprocity, or obligation, fall by the wayside. Not only the slave’s humanity, but the master’s too, is corroded. Or as Douglass himself concludes: “Everybody, in the south, wants the privilege of whipping somebody” ([1855] Reference Douglass2014, 59).

In this way, Douglass’s description of slavery’s dynamics also gives the lie to the idea, sometimes attributed to Enlightenment thought, that the human being is a sovereign self or “possessive individual” (Macpherson Reference Macpherson1962). It is certainly true, as Buccola and others have noted, that Douglass was a strong proponent of the Lockean idea of “self-ownership,” and he often deployed it in speeches to make the case for abolition (Buccola Reference Buccola2012, ch. 2). Nonetheless, Douglass shows through his slave narratives that such ownership does not psychologically insulate us from the effects of our actions. We are not, nor can we be, imperious masters of our reality. We cannot simply impose our will on the world, and on others in it, without consequences for ourselves. In truth, the world pushes back. When we attempt to dominate others, it leaves a mark on our souls.

AGAINST THE “HAPPY SLAVE”: COMPLICATING AND CONTEXTUALIZING REASON

Douglass, as we have seen, vividly depicts slavery’s cruelties to make palpable the institution’s mutual moral degradation, reconfiguring elements of natural rights philosophy in the process. At the same time, he knows that such depictions introduce a potential danger. In philosophical principle, natural rights are universal and inalienable, applying to all human beings, at all times. They cannot be discarded even by their possessors. In practice, the scope of natural rights was often narrowed through caveats and exceptions. Locke, for instance, argued that children can be rightly coerced by their parents because of their undeveloped rational faculties: “No Body can be under a Law which is not promulgated to him; and this Law being promulgated or made known by Reason only, he that is not come to the Use of his Reason, cannot be said to be under this law” ([1689] Reference Locke2008, ch. 6, §57, emphasis in original). As Du Bois would later observe, slavery’s ideological defenders sometimes mobilized a version of Locke’s logic for their own purposes. “[Black slaves],” Du Bois writes in the voice of the pro-slavery advocate, “were congenital wards and children, to be well-treated and cared for, but far happier and safer here than in their own land” (Reference Du Bois1935, 5). Slavery, by this view, could be justified as a form of paternalism—an improvement on blacks’ purportedly “savage” condition in Africa. The master’s power could cease to be “arbitrary.” And the systematic domination of an entire race of people could (ostensibly) be reconciled with an expressed commitment to individual rights and liberties.

For Douglass, then, the risk of revealing racial domination’s totalizing nature is that it might reinforce the widespread myth that Black slaves, by largely eschewing physical resistance, were rationally undeveloped. It might suggest that denying them the exercise of their natural rights was justified. It might corroborate the so-called “happy slave” hypothesis: the idea, often ascribed to Marx, that a subaltern’s outward subservience implies his inner acquiescence, that the dominated accept the terms of their domination. For Douglass, it might suggest the unthinkable: slaves consent to their slavery.Footnote ¹⁵

To fend off this possibility, Douglass uses techniques of embodiment and redescription to develop a nuanced model of slave psychology. According to standard accounts of natural rights, it is impossible to voluntarily renounce one’s freedom. “A man,” Locke declares, “cannot subject himself to the arbitrary power of another” ([1689] Reference Locke2008, ch. 11, §135). Douglass agrees: as a general rule, slaves strongly chafe against domination; there are not, nor can there be, “happy slaves.” Nonetheless, Douglass uses his narrative depictions to subtly complicate the standard natural rights account, demonstrating that in limited circumstances, and with sufficient repression, slaves can be acclimated to their subjugation and so prevented from asserting their natural rights. The key to Douglass’s argument is a novel, intersubjective understanding of the Enlightenment’s most important concept: human reason. Reason, Douglass proposes, is never given its finished form by nature. It is instead susceptible to context, capable of being either nurtured or suppressed by its attending social conditions.

On the one hand, Douglass adds nuance to Locke’s account of subjection to arbitrary power, suggesting that human beings can be naturalized into systems of oppression. Slaves’ servile dispositions and attitudes are habituated from birth, becoming an integral and unnoticed part of their self-conception. They not only regulate their behavior but also define their very sense of self and place in the world. As he writes of his childhood, for example: “I was a SLAVE—born a slave—and though the fact was incomprehensible to me, it conveyed to my mind a sense of my entire dependence on the will of somebody I had never seen” (Douglass [1855] Reference Douglass2014, 39). In his telling, he only truly awakened to his oppression after repeated stays in cosmopolitan Baltimore (258–60).

Likewise, Douglass is highly critical of his slave peers who choose to spend their Christmas holiday in games and carousal, strongly implying that they have been successfully mollified by their masters. Slaves, Douglass argues, interpreted such permissiveness as “liberty” because they had never experienced the genuine article. Consequently, a few days of “brutal drunkenness” and “revolting dissipation” would cool their desire for freedom. They would be almost relieved to return to work: “Feeling, upon the whole, rather glad to go from that which our masters artfully deceived us into the belief was freedom, back to the arms of slavery….It was about as well to be a slave to master, as to be a slave to rum and whisky” (204–5). Such institutions, Douglass stresses, were not merely clever psychological tricks which would fade quickly over time. They were structural features of slavery, “conductors or safety valves to carry off the explosive elements inseparable from the human mind, when reduced to the condition of slavery.” They had profound social and political implications, helping to buttress the whole slave system. “Were slaveholders at once to abandon the practice of allowing their slaves these liberties,” Douglass avers, “I doubt not that the south would blaze with insurrections” (203).

On the other hand, Douglass insists that slaves, despite appearances, have not accepted their bondage. They might perform deference and non-resistance in what James C. Scott has termed their “public transcript,” those elements of their behavior which are knowable to outsiders. But in what Scott called their “hidden transcript”—spaces shielded from their master’s gaze—they voice the deep injustice of their condition (Scott Reference Scott1990).

An important example Douglass cites are slave songs. According to Marxian proponents of voluntary servitude, such songs would likely exemplify religion’s hegemonic function. They would be “sigh[s] of the oppressed creature,” which means by which human beings, in the face of seemingly hopeless oppression, imbue that oppression with a spiritual meaning and purpose (Marx [1843] Reference Marx and Tucker1978). They would be evidence, in other words, of false consciousness. Douglass vehemently rejects this view. Far from proving that slaves are happy with their lot, slave songs keep alive a spirit of resistance. They signal that slaves are profoundly aware of their subjugated condition and earnestly hope to be free. “Every tone,” Douglass writes, “was a testimony against slavery, and a prayer to God for deliverance from chains” ([1845] Reference Douglass and Blight2016, 50). He cites one song in particular which speaks to this sense of injustice in remarkably candid terms:

Slave songs, Douglass concludes, make a more compelling case that slaves are entitled to natural rights than could ever be made at the level of reasoned argument. Rather than working downward from axiomatic assertions about human nature—axioms which, as we have seen, were often contested by slave owners—they work upward from shared, embodied human experience. In witnessing others join their voices in a solidarity of suffering and hope we hear an echo of our own pain and aspiration. “I have sometimes thought,” Douglass muses, “that the mere hearing of those songs would do more to impress some minds with the horrible character of slavery, than the reading of whole volumes of philosophy on the subject could do” ([1845] Reference Douglass and Blight2016, 50). Indeed for Douglass, the fact that slaves sing, rather than openly challenge their masters and so risk life and limb, gives further evidence of their shared humanity. Why, Douglass asks, should we expect slaves to attempt revolt and almost certainly die? Instead, they do what any other human being would do under conditions of abject powerlessness: “[Slaves] suppress the truth rather than take the consequences of telling it, and in so doing prove themselves a part of the human family” (53; Scott Reference Scott1990, 78–9).

In western philosophy, music has often been distinguished from reason; yet for Douglass, one of the most crucial effects of songs for slaves was precisely to elevate their rational consciousness.Footnote ¹⁶ Thus by illustrating the role of music for reason—not in the abstract, but in embodied practice—Douglass covertly redefines one of the elementary features of natural rights. When slaves sing about their condition, he argues, they nurture and sustain critical faculties which might otherwise have been smothered by oppression:

Subjugation becomes naturalized when the slave system comes to appear as inevitable, objective, and immutable.Footnote ¹⁷ Slave songs shatter this order. They expose slavery’s actual inconsistencies and contradictions. They offer slaves a means to raise and sustain awareness of their oppression and its basic injustice. They allow them to reassert their reason and humanity—their “thinking powers”—in the face of systematic dehumanization, without risking their masters’ ire (Douglass [1846] Reference Douglass and Blassingame1979).

THE SOCIAL FOUNDATIONS OF HUMAN DIGNITY: RECOGNITION, IDENTITY, AND THE FAMILY

By embodying and redefining human reason, Douglass adds nuance to standard natural rights accounts of arbitrary power. I now turn to an idea that is often coupled with reason in Enlightenment thought and is similarly reconfigured by Douglass: human dignity. That human beings have a moral worth which must be respected, protected, and preserved, both by states and other people, was for many of Douglass’s intellectual predecessors a fundamental normative proposition. “Men being all the workmanship of one omnipotent and infinitely wise maker,” Locke writes, it follows that each person “is bound to preserve himself, and…as much as he can, to preserve the rest of mankind” ([1689] Reference Locke2008, ch. 2, §6).Footnote ¹⁸ Or as Kant declares, in a well-known passage from his Metaphysics of Morals: “A human being is exalted above any price…he is not to be valued merely as a means to the ends of others or even to his own ends, but as an end in himself, that is, he possesses a dignity (an absolute inner worth)” ([1797] Reference Kant and Gregor1998, 186). Douglass would not disagree. The concept of human dignity threads through his writings and speeches, underlying his attacks on slavery and animating his vision for a more just and equal future (Buccola Reference Buccola2015). Yet even as he adopts this most basic Enlightenment concept, Douglass, painfully aware of how deeply, widely, and easily it is violated in practice, seeks to subtly shift its meaning through techniques of embodiment and redescription. Nesting philosophical observations into depictions of slavery’s effects on Black families—others and his own—he contributes a layer of social depth to conventional natural rights accounts. Even if all people have a divinely endowed dignity, in practice such dignity is not intrinsically given. It must be instantiated in our concrete relations with others, constructed and reaffirmed by interpersonal recognition.

For Douglass, an important way masters denied their slaves dignity was by destroying their families. Familial relations, he emphasizes, are not only an outgrowth of our moral worth; they help to constitute it. The relations of commitment, obligation, and love that we develop within the family nurture what makes us distinct as a species, providing the “strongest ties known to human beings” (Douglass [1845] Reference Douglass and Blight2016, 70). Seeking to deny that humanity, therefore, owners had to do more than deny slaves dignity in an abstract sense. To yield a “humanity converted into merchandise,” they had to actively eliminate our most essential of human relationships (Douglass [1852] Reference Douglass, Stauffer, Levine and McKivigan2015, 215–6). Here, for instance, is how Douglass recounts the words of an overseer driving a slave-gang to market:

Sundering children from parents was as much a tactic for denying dignity as an outgrowth of such denial. Legally designated paternity, Douglass observes with bitter irony, was likewise refused to the enslaved: “Genealogical trees do not flourish among slaves. A person of some consequence here in the north, sometimes designated father, is literally abolished in slave law and slave practice” ([1855] Reference Douglass2014, 30).

Such laws, Douglass stresses, did more than codify Blacks as chattel; they deprived slaves of family life, their earliest cradle of recognition and identity. “The grand aim of slavery,” Douglass concludes, referring to this shattering of family life, “is to reduce man to a level with the brute” ([1855] Reference Douglass2014, 32). The family’s vital import for Douglass lies not in blood ties but in social ones, not in material subsistence but in the formation of personhood. It offers the site where we gain our earliest cognizance that there exist others, separate from ourselves, to whom we owe respect and affection. It is that intimate pocket of life in which budding subjectivities start to grow into full human beings—precisely the dynamic that slavery seeks to stifle: “A successful method of obliterating from the mind and heart of the slave, all just ideas of the sacredness of the family, as in institution” (32). This was why children had to be separated from their parents. As Douglass writes of his long-estranged brothers and sisters, “I really did not understand what they were to me, or I to them. We were brothers and sisters, but what of that? Why should they be attached to me, or I to them? Brothers and sisters we were by blood; but slavery had made us strangers” (41). Or as he recalls of one fleeting moment when his mother intervened to rescue him from an abusive supervisor: “That night I learned the fact, that I was not only a child, but somebody’s child” (47).

Douglass’s most powerful—and in his eyes essential—example of how slavery destroys dignity depicts the fate of his grandmother. Douglass initially recounts this story in his first autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. But in a sign of its centrality for his thought, he quotes it in full, and without modification, in his second autobiography, My Bondage and My Freedom. In both cases, the narrative is bookended by visceral descriptions of slavery’s physical barbarities: whippings, beatings, and starvations. Yet for Douglass, these cruelties, even in their depraved depths, do not elicit from him the same “unutterable loathing” of slavery and slaveholders as his grandmother’s seemingly more benign fate:

Douglass’s grandmother has been provided with a kind of slave’s pension: a house of her own. Though denied her liberty, she has her life and (meager) property. Yet the problem, for Douglass, is not merely that she has been stripped of one of her natural rights. The problem is with natural rights itself as conventionally understood. Even setting aside her unfreedom, Douglass stresses, his grandmother’s life has been rendered nearly inhuman. Abandoned to loneliness and isolation, the “necessities” she has been granted reflect a bare, abstract, and atomistic understanding of personhood.

This is Douglass’s broader point: our liberty, property, and lives are not enough if we are forced to spend those lives alone. It is true that Douglass often stressed the importance of individuality and principles of what came to be called classical liberalism. As Myers notes, “Self-Made Men” was for decades his most popular speech, with themes and phrases rhetorically continuous with Lockean ideas of self-ownership (Reference Myers2008, 114). Yet to insist on these abstractions alone, for Douglass, would be to crop the complete image of humanity. Full, embodied human beings are enmeshed in meaningful ties with others. As Buccola has eloquently put it, Douglass was deeply “cognizant of the vulnerability of individuals in isolation,” aware of “the myriad ways in which human beings need one another to survive and flourish” (Reference Buccola2012, 9). Contra an important stand of Enlightenment thought, we are not, nor can we be, Robinson Crusoes.Footnote ¹⁹ Slavery has forced upon Douglass’s grandmother—and countless others—an impoverished form of humanity:

Slavery is evil not only because it wreaks violence, deprivation, and humiliation. It is evil not only because it kills. It is also evil because it inflicts what Orlando Patterson calls “social death” (Reference Patterson1982). At the same time that Douglass’s grandmother has been deprived of her physical needs—a fact that should not be understated—she has also been deprived of her psychological needs. She has been torn from those webs of recognition that make us who we are—first and foremost, those of her family. She has been made to suffer an inhumanity not only of body but of soul.Footnote ²⁰

Thus by so embodying his grandmother’s experience, Douglass subtly redefines a fundamental element of natural rights. God has granted human beings an intrinsic dignity. But such dignity only acquires tangible meaning when it is acknowledged and sustained by others in ties of mutual recognition.

“THE SLAVE OF SOCIETY AT LARGE”: COLLECTIVE RESPONSIBILITY

Embodying and redefining human dignity is one way that Douglass adds social depth to natural rights accounts. An additional way is by expanding humanity’s circle of moral responsibility to encompass both individual and collective dimensions. “The state of nature,” Locke writes, “has a law of nature to govern it, which obliges every one” ([1689] Reference Locke2008, ch. 2, §6). Even in the absence of society and government, for Locke, human beings are bound by moral laws. Because these laws are knowable through reason, and because we may freely choose to follow them, it follows that we can be justly punished for violating them. Douglass likewise affirms our ability to grasp the laws of nature and our free capacity to obey them; as attested by his frequent calls for divine justice, he too believes that we should be held personally accountable for our actions. Nonetheless, he implies that conventional natural rights accounts of culpability are inadequate. The experience of slavery and an analysis of its institutions demand that we refine our views. Moral responsibility is multilayered: it should be assigned to individuals and collectives, to people and societies. For Douglass, this has two important implications. First, our actions are only partly of our own making. While individuals are still responsible for their choices, their culpability is attenuated—not only that of law-breaking slaves but also, and more controversially, that of brutalizing masters. Second, we cannot eliminate slavery’s lasting effects if we focus only on individual decisions. We must also tackle the larger systems and structures in which our choices are enmeshed.

Douglass introduces the idea of collective responsibility in order to defend the slave’s right to steal from masters other than his own. A foundational premise of natural rights is that a person’s property belongs to him—not only de facto, but de jure. Consequently, property owners are entitled to defend their possessions, including with force. As Locke writes, “The great and chief end of Men’s uniting into Commonwealths, and putting themselves under Government, is the Preservation of their Property” ([1689] Reference Locke2008, ch. 9, §124). Douglass agrees that theft, as a general rule, is wrong; yet the circumstances of slavery—the fact that it exists not as isolated relations of master and slave, but within a social order which actively sustains it—uproot the normative landscape. A slave should be entitled not only to take from his owner, but from any owner:

A slave is clearly the victim of his own master. He has been denied his freedom, his body beaten, and his labor stolen. According to a standard model of natural rights, therefore, the slave should at least be entitled to just compensation. Alternatively, as Myers argues, the “slaveholders’ claims to property were nullified by the fact that those claims were based on their expropriation by others” (Reference Myers2008, 55).Footnote ²¹ For Douglass, however, this standard model is insufficient. To individuate culpability for slavery’s evils is to overlook the larger institutional and structural context in which masters operate. Slavery is not a mere aberration in otherwise free relations between men. It is constitutive of those relations. Anticipating Ira Berlin’s distinction between “societies with slaves” and “slave societies,” Douglass insists that “the morality of a free society can have no application to a slave society” (Douglass [1855] Reference Douglass2014, 154–5; Berlin Reference Berlin1998). Slaveholders, he concludes, should be held “individually and collectively responsible for all the evils which grow out of the horrid relation” (Douglass [1855] Reference Douglass2014, 155).

Collective moral responsibility for slavery has important consequences, foremost among them the attenuation of individual moral responsibility. This is most straightforwardly true for slaves themselves. In his novella The Heroic Slave, for instance, Douglass describes how Madison Washington justifies stealing from slaveowners during his escape: “During my flight, I felt myself robbed by society of all my just rights, that I was in an enemy’s land, who sought both my life and my liberty. They had transformed me into a brute, made merchandise of my body…” ([1852] Reference Douglass, Stauffer, Levine and McKivigan2015, 18). Douglass’s fictionalized narrative clearly echoes his biographical one, as does its normative argument. Washington has been deprived of his natural rights. Yet the guilty party was not his own master alone, but the social order as a whole. He was “robbed,” not by one slaveowner, but “by society”; and it was the whole society—“the combined physical force of the community”—who brutalized and commodified him (Douglass [1855] Reference Douglass2014, 154–5, 217).

More controversially, Douglass suggests that slavery’s systematic quality should also reduce the culpability of its oppressing agents, from owners to overseers. Remarkably, he makes this point by contextualizing the behavior of his own sadistic master, Captain Anthony:

At least some forms of evil, Douglass suggests, can be explained by larger social systems. Such systems play an important role in determining our actions. They shape our moral personality, for good or ill. Consequently, our culpability as individual agents can be only partial, not total. Captain Anthony was a cruel man. But he could have been otherwise. His free choices, though important, were not dispositive. “The slaveholder,” Douglass continues, “as well as the slave, is the victim of the slave system” (66).

Douglass explains society’s influence on our behavior in two ways, one psychological, the other structural. One the one hand, slave societies stifle or silence our rationality. By positioning certain people to exercise power arbitrarily, they enable our worst emotions and instincts:

Douglass shares the conventional Enlightenment view that human beings should, ideally, determine their choices rationally. Yet reason, he insists, is an uncertain and fragile faculty. Contra Locke, it is not an inevitable outgrowth of our maturity—a gift of God or nature. It is subject to the circumstances of embodied, creaturely life. It must be constructed and reinforced by a civilization which tangibly respects the rights of every person. In slave societies, it is hardly permitted to develop at all.

On the other hand, Douglass sometimes explains the behavior of slavery’s agents precisely in terms of a form of rationality: that possessed by the slave system as a whole. Consider, for example, how he interprets an owner’s unwillingness to halt an overseer’s abuses:

Seen from one angle, slave societies are constituted by individual agents: masters and overseers make their own decisions; each can be held responsible for their actions. Yet from a different angle, slave societies are coherent systems, wholes which can be assigned their own reasons and interests. To operate and sustain themselves, they need their members to act not only from their limited, individuated logic, but from a collective one. Not only is their behavior strongly determined by larger social frameworks; such behavior fits into identifiable patterns, “common in every slaveholding community…incidental to the relation of master and slave…in all sections of slaveholding countries” (Douglass [1855] Reference Douglass2014, 69).Footnote ²²

Collective responsibility has important normative ramifications for Douglass as well. Douglass, as is well-known, frequently invoked ideas of divine justice—and retribution—against slaveowners. Though initially a proponent of nonviolent abolition, he eventually became one of the most vocal advocates for armed struggle and rallied support for the Union in wartime (Douglass [1862] Reference Douglass and Blassingame1985a; [1862] Reference Douglass and Blassingame1985b; [1863] Reference Douglass and Blassingame1986; [1864] Reference Douglass, Blassingame and McKivigan1991a; [1864] Reference Douglass, Blassingame and McKivigan1991b). Nonetheless, in a speech delivered in 1864—a full three years into the Civil War, a time by which the South’s defense of slavery had cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans—the charitable perspective of his antebellum writings remains:

Douglass’s choice of Biblical metaphor is revealing. The Bible contains no shortage of references to masters and slaves. White southerners could easily have been cast as Pharaoh. The “waters” in his speech could have been those which drowned the Egyptian army. Yet Douglass instead chooses to invoke a different deluge: the flood in Genesis. God, the Bible recounts, brings waters from above and below to purify a world that has normalized wrongdoing. This, Douglass implies, has likewise been the case with slavery: slaves and masters alike were caught in a “great social system,” one inured to its evils. Thus just as God extends to the postdiluvian world an olive branch—a chance at a new beginning for humanity—so too, Douglass suggests, an olive branch should be extended to slavery’s agents. With the slave system washed away, they will together have the chance to make the world anew.Footnote ²³

NATURAL RIGHTS FROM BELOW

In this article, I have argued that Frederick Douglass reconstructs core elements of natural rights thought via techniques of embodiment and redescription. In his slave narratives, the philosophy’s core concepts—among them freedom, reason, dignity, and moral responsibility—are concretized in practice and reconceived in meaning. Against those who interpret his ideas in straightforwardly Lockean terms, as well as those who read into his thought a “fugitive” critique of Enlightenment, I showed that Douglass remains committed to key liberal ideas while subtly reconfiguring them. By reinterpreting his antebellum and wartime texts, I showed that he articulates an important and original political theory: a philosophy of natural rights, told from below.

In this way, Douglass anticipates a number of influential contemporary critiques of Enlightenment and liberal thought which have similarly sought to foreground the plight of the powerless. For example, recent theorists have suggested that a too-narrow focus on individual choices blinds us to inequalities rooted in social structures (Anderson Reference Anderson1999); that moral responsibility should be at least partly conceived in collective terms (Harris Reference Harris1974); that human dignity is often granted or denied to marginalized groups via intersubjective processes (Young Reference Young1990; Taylor Reference Taylor and Gutmann1994; Kymlicka Reference Kymlicka1996); that our selfhood depends on the communities in which we become enmeshed (Sandel Reference Sandel1998); and that even the most purportedly civilized and enlightened societies can dehumanize whole groups of people—render them invisible, “superfluous,” or marked for destruction (Arendt [1951] Reference Arendt1994).

These critiques represent only a few of the Douglass echoes we find in contemporary political theory, and I do not mean to suggest that his ideas can answer them. My aims in this article have been more modest: to contribute to elucidating Douglass’s thought, and to help situate it into broader debates on key moral, social, and political questions. Methodologically, I have drawn from texts, like biographies, which are not conventional sources for political theory.Footnote ²⁴ Still, I think they gain us something important. Douglass was not a professional philosopher. Nor did he set out to be one: he was a writer, statesman, journalist, and rhetorician. Rather than discourse abstractly, he rendered ideas empathically and eidetically. He wrote this way, to be sure, as a means to persuade—to jolt our conscience, rouse our anger, and motivate us to act. But he also wrote this way because he recognized that stories—his own, and those of oppressed people everywhere—contain their own distinctive insights. They speak to truths which elude philosophy. They impart lessons about human experience, and humanity itself, inaccessible to categories of elite discourse. They give us a political theory not only about, but of, the powerless.