Frederick Douglass “Life and Times”
In the lengthening perspective of the Negro’s history in America the career and character of Frederick Douglass take on more and more the stature and significance of the epical. For in terms of the race experience his was, beyond doubt, the symbolic career, typical, on the one hand of the common lot, but on the other, inspiringly representative of outstanding achievement. Its basic pattern is that of the chattel slave become freeman, with the heroic accent, however, of self-emancipation and successful participation in the struggle for group freedom. Superimposed is the dramatic design of a personal history of achievement against odds, in the course of which the hero becomes both an acknowledged minority leader and spokesman and a general American publicist and statesman. Both chance and history conspired toward this, as he himself acknowledges, modestly enough, in his autobiography, but no one can come away from the reading of it except with the conviction that in mind and character he was, in large part, author of his own destiny. This heroic cast makes the story of Fred Douglass an imperishable part of the Negro epic, and should make his Life and Times, now for the first time reprinted, the classic of American Negro biography.
Another narrative of outstanding individual achievement and group service, however,—Booker Washington’s Up From Slavery, has long held prominence in popular attention and favor. Its author, himself a biographer of Frederick Douglass, gives an apt clue to at least one important reason for this—a reason over and above the comparative inaccessibility of the Douglass Life to the general reading public. Washington speaks of the Douglass career as falling “almost wholly within the first period of the struggle in which the race problem has involved the people of this country,—the period of revolution and liberation.” “That period is now dimmed,” he goes on to say, “we are at present in the period of correction and readjustment.” So different did it seem, then, to Washington in 1906 that he could regret “that many of the animosities engendered by the conflicts and controversies of half a century ago still survive to confuse the councils of those who are seeking to live in the present and future rather than in the past” and express the hope that nothing in Douglass’s life narrative should “serve to revive or keep alive the bitterness of those controversies of which it gives the history.” In so saying Washington does more than reveal the dominant philosophy of his own program of conciliation and compromise; he reflects the dominant psychology of a whole American generation of materialism and reaction which dimmed, along with Douglass and other crisis heroes, the glory and fervor of much early American idealism.
That period, in its turn, is closed or closing. And the principles of Douglass and his times,—the democracy of uncompromising justice and equality, perenially true for all acute observers, emerge from their social and moral eclipse all the more apparent, vital and inescapable. A chronicle of the initial struggles for freedom and social justice is, therefore, particularly pertinent again in our present decade of crisis and social reconstruction. Without undue belittlement, then, of Booker Washington in his time and place of limited vision and circumscribed action, it is only fair and right to measure Douglass, with his militant courage and unequivocal values, against the yardstick, not of a reactionary generation, but of all times. It is thus evident why in the intervening years Douglass has grown in stature and significance, and why he promises to become a paramount hero for Negro youth of to-day.
This can happen most sanely and effectively if today we read or re-read Douglass’s career in his own crisp and graphic words, lest he be minimized or maximized by biographers. There is most truth and best service in a realistic rather than a romanticized Frederick Douglass. For he was no paragon, without flaw or contradiction, even though, on the whole the consistent champion of human rights and the ardent, over-loyal advocate of the Negro’s cause. His life was full of paradoxes and on several issues he can be quoted against himself. In the course of events, for example, the man who ‘unsold himself from slavery’ accepted, for expediency at the hands of philanthropic anti-slavery friends the purchase price of his legal freedom; he could whip his overseer and defy, physically and morally, the slaveholder and yet forgive and benefact his old master. He could engage against great odds of personal safety in anti-slavery demonstrations in Indiana and elsewhere, and yet counsel John Brown against the Harper’s Ferry uprising in 1850, he declared uncompromisingly for pacifism and peaceful abolition, but in 1862 plead with Lincoln to enlist Negro troops and when the order finally came sent in his two sons and started out himself as a recruiting agent. Here contradictions of this sort could be cited, none more illustrative than the dilemma of intermarriage, which he had to face late in life before the bar of divided public opinion after a long and happy first marriage to his devoted ex-slave wife, said he to friends, in skillful but incisive self justification, “In my first marriage I paid a compliment to my mother’s race; in my second, to my father’s.” Whoever reads the full story will doubtless grant him in all cases the tribute of sincerity and courage, and in most instances, too, the vindication of the higher consistency. Douglass’s personality, even on its most human side, never lacked the fibre of manhood and manliness.
Douglass’s long and close identification with the anti-slavery cause, by which he is generally known, obscures his many-sided public life and service. Perhaps his surest claim to greatness came from his ability to generalize the issues of the Negro cause and see them as basic principles of human freedom, everywhere and in every instance. We see him accordingly taking sides with land and labor reforms in England and Ireland when there on a two-year anti-slavery campaign. Similarly he became one of the first public advocates of woman’s right and suffrage, attending the first Woman’s Right Convention and becoming the lifelong friend and co-worker of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. His speeches indicate that he clearly saw the land reform objectives of the Free Soil Party, whose first convention he attended in 1852, and was not just attracted by its more obvious bearing in blocking the extension of slave territory. His advocacy of Civil Rights Legislation and of free public education similarly showed him far in advance of any narrowly racialist view or stand. It is in this dimension of the progressive publicist and statesman that we need to know in deeper detail of the career of Douglass.
Needing emphasis, too,—to do him fuller justice, is his pioneer advocacy of practical vocational education (we find him visiting Harriet Beecher Stowe as early as 1852 with a plan for founding an industrial self trade school for coloured youth)—likewise, his early sponsorship of economic organization and business enterprize as a program supplementing educational advancement and political action. All this, when dated, is very impressive as evidence of statesmanship. Indeed objectives which later seem to have become rivals and incompatibles in the hands of leaders of lesser calibre were in the conception of Douglass allies in the common-sense strategy of a common cause. In this respect, he seems, particularly as we read his pithy prose so different from the polished and often florid periods of his orations, a sort of Negro edition of Ben Franklin, reacting to the issues of his time with truly profound and unbiased sanity. It is unusual for a campaigning advocate of causes and a professional creator to be so sane.
Witness his shrewd realistic comment that flanks, in his biography, his impassioned editorial ‘Men of Color: To Arms:’—showing him to be by no means the dupe of his own rhetoric,—“when at last the truth began to dawn upon the administration that the Negro might be made useful to loyalty as well as to treason, to the Union as well as to the Confederacy. It then considered in what way it could employ him, which would in the least shock and offend the popular prejudice against him.”
Much of his writing has upon it the timeless stamp of the sage. “No people,” he says, “to whom liberty is given can hold it as firmly and wear it as grandly as those who wrench their liberty from the iron hand of the tyrant.”… ‘No power beneath the sky can make an ignorant, wasteful and ideal people prosperous, or a licentious people happy.’ … ‘Neither we, nor any other people, will ever be respected till we respect ourselves, and we will never respect ourselves till we have the means to live respectably.’ … ‘My hope for the future of my race is further supported by the rapid decline of an emotional, shouting, and thoughtless religion. Scarcely in any direction can there be found a less favorable field for mind or morals than where such a religion prevails.’ Obviously there is much in Douglass, both of word and deed, which is vital and relevant to this present generation and to our world of today. Racially and nationally we still need the effective reenforcement of his career and personality. Youth, in its time of stress and testing crisis, needs and can benefit by the inspiring example of a crusading and uncompromising equalitarian. The Douglass League, in its mission of revitalizing Negro life today through the revival and rediscovery of its heroic past, is to be congratulated upon making Douglass’s autobiography once more readily available.
Sept. 3, 1940, 102nd Anniversary of Douglass’s Escape from Slavery.