DAVID WALKER, FREDERICK DOUGLASS, AND THE ABOLITIONIST DEMOCRATIC VISION
On August 22, 1831, a slave rebellion sent a shockwave through the American republic. Nat Turner, a precocious and charismatic slave who saw himself as a prophet driven by a divine vision, mobilized a group of slaves in Southampton County, Virginia, who unleashed a deadly assault on at least fifty-five white Americans. Nothing scared white slaveholders more than slave rebellions. Turner’s and, several decades later, the white abolitionist John Brown’s failed attempt to inspire a slave uprising in Harper’s Ferry, Virginia, in 1859 were probably the two most famous of the nineteenth century, but—starting with Gabriel’s Rebellion in 1800, a failed plot in which literate and privileged slaves sought to capture Richmond, Virginia, during the fraught presidential election between the Federalists and the Republicans—they were far from exceptional: Slave conspiracies, runaway plots, attempts at poisoning their masters, and insurgencies were widespread, even if not always memorialized.1
Turner’s revolt was squashed two days later, and, although he was in hiding for several months, Turner would be hanged and eventually skinned—according to some accounts, parts of his body became heirlooms.2 The decision of the Virginian state to deny Turner a funeral recalled Sophocles’s tragedy Antigone, in which the authoritarian political-realist ruler Creon punished his rebellious nephew Polynices by denying him a proper burial, to prevent public grieving, which might foment even more resistance in Thebes.3 The play’s eponymous heroine, Antigone, refused her uncle Creon’s decree through nonviolent civil disobedience—by burying Polynices, her brother.
After she was caught by the authorities, Antigone’s final protest was an inwardly directed act of suicide—a statement that said she, not the state, would have ultimate say over her death—but, in contrast, those slaves like Turner who died while protesting slavery did so while trying to confront those who enslaved them. For enslaved Americans—who had no political rights, no freedom of mobility, little hope for personal flourishing, and who lived with the constant threat of humiliation, if not violence—a life of complete bondage was much worse than the price of death, which was the cost of failed resistance. How, then, could black people fashion a practice of agency under these brutal circumstances? What kind of insights does slave rebellion offer about democratic citizenship?
Arguably no word other than “slavery” so formed the discursive backdrop of many American revolutionary arguments against British imperialism. Yet it was invoked more as an abstract idea than as an empirical reality—an idea completely devoid of its most obvious manifestation in the Southern colonies: the enslavement of black Americans. For many early Americans, slavery was positioned as the antithesis of political liberty.4 But if slaves had been given a voice in the Constitutional Convention in the summer of 1787, they would have said that the domination at the heart of African American slavery was much more than the deprivation of certain public freedoms like freely speaking and assembling and electing political representatives. Slavery was instead the deprivation of a minimally decent existence. Slaves were barred from education and were made to be illiterate; they had no recourse to the law; they were restricted to the plantation and forced to labor without any sort of compensation; and they were beaten, whipped, raped, and murdered at will.5
The intellectual flight from this experience was impossible for the African American abolitionists David Walker and Frederick Douglass.6 Walker was born legally free in 1785 in North Carolina to a free mother and slave father; Douglass was born into slavery in Maryland in 1818. Before dying at the young age of forty-four—rumors circulated that he was poisoned, but the official cause was tuberculosis—Walker would become one of the leading abolitionists in Boston through his involvement in various civic and religious organizations and through writings in the short-lived Freedom’s Journal. Douglass’s life was much longer and more public. His deeply affecting speeches—he was arguably the greatest orator in the American tradition—drew upon his own experience of escaping slavery as a teenager and made vivid the brutality of slavery in ways that had profound effects on the American public.
If one were asked to distill the primary similarity between Walker’s and Douglass’s abolitionist political thought, it would be that each invoked a nationalist argument about natural rights—usually drawn from the Declaration of Independence—to identify the tension between the moral American ideal of democracy and the immoral scourge of slavery.7 But there were significant differences between the two thinkers. Walker, who advocated slave resistance by all means necessary (including violence) in his most famous text, Appeal, in Four Articles; Together with a Preamble, to the Colored Citizens of the World, but in Particular and Very Expressly to Those of the United States of America (1829), was much more militant than Douglass, who, especially in his earliest speeches, used the rhetorical tactic of moral suasion popularized by William Lloyd Garrison’s newspaper The Liberator to persuade white Americans to abolish slavery through political compromises and electoral avenues.8 Although Walker criticized the fantasy of black emigration to Africa, he is nevertheless correctly viewed as one of the first black nationalists, given his defense of black solidarity.9 Douglass, however, was always an integrationist who sought to fold his political thought into the larger project of American exceptionalism.10
Exclusively focusing on these differences, however, can make us overlook an unappreciated project in which both were involved: an alternative practice of democratic citizenship that would seriously and directly address the problem of action under paralyzing and totalizing constraints. The rhetoric of Walker’s Appeal—replete with declarative statements, provocative exclamations, and searching questions—cast disenfranchised citizens as agents capable of political judgment in ways radical for the time. The text’s cynical tone articulated the democratic significance of deciphering the hidden interests behind declarations of moral benevolence. Furthermore, Walker insisted that a critical form of direct resistance could be energized through appreciating human finitude. He exposed in vivid ways how social division could intensify elite political power and how ideas such as human nature, responsibility, and patriotism needed to be reimagined.
More vividly than Walker, Douglass, in his second autobiography, My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), recounting his own direct resistance to his slaveholder Edward Covey, uniquely described slavery as a tool of psychological colonization. Yet Douglass, unlike Walker, used this analysis to remind readers that human dignity could never be fully divorced from action. Finally, Douglass centered attention on the way that anguish and shame could do powerful political work for resistance and argued that such emotional experience was central for theorizing the meaning of freedom.
THE LANGUAGE AND RHETORIC OF THE APPEAL
What understanding of slave agency was necessary to justify resistance? The 1830 edition of the frontispiece of Walker’s Appeal—originally published on September 28, 1829, in Boston, where he was both a key contributor to Freedom’s Journal and a salesman of used clothing—answered this question in a way few black Americans and no slaveholders would have accepted. At the center of the painting, the African American’s outstretched arms, reaching toward a cloud while standing upon a mountain, reiterated Walker’s prophetic argument that a just God would eventually smite the white perpetrators of slavery and redeem its black victims.11 Walker must have heard this argument repeatedly at the antislavery AME (African Methodist Episcopal) Church in Charleston, South Carolina, where he moved in 1822, which was at the center of the failed Vesey conspiracy plot, which involved the former slave Denmark Vesey’s plot to kill the governor of South Carolina and leave Charleston in flames.12
Vesey’s apocalyptic vision was expressed through his desire to turn Charleston into a dystopian hell, but no black American in the early nineteenth century so effectively used the pen to inflame slaveholders like Walker. If Vesey’s concern was strategizing rebellion, Walker was not only supplying its political theory but also sketching the new black political subject who could enact it. This explains why after the Appeal was circulated by hand and through a loose underground network throughout the American South, Southern planters offered a three-thousand-dollar bounty for Walker’s head and ten thousand dollars for his capture.
What the Appeal’s frontispiece told black readers did not sit well with slaveholder political thought. First, the absence of shackles, which symbolically and physically characterized slave life, suggested that black people could still become free, even if they had no political liberty under slavery. By shifting perspective away from liberty, which slaveholders believed needed to be regulated by government and could only be found through life in an organic society with well-defined social roles, and toward freedom, Walker defined self-determination as an internal condition of freedom. This internal condition of freedom could be the foundation for collective political struggle for liberty.
Second, the African American’s looking upward into the realm of ideals told readers that transcendent principles were essential for animating one’s freedom struggle. The radicalism of these ideals was found in the way they functioned like a fleeting horizon that could never be reached, but only approximated, in the world. Struggling to achieve these ideals with no end in sight, rather than stopping after some limited victories, the Appeal’s frontispiece suggested, needed to define black politics. Third, the person’s ambiguous positioning of their hands—at once summoning and receiving a deity decidedly absent from view, hidden above the heavens—suggested that emancipation required direct action in the world.
At the center of the Appeal’s rhetoric was indignation toward the twin viruses of American slavery and American racism, which entered a new phase by the 1820s, when the 1819 Missouri Compromise limited the spread of slavery in the new Western territories but nonetheless kept it in place below the Mason-Dixon Line.13 To communicate the gravity of this unbearable condition of racial domination, the Appeal deployed exclamations, sometimes as many as six after a sentence, repeated in dizzying fashion throughout the text. Walker announced: “But I tell you Americans! that unless you speedily alter your course, you and your Country are gone!!!!!!”14 Slavery destroyed white moral conscience and precluded the possibility of living in the light of truth, creating a condition instead where sin and greed ruled the day: “Their hearts have become almost seared, as with an hot iron, and God has nearly given them up to believe a lie in preference to the truth!!! And I am awfully afraid that pride, prejudice, avarice and blood, will, before long prove the final ruin of this happy republic, or land of liberty!!!!15
FIGURE 1.1 Frontispiece to David Walker’s Appeal, 1830.
Source: Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/resource/cph.3c05530/.
Compare Walker’s words to the tone and substance of two of the most famous American political manifestos up until that point: Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence (1776) and Thomas Paine’s Common Sense (1776). Not only does the Declaration fail to mention American slavery by name—and Common Sense barely mentions it—but both texts wanted to outrage white Americans who could not partake in the joys of representative citizenship but who still had basic freedoms of mobility and social dominance over both women and slaves. For Jefferson, the real problem was arbitrary and unelected political power. For Walker, the real problem was brutal social and economic exploitation. “Governments,” Jefferson said, “long established should not be changed for light and transient causes.… But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right … [to] provide new Guards for their future security.”16 Likewise, if for Paine tyranny was defined by an abnegation of the rule of law—“for as in absolute governments the King is law, so in free countries the law ought to be King; and there ought to be no other”17—then, for Walker, tyranny was the undemocratic, even if popularly sanctioned, rule of an immoral majority.
Similarly, although its preamble and four Articles—“Article I: Our Wretchedness in Consequence of Slavery,” “Article II: Our Wretchedness in Consequence of Our Ignorance,” Article III: Our Wretchedness in Consequence of the Preachers of the Religion of Jesus Christ,” and “Article IV: Our Wretchedness in Consequence of the Colonizing Plan”—mirrored the rhetorical structure of the U.S. Constitution to refound a polity serviceable for black Americans,18 the Appeal’s rhetoric also had a much more ambitious purpose than either it or the Declaration. The Appeal’s aim was not to lay the foundation for a certain kind of government but actually to transform the self-perception of the marginalized. Addressed as it was “to the Colored Citizens of the World,” there was something truly stunning about the Appeal’s assumption of the unquestioned status of African American citizenship when it was overtly denied through slavery or highly constrained through discriminatory practices in the North.19 Walker couldn’t have put it clearer: The Appeal’s purpose was to awaken in what he saw as his “wretched” black brothers “a spirit of inquiry and investigation respecting our miseries and wretchedness in this Republican Land of Liberty!!!!!!”20
Strikingly, throughout the text, Walker’s assertion of black citizenship was accomplished rhetorically: through the question mark. After the exclamation point, which appeared over four hundred times in a text of roughly thirty thousand words, no rhetorical device in the Appeal received as much play as the question mark, which appeared over two hundred times, doing the treasonous work of placing black people into a position to see themselves as agents capable of critical reflection at a moment when this position was denied them by slaveholders.21 Not all questions in the Appeal were constructed with the same objective. Many that Walker raised merely aimed to foment indignation about a reality that he believed was indisputable, rather than inspire independent reflection from his readers. He was convinced in his religious conviction that God would punish the white enslavers: “Will he let the oppressors rest comfortably and happy always? Will he not cause the very children of the oppressors to rise up against them, and oftimes put them to death?”22
Other questions, however, did much more politically. Take the following example, where Walker asked readers to consider that, if they were of Moses’s “excellent disposition,”
Would we not long before this time, have been respectable men, instead of such wretched victims of oppression as we are? Would they be able to drag our mothers, our fathers, our wives, our children and ourselves, around the world in chains and hand-cuffs as they do, to dig up gold and silver for them and theirs? This question, my brethren, I leave for you to digest; and may God Almighty force it home to your hearts.23
Asking readers to explore what freedom would look like expressed Walker’s recognition that different experiences and imaginations could lead to different answers, within which would be different views of the good life. Placing readers in a position to answer freely “yes” or “no” to his questions also expressed Walker’s defense of a mode of reflective judgment in which the potential of error was not simply rejected but seen to be intrinsic.
In Walker’s own view, however, freedom could never be viewed abstractly. One could only evaluate it by considering social context. Addressing emancipated black people, he wrote:
Do any of you say that you and your family are free and happy, and what have you to do with the wretched slaves and other people? … Look into our freedom and happiness, and see of what kind they are composed!! They are of the very lowest kind—they are the very dregs!—they are the most servile and abject kind, that ever a people was in possession of! If any of you wish to know how FREE you are, let one of you start and go through the southern and western States of this country, and unless you travel as a slave to a white man … or have your free papers … if they do not take you up and put you in jail, and if you cannot give good evidence of your freedom, sell you into eternal slavery, I am not a living man.24
Astute observation of the world, Walker insisted, revealed that freedom was not simply about mobility or lack of violent domination; it was instead black autonomy from the sovereign white gaze and racist institutions—especially in the South and West—that could exercise their power in arbitrary ways. Freedom could not be dependent upon a faith in fellow citizens not to deny a person his or her citizenship or political rights; it was about not worrying that this could become a possibility at any moment.
Walker’s rhetoric may have reframed black Americans’ self-perceptions of racial inferiority, but his assumption that black people had equal capacity for reason would have been denied by the slaveholding class, which did everything in its power to repress the public visibility of black reason by precluding them from civic discourse. To make his claim about equality resonate, sometimes he described how racism created a cycle of violence, which left all vulnerable to its brutal effects. Warning white Americans to stop this cycle before it unleashed a racial civil war, he wrote: “But remember, Americans, that as miserable, wretched, degraded and abject as you have made us … some of you, (whites) on the continent of America, will yet curse the day that you ever were born. You want slaves, and want us for your slaves!!! My colour will yet, root some of you out of the very face of the earth!!!!!!”25
At other times, Walker emphasized the God-given undeniable dignity of all human beings: “For you must remember that we are men as well as they. God has been pleased to give us two eyes, two hands, two feet, and some sense in our heads as well as they. They have no more right to hold us in slavery than we have to hold them.”26 At times, however, Walker characterized equality as bodily vulnerability. Note in the above passage the emphasis on God giving human beings two eyes, hands, and feet. In another passage, he cast the body as a source of suffering that neither blacks nor whites can escape. Drawing a parallel between the “social death”27 that defined slavery and what would also be easily recognizable in whites’ own lives (the inescapability of weakness, fragility, and death), he wrote, “Are we MEN!!—I ask you, O my brethren! … Are they not dying worms as well as we?”28 White supremacy was a political truth, and white slaveholders were responsible for unequal rates of premature death for black people, but talk of fundamental racial inequality made little sense when one recognized that no one could be completely invulnerable from an uncontrollable force like death.
Walker also understood that morality could help equalize those who were unequal. The Appeal embodied how religion could be a revolutionary force put in the service of ending oppression.29 Slaves had no political power, but, Walker insisted, they could wield moral power and be judged equally to whites on moral terms:
Have they not to make their appearance before the tribunal of Heaven, to answer for the deeds done in the body, as well as we? Have we any other Master but Jesus Christ alone? … What right then, have we to obey and call any other Master, but Himself? How we could be so submissive to a gang of men, whom we cannot tell whether they are as good as ourselves or not, I never could conceive. However, this is shut up with the Lord, and we cannot precisely tell—but I declare, we judge men by their works.30
Although primarily addressed to black Christians, the radical potential of this statement was not constrained by religious conviction. Morality was a great equalizer whose existence depended on deeds, not words. On the one hand, just like acknowledging the slave’s mortality—their death—could inspire in them a sense of fearlessness to act, so could acknowledging their morality lead them to refuse unjust laws. Fidelity to moral principle could encourage vigorous black dissent.31 On the other hand, Walker’s understanding of morality also highlighted something powerful about human vulnerability. If truth was found in God’s will (and so the absolute moral truth would never be fully known until one experienced divine judgment), then one needed always to resist hubris in believing in their moral righteousness. As he wrote elsewhere: “The Americans may be as vigilant as they please, but they cannot be vigilant enough for the Lord, neither can they hide themselves, where he will not find and bring them out.”32 Translated into an idiom for citizenship, one needed to work against their wishes to demonize others.
AMERICAN CYNICISM
Taking seriously a critical mode of judgment would have helped black Americans shift internal perceptions about being inferior, but what kind of disposition did they need to adopt toward those who dominated them? Walker’s answer was cynicism.33 Soon after the Appeal’s publication, the only thing that matched whites’ cynicism toward Walker’s authorship (they couldn’t fathom that a black person could compose such a well-researched, critically engaged, theoretically sophisticated, and deftly written text) was Walker’s cynicism toward white Americans actually believing his claims:
I say, I do not only expect to be held up to the public as an ignorant, impudent and restless disturber of the public peace, by such avaricious creatures, as well as a mover of insubordination—and perhaps put in prison or to death, for giving a superficial exposition of our miseries, and exposing tyrants.34
Walker’s words remind us that cynicism can erode the possibility of honest communication—the last thing one would want to embrace in organizing a national liberation organization such as Walker’s short-lived Massachusetts General Colored Association (MGCA), created in 1828, or the African Lodge of freemasons, of which he was a member.
But more than simply guarding against the vulnerability that may come with being outsmarted or duped, Walker’s use of the word “exposition” captured how cynicism’s emancipatory value comes from the way it actually exposes the world in which one lives, piercing the official discourse of public justification, drawing attention to what is lurking in the shadows, unsaid, implied. Before the Appeal’s publication, the most famous cynics in American political thought were the Anti-Federalists, who excoriated and described as too naïve the authors of The Federalist—Madison, Hamilton, and Jay—for failing to recognize that the self-interest foundational to human nature could always corrupt the most civic republican of political institutions, where political elites ruled with patriotism and a sense of the public good. As the Anti-Federalists famously put it in “Brutus no. 2”: “Rulers have the same propensities as other men; they are as likely to use the power with which they are vested for private purposes, and to the injury and oppression of those over whom they are placed, as individuals in a state of nature are to injure and oppress one another.”35
Walker’s cynicism, however, was not directed toward virtuous political rule but toward moral benevolence. Take Walker’s reflections on former secretary of state Henry Clay’s proposal to send free black Americans to Africa, so that they could create a colony that might encourage slaveholders to emancipate their slaves. Walker first cited a speech of Clay’s that said free black Americans
neither enjoyed the immunities of freemen, nor were they subjected to the incapacities of slaves, but partook, in some degree, of the qualities of both. From their condition, and the unconquerable prejudices resulting from their colour, they never could amalgamate with the free whites of this country. It was desirable, therefore, as it respected them, and the residue of the population of the country, to drain them off.
Walker then asked:
Is [he] a friend to the blacks, further, than his personal interest extends? Is it not his greatest object and glory upon earth, to sink us into miseries and wretchedness by making slaves of us, to work his plantation to enrich him and his family? Does he care a pinch of snuff about Africa—whether it remains a land of Pagans and of blood, or of Christians, so long as he gets enough of her sons and daughters to dig up gold and silver for him?36
At another moment in the text, Walker would unleash his ire at Elias Caldwell, clerk of the U.S. Supreme Court, who claimed that the African colonization plan actually represented white Americans’ love of liberty—specifically, their desire to extend it to black Americans. Quoting Caldwell, Walker wrote:
He says, “surely, Americans ought to be the last people on earth, to advocate such slavish doctrines, to cry peace and contentment to those who are deprived of the privileges of civil liberty, they who have so largely partaken of its blessings, who know so well how to estimate its value, ought to be among the foremost to extend it to others.” The real sense and meaning of the last part of Mr. Caldwell’s speech is, get the free people of colour away to Africa, from among the slaves, where they may at once be blessed and happy, and those who we hold in slavery, will be contented to rest in ignorance and wretchedness, to dig up gold and silver for us and our children. Men have indeed got to be so cunning, these days, that it would take the eye of a Solomon to penetrate and find them out.37
For Walker, relocating freed black Americans to Africa would only intensify slavery. Stifled would be the potential for black solidarity and resistance; alleviated would be the feeling of white guilt. Although Walker’s critique of Clay and Caldwell expressed his implicit agreement with the Federalists and Anti-Federalists that self-interest had been one guiding motivation of human behavior, it also conveyed that the skepticism cynicism unleashes—compared, for instance, to dispositions like pragmatism, which tries to approach problems with how they can best be solved, or irony, which teases out the humorous contradiction between what is expected and what occurs—is especially valuable when it is centered on an ideological system of white supremacy that dominates through doubletalk.
Many slaveholders and ostensible moderates like Clay and Caldwell invoked decidedly liberal, Enlightenment arguments about the importance of private property, freedom, and popular sovereignty to keep enslavement intact.38 If this was the ideological armor through which slavery functioned, then cynicism—which could pierce and dismantle the view that freedom can only be achieved through emigration to Africa and that black cultural progress and emotional health required white stewardship—was as powerful as the pistols and knives used in slave rebellions.
If no abolitionist could doubt the importance of exposing the lies through which white supremacy operated, then few went so far as Walker to call for the importance of confronting rather than dismissing white racist views. At the heart of Walker’s ire was Thomas Jefferson’s famous “Query XIV,” in Notes on the State of Virginia (1785), which described black people as naturally incapable of philosophical genius and that asserted—without any moral qualms or indignation—the ease with which slaves could be murdered: “When a master was murdered, all his slaves in the same house, or within hearing, were condemned to death.”39 Walker wanted readers to feel his own indignation at Jefferson’s words:
Do you believe that the assertions of such a man, will pass away into oblivion unobserved by this people and the world? If you do you are much mistaken—See how the American people treat us—have we souls in our bodies? … I am after those who know and feel, that we are MEN, as well as other people; to them, I say, that unless we try to refute Mr. Jefferson’s arguments respecting us, we will only establish them.40
Walker’s very decision to engage with Jefferson’s antidemocratic racism, which itself stood in an uneasy relationship with Jefferson’s defense of natural rights,41 performed a hallmark of democratic citizenship that was undeveloped in Jefferson’s own radically democratic defense of a local ward system in which citizens locally and directly controlled their political fates in a town-hall setting. Jefferson proposed that this would allow “the voice of the people” to be “fairly, fully, and peaceably expressed, discussed, and decided by the common reason of society.”42 Jefferson saw democracy as a matter of direct popular rule, but Walker thought—and the Appeal embodied how—it meant nothing without fully understanding opposing political-theoretical positions and required embracing a mode of political communication animated by disagreement rather than consensus.43 For Walker, it was not enough to agree or learn how to disagree respectfully about issues pertaining to collective political life; one needed to learn and respond directly to the very positions that actually threatened one’s existence. This was not a cordial discussion about policy but a matter of life and death.
Walker urged black Americans to practice autonomous critical reflection: “We, and the world wish to see the charges of Mr. Jefferson refuted by the blacks themselves … for we must remember that what the whites have written respecting this subject, is other men’s labours, and did not emanate from the blacks.”44 On the one hand, understanding Jefferson’s position could enable black Americans to test it against their own knowledge (as well as the sense that they themselves are capable of knowledge without white paternalism) that they “know and feel.” On the other hand, engaging Jefferson’s position could allow black Americans to see that white racism was incredibly dangerous. Seeing in full force Jefferson’s position regarding the dispensability of black life would bring into relief racism’s lethal intensity (white racism is not innocuous and is always on some level the first step toward unleashing violence and death) and the conceptual fragility of the racist argument. This would show that racism not only legitimizes racial violence and domination but that both are necessary to secure the intellectually weak arguments upon which it subsists.
ABOLISHING SLAVERY
At the heart of Walker’s resistance to slavery was the articulation of an effective argument for abolishing slavery. This was no easy task given the way slavery was debated in American culture. Indeed, many moderate, even nonslaveholding, white Americans appreciated Abraham Lincoln’s views in his 1858 debate with Stephen Douglas. At the outset of his speech, Lincoln described slavery as a political problem in which the salient criteria for abolition centered on whether it would create more or less national disunity or whether it was economically feasible or politically practical. As he put it:
My first impulse would be to free all the slaves, and send them to Liberia.… But a moment’s reflection would convince me, that … in the long run, its sudden execution is impossible.… What then? Free them all, and keep them among us as underlings? Is it quite certain that this betters their condition? … What next? Free them, and make them politically and socially our equals? My own feelings will not admit of this; and if mine would, we well know that those of the great mass of white people will not.45
Understanding that decisions about slavery based on cost-benefit analyses or the maintenance of political order would likely keep the racially unequal status quo in place, Walker refused Lincoln’s approach and instead evaluated slavery in moral terms: “The sources from which our miseries are derived, and on which I shall comment, I shall not combine in one, but shall put them under distinct heads and expose them in their turn; in doing which, keeping truth on my side, and not departing from the strictest rules of morality.”46
But Walker’s shift away from political to moral necessity also coexisted alongside an attempt to redescribe the barometer for abolishing slavery. The barometer, for him, was whether it inflicted physical and emotional suffering, not whether it deprived people of political liberties or rights—the right to free speech, to assembly, equal protection under the law—or whether it would create political backlash from the white electorate. He wrote:
If he is not a tyrant, but has the feelings of a human being, who can feel for a fellow creature, he may see enough to make his very heart bleed! He may see there, a son take his mother, who bore almost the pains of death to give him birth, and by the command of a tyrant, strip her as naked as she came into the world, and apply the cow-hide to her, until she falls a victim to death in the road! He may see a husband take his dear wife, not infrequently in a pregnant state, and perhaps far advanced, and beat her for an unmerciful wretch, until his infant falls a lifeless lump at her feet!47
Walker knew that thinking about the physical effects of slavery on those who endured it would more likely force one to engage slavery as it was lived rather than as a rational calculation about whether emancipation was or was not politically viable. The above passage also tells us about Walker’s implicit embrace of the argument that morality is at once affected by emotion and, in an important sense, is itself an emotional sentiment.48 Sentimentalism here is meant to inspire in readers a feeling of moral outrage and to see slavery as a moral wrong that consists of depriving human beings of everyday experiences. Enslavement was defined by a life where the constant threat of violence replaced love and where humiliation replaced dignity.
Perhaps because appeals to reason had rarely worked on slaveholders, Walker thought appealing to emotions would be more effective for moving all Americans from a condition of passivity to action. Witnessing these “cries and groans in consequence of oppression [that] are continually pouring into the ears of the God of justice,”49 he believed, could encourage white Americans to ask whether such a life would ever be acceptable for anyone and facilitate greater soul-searching for the reasons why many simply stood by idly. “If you will allow that we are MEN, who feel for each other,” Walker asked, “does not the blood of our fathers and of us their children, cry aloud to the Lord of Sabbath against you, for the cruelties and murders with which you have, and do continue to afflict us?”50
Another of Walker’s resistance strategies for abolition, however, was to describe black suffering as historically exceptional:51
I promised in a preceding page to demonstrate to the satisfaction of the most incredulous, that we, (coloured people of these United States of America) are the most wretched, degraded and abject set of beings that ever lived since the world began, and that the white Americans having reduced us to the wretched state of slavery, treat us in that condition more cruel (they being an enlightened and Christian people), than any heathen nation did any people whom it had reduced to our condition. These affirmations are so well confirmed in the minds of all unprejudiced men, who have taken the trouble to read histories, that they need no elucidation from me.52
Notwithstanding their historical accuracy, these assertions make the notion of American exceptionalism much more difficult to sustain.53 American exceptionalism—replete with an ostensible commitment to equality, rights, progress, and justice—becomes retold as a story of unparalleled violence and human degradation.54 The Appeal’s embodiment of a Manichean Christian moralism—the strict dichotomy between good and evil—never stopped Walker from warning his black readers to see that the white American conviction that they were “enlightened” and that they were a “Christian people” was contradicted by and actually helped perpetuate “wretchedness and endless miseries … to be poured out upon [black] fathers, ourselves and [black] children.”55 American exceptionalism could no longer be used to inspire hope of just political change. Walker’s political plea to black Americans was clear. They were to anticipate always the unseen and creative forms future white domination might take. They were to assume that the answer to this question would always be a resounding yes: “I will ask one question here—Can our condition be any worse?—Can it be more mean and abject?”56
But exposing how slavery inflicted exceptional suffering or that America was unexceptional was not entirely adequate for addressing one of the major intellectual defenses of slavery, which centered on arguing that it was comparatively better than freedom under capitalism. Slaveholder intellectuals were appalled by the elitist snobbery and heartlessness of Northern abolitionists. “Compare his condition [the American slave’s] with the tenants of the poor houses in the more civilized portions of Europe,” John Calhoun declared. “Look at the sick, and the old and infirm slave, on the one hand, in the midst of his family and his friends, under the kind superintending care of his master and mistress, and compare it with the forlorn and wretched condition of the pauper in the poor house.”57 George Fitzhugh went even further, arguing for poor whites to be enslaved. After all, “had [free white workers] been vassals or serfs, they would have been beloved, cherished and taken care of by those same landlords and employers. Slaves never die of hunger, scarcely ever feel want.”58
Aware of these distorted arguments, Walker proposed a different way to judge the ethics of slavery. Expanding the notion of family from the nuclear household to humanity, Walker saw the insult to one’s dignity to be as serious a crime as that of economic exploitation. Quoting Jefferson’s view in the Notes that “I advance it therefore as a suspicion only, that the blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind,” Walker declared: “This very verse, brethren, having emanated from Mr. Jefferson … has in truth injured us more, and has been as great a barrier to our emancipation as any thing that has ever been advanced against us. I hope you will not let it pass unnoticed.”59 Furthermore, he asked: “Have [they] not, Americans, having subjected us under you, added to these miseries, by insulting us in telling us to our face, because we are helpless, that we are not of the human family?”60 and “Have they not, after having reduced us to the deplorable condition of slaves under their feet, held us up as descending originally from the tribes of Monkeys or Orang-Outangs?”61
Dignity for Walker meant something other than what it did for slaveholders: It was a basic status of equal human worth, rather than an esteemed social status where one comported oneself with measured pride and unbridled honor.62 But embedded in Walker’s rhetorical questions was something powerful: an attempt to make indignation the measure for abolition. Adequate redress of moral wrongs places into positions of power those who have been wronged. It is their judgment that determines whether dignity has been violated or properly been upheld. Furthermore, moral injury is irreducible to and more difficult to measure (and thus redress) than economic or political deprivation. Because it is not easily quantifiable, indignation can become a potent source for resistance and create spaces where those who experience it can make more and more demands upon those who violate it.
POWER AND DEPENDENCE
Walker’s time in slaveholding cities such as Wilmington and Charleston must have led him to appreciate how power was protean because its manifestations depended on the specific practices through which it was enacted and authorized. No one in the American tradition before Walker had so thoughtfully disentangled the complex yet interwoven relationship between those who ruled and those they ruled over. On the one hand, the classic American statement on power, Alexander Hamilton’s “Federalist no. 70,” described the importance of the executive branch (the president) having power that was unitary and indivisible, characterized by qualities like “decision, activity, secrecy, and dispatch.”63 But for Hamilton, it was precisely the closely linked relationship between the people and elites that diminished his concern of absolutism. In his view, “the restraints of public opinion” would curtail the excessive power of political elites.64 Yet what Hamilton failed to grasp with much depth—or intentionally wanted to ignore, for he was a statesman as much as a philosopher—was something Walker understood: the creative way elites could deepen their own power through creating a condition of self-inflicted subjugation in those they dominated.
In Walker’s view, this occurred through elites producing a condition of ignorance in the oppressed. The second article of the Appeal, entitled “Our Wretchedness in Consequence of Ignorance,” said that “Ignorance, my brethren, is a mist, low down into the very dark and almost impenetrable abyss in which, our fathers for many centuries have been plunged”65 and that “ignorance, the mother of treachery and deceit, gnaws into our very vitals.”66 For Walker, ignorance had the effect of destroying the black solidarity crucial for resistance. Every time a son beat his mother, a father killed his infant, or slaves spread “news and lies, making mischief one upon another,”67 focus would be displaced away from the source of their suffering—slavery. Meanwhile, slaveholder power would remain unquestioned, if not become strengthened—“the reason our natural enemies are enabled to keep their feet on our throats.”68 So too was this displacement accomplished through slaveholders creating competition between slaves and free blacks, who were so desperate to earn a living that they often helped recover fugitive slaves or enslave those who were free. No group did Walker despise more: They were “in league with tyrants, and who receive a great portion of their daily bread, of the moneys which they acquire from the blood and tears of their more miserable brethren, whom they scandalously delivered into the hands of our natural enemies!!!!!!”69
In another example of a woman slave who brought to safety a white slaveholder after he survived the rebellion of sixty slaves he was leading to dig for gold and silver, Walker lamented the horrifying effects of mixing ignorance with empathy. Here, slaveholder power worked through the slave’s self-policing. Empathy was something of a moralizing discourse of power where the oppressed subject participated in his or her own oppression.70 Walker wondered:
Was it the natural fine feelings of this woman, to save such a wretch alive? I know that the blacks, take them half enlightened and ignorant, are more humane and merciful than the most enlightened and refined European that can be found in all the earth … there is a solemn awe in the hearts of the blacks, as it respects murdering men: * (* Which is the reason the whites take the advantage of us).71
These lines capture Walker’s critique of Madison’s solution to the problem of human plurality and freedom. In “Federalist no. 10,” Madison thought the solution for keeping both alive was to create more factions, which would compete against one another so that no single one would become too powerful, giving all a voice. As he explained: “Extend the sphere, and you take in a greater variety of parties and interests; you make it less probable that a majority of the whole will have a common motive to invade the rights of other citizens.”72 But neither the problem of unequal voice nor unequal resources especially bothered Madison. If Madison truly considered this, perhaps he would have seen what Walker understood well: how competition between those who are voiceless and powerless keeps those who have both voice and power in good shape. Subjugated people fighting over limited goods keep racial inequality intact.
Yet we should express skepticism about Walker’s questionable view that slave-on-slave violence, manipulation, and empathy were somehow productive merely of ignorance or lack of willpower rather than physical compulsion or necessity. And we should rebuke Walker’s ideas, which surface throughout the Appeal, of nineteenth-century racial naturalism—the long since rejected view that races have biological and heritable characteristics that define human behavior.73 We should also notice that Walker’s example of black treachery centered on a black slave woman raises the question of whether the Appeal is narrowly concerned with liberating black men and whether his notion of virtue was deeply masculine.74 He declared at one point, “Oh! my coloured brethren, all over the world, when shall we arise from this death-like apathy?—And be men!! You will notice, if ever we become men, (I mean respectable men, such as other people are,) we must exert ourselves to the full.”75
Finally, we should worry about Walker’s own inability to straddle the delicate line between warning citizens about the subjugating power of empathy and rejecting empathy at all costs. Rejecting empathy entirely in favor of no-nonsense political realism allows violence to enter the picture. The paragraph after the anecdote about what he perceived as the traitorous enslaved black woman not only expressed Walker’s problematic conviction in the virtue of manhood but was one of the few places in the Appeal where he explicitly endorsed violence as a form of self-defense—“that it is no more harm for you to kill a man, who is trying to kill you, than it is for you to take a drink of water when thirsty; in fact, the man who will stand still and let another murder him, is worse than an infidel, and, if he has common sense, ought not to be pitied.”76
HUMAN NATURE, RESPONSIBILITY, AND PATRIOTISM
Another of Walker’s ambitions in the Appeal was to recast the meaning of human nature to make it serviceable for resistance. This was understandable given that arguments about human nature were central to many nineteenth-century American defenses of slavery. Usually, this entailed adopting some version of Aristotle’s argument in the Politics—that slaves completely lacked the “deliberative faculty” and were unsuited for citizenship.77 The Appeal’s entire argument and rhetorical ambition was about rejecting this view, but Walker’s own thinking about human nature did not simply reiterate Locke’s argument about individuals being generally peaceful78 or echo Rousseau’s argument that human beings naturally felt pity.79
For Walker, human nature—or what might be more appropriately called the behavior of those who find themselves in the human condition—was socially constructed and always evolving:
The whites have always been an unjust, jealous, unmerciful, avaricious and blood-thirsty set of beings, always seeking after power and authority … [In ancient Greece and Rome and later in Gaul, Spain, and in Britain] cutting each other’s throats … they used all kinds of deceitful, unfair, and unmerciful means … we see them acting more like devils than accountable men.80
One can dispute Walker’s view that white Americans had always been historically violent but nonetheless notice how his words suggest that this was by no means necessary. Walker’s emphasis on deeds reveals his view that action creates human identity, while his emphasis on immoral activities illuminates the difference between some essential and impermanent human behavior. This becomes even clearer in the following passage, where he expresses his “suspicion of [white people], whether they are as good by nature as we are or not. Their actions, since they were known as a people, have been the reverse.”81
Walker’s oft-repeated notion of “natural enemies” is therefore both misleading and can be explained through his understanding of human action. Racial hostility is not natural but is instead productive of a social relationship. For evidence, consider the following statement: “I have several times called the white Americans our natural enemies—I shall here define my meaning of the phrase.… I say, if we are men, and see them treating us in the manner they do, that there can be nothing in our hearts but death alone, for them, notwithstanding we may appear cheerful, when we see them murdering our dear mothers and wives, because we cannot help ourselves.”82 Note Walker’s juxtaposition of blacks’ death wish for whites—something that runs counter to any feeling of empathy—with the claim that this feeling emerges in one’s “heart,” which conjures the very sentimentalism with which he wants all citizens to register suffering. This emotional ambivalence is produced through a relationship of power. Indeed, Walker’s own ambivalence engendered in him a feeling of hope that white Americans could change their wayward ways: “But Oh Americans! Americans!! I warn you in the name of the Lord, (whether you will hear, or forbear,) to repent and reform, or you are ruined!!!”83
The Appeal was no less remarkable for the intensity with which it chastised white Americans for defaulting on their moral responsibility as it was for its uncompromising plea to black Americans to rethink responsibility as something driven by the pursuit of collective freedom.84 Invoking an antimaterialistic argument, Walker asserted that the pursuit of more wealth was of a lower order than struggling to liberate those who were enslaved: “Be looking forward with thankful hearts to higher attainments than wielding the razor and cleaning boots and shoes.”85 Walker revised the vaunted pursuit of happiness that the Declaration of Independence championed as one of the inalienable rights of democratic citizenship. Happiness, for Walker, was not based in personal edification but could only be realized through struggling to end the collective oppression of all people of color worldwide.86 “Your full glory and happiness, as well as all other coloured people under Heaven, shall never be fully consummated,” Walker declared, “but with the entire emancipation of your enslaved brethren all over the world.”87 Slaveholders would have been aghast—as many of them truly believed that the occasional slave song, laugh, or dance on the plantation (which was nothing but a coping mechanism) signified satisfaction with one’s standard of living.88 And Walker’s call for actively participating for the common good in a way (“entire” rather than limited) and for a purpose (social rather than political liberation) would have been odd—if not worrisome and potentially dangerous—for some American civic republicans who believed that uncompromised social liberation was entirely outside the purview of political life.89
Marx and Engels, writing twenty years after Walker in The Communist Manifesto (1848), would have rejected Walker’s revolutionary defense of racial solidarity at the expense of class solidarity, but they would have appreciated Walker’s internationalist notion of struggle, which moved past the narrow confines of the U.S. nation-state and also found historical expression in actual uprisings in Antigua, the Bahamas, and Jamaica in 1830 and 1831.90 Walker counseled a practice of revolutionary leadership that entailed acting with those who were not yet enlightened, even though his words may have sounded problematically paternalistic to some: “I conjure you in the name of the Lord, and of all that is good, to impute their actions to ignorance, and wink at their follies, and do your very best to get around them some way or other, for remember they are your brethren.”91
Walker’s internationalism militated against uncritical nationalism, but his Appeal was nonetheless couched in the language of national attachment—or something approximating civic love—that exceeded narrow racial identification.92 In addition to refusing to renounce black birthright citizenship, saying, “this country is as much ours as it is the whites, whether they will admit it now or not, they will see and believe it by and by,”93 citing the Declaration of Independence became Walker’s own patriotic attempt to emphasize the American democratic hypocrisy at the heart of racial domination. “Compare your own language,” Walker wrote, “from your Declaration of Independence, with your cruelties and murders inflicted by your cruel and unmerciful fathers and yourselves on our fathers and on us—men who have never given your fathers or you the least provocation!!!!!!”94
On some level, patriotism—even in its most benign forms—often seems to encourage uncritical deference to national institutions in ways that might allow inequality to remain intact.95 Walker’s brand of patriotism, however, had more democratic potential, which was expressed by the way he made public usefulness the measure of whether his ideas were politically successful.96 At the outset of the Appeal, he declared: “I shall endeavor to penetrate, search out, and lay [the facts of slavery] open for your inspection. If you cannot or will not profit by them, I shall have done my duty to you, my country and my God.”97
Patriotism here was measured not by uncritical love of country but directly by the kind of emancipatory value it had for oppressed citizens, who themselves were endowed with the authority to scrutinize patriotic claims. Even if this practice of patriotism didn’t entirely solve the problem of unfettered national love, it nonetheless served as an important check on what kind of patriotic assertions were or weren’t acceptable. For Walker, patriotism was not simply an embodiment of unconditional love toward national identity but was conditional upon a certain political achievement: collective liberation. Love required complete emancipation. One couldn’t and shouldn’t love one’s country unless it liberated the most oppressed: “We ask them for nothing but the rights of man, viz. for them to set us free, and treat us like men, and there will be no danger, for we will love and respect them, and protect our country—but cannot conscientiously do these things until they treat us like men.”98
DOMINATION AND HUMANITY
As one of the greatest egalitarian humanists of the nineteenth century whose thinking centered on the idea of freedom, Frederick Douglass was, like Walker, the man Douglass eulogized in 1883 as one of the first great antislavery pioneers,99 one of the most perceptive American theorists of its opposite: bondage.100 In painting the most intimate portrait of the experience of enslavement any American had ever read, My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), the second of his three autobiographies, interpreted slavery as a psychological experience of domination in ways that would have even surprised Walker. The Appeal can be read as an unwavering defense of the possibility of black people to exercise the exemplary virtues of citizenship despite domination. Some of My Bondage’s most despairing passages, however, suggested the exact opposite. “Under the whole heavens there is no relation more unfavorable to the development of honorable character [than slavery],” Douglass wrote, because the way it rigidly organized one’s life produced an inner psychic chaos. “Reason is imprisoned here, and passions run wild.”101
The slave’s psychological colonization, for Walker, occurred primarily through ignorance, but Douglass believed that it occurred through making reflective human beings into automatons. The enslaved person became a bundle of nerves. Existential fear, dread, and unease were abundant. The outcome was devastating. The slave could not think of himself as having individuality:
“Tumble up! Tumble up, and to work, work,” is the cry; and, now, from twelve o’clock (mid-day) till dark, the human cattle are in motion, wielding their clumsy hoes; hurried on by no hope of reward, no sense of gratitude, no love of children, no prospect of bettering their condition; nothing, save the dread and terror of the slave-driver’s lash. So goes one day, and so comes and goes another.102
Slavery created subjects who—after continued physical, emotional, and intellectual deprivation—learned to deny their own humanity. Here and elsewhere Douglass conveyed how slave resistance was incredibly difficult because there was no firm ground from which to resist.103 Taking the definition given to us by physics, we could say that resistance entails a countervailing action against some force. But the slave was, for Douglass, something of “a fixture; he has no choice, no goal, no destination; but is pegged down to a single spot, and must take root here, or nowhere.”104
Historians have marshaled copious evidence of slave resilience in the face of domination in a way that renders dubious Douglass’s view of the traumatized, docile slave—an inflammatory narrative that would also resurface in the 1960s.105 But judged less for its accuracy of depicting slave life and more as a narrative that theorized the relationship between social power and agency, Douglass implied a startling idea: that achieving freedom required shifting individual self-perception. In the aftermath of the Civil War, Douglass asserted that self-reliance greatly depended upon the government’s ability to secure material goods for all citizens.106 But never did he believe that gaining full political, social, or economic rights could simply overturn psychological colonization. A kind of Copernican transformation of one’s mindset was necessary. But what did this entail, and how did one achieve it?
ACTION AND DIGNITY
Six years prior to the publication of My Bondage, Thoreau thought he had the answer, in what would eventually become one of the most famous nineteenth-century meditations on political dissent, “Resistance to Civil Government” (1849). For Thoreau, the first step toward freedom was moral conscience, which would transform citizens from what he saw as passive, unthinking machines into active political subjects. Thoreau wrote: “The only obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think is right … a corporation has not conscience; but a corporation of conscientious men is a corporation with a conscience.”107 If Douglass’s appeals to white conscience to abolish slavery before the 1850s embodied Thoreau’s argument, his view on racial domination throughout his autobiographies dramatized the limitations of Thoreau’s view. How could slaves begin to appreciate their moral conscience if they had trouble seeing themselves as having dignity in the first place?
For Douglass, the ability to recognize one’s dignity thus turned on direct action in the world. He would trace this idea in My Bondage’s most critically discussed chapter, “The Last Flogging,” which detailed his transformative experience of resistance at the youthful age of sixteen. Douglass didn’t read the Appeal as a youth, but several years after it was published his confrontation with his then-slaveholder, Edward Covey, a violent and impulsive “Negro breaker” who treated slaves as brutally as he treated his oxen, suggested that he didn’t have to. We shouldn’t simply overlook an important difference between Walker’s and Douglass’s acts of resistance: Walker’s, enacted through a manifesto, was centered on fomenting collective black revolt against slavery; Douglass’s was deeply personal. But Douglass’s brief recollection of the event was as much a story of Douglass’s life as it was a work of consciousness raising and political theory. One of its central points was this: Publicly resisting power allowed one to recognize one’s own dignity.108
Here is how Douglass told it: Bloody and dejected after being beaten by Covey, he refused to acquiesce to the “tyrant’s” will and instead “was resolved to fight … The fighting madness had come upon me, and I found my strong fingers firmly attached to the throat of my cowardly tormentor; as heedless of consequences, at the moment, as though we stood as equals before the law. The very color of the man was forgotten.”109
Douglass echoed Hegel’s view that the fearlessness emerging from violent struggle—between the lord and the bondsman—could be emancipatory, a view Hegel himself may have developed through carefully following the revolt of real black slaves against their white masters in the Haitian Revolution against French colonialism from 1791 to 1804.110 As Hegel wrote: “For this consciousness … its whole being has been seized with dread; for it has experienced the fear of death, the absolute lord.”111 With nothing to lose—and with only his freedom to gain—Douglass, like the bondsman, struggles against Covey, the lord, and in so doing recognizes himself as an agent capable of killing him, of negating Covey’s existence.112
Hegel thought the bondsman’s experience of existential dread was crucial for self-recognition, but for Douglass, perceiving oneself as an actor in the world gave rise to the recognition of human dignity. An astute reader might wonder whether Douglass’s own act of resistance did not challenge his earlier depiction of domination as compromising slave agency. But what if the incident with Covey not only signaled a turning point in Douglass’s thought, where he now recognized that resistance was possible—Douglass’s analysis of domination was, after all, described earlier in the narrative of My Bondage—but also his understanding that, as Hegel understood, domination created the very contours of resistance? If slavery transforms slaves into bundles of emotion, then it is precisely, according to Douglass, two emotions—anguish and what he calls a “fighting madness” (rather than reason)—that inspire resistance.
Anguish was an especially powerful emotion Douglass experienced during his stay at Covey’s: “I was completely wrecked, changed and bewildered; goaded almost to madness at one time, and at another reconciling myself to my wretched condition … all my former hopes and aspirations for usefulness in the world … contrasted with my then present lot, but increased my anguish.”113 But Douglass would not be consumed by it. After the first beating at the hands of Covey, which forced him into hiding and eventually to seek help from the slaveholder that had initially lent him to Covey for a short time, Thomas Auld, Douglass described how
after lying there about three quarters of an hour, brooding over the singular and mournful lot to which I was doomed, my mind passing over the whole scale or circle of belief and unbelief, from faith in the overruling providence of God, to the blackest atheism, I again took up my journey toward St. Michael’s, more weary and sad than in the morning when I left Thomas Auld’s for the home of Mr. Covey.114
Douglass’s Hegelianism went deeper than is generally appreciated (anguish, or despair for Hegel, was not simply a source of resignation but of engagement): As heavy as it is, anguish is not only debilitating but allows one to reflect upon one’s commitment to survival and partake in serious existential reflection upon the meaning of commitment itself.115
But let us briefly return to the final sentence in the quotation cited earlier—“we stood as equals before the law. The very color of the man was forgotten”—which illustrates Douglass’s view that resistance also deepens, rather than emerges from, one’s sense of equality and undermines narratives of racial inferiority. Douglass’s words capture how the very experience of volitional action creates the psychological reality that one possesses inviolable self-worth.
Douglass’s argument makes sense once one realizes that human dignity is never an empirical fact. More so than anything else, it is an abstract normative theory of human worth—a theory that tells us the kind of value that should be placed on human life. We can debate whether dignity should be substantially conceptualized as a virtue—a cultivated act that speaks to something redemptive in one’s character—or whether it is nothing more than a status afforded to all people, something they have irrespective of what they do.116 But we can say with greater certainty that human dignity is nothing without some kind of acknowledgment. To put it differently, its existence depends on the person within whom it exists to acknowledge its existence.117
In Douglass’s case, acting in the name of self-defense brought forth the recognition of his dignity. “My resistance was entirely unexpected,” he told readers, “and Covey was taken all aback by it, for he trembled in every limb. ‘Are you going to resist, you scoundrel?’ said he. To which, I returned a polite ‘Yes sir;’ steadily gazing my interrogator in the eye, to meet the first approach or dawning of the blow, which I expected my answer would call forth.”118 Douglass continued, “the cowardly tyrant asked if I ‘meant to persist in my resistance.’ I told him ‘I did mean to resist, come what might;’ that I had been by him treated like a brute, during the last six months; and that I should stand it no longer.”119 Analyzing this moment for what it tells us about Douglass’s views on the redemptive power of physical violence misses the centrality of the performance that animates it. Self-defense creates the recognition that one’s life is important enough to struggle to the death for. A verbal utterance—his declaration of “yes sir”—alongside his steady gaze and the cool awareness of his tone conveyed Douglass’s understanding that he could neither be conquered nor was willing to relinquish his life. Volition gave rise to action, which gives rise to the recognition of volition, which, in turn, solidifies his recognition of dignity.
To appreciate this point further, notice the tension Douglass clearly elucidated between undignified action and what he described as the force necessary for dignity. In his concluding reflections in “The Last Flogging,” he wrote, “this battle with Mr. Covey—undignified as it was, and as I fear my narration of it is—was the turning point in my ‘life as a slave’ … A man, without force, is without the essential dignity of humanity. Human nature is so constituted, that it cannot honor a helpless man, although it can pity him; and even this it cannot do long, if the signs of power do not arise.”120 One way to read this is as evidence of Douglass partaking in a defense of manhood. His equation of force with dignity makes resistance the barometer for one’s manhood.121
But another equally significant argument is at work here. Consider the striking tension between Douglass’s characterization of his battle with Covey as “undignified” and his statement that force is necessary for dignity. One way to resolve this tension is to understand Douglass’s appreciation of the political-theoretical difference between violence and force. Violence refers to a specific means used to inflict direct harm, while force refers to something—again to borrow the language of physics—that literally changes the motion of an object.122 Douglass’s use of violence—his attempt to suffocate Covey—is thus undignified because it cannot engender the recognition of dignity. This recognition can, however, be created through the direct action that Douglass is a force to be reckoned with—that he can affect the trajectory of the world and the lives of those around him.
EXPERIENCE AND COMMUNITY
Douglass’s revolt against Covey was something of a transcendent experience that animated his sense of hope that a better future was within reach. But at the heart of his retelling was also a challenge to the view that political thinking could fully be divorced from, or was not in any strong way related to, embodied experience. Experience told Walker that freedom rarely existed for black Americans (free and enslaved), given the totalizing force of white supremacy, but Douglass more forcefully argued that the very meaning of what freedom was is determined by those denied it. He wrote:
[My resistance to Covey] rekindled in my breast the smoldering embers of liberty; it brought up my Baltimore dreams, and revived a sense of my own manhood. I was a changed being after that fight. I was nothing before; I WAS A MAN NOW. It recalled to life my crushed self-respect and my self-confidence, and inspired me with a renewed determination to be A FREEMAN.
He can only understand the effect of this combat on my spirit, who has himself incurred something, hazarded something, in repelling the unjust and cruel aggressions of a tyrant. Covey was a tyrant, and a cowardly one, withal. After resisting him, I felt as I had never felt before. It was a resurrection from the dark and pestiferous tomb of slavery, to the heaven of comparative freedom. I was no longer a servile coward, trembling under the frown of a brother worm of the dust, but, my long-cowed spirit was roused to an attitude of manly independence. I had reached the point, at which I was not afraid to die. This spirit made me a freeman in fact, while I remained a slave in form. When a slave cannot be flogged he is more than half free. He has a domain as broad as his own manly heart to defend, and he is really “a power on earth.”123
Suggesting that Douglass had achieved “comparative freedom”—or that external bondage did not preclude him from being internally free—aligned with Emerson’s claim that individual self-reliance could make one free.124 Emerson argued that “nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. Absolve you to yourself, and you shall have the suffrage of the world.”125 For both, personal freedom and political freedom were never as divorced in practice as they might have been in theory. A stronger view of personal freedom does not provide the promissory note for political withdrawal.126 Yet if Emerson subscribed to thinking about freedom in ways divorced from real social conditions and experiences (conscience was conscience, freedom was freedom, irrespective of who was thinking about it), Douglass believed that his experience in the world gave rise to political-theoretical reflection.127
Resistance, for Douglass, engendered thinking about three temporal moments: the present (the kind of activity in which one is engaged), the future (what might otherwise be but is not yet), and the past (who one was and what they will not be).128 Paradoxically, thinking about a reality that one had never experienced could only occur through experience—whether this entailed remembering the experience of deprivation or the joys or fears associated with one’s present condition of agency. The meaning of freedom is therefore as much an existential experience as it is a product of experience.129
No less than rethinking freedom, Douglass reimagined community. Walker drew attention to the way human identity was dependent upon deeds; Douglass centered attention upon the way community not only appeared in unlikely everyday places but also emerged spontaneously. His argument challenged what was implied in Calhoun’s A Disquisition on Government (1848), which asserted that community was fixed, an organic entity founded in history and tradition, which had a definable set of interests: “Man is so constituted as a social being. His inclinations and wants, physical and moral, irresistibly impel him to associate with his kind.”130 If Calhoun depicted community in this way to justify why slaveholders constituted an intractable social class who needed to be given veto power over any political decision, Douglass depicted community as ephemeral in order to create hope for the possibility of resisting power. “We were all in open rebellion, that morning,” Douglass explained, in giving a synoptic view of what was happening as he fought with Covey, because one of Covey’s slaves, Caroline, “was in no humor to take a hand in any such sport [of helping Covey subdue Douglass],” and one of Covey’s hired slaves, Bill, “affected ignorance” when he “pretended he did not know what to do” and subversively played upon his status as laboring human chattel rather than a rational actor, claiming, “My master hired me here, to work, and not to help you whip Frederick.”131 Caroline’s and Bill’s micropolitical acts of black solidarity were as ephemeral and contingent as Douglass’s resistance to Covey.132
Shifting attention away from the smaller black community of enslaved people to the larger white American one, Douglass reminded readers that black resistance could emerge because of American racist culture. Not only did black Americans often subversively play on racist myths about black passivity and stupidity—as did Bill with his feigned ignorance—but these racist myths also exercised a powerful hold on whites in ways that could keep black resistance alive. The very shame Covey experienced at being beaten by Douglass, an African American youth of sixteen, precluded him from acknowledging the encounter—he never spoke about it again. Covey’s fear of collective white backlash allowed Douglass to continue plotting his escape. “Covey was, probably, ashamed to have it known and confessed that he had been mastered by a boy of sixteen,” Douglass wrote, because he “enjoyed the unbounded and very valuable reputation, of being a first rate overseer and Negro breaker.”133 In 1838, Douglass was finally successful, consummating in his own life the transition his second autobiography retold: from bondage to freedom, Douglass’s two lifelong theoretical concerns.
SLAVERY AND CONTEMPORARY DEMOCRACY
Any sober observer of contemporary life will see that slavery is not a relic of the past. Slavery remains a serious international problem with real effects for many people—ranging from the lucrative global business of sex-trafficking young women to the continuing problem of unpaid labor for undocumented citizens. This reality is striking given that in our current moment many countries have—at least in theory, if not in practice—adopted democracy as the normative standard for governance. How could democracy and slavery coexist?
Taking seriously Walker’s call for cynicism might help us answer this question. Rather than be fundamentally at odds with the modern democratic promises of progress, freedom, and equality, slavery coexists with or is actually essential for the achievement of these aspirations.134 This is not a logical connection but rather a case in which democratic ideas can easily be deployed in deeply antidemocratic ways. Progress can become the justification for bringing populations into the capitalist workforce, even if these workers have no rights in the workplace; the aspiration for freedom (for some) can be the reason why some wish to exploit others; and equality may create anxiety (if all are equal, then some might fail to achieve what they want) about one’s social status, which could lead the more anxious ones to authorize a system in which some people are marginalized and placed in a fixed social position (slaves).
Although the link between slavery and democracy may be more troubling than many acknowledge, few would disagree with the argument that achieving democracy requires citizens, and the governments that they legitimate, to take an active role in abolishing slavery. Walker and Douglass understood this well. Yet their own resistance to slavery reflected an exemplary practice of democratic citizenship that reimagined many core American ideals to make American democracy into something that was not restricted to the few but existed for the many.
Their practice and ideas can also be made useful for those who are currently struggling with a sense of political hopelessness or are living under intense constraints, especially those whose rights are tenuous. Walker and Douglass show how to cultivate a language of political critique that identifies and exposes the inner workings of oppression, how to make and remake communities, and how to establish decolonized identities and articulate emancipatory demands in spaces that neither legitimize nor sanction them.
They remind vulnerable citizens that negative emotions like anguish and fear can be important resources for political struggle, that democratic authority is never sanctioned but always seized, and that struggling for individual and collective freedom with a sense of moral responsibility may also require either strategically adapting to, or drawing unexpected sustenance from, the constantly evolving communities and social relationships in which this struggle takes place. Above all else, Walker and Douglass express an idea that is as simple as it is powerful: Struggle can be made possible even in the most impossible places and moments and is an indispensable instrument for democracy.