02.03.2021 | FREDERICK DOUGLASS (1817 - 1895)
Frederick Douglass
Frederick Douglass (c. 1817–1895) is a central figure in United States and African American history.[1] He was born a slave, circa 1817;[2] his mother was a Negro slave and his father was reputed to be his white master. Douglass escaped from slavery in 1838 and rose to become a principal leader and spokesperson for the U.S. Abolition movement. He would eventually develop into a towering figure for the U.S. Civil Rights Movement, and his legacy would be claimed by a diverse span of groups, from liberals and integrationists to conservatives to nationalists, within and without black America.
He wrote three autobiographies, each one expanding on the details of his life. The first was Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written By Himself (in 1845);[3] the second was My Bondage and My Freedom (in 1852a; FDAB: 103–452);[4] and the third was Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (in 1881; FDAB: 453–1045). They are now foremost examples of the American slave narrative. In addition to being autobiographical, they are also, as is standard, explicitly works of political and social criticism and moral suasion; they were aimed at the hearts and minds of the readers, and their greater purpose was to attack and to contribute to the abolition of slavery in the United States, and to argue for the full inclusion of black Americans into the nation.
Shortly after escaping from slavery, Douglass began operating as a spokesperson, giving numerous speeches about his life and experiences, for William Lloyd Garrison’s American Anti-Slavery Society. To spread his story and assist the abolitionist cause, as well as to counter early charges that someone so eloquent as he could not have been a slave, Douglass wrote and published his first autobiography, the Narrative. The Narrative brought Douglass fame in the United States and the United Kingdom, and it provided the funds to purchase his freedom.
After breaking with Garrison, Douglass founded and edited his first paper, the North Star, and authored a considerable body of letters, editorials, and speeches. These writings have been collected in Philip Foner’s multivolume, The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass (1950–1975, hereafter FDLW),[5] and in John W. Blassingame and John R. McKivigan’s multivolume, The Frederick Douglass Papers (1979–, hereafter FDP).
Douglass’s life, from slavery to statesman, his writings and speeches, and his national and international work have inspired many lines of discussion in debate within the fields of American and African American history, political science and theory, sociology, and in philosophy. His legacy is claimed, despite his links to ideas of cultural and racial assimilationism, by black Nationalists as well as by black liberals and black conservatives.
Douglass can be linked to the history of American philosophy, through his participation in national discussions about the nature of and future of the American Republic and its institutions. In that light he is linked to his contemporaries who had academic philosophic connections, in particular Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882), and by the uptake of his political and social legacy and writings by later African American philosophers, such as W.E.B. Du Bois (1868–1963) and Alain Locke (1884–1954; see Harris 1989). Frederick Douglass: A Critical Reader, edited by Bill E. Lawson and Frank M. Kirkland (1999), is a valuable guide to lines of inquiry about Douglass, and the debates he inspired, within philosophy in the United States. In contemporary philosophy in the United States, Douglass’s work is usually taken up within American philosophy, African American philosophy, and moral, social, and political philosophy; in particular, the debates in those areas focus on his views concerning slavery and (later in his career at the dawn of Jim Crow segregation) racial exploitation and segregation, natural law, the U.S. constitution, violence and self-respect in the resistance against slavery, racial integration versus emigration or separation, cultural assimilation, racial amalgamation, and women’s suffrage.
In his three narratives, and his numerous articles, speeches, and letters, Douglass vigorously argued against slavery. He sought to demonstrate that it was cruel, unnatural, ungodly, immoral, and unjust. He laid out his arguments first in his speeches while he was with Garrison’s American Anti-Slavery Society, and then in his first autobiography, the Narrative. As the U.S. Civil War drew closer, he expanded his arguments in many speeches, editorials, and in his second autobiography, My Bondage and My Freedom.
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