Sarah Gorbatov

Ms. Edelman

Humanities (Honors B)

Thursday, Dec 10, 2020

Turning to Douglass: How Do We Preserve Our Collapsing American Democracy?

“We are a country of all extremes, ends, and opposites; the most conspicuous example of

composite nationality in the world. Our people defy all the ethnological and logical

classifications. In races, we range all the way from black to white, with intermediate shades

which, as in the apocalyptic vision, no man can name a number,” proclaimed Frederick Douglass

during an 1869 oration in Boston in which he advocated for Chinese immigration, a proposition

that, at the time, defied the popular opinion of observers and politicians alike. A fugitive slave

turned orator, poet, human rights activist, and abolitionist, Douglass shattered all expectations of

the capabilities and potential influence of a 19th-century black man. In the foreword to “My

Bondage and My Freedom,” his second autobiography, a close friend of Douglass’s wrote that,

at the time, if a foreigner arrived in America and sought out its most powerful men through

newspapers and telegraph messages, they would inevitably catch wind of a spirited speaker

demanding his voice be heard by all of the country, thralls and presidents inclusive. Douglass

was the Socratic sort of man who would ask, as this friend has divulged, “‘Tell me your

thought!’ and somehow or other, revolution seemed to follow in his wake.”

For a long time, Frederick Douglass, then Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey,

believed he was born in 1817, but when he visited a former master in 1877, he was informed that
he had actually been born in 1818, although the exact date no one knows. Born into slavery,

Douglass could scarcely recall his mother, who had been assigned to a new household just

months after giving birth, and he never discovered who his father was, though likely he was a

white man. “Genealogical trees,” Douglass acerbically observed, “do not flourish among slaves.”

As an infant, he was sent to a plantation in Maryland and brought up by his grandmother until, at

the age of eight, his owner sold him to the Auld family in Baltimore. Mrs. Auld immediately

rebelled against state law and started teaching Douglass how to read and write. The man of the

house, however, declared that an education and literacy would deem Douglass unfit for slavery,

and thus he was forced to continue learning surreptitiously with the occasional donation of books

and writing utensils from nearby schoolboys. At 16, upon the death of Mr. Auld, he was returned

to the plantation as a field hand and later hired as a ship caulker. There, on the rowing docks, he

attempted to flee with three other slaves, but their plot was revealed before they could flee. Five

years later, however, Douglass, imitating a sailor, managed to run away to New York City and

then to Bedford, Massachusetts, working as a laborer and changing his surname to Douglass to

elude the slave hunters enabled by the Constitution (Article IV, Section 2) and empowered by the

notorious Fugitive Slave Act. At a Nantucket anti-slavery convention in 1841, he was invited to

share his experiences with and sentiments about slavery. “It was as if he transformed into a

songbird upon opening his mouth,” one attendee of the convention remarked. Douglass came

unprepared and yet his words were so eloquent, potent, and inspirational that he was catapulted

into a career as an agent for the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, and from then on, with the

guidance of his fellow abolitionists, he cultivated his remarkable talents as an orator and writer

despite incessant mockery and even violent personal attacks. Not once did he waiver or flag in

his devotion to the abolitionist cause, his dedication all the more impressive by virtue of the
depths from which he rose and the pall of ambiguity that enveloped his origins.

Some skeptics contended that it was not possible for a former slave to be such an

articulate spokesman. To counter these accusations, Douglass felt compelled to write his first

autobiography: ​Life and Times of Frederick Douglass​. This account, which he then published

only to prove himself, became a classic in the American literary canon, as well as one of the first

primary sources about slavery actually from the slave’s perspective, as opposed to the

slaveowner’s or bystander’s. Mentioning his former master’s name and address in the work,

Douglass realized he was putting himself in harm’s way, and therefore left on a two-year

speaking tour of Great Britain. Abroad, he mingled and made many new foreign friends for the

abolition movement and tied the humanitarian knot between the US and UK, two intercontinental

juggernauts. Returning from the voyage with Douglass were funds to purchase his freedom and

start his own newspaper called the ​North Star​ (later changed to ​Frederick Douglass’s Paper​) in

Rochester, NY. Abraham Lincoln stumbled upon the paper one day and immediately took a

liking to Douglass’s rhetoric and poignancy, and while the two powerful political figures often

clashed on matters such as when to go to war and how to establish equality and preserve

democracy, ultimately, they became extremely close collaborators and companions. After the

Emancipation Proclamation was ratified and the Reconstruction era was underway, Douglass

fought for full civil rights for freedmen and passionately advocated for women’s rights alongside

Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. At the end of the day, it is difficult to imagine a

more remarkable tale of self-determination and advancement, as well as zeal for a cause, than the

life of Frederick Douglass.

 It is not, on the other hand, difficult to imagine Frederick Douglass’s character as a result

of the numerous autobiographies he wrote and details of his life he recorded. In ​The Narrative of

the Life of Frederick Douglass,​ for instance, Douglass is both the narrator and protagonist, which

makes for a fascinating dichotomous dialogue between how he perceives himself and how he

carries himself. In the memoir, Douglass details his transition from an uneducated, oppressed

slave to a silver-tongued political commentator, and as any proficient commentator, he is capable

of taking into account both sides of a predicament, even that of slavery. He definitely doesn’t

make any excuses for slave owners, but he does make an effort to display a realistic, if critical,

account of how the abominable institution of slavery operates and why. This strangely humane

outlook allows Douglass to, in the book, distinguish slave owners from the system that corrupts

them, offer certain concessions, and freely adopt the opposing perspective. In many of his

orations, Douglass also compares African American slaves to the American people under

imperial British rule. By making such juxtapositions, by relating his listeners to himself and the

sufferings of those black, and by being able to see beyond any myopic rose-colored glasses, he

appeals to the masses and encourages empathy. There’s nothing more humans, Americans

specifically, love than being included in stories, jokes, events, and shared traumas, and Frederick

Douglass perfectly exploits this quality of ours, twisting it to challenge America’s hypocrisy,

immorality, and insecurity. It doesn’t hurt, of course, that Douglass was exceptionally

resourceful, as evidenced by his untraditional self-education, and his earnest desire to help

others, demonstrated by his persistent support of minorities, civil rights, and democracy and his

denouncement of slavery, American exceptionalism, and the country’s narrow-mindedness.

At any moment, Douglass could have easily taken up the quieter, more reserved life of a
clothier or found work in the whaling industry, both of which were common jobs for African

Americans who had escaped to the North. He could have easily traveled to Canada and lived out

the rest of his days relaxed and unconcerned, far beyond the reach of slave catchers. But he

chose a different path. ​Personal​ freedom wasn’t sufficient for Frederick Douglass—he wanted

universal​ freedom. He wanted equality, equal opportunity, impartiality, due process, morality,

the protection of individual rights, a limited government, separation of powers, and social justice.

He wanted democracy. Thus, when Radical Reconstruction gained momentum in Washington,

D.C., he was more than thrilled. The fact that the ex-Confederate states were being placed under

rigid military supervision and political and social rights for the previously enslaved were

materializing was, for Douglass, proof of the fall of our national cant and our move toward

shaping a new Constitution grounded in three long-coveted amendments spawned by the war:

The Thirteenth Amendment (ended slavery), the Fourteenth (called for birthright citizenship and

the equal protection clause), and the Fifteenth (granted black men the right to vote). Douglass

even became an enthusiast for American expansion. Now that America had finally accomplished

what its Founding Fathers (who Douglass had always admired: “The signers of the Declaration

of Independence were brave men. They were great men, too, great enough to give frame to a

great age,” reads his ​What to the Slave is the Fourth of July? ​speech) had promised it would, the

nation could export its egalitarian values to societies who were either pro-slavery or still riddled

with racial discrimination. Pervading the air was the spirit of the country, the hope everyone had

that America would shed the memories of the bloodstained war and slavery’s evil iron grip and

become the democratic land of milk and honey it had vowed to be. Everyone, especially

Douglass, craved a “composite nationality” that would separate Church and state, align with a

single approved Constitution, federalize the Bill of Rights, and propagate liberty more than any
country Douglass had visited on his tour many years ago. Deciding whether this utopian

democracy was a fledgling possibility or mere fantasy was a matter quite familiar to Douglass, as

well as determining whether he was ready to make the jump from an embittered critic of

American racism and hypocrisy to a believer that, in his own words, “the most fortunate of

nations” was “at the beginning of our ascent.”

“I have no love for America… I have no patriotism. I have no country,” he announced at

one point, “The institutions of this country do not know me, do not recognize me as a man except

as a piece of property.” In ​What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?,​ perhaps Douglass’s most

famous and referenced speech, one that he gave to an audience of white women at an abolitionist

conference in Rochester, he sheds light on America’s inherent two-facedness. Our Declaration of

Independence declares independence and liberty, and yet there had been 4 million slaves toiling

away at the dirt, being whipped, spat on, and debased, and losing touch of what made them

human. “This Fourth of July is yours, not mine, You may rejoice, I must mourn,” Douglass so

tear-jerkingly conveyed. While white Americans were off lackadaisically hip-hip hooraying for

their freedom, black Americans were in a state of what seemed to be perpetual agony,

dehumanization, sorrow, and captivity. Yet, in Douglass’s mind, America had a “mission” that

still needed completing, that the country was an idea yet to come into fruition. Now, post-Civil

War, it was time to complete that mission, and as Douglass took on a definition of nationality

quite similar to that of modern-day Irish political scientist Benedict Anderson—that of

“imagined communities,” where a nation is purely a socially constructed collection of

communities imagined by the people who perceive themselves as part of the constituency—he

explained that being part of a nation “implies a willing surrender and subjection of individual
aims and ends, often narrow and selfish, to the broader and better ones that arise out of society as

a whole.” In this regard, John Locke, the Father of Liberalism, and Douglass had thought

processes not so dissimilar. In fact, the likeness is indisputable. Both blatantly express their

reverence for the principles of popular sovereignty, natural rights, communal contribution to

democracy, and the division of Church and state.

The great and chief end, therefore, of men’s uniting into commonwealths, and putting

themselves under government, is the preservation of their property. To which in the state

of nature there are many things wanting. First, There wants an established, settled,

known law, received and allowed by common consent to be the standard of right and

wrong, and the common measure to decide all controversies between them: for though

the law of nature be plain and intelligible to all rational creatures; yet men being biassed

by their interest, as well as ignorant for want of study of it, are not apt to allow of it as a

law binding to them in the application of it to their particular cases. Secondly, In the

state of nature there wants a known and indifferent judge, with authority to determine all

differences according to the established law: for every one in that state being both judge

and executioner of the law of nature, men being partial to themselves, passion and

revenge is very apt to carry them too far, and with too much heat, in their own cases; as

well as negligence, and unconcernedness, to make them too remiss in other men’s. —

John Locke​, Second Treatise of Government​, 1690

A Government founded upon justice, and recognizing the equal rights of all men;

claiming no higher authority for its existence, or sanction for its laws, than nature,
 reason and the regularly ascertained will of the people; steadily refusing to put its sword

​ rederick Douglass​, Our

and purse in the service of any religious creed or family. – F

Composite Nationality​, 1869

During the concluding decades of the 19th century, amid the Gilded Age, nativism,

nationalism, and racism reemerged, eugenics became legitimate, and violence, specifically with

the Jim Crow laws, cemented a system that bolstered white supremacy. By the 1890s, Douglass

was practically on his deathbed, aged and ill, and yet he could still churn out the most beautiful,

moving orations. In the last speech of his lifetime, ​Lessons of the Hour​, he analyzed the

disenfranchisement and murderous brutality caused by lynchings, which were gaining popularity

then, and how a country once infused with “nobility” was decaying into one with “buzzards,

vultures, and hyenas” establishing what was so obviously mob rule. Douglass, heartbroken at the

sight, implored his audience to remember that America’s “mission was the redemption of the

world from the bondage of ages.”

Now more than ever, we must recall these hymn-like words as our country’s democracy

hangs on a loose string and its composite nationality is in shatters. Our recent election has drawn

so thick, so rigid, so polarizing a line in our country’s soul, that we have each turned against our

own friends and family, borne grudges, and judged individuals on a basis of political stance. We

have formed comforting, impermeable echo chambers and refused to depart them. We have

politized a global pandemic and jeopardized the safety of ourselves and those around us simply

to spite another. We have been led by a president who openly, unabashedly asked of his

supporters to break federal law and double vote and then, once he received word that he had still,
despite his ingenious efforts, lost, thrown a hissy fit and tossed around accusations of election

fraud. We have allowed minorities to remain disenfranchised on account of voting rights

rollbacks and the contorted prison industrial complex. We have witnessed police brutality, the

prevention of peaceful protest, and exigent racial unrest. We have seen the un- and

underemployed struggle to provide for themselves in the midst of an economic recession. We

have sent our children to school with the ever-looming existential threat of gun violence. We

have observed an imbalance in opportunity, education, and income between men and women.

We have stood idly by as undocumented immigrants live akin to fugitives and are labelled

“illegal animals” by the government that is meant to welcome and support them. We have beheld

people struggling to get across something so seemingly natural yet apparently controversial: their

lives matter.

This is most certainly not a reality that Frederick Douglass envisioned when he

proclaimed that the exercise of human rights is the “deepest and strongest of all the powers of the

human soul.” Douglass passed during a tumultuous time similar to ours, but he had pictured and

prayed for a tomorrow better than today. Of course, he acknowledged the impossibility of

perfection and the futility of striving for it, and yet, much like President Barack Obama in his

2013 inaugural address, he understood that the fact that our union is inherently imperfect is all

the more reason to strive for a better, a perfect-er union. “We must act, knowing that our work

will be imperfect. We must act, knowing that today’s victories will be only partial and that it will

be up to those who stand here in four years and 40 years and 400 years hence to advance the

timeless spirit once conferred to us in a spare Philadelphia hall.” Douglass would have applauded

these words. He would have sat alongside the Black Lives Matter and #MeToo movements,
alongside the LGBTQ+ community, alongside all underrepresented and exploited minorities, and

alongside Martin Luther King Jr., John Lewis, Nelson Mandela, John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X,

Rosa Parks, Malala Yousafzai, Joan Didion, Gloria Steinem, Toni Morrison, Eleanor Roosevelt,

Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Angela Davis, Maya Angelou, Yoko Ono, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie,

Grace Lee Bogs, and so many other trailblazers and torchbearers. He would have been proud of

them and of us, and he would have rooted for us as we continued to fight for our rights and what

is right. If anything, the narrative of Frederick Douglass and his countless touching orations

serve to emblematize what it means to be American: to rise from dust and ashes, learn of the

flaws and shortcomings of your home, discern the light in the darkness—the sizzling potential

for a brighter future—and to expand that light. All changing the world requires is a keen eye, an

open heart, and a strong will. “The duty of today,” Frederick Douglass communicated, “is to

meet the questions that confront us with intelligence and courage.” The duty is indeed ours. I’m

ready. Are you?

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Slave. Written by Himself​, docsouth.unc.edu/neh/douglass/douglass.html.

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2019,

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teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/what-to-the-slave-is-the-fourth-of-july/.

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