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November 10, 2012 21:24
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The lives of Douglass: Part II | |
------------------------------ | |
Originally posted on Tuesday, December 21, 2004 | |
As I explained in [Part | |
I](http://modeforcaleb.blogspot.com/2004/12/lives-of-douglass-part-i.html), | |
Frederick Douglass's | |
[*Narrative*](http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/Literature/Douglass/Autobiography/) | |
marked the highpoint of his collaboration with the radical abolitionists | |
who identified with William Lloyd Garrison, the fiery editor of the | |
*Liberator*. Both Garrison and Wendell Phillips, another prominent white | |
abolitionist, wrote glowing prefaces for the *Narrative*, which they | |
rightly identified as a powerful new weapon in their armory of | |
antislavery polemics. The *Narrative* also catapulted Douglass to fame, | |
first as a Garrisonian lecturer but then as a celebrity in his own | |
right. As James McCune Smith put it in the introduction to Douglass's | |
second autobiography, [*My Bondage and My | |
Freedom*](http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/toc/modeng/public/DouMybo.html), | |
"It is not too much to say, that he formed a complement which [the | |
Garrisonians] needed, and they were a complement equally necessary to | |
his 'make-up.'" | |
Yet by the time *My Bondage and My Freedom* was published in 1855, both | |
complements and compliments had given way to open conflict between | |
Douglass and the Garrisonians. Part of the blame belongs to the | |
persistence of racial prejudice among some white Garrisonians -- a | |
condescension of which Douglass became acutely aware while he toured | |
Great Britain in 1846. Yet prejudice alone does not explain the rift | |
between Douglass and his former friends. Nor should we patronize | |
Douglass with the condescension of posterity by assuming that he was but | |
a passive victim, who played no active role in the rift. As McCune Smith | |
also suggested in his foreword to *My Bondage and My Freedom*, one of | |
Douglass's own personality traits may have been an extreme sensitivity | |
to any hint of patronization -- a trait that certainly would have been | |
understandable in a man with his history and in his circumstances. "The | |
same strong self-hood," wrote Smith, "which led him to measure strength | |
with Mr. Covey," (the slave driver immortalized by [the famous fight | |
scene](http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/Literature/Douglass/Autobiography/10.html) | |
in Douglass' *Narrative*) "and to wrench himself from the embrace of the | |
Garrisonians, and which has borne him through many resistances to the | |
personal indignities offered him as a colored man, sometimes becomes a | |
hyper-sensitiveness to such assaults as men of his mark will meet with, | |
on paper." | |
It may be impossible, however, to judge finally whether Garrisonians' | |
insensitivity or Douglass's sensitiveness was most to blame for the | |
complex personal friction between the two parties. What *is* clear is | |
that the friction only encouraged Douglass's desire for independence. | |
And however justified or understandable that desire might have been, it | |
is also clear that Douglass framed his break with the Garrisonians in | |
the most provocative of ways by publishing *My Bondage and My Freedom*. | |
The title itself was edgy. It claimed Douglass's narrative, his life, as | |
his own property: "*My* Bondage and *My* Freedom." In the introduction, | |
Smith's implicit comparison between Covey and the Garrisonians also | |
suggested that Douglass's "Freedom" from *Southern* "Bondage" would not | |
be the book's only plot. The book would also conclude by framing | |
Douglass's relationship with the Garrisonians as itself a kind of | |
"Bondage," and his decision to found his own newspaper in Rochester as a | |
new birth of "Freedom." | |
Sparks flew in the closing chapter of the book, when Douglass recounted | |
the objections that many Garrisonians had to his newspaper. These | |
objections were interpreted by Douglass as accusations that he was | |
"ambitious and presumptuous." Such words certainly had not been unknown | |
in Garrisonian circles when the subject of Douglass's new venture came | |
up. Although he tried hard to convince his former allies that he knew | |
what he was doing, Douglass wrote that he was "not sure that I was not | |
under the influence of something like a slavish adoration of my Boston | |
friends." Douglass knew that the Bostonians would be pricked by the word | |
"slavish," no matter how carefully it was swaddled in awkward syntax | |
(the double negative that began the sentence) and qualifications | |
("something like" ... "adoration" ... "friends"). The inflammatory word | |
was "slavish." And in the years after 1855, Douglass fanned the flame. | |
In 1857, he declared: | |
> I know, my friends, that in some quarters the efforts of colored | |
> people meet with very little encouragement. We may fight, but we must | |
> fight like the Sepoys of India, under white officers. This class of | |
> Abolitionists don't like colored celebrations, they don't like colored | |
> conventions, they don't like colored Anti-Slavery fairs for the | |
> support of colored newspapers. They don't like any demonstrations | |
> whatever in which colored men take a leading part. They talk of the | |
> proud Anglo-Saxon blood, as flippantly as those who profess to believe | |
> in the natural inferiority of races. Your humble speaker has been | |
> branded as an ingrate, because he has ventured to stand up on his own | |
> right, and to plead our common cause as a colored man, rather than as | |
> a Garrisonian. I hold it to be no part of gratitude to allow our white | |
> friends to do all the work, while we merely hold their coats. | |
> Opposition of the sort now referred to, is partisan opposition, and we | |
> need not mind it. [From "West India Emancipation," in The Life and | |
> Writings of Frederick Douglass, ed. Philip S. Foner, vol. 2, pp. | |
> 436-37.] | |
Comparing Garrisonians to the colonial officers of the British empire? | |
These were strong words indeed, especially when one considers that they | |
were uttered in the year of the "[Sepoy | |
Mutiny](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sepoy_Mutiny)" in India. (That | |
quote was for you, | |
[Sepoy](http://www.chapatimystery.com/1857blog.html)!) But Douglass's | |
1857 speech also brings us to a second important dimension of the | |
Garrisonian rift, for it suggests that the break had to do not only with | |
personal offense, but also with "partisan opposition." Douglass's break | |
occurred at the same time that the antislavery movement as a whole was | |
fracturing, and not just along faultlines dividing white and black | |
reformers. | |
In the 1840s, many white abolitionists, like Gerrit Smith, James Birney, | |
and Lewis Tappan, increasingly disagreed with the Garrisonians about | |
major strategic and dogmatic issues, like the question of whether | |
violence could be used in the service of antislavery goals. Many black | |
abolitionists also broke with Garrisonians on precisely this issue. | |
Another major disagreement revolved around the Garrisonians' opposition | |
to forming political parties to run antislavery candidates for local and | |
national offices. Some Garrisonians opposed politics because they were | |
near-anarchists who believed that all human governments were sinfully | |
coercive. A larger number opposed antislavery parties because they | |
believed the Constitution itself was a proslavery document, a "covenant | |
with death" as Garrison put it. Any political action within the existing | |
framework -- even voting, according to some -- was corrupted before it | |
began. Beginning in 1842, Garrison and many of his supporters carried | |
this logic to its fullest extreme by calling for "disunion" between the | |
North and the South. | |
In 1854, a year before *My Bondage and My Freedom* was published, | |
Garrison dramatized the radicalism of these positions by publicly | |
burning a copy of the Constitution at a Fourth of July picnic for | |
abolitionists. Long before that act, however, Douglass had already | |
dissociated himself from such incendiary views. Against the | |
Garrisonians, he agreed with Gerrit Smith and others that the | |
Constitution was not necessarily proslavery, but had only been made so | |
by misinterpretation. He believed that political action was not only | |
justified on behalf of abolition, but positively required if it could be | |
effective. In *My Bondage*, Douglass spelled out his change of opinion | |
on these subjects. Even after he had moved to Rochester to start his new | |
paper, Douglass continued to be "on the anti-slavery question, a | |
faithful disciple of William Lloyd Garrison, and fully committed to his | |
doctrine touching the pro-slavery character of the United States, and | |
the *non-voting principle.*" But in 1851, following the passage of an | |
even more stringent Fugitive Slave Law by Congress, Douglass "became | |
convinced that there was no necessity for dissolving" the Union, and | |
"that to abstain from voting, was to refuse to exercise a legitimate and | |
powerful means for abolishing slavery." Douglass also concluded that the | |
Constitution, far from being a pact with the devil, as Garrison called | |
it, was "an anti-slavery instrument." | |
These conclusions placed Douglass firmly on the side of the | |
Garrisonians' opponents within the antislavery movement, and they | |
reopened the wounds of earlier schisms. Douglass's close friendship with | |
McCune Smith and Gerrit Smith and his complicated relationship with John | |
Brown (see [this | |
book](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0674006453/qid=1103690594/sr=8-1/ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i1_xgl14/104-8045739-2839148?v=glance&s=books&n=507846)) | |
made the wound wider. By 1853, Garrison wrote to his friend, Samuel J. | |
May, that "with Douglass, the die seems to be cast. I lament the schism, | |
but it is unavoidable." It was made unavoidable partly by Douglass's | |
commitment to positions on which Garrison could admit no compromise. And | |
as the years wore on, the wounds only festered. By 1860 Garrison wrote | |
in another letter to May that Douglass's plans to be at an upcoming | |
meeting "powerfully repel me from attending. I regard him as thoroughly | |
base and selfish, and I know that his hostility to the American | |
Anti-Slavery Society and its leading advocates is unmitigated and | |
unceasing. ... In fact, he reveals himself more and more to me as | |
destitute of every principle of honor, ungrateful to the last degree, | |
and malevolent in spirit. He is not worthy of respect, confidence, or | |
countenance." | |
Garrison is notorious for his unflinching positions, and his tendency to | |
impute false motives to anyone who disagreed with him. In that sense, he | |
was an equal opportunity offender. His public reproaches of white | |
enemies within the movement could be as harsh as those that he uttered | |
privately against Douglass in 1860. So what should we make of such hard | |
words? We might turn again to what Douglass made of them in the | |
concluding pages of *My Bondage and My Freedom.* | |
> Here was a radical change in my opinions, and in the action logically | |
> resulting from that change. To those with whom I had been in agreement | |
> and in sympathy, I was now in opposition. What they held to be a great | |
> and important truth, I now looked upon as a dangerous error. A very | |
> painful, and yet a very natural, thing now happened. Those who could | |
> not see any honest reasons for changing their views, as I had done, | |
> could not easily see any such reasons for my change, and the common | |
> punishment of apostates was mine. | |
How, then, should we settle the question of what caused the rift between | |
Douglass and the Garrisonians? Were the causes as simple as racism among | |
white abolitionists? Or did Garrisonians prove that they thought of | |
Douglass as equal to their white opponents by dignifying him with "the | |
*common* punishment" that they meted to all "apostates"? As I suggested | |
before, these are the kinds of questions I want to raise and keep | |
provisionally open in [my | |
classes](http://modeforcaleb.blogspot.com/2004/12/notes-for-philosophy-of-teaching.html). | |
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