Lions Write History
“What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence? . . . I am not included within the pale of this glorious anniversary! . . . The blessings in which you this day rejoice are not enjoyed in common . . . The sunlight that brought life and healing to you, has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth of July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn.”
Douglass exhibits his most exuberant, emphatic, and scathing self in this 4th of July speech. One can see the strength of force in his energetic advocacy of equal status among and between races. He is blunt, straightforward, ironic, and clever. He spoke that way often. It is not the only way that he spoke or wrote, however. As a literary master, Douglass’ corpus exhibits a many faceted and well developed narrative voice. A study of his writing, focusing on his major work: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, and taking into account several lesser works also, reveals Douglass as an artist with tremendous aesthetic and rhetorical skill.
An aesthetic analysis of any work is problematic, as it is dependent upon opinion. To assist such an analysis we will define the beautiful quality in Douglass’ work in three ways: his confession as a reader and his portrayal of the experience of reading, his artistic ability to convey opposite ideas equally, and his cleverness in manipulating the English language.
It is surprisingly rare to encounter a strong portrayal of the experience and value of reading in literature. Douglass is a unique source for such a portrait. To all for whom reading is a dear occupation, the appeal of his account of defying oppression, utilizing wit and trickery, and mastering a task he was forbidden to pursue, all in order to read, is attractive. The first documents he had the privilege to peruse were from The Columbian Orator, an anti-slavery publication. He says of the experience, “these were choice documents to me. I read them over and over again with unabated interest. They gave tongue to interesting thoughts of my own soul . . . The reading of these documents enabled me to utter my thoughts.” Any bibliophile can empathize with the reverent experience of having one’s own thoughts expressed finally in a way one could not imagine before. The reason that we love Shakespeare, for example, according to Isaac Asimov, is because, “Shakespeare has said so many things so supremely well that we are forever finding ourselves thinking in his terms.” What Shakespeare does not do as well, is put that intellectual experience of discovery through reading into words. Douglass does that best.
Yet he does the opposite also. Throughout Douglass’ Narrative, he places special emphasis on the sacred value of written expression. He names it as “the pathway from slavery to freedom.” Through concrete, written word, “Freedom now appeared, to disappear no more forever.” Yet an equally persistent theme of the weight of the unexpressed, the unutterable, and the ineffable exists also. Early in the Narrative, Douglass tells us about the scene of witnessing his aunt suffering punishment by whipping by her master. He says of the experience, “It was the blood-stained gate, the entrance to the hell of slavery, through which I was about to pass. It was a terrible spectacle. I wish I could commit to paper the feeling with which I beheld it.” In several passages, Douglass proves his immense capacity to commit such feelings to paper. Yet he does not elaborate on this essential scene.
This is a powerful rhetorical effect and a strong evidence of the aesthetic value of his piece. The restraint that Douglass shows in this and other episodes in his writing, serve two purposes. One is that it hints at the enormity of the horror of slavery. Douglass reminds his reader of the “inexpressibility of his deepest feelings . . . and a reality beyond words.” It is that hint of a vastness incommunicable, but absolutely real, that adds the gravity behind the passages in which Douglass tells of his “unutterable loathing” for a person or an opinion. The second effect of Douglass’ use of prolific written expression, and artistic silence is what Professor Collin Hughes describes as “artistic androgyny, in which the true artist conveys two opposing realities at once.” So Narrative is not only a slick nineteenth century political tract, but “it is also a work of art whose sentences, with their careful twists and balances and their unrelenting drive, continue to evoke a direct, visceral response.”
The last definitive evidence of a strong aesthetic quality to Douglass’ work is found within those carefully constructed sentences. For example, Douglass uses a sentence structure called Chiasmus throughout his Narrative. This is a rare and attractive device used by Hebrew and Roman authors. It is “a verbal crisscrossing in which the order of words in the first clause of a sentence is inverted in the second.” A common modern example is John F. Kennedy’s refrain, “Ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country.” Douglass does this also when he says, “You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man,” and also, “Just the man for such a place, just the place for such a man.” The turn is interesting and strange. One has to re-read the sentiment and pause to appreciate it. It is a beautiful aesthetic, as well as a rhetorical device.
It is in the rhetorical mode in fact that Douglass truly shines. One of the strongest rhetorical modes in Narrative, and one that is not often explored, is Douglass’ appeal to Ethos throughout the text. He does this by associating himself and his fellow slaves with the historical struggle of American patriotism. He evokes the very language of the most heroic chapters from the Revolutionary War and the canon of literature that contributed to it. In his description of the way that the institution of slavery both oppresses the slave and brutalizes the slave owner, Douglass tells us about one of his masters named Sophia Auld. In the beginning, before she experienced the reality of commanding slaves, Sophia is kind and “the meanest slave was put fully at ease in her presence . . . Her face was made of heavenly smiles.” When Sophia is placed in charge of Frederick Douglass, however, she undergoes a dramatic change: “that cheerful eye . . . soon became red with rage; that voice, made of sweet accord, changed to one of harsh and horrid discord; and that angelic face gave place to that of a demon.”
This, Douglass explains, is the result of her having tasted, “the fatal poison of irresponsible power.” That term “irresponsible power” seems to be unique. It is a choice expression. It does seem to allude to a few different philosophical doctrines that Americans held sacred. One comes from Baron John Dalberg-Acton, in a letter addressed from him to Bishop Mandell Creighton, in which he said, “power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” He also seems to be alluding to the famous statement of John Locke: “we are born free as we are born rational, not that we have actually the Exercise of either: Age that brings one, would bring with it the other were monarchs denied that unlimited power by which they deny our birthright.” It is a very nuanced and effective allusion. Since America was founded upon the principle that monarchy is evil because it has unlimited, or irresponsible, Americans could not defend the existence of such power within the slaveholders. The slaveholders could not deny the negative effect of such power upon their own characters.
Douglass’ association of himself with the founding patriots of the Revolutionary War is even more explicit. In his famous and beautiful apostrophe to the ships on Chesapeake Bay, Douglass reasons, “I have only one life to lose. I had as well be killed running as die standing,” he uses the same reversal strategy of Chiasmus, but does so implicitly. The allusion is to the legendary statement of Nathan Hale when he was martyred for the cause of independence in the Revolutionary War. Immediately before Hale was hanged for treason to the British crown, he quoted the play Cato: “What pity is it that we can die but once to serve our country.” That has come down to us, and it came down to Douglass’ readers as, “I regret I have but one life to give for my country.”
He does not only associate himself with the Founding Fathers, however. He seeks to associate all slaves with them. Douglass’ choice of names for the historical figures throughout Narrative is very cleverly crafted. The harsh slave drivers Mr. Gore and Mr. Severe, the hopeful name of Mr. Freeland, and the deceitful Mr. Covey all show deliberate artistic license in the selection of names. So, too, we have the group of slaves that conspire to escape with Douglass, named Henry Harris, John Harris, Henry Bailey, and Charles Roberts. From later textual evidence these names seem to have been selected to evoke the names of Patrick Henry, John Paul Jones (or John Jay, but the textual evidence seems to point better to Jones), and Charles Coffin (who was the latest surviving signer of The Declaration of Independence).
The allusion to Patrick Henry is made explicit in the episode that takes place after Douglass’ conspiracy to escape is discovered, and the slave hunters attempt to tie Henry Bailey up for recapture. In that passage, Bailey refuses to be bound, saying, “I won’t,” when the constables cock their pistols and threaten to kill him if he does not submit to be tied, Henry replies, “Shoot me, Shoot me! . . . you can’t kill me but once. Shoot, shoot, -- and be damned! I won’t be tied.” This alludes pretty strongly to Nathan Hale once again, but as his name is Henry and Douglass explicitly tells us that, “we did more than Patrick Henry, when he resolved upon liberty or death,” the scene seems to evoke Patrick Henry’s declaration, “Give me liberty, or give me death.” The reason that it appears that John Harris corresponds to John Paul Jones, comes from an earlier passage from the text. When Douglass has his physical fight with Mr. Covey, there is a moment when the two are locked together in a wrestling grapple and Douglass relates that Covey asked, “if I meant to persist in my resistance,” to which he responded that, “I did, come what might; that he had used me like a brute for six months, and that I was determined to be used so no longer.” The wording here is similar to that used by John Paul Jones in his epic Battle off Flamborough Head. When Jones’ ship The Bonhomme Richard was stuck in a deadly battle with the Serapis Captain Pearson asked Jones, “Sir, do you ask for a quarter?” a quarter was a surrender, to which Jones replied, “No, sir, I haven’t as yet thought of it, but I’m determined to make you strike,” to strike was also to surrender.
Such an appeal to the words and men that every American held dear would have been an effective way to appeal to the ethos of his readers. No matter what one’s opinions were about the institution of slavery, most Americans were decidedly supportive of the cause of the patriots of the revolution. Douglass accomplishes two purposes by his association with them: first he lays out the inconsistency of the founding doctrines of America with the institution of slavery and second, he humanizes his own experience and the experience of every slave. The accomplishment of those two purposes, readily established by the text, turns that appeal to ethos into an appeal to logos that is just as strong
In several places throughout Narrative Douglass uses logos to directly respond to pro-slavery arguments. One such instance is in his famous discussion of the Negro hymns, sung by slaves, and put forth as evidence of their happiness. Douglass responds to such an argument by saying that it could not be made by one who actually heard them, or heard them and had “flesh in his obdurate heart.”
“I have often been utterly astonished,” he says, “to find persons who could speak of the singing, among slaves, as evidence of their contentment and happiness. It is impossible to conceive of a greater mistake . . . The songs of the slave represent the sorrows of his heart; and he is relieved by them, only as an aching heart is relieved by its tears.” Here there is a strong whiff of pathos as he lays out the condition of the slave, and ethos since his condition as an escaped slave gives him special knowledge of the subject. The real logos comes from his analysis of the content of the songs, “They told a tale of woe . . . they breathed the prayer and complaint of souls boiling over with the bitterest anguish. Every tone was a testimony against slavery, and a prayer to God for deliverance from chains.” Such lyrics cannot be evidence of satisfaction.
Another of the many pro-slavery arguments that Douglass debunks in his Narrative is the “types of mankind” theory. This was pseudoscientific twist on the field of anthropology. American anthropologists such as Josiah Nott utilized historical evidence that “the Egyptian, Negro, several White, and sundry Yellow races, had existed, in their present forms, for at least 4000 years,” to assert that race was a type of separate species. The several races extant on earth did not evolve from a single original, but began simultaneously and in the same forms as they existed in the nineteenth century. Tying that conclusion, tenuous as it is, to the patently false assertion that, “in the broad field and long duration of Negro life, not a single civilization, spontaneous or borrowed, has existed, to adorn its gloomy past,” lead to the assertion that there were very real, and historically constant differences between the races of men, and those differences lead to a necessary conclusion that Caucasian races were superior to Negro races.
Negroes were a sub-species of human, and Caucasians had ethical responsibility to subdue them, as they would animals. Nott saw himself as being on the cusp of ethnographical research, and in the mainstream of scientific consensus. Douglass had many tools at his disposal to refute such an argument. Far from a testimony to the consistency and absoluteness of racial separation, historical research indicates that, “despite hundreds of years of labor by enormously creative and intelligent researchers, no agreed upon, consistent system of racial classification has ever been developed.” Rather than dwell on the fact that “compared with other closely related species, the human species shows extremely low levels of morphological and serological diversity,” however, Douglass attacked the argument at its foundation.
“There are seventy-two crimes in the state of Virginia,” Douglass points out, “which, if committed by a black man, subject him to the punishment of death . . . The manhood of the slave is conceded. It is admitted in the fact that southern statute books are covered with enactments forbidding, under severe fines and penalties, the teaching of the slave to read or write. When you can point to any such laws, in reference to the beasts of the field, then I may consent to argue the manhood of the slave.” This effectively answers every element of the “types of humanity” argument. If Negroes are a different, lesser, species, they cannot be held accountable to laws that restrict the exercise of humanity. There is no law forbidding a horse to read, therefore a Negro is a man, not a horse. Additionally, if the slaves are so contented, there is no need for the southern legal system to contain so many statutes to keep them at bay A contented community is in no danger of uprising, or laws to address them.
Douglass proceeds throughout his writings under the assumption, rightly assumed, that every person that looks upon slavery with a candid eye will see it as evil. He knows that he is speaking to an audience that does not need to be convinced, but convicted. He famously summarized the argument: “There is not a man beneath the canopy of heaven that does not know that slavery is wrong for him,” an argument Abraham Lincoln would eventually adopt. Douglass had infinite powers for reasoned argument. He exercised those powers to beautiful effect often. He saw the problem, however, as emotional, not intellectual. “The feeling of the nation must be quickened; the conscience of the nation must be roused; the propriety of the nation must be startled; the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed; and its crimes against God and man must be proclaimed and denounced.” So it is with divine pathos that Douglass most effectively brings his argument home.
No better pathetic appeal exists in literature than Douglass’ apostrophe to the ships on the Chesapeake. “Go on, go on. O that I could also go! Could I but swim! Could I but fly! O, why was I born a man, of whom to make a brute! . . . O God, save me! God, deliver me! Let me be free! Is there any God? Why am I a slave?” That uncomfortable combination of questions must give any thinking Christian pause: Is there any God? Why am I a slave? Such inescapable, afflicting, and beautiful prose testifies to the truth of Victor Hugo’s maxim: “Despots have a hand in creating thinkers. Shackled words are terrible words. The writer doubly, triply intensifies his style when silence is imposed on the people by some master.” That remarkable prose, elevated by the despotism of slavery, did not produce a voice relevant to antebellum Americans only. Douglass’ artistic achievement was to produce a literature that resonates worldwide, as loudly now as it did 150 years ago. Beyond his wonderful career as a statesman and activist, his artistic achievement is his eternal legacy. It is ours also who seek to feel the dangerous truths about justice that humanity shares inexpressibly. He gives that inexpressibility the courage to speak.
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