A Conversation About Frederick Douglass

good afternoon everybody and welcome Ian Shapiro the director of the Macmillan Center and I'm delighted to be welcoming you here today for this joint venture between Macmillan and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences before getting things off to a start let me just remind everybody that there will be a reception following this event up on the second floor to which everybody is invited it's it's really a great pleasure for me to be able to introduce this event today let me say a couple of words about the American Academy it was founded in 1780 doing the revolution by John Adams James Bowden John Hancock and others who helped establish the new nation the Academy's founders believed that a strong Republic must be grounded in open discourse engaged scholarship and informed and an informed an active citizenry over time the American Academy has expanded to include leaders in all fields and disciplines many of whom worked together through the Academy to dress topics of both timely and abiding concern the Academy now includes about 5,000 members around the world including 200 or so in the New Haven area it it holds annual meetings around the country and conducts research projects out of its home offices in Cambridge Massachusetts in the areas of Arts and Humanities American institutions Science and Technology education and global security tonight's program is part of the Academy's Morton L Mandel public lecture series named in honor of Jack Joseph and Morton Mandel foundations generous support for the Academy it was organized by the Academy's new haven program committee a group of Yale based Academy members that convenes periodic discussions and research presentation on issues of importance in partnership with Macmillan I'm going to just introduce our moderator Krystal beamster and then turn things over to her and she will introduce the panelists and talk about how we're going to proceed she's a professor in the department's of African American Studies history and American Studies so welcome to you all and thank you crystal thank you and good afternoon and welcome I want to begin by thanking and the New Haven Program Committee of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Yale's Macmillan Center especially Francis Rosen booth and Anne Shapira for helping to organize this event this evening now I have the honor and the great pleasure of introducing two of my colleagues professor David Bligh and professor Robert Steptoe and and because I do want us to be able to have a full and lengthy lengthy conversation in which you all get to participate and ask questions I will keep my introductions brief because I do I'll know that these scholars really don't need an introduction but I will attempt to to give you a little bit of taste of who they are Robert Steptoe is the jaw is the John and skiffs professor of English about African American Studies and American Studies at Yale his he is the author of many publications including a home elsewhere reading african-american classics in the Age of Obama blues as the lake a personal geography and from behind the veil a study of african-american narratives this is also professor steppe toast last semester teaching at Yale we were able to celebrate him about a year ago when many of his students came back and I have to say I'm on the fourth floor with Robert and it is going to be really sad when he's not moving through those halls I'm hoping he is not going to give up his office anytime soon not soon and and I want to turn to my colleague I'm professor David Bligh he's the class of 1954 professor of American history and director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of slavery and abolition at Yale University he is the author of numerous books as well including a slave no more two men who escaped to freedom race and reunion the civil war in American memory beyond the battlefield race memory and the American Civil War and most recently frederick douglass prophet of freedom which has been awarded the Gilder Lehrman Lincoln prize and the Bancroft prize and so today we want to have a conversation about Douglass as a writer a literary scholar and artists as David's mammoth biography of Douglass makes clear there is much to discuss ranging from his three autobiographies the novella heroic slave to his hundreds upon hundreds of short form political editorials and the thousands of speeches he delivered in frederick douglass prophet of freedom professor black wrote the reason we remember Douglass is because he found the word and in professor step toes introduction to Douglass's first autobiography narrative of the life of Frederick Frederick Douglass he wrote somehow Douglass intuitively knew that to write and craft his story as opposed to telling it was to compose and author himself both professor Bly and professor Steptoe have argued that Douglass Douglass's autobiography czar great books with capital G and Steptoe wrote that the narrative is a truly great American book and blight wrote that bondage and freedom is a great autobiography so I was hoping we could begin our Congress sation by talking about what made douglas such a brilliant writer more specifically how douglas became a writer his method are as Professor blight refers to his style and motivations and how he's contributed to American literature more specifically and I know that both professor blight and I'm professor Steptoe can speak from their disciplines as literary scholars and historians but I also know that they're both interdisciplinary scholars working in at the intersection of african-american studies history English and American Studies so I'm hoping that they will speak to what what how their own methods speak and align with blight us what I mean with Douglas as well sorry anyway I'm gonna turn it over to them and you can choose to engage that question however you like let me first of all welcome you all but jump right into the question and it seems to me that Douglass was an extraordinary writer because of his relationship to words and I'm I'm putting it in in that sense because we're talking about someone creating and also creating himself through too inviting but also through the spoken word one of the things that I've been I've been thinking about particularly after reading David's latest book is Douglass's performance of words yes the performance in terms of writing all of the text but the performance in terms of the speeches he gave the would he would give at any slavery relevance what he would do in churches and so forth one thing that is also very clear to me I said got so much from biblical stories and biblical language he found he found images he found metaphors he found rhythms and and so forth and certainly one thing that he done from from from the Bible were the various prophetic stories and indeed one of the things I hope that David will touch on is something that he's written about and that is Douglass being himself a prophet and the ways in which he was a prophet through his word mastery let me stop there for now well first of all thank you Ian and Francis and the American Academy and crystal for coming to do this and when Ian and Francis asked me to do this I said yes I'd be thrilled to do this but I want to do Robert Steptoe I knew Robert was somewhere close to teaching his last semester I don't know if you why she will know this or not but I started reading Roberts essays on Douglass when I was in graduate school he wrote an essay in particular which I still quote it quoted in my edition of the narrative he he true this was in the 70s I think I shouldn't have said that but anyway he wrote an essay on Douglass's narrative that argued how it showed how the text was what he called a story of ascendancy it was an ascendant story from slavery to freedom and that the rhythm of the book the movement of the book the creation of the self in the book the character called Frederick Douglass is always ascending and I didn't know what I was doing at that point except trying to learn about Douglass and he's right of course that's Douglass his great skill as the manipulative photo biographer that he was yes always imposing the self on us that he most wants us to use Douglass's is Robert just said he's all about words we wouldn't be here and we wouldn't even be talking about it if it weren't for the words millions of them thousands of speeches 1,200 pages of autobiography three autobiographies and then he revises the third one a fourth time if you're a biographer never trust anybody who writes three autobiographies because they are always there in front of you imposing themselves on himself on you I think it's good well I think it's good to it it's great but but as a biographer there's a lot left out okay for we lowly historians there's a lot left out anyway but words we might discuss here a bit just how he came by literacy and when when he ceases literacy which is what he did as a boy and then as he grows into an early teen discovers the Columbian orator this this book of speeches but especially this manual of oratory that he in his hands by the time he's 12 years old the most important possession he ever had in slavery and then gains a further kind of literacy from just gathering anything he could find a read and then by listening to sermons that sermonic language he gets that King James language he gets in his head as a kid first and then as a teenager and he names four churches in Baltimore that he attends while he's still a teenage slave he not only seized literacy he weaponized words good point it took him time I mean this he doesn't you know come out of slavery a fully-formed orator and certainly not a fully formed writer that takes time for anybody but he was also so proud once he established himself as a writer there was nothing he was more proud of in fact there's a letter he writes about his first published article it's in the late fall of 1844 he's just about to start to sit down to write the narrative and his little cottage up in the Lynn Massachusetts and he writes to this editor who's just accepted this short article he's written and the letter ends with a line that goes something like oh but to write for a book well which was his way of saying if I could write a book and a lot of us in this room you never forget writing your first book and what it looks like and the altar you make for it in your home or your apartment or that's what I did I still do this book isn't is up on the mantle I'm sorry it is but but Oh to write for a book it was and here was a very young man 26 years old a former slave black people weren't supposed to be people of literacy people of literature could I write a book could he ever and that winter he sits down and writes the greatest slave nurse yes well you're absolutely right - to talk about how he was very clear that it wasn't enough to be able to read that you needed to be able to to write as well never said essay in in 1844 that the first narrative comes out in 1845 and let us not forget that what he would do soon thereafter let's do actually start talking about a newspaper and and couldn't wait to have his own it couldn't could not wait to have his own newspaper and to and and indeed that came before my bondage in my freedom and and so the writing was very important in in that regard but I also want to think about how he was also creating himself if you will to through the speaking that we've talked about before one of the things that has been on my mind lately and I really surprised I hadn't really thought about it earlier is that Douglass is speaking and writing performing words creating himself and when I say perform I'm also talking about how he is dressing himself and we know something about that from the photographs and so forth that he's doing all of this during the period in which minstrelsy is being created and and is coming up bow it in this country but she o of course he hated it but think exactly about how he was presenting himself and the race different from what was in the minstrel shows and and and that and that that was that was a that was something to see that was something to to contrast the I was just looking at some of the dates the other day they the first minstrel group interested really their Virginia minstrels they created they were created in 1843 now put that date right with Douglass writing this first autobiography in 1845 with him speaking in the churches in New Bedford and elsewhere and and creating the newspaper and and and so forth so we we have that that particular situation let me add a couple other things to to to all of this one thing that we learn in my bondage and my freedom that he does not write about in the first autobiography was that sometimes shortly after his mother passed away he discovered that his mother was literate and I just want you to think about what that would mean to him that to discover that that not only to discover that there was an African American who was literate but it was his mother and what that would mean to him in terms of actually on some level being part of the next literate generation and so forth it that that would mean something to him that he just wasn't some kind of you know anomaly or something and yes he was let me just mention another elder who was important in this story and again an elder that he describes in my bondage of my freedom for the first time and that is uncle Lawson a man a black man in Baltimore that he meets when he gets to Baltimore and one of the things I suggested in writing about the narrative was it you know in meeting uncle Lawson you know this is an opportunity for him to if I may put it this way find a black father and to go to church with that black father and to be literate in those various ways with that black father unbonded she calls him father was yes in bondage she calls him father that's terribly important he encounters this Charles Lawson who was a dreaming by day just drove a cart to try to make a living but he was a Bible fanatic and yet he wasn't fully literate but when he discovered this teenage kid who could read so well according to Douglas he just sat him down hours and hours and hours and hours and they would read out loud the old testament dog was you know he's not understanding the book of Job if that's what he's not understanding Isaiah yet he's not understanding Jeremiah but he's reading the cadence of that language is getting into his head reading with this old man who he came to love and otherwise who said really not loud but that would mean in terms of hearing the cadences not really imagining them and as you read them and let's talk a little more about the orator I mean where does where does this this brilliance for the oratory come from again he's not born that way but he's already doing this while he's a slave he takes his Columbian order this is an orator this amazing book this compilation put together in 1797 by Caleb Bingham a Connecticut schoolmaster run it up up at Dartmouth and then in Boston but anyway he published the school reader in 1797 it went through 28 or odd editions over 75 years it was even published there's a there's a Maryland Edition it was published in a slave state most of the speeches are out of the Enlightenment tradition there's some speeches from antiquity demosthenes is in there Cicero is in there but it's mostly speeches from the British and American enlightenment that are about things like liberty and equality and then the book has a 20 page introduction that is a manual on oratory it's a kind of a how-to it it tells you how to gesture with your arms and your shoulders and your neck and then how to modulate your voice from lower tones to higher atones it it tells how to come to crescendos and it has a whole section which is really probably from Aristotle I'm not so sure but it is all about how the order must reach a moral message must reach the heart the spirituality of the audience Douglass used this manual to teach his buddies on the Freeland farm one of the places he's hired out to when he's 17 and 18 years old on Sunday afternoons they go off on a brush Arbor and he was Fred it was the only literate one among them according to his testimony yes and he would teach them oratory and then they'd recite so he's already practicing and I think I mean I say this in the book it's a kind of speculation but what does every kid want every kid wants to learn what you're good at so you couldn't be better than the other kids I mean you know right dribble behind your back or oratory and in this case it was oratory and by the time he comes out of slavery at age 20 he's already practiced this so what's he doing New Bedford by the time he's 21 the local AME Church has impress formally preaching from the text and the classic Protestant tradition and that's where he gets discovered finally by you know like two years later by some garrison and abolitionists from up in Boston and somebody says stolen on board there's this young black guy down at that AME Church and you better you got to go see this kid and that's how he gets discovered now he's still not fully formed but when he finds when he does get hired meager wages in 1841 by the by the William Lloyd Garrison's organization and he goes out on the anti-slavery circuit at age 23 okay his most famous speech in those first few years and he's on the road all the time with this troupe of abolitionists is the speech that became known as the slaveholders sermon this was Douglass mimicking a slaveholding preacher using those passages from the Bible slaves be loyal to your masters and so on and so forth and he would perform it he'd mimic accents he'd prance around the stage and it was such a good performance that they'd be out on the circuit and somewhere in Ohio and they abolitionist meetings would always be organized around speaking tour against a resolution whatever the six resolutions were that day and infrequently and I have numerous press accounts of this where someone in the audience does shots out Fred do the sermon and this is okay you know and he goes and he performed performs the sermon and the audiences would be weeping and laughing and clapping and that's how he takes the abolitionists oratorical platform by storm at first he's kind of a second fiddle to Abbey Kelly who was this the first real star woman of the abolitionist circuit but within a couple of years he was the Marquis and it would always be a problem because other abolitionists with time didn't always like to appear with him well I mean just too good speak to that because I think if I remember your works depth oh you really make the point about the shift from telling the performance of doing the abolitionists work right and writing the book right and that you you make a real concrete argument about the power of the written word and what he's able to do with that that he's not able to do in those abolitionist performances I'm wondering if you could speak to what was at stake for him to not just stick with telling it right and those performances but what what is at stake in the written word having it on the page right and maybe it comes out of those bad first book that he has that he understands the stage could hold that in his hands and say Here I am well let me let me begin on that by mentioning and perhaps reminding you that famous moment in his autobiography is when he talks about how there came a point when someone and mine you an abolitionist came up to him and said in so many words you know you need to sound more like a slave you need you know you know you know you're you you're going too far you know you get a little more of the plantation into your into your speech and all of that and you know I'm not mistaken he's hearing that specifically from garçon Ian and I'm sure that that had something to do with why he eventually moved away from the garçon Ian's I mean there were lots of reasons putting political reasons and and so forth but I would say among other things that part of his response to people saying to him why don't you sound more like a slave was number one he wasn't going to do that and number two he was going to write and writing of course was not what most slaves are doing but that certainly is it's part of it David well one thing that you mentioned is it is the whole business about Douglass being attracted not just to the Bible but specifically to to the prophets yeah Isaiah Jeremiah and so forth and and and then being models for him in the certain respects could you say something in this conversation about Doug listen mm-hmm prophecy I'd love to we didn't plan that either one of my problems in writing this book over many years was coming to a confidence confidence is huge in writing as so many of you know we're even using the word prophet prophets a big word and you don't throw it around loosely but Douglas writes and speaks in a language that sometimes just hits you between the eyes with a metaphor a single sentence or a paragraph that transmits you somewhere this there's so many Douglas quotations you know the whole list of Douglas quotations that people put together now now the way I got comfortable with that idea of prophecy first of all you cannot read Douglass carefully at all and not see the Bible all over it especially the Hebrew prophets he could not write a speech without something generally speaking there are a few exceptions without something from Isaiah Ezekiel Jeremiah or Amos and others sometimes the New Testament but usually the Old Testament where Douglas learned his storytelling and the cadences of his voice are in the stories of the Old Testament he made Exodus his own story this this hardly makes him unique the Americans did this all the time he made Exodus his own story the story of his people and the story of his nation Americans have been doing that ever since they've been Americans but the way I got finally comfortable with this was by asking a few theologian friends of mine one of them is sitting here Jim ponent I'm sorry Jim you're here in the front row so there were others I asked like Don Shriver who's a dear friend III don't have any formal theological training and I had wished many times in the course of reading this book that I somehow could get a year off to do nothing but read theology I asked but I asked a few theologian friends one of them was Jim rabbi Jim and after laughing at me I think when I asked so what should I read on the Old Testament you ask a rabbi what you should read on the Old Testament and after a while Jim said you've got to read Abraham Heschel should read barbered alter you should read this you should read that sure read heschel and I did Heschl's great book especially called the prophets in the 1950s and the first long chapter of that book is a hundred different ways of defining a profit and Heschl's template of course is the Hebrew prophets but he's also reflecting on modern prophets and the mecca long story short what heschel helped me understand is that a prophet is not just somebody who predicts prophets are often wrong prophets don't just predict prophets as heschel says are human but they are those people who speak in words one ought to speak or write in words one octave higher than most of us can comprehend and they find those words in the right timing and place to shatter us and then there are many other definitions I took from Heschel and from Walter Brueggemann and from Robert alter who wrote a terrific book about how the King James version of the Bible is kind of the American text of the 19th century that all American writers owed I think of Melville think of Lincoln owed so much of their prose style there their message in their prose to the King James style of language now what Douglass would do on and off is sometimes direct uses of biblical quotations sometimes just paraphrases sometimes just single phrases out of quotes I actually brought a couple to use if you really want to hear them but what Douglas found in the Old Testament was storytelling and metaphor and ancient authority ancient authority and power for the claims he's trying to make on this American experiment which is failing and then he's gonna live long enough to see it failing again so I made a big deal at one of the biggest themes in my biography is how how steeped Douglas was in the Bible and how his rhetoric and his politics oh so much to the storytelling of the Old Testament I even did a survey at one point of several of the major speeches which books the Testament got used the most Isiah always comes out first maybe it's because it's the longest book in the Bible I don't but Jeremiah was second yeah and Frederick Douglas was the American Jeremiah and the fullest sense and I think even self-consciously so although he I know of no time when he actually called himself that I'm glad he didn't if he called himself that it would have been a little awkward hello I'm the American Jeremiah yeah don't do that anyway I could go on and on about well he would use super examples of their the famous line in Isaiah there's no rest for the wicked which comes out in many different ways and forms and uses he used that over and over and over on slaveholders or anybody else he wanted to shatter with language you sorry no no religion so many wonderful things actually you're reminding me of something I made a note of here today that I found in your book that that I'd like to share with people and also your comment about it for black Americans Exodus is always contemporary history always past and present that really struck me Exodus is always contemporary and part of the reason it strikes me is because it certainly was always contemporary for Douglass among others but in fact it's contemporary for us now he's an exiled son he's an exiled son over and over and over and when he thinks he's transcended that he sometimes learns he hasn't yes and of course among other things thinking about it historically it gives the Kansas Exodusters oh yeah uh yeah gives that story of a particular place in history he got on the wrong side of that one though in some ways I mean he yes he sort of lost that debate well that's another story no no no I know exactly what it was called yeah it was called it and it's another moment when exodus was to burn yeah yeah for him another thing you you mentioned which struck me and that was were you write about how Douglass employed all manner of blood metaphors for the nature of african-american history and especially in the second autobiography especially in the second autobiography but you know consider such phrases is you know history that might be traced with a trail of blood or here's this one and you know him directly quoting Douglass slavery put thorns under the feet under feet already bleeding their thorns under feet already bleeding and and and and the blood metaphor is gone and it's in a word graphic it's especially me as a literary scholar you've probably already written this but in the first autobiography of 1845 he portrays famously a fight he has with Edward Co V the overseer to whom he's hired out and it's a pivot of the book no question he's he spends about 11 pages and I just looked this up today I don't walk around knowing all these things he spends about 11 pages on it in the narrative he spends 35 pages on it in bondage and freedom 10 years later when he's 37 years old in that right dead in the midst of the political crisis over slavery when he's broken from the moral suasion Esguerra so nians he's embraced palette to the politics of anti-slavery and he's even begun to embrace the possible uses of violence yes and in the two pages where he actually describes the combat with Edward Co V he spends 35 pages on his time with Co V the 15 uses of the word blood we're getting very literary here but why not this this is a Douglass now who is using autobiography to attack not just now the hypocrisy of the American nation but it's very existence and he's in effect you know he doesn't know what's coming he's a prophet who can't or can't predict any better than the next but blood metaphors are all over that book and heaven ends with one yeah which he didn't quite do ten years earlier no when he's a he's a moral suasion asti's supposed to be pacifist under Garrison's now I'm not I'm not saying that you know he's right now that he's not a pacifist it's just that he's he's scrambling he's desperate by the middle of the 1850s for solutions that are out of grasp and yet he uses the literary form he makes the literary act into a political act yes through autobiography yes as well as any American who wrote a memoir in the 19th century perhaps any American who's ever written a memoir one of the things that it occurs to me is you remind us of all these things is that and I I realized this is going to sell in at first a little cute but Douglas is telling went by learned a particular meaning and substance for what I'm going to call the V words victory violence and the vote oh that's good you should have been advising Douglas he could have he could have he could have took that on the road he did in certain ways yes well never forget a time in Rochester oops well a great autobiography is about loss about the hopeless but necessary quest to retrieve and control a past that forever slips away memory is both inspiration and burden method and subject the thing one cannot live with or without Douglas made memory into art brilliantly and mischievously employing its authority its elusiveness its truth and its charms I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit and you write about this if you could talk a little bit about what makes what makes Douglass's second biography so brilliant and how is he using memory not only as a method but as a strategy well first of all thank you for reading the book so carefully wow did I write this while bondage and freedom is four times as long as the narrative he's writing it when he's 36 and 37 years old he's a much more mature writer by now and by the way the writer just a quick aside and I'll come right back to that in case we leave the oratory behind every major speech of Douglass's life all the lasting great speeches are in the form of a text they're written they're not he didn't just walk into the halls and blow out the lights with an eloquence you know they're written down and by the 1870s and 1880s they're in typescript this wasn't this wasn't an orator who just spun it off the top of his head in fact I'm absolutely convinced like a lot of us maybe Douglas didn't know what he thought about something till he went to his desk and he wrote it exactly and he's a writer anyway bondage and freedom is a much more political autobiography that that sounds kind of vague but but he's writing it now in 54 55 when he's become a political abolitionist he's embraced first a Free Soil party then the Liberty Party and he's now trying to understand how to embrace the new Republican Party he's come to believe slavery cannot be destroyed without somehow altering law political institutions and political will he doesn't exactly know how that's gonna happen yet and he's not comfortable yet with the Republicans but it's it's a it's a it's a book that's arguing with American voters yes secondly he's begun to embrace violence possible uses of violence he never had a theory of just how violence was supposed to overthrow slavery and no one should try to impose one on him he had a long relationship with John Brown by my count they met 11 times but he had the great good sense not to join John Brown in 1859 so there is a the bondage and my freedom reads at times as his story as anticipation of possible violence in the country it's his own story employed to give this Jeremiah attic warning now of the terror to come if the country can't which is exactly what he's argued in the famous fourth of July speech just a few years earlier you know in a single in his greatest speech the rhetorical masterpiece of American abolition but bondage and freedom also is an updating it's ten more years of his life and it's the transformation he wrote the first narrative before he goes to England you know he's got to tell you the story of how Ireland Scotland and England transformed him and it did brought him a whole new set of friends which it did supporters financial supporters from he's never giving full credit to particularly to julia Griffiths who became his assistant editor and made his writing life possible in some ways but he's also got this this emergence of a political thinker now and a constitutional thinker to represent and he is doing that through telling you the tales of his life it's also still and this would be my last point about this it's still it's still the voice and now the voice of a much more insurgent kind of revolutionary voice it's it's a it's a much more mature kind of heroic revolutionary voice warning the country and it's why it's so different from what will become his third autobiography some 30 years later life and times yeah well that heroic revolutionary voice gives way into a it's a terribly important book so full of information but it gives way to a kind of a flattened Gilded Age old man summing up his life and name-dropping 10 years later which is mostly about how famous I am and I went to Europe and I saw the pyramids and and that's it's it's still full of great stuff if you're the biographer but it's not not the heroic writing of those first two autobiographies but but one last thing about my bondage and my freedom he launches it in 1855 five thousand copies sold in the first two days you know which shows you something about Douglass's notoriety and fame and it sold 18,000 copies in the first three years out that that's incredible in the 19th century for a book that's four hundred and sixty pages long and he sold it for a dollar and he took he he would take two of his sons with him on the road given speeches and they would Hawk the book among the audience the guy was a marketer too he had to be how he's making a living and by the way from 1841 when he goes on the lecture circuit to 1877 when he gets his first federal appointment in the District of Columbia from President Hayes he never made a dime in his life except by his voice in his pen and his British and a few American financial supporters he had some patrons he didn't always give him credit except privately but he never he never had a job I always tell my students you know being an abolitionist it's not a good career move it wasn't any there were no salaries and abolitionism I'm gonna go back for a minute to the business about the blood imagery in the blood metaphor this is one thing that I forgot to mention when I was talking about it before it was sort of obvious that he was he was talking about how people were harmed and and and so forth there's fascinating the early moment in my bondage of my freedom when he mentions a white woman by the name of Miss Lucretia who was there in Maryland you really liked when he was young I mean is a child young man so forth and he remembers her for two distinct reasons number one this is a woman who would give him a piece of bread and butter every now and then especially if he came up to her window and saying the other thing I said at one point he's got in on some kind of battle fight believe what that another young man named Ike and and he was all bloody and so forth and he specifically tells us that Miss Lucretia was the one who brought him inside and cleaned him up so that is another side to her to all of it there are the people who spill your blood but they're also the people who clean you up and and miss Lucretia is remembered in those terms it's a it's a very particular way to turn to and there are ways Robert in which he came to trust women in his life that he did not necessarily trust men true me that's not always an easy claim to make but he developed trusting relationships with women more than he'd ever did with men yes and I may not be just Lucretia that brought that but he does say that's the first white person who ever invited him inside that's right about the blood sort of metaphor I mean he opens narrative with the blood of his aunt right the first narrative yes Esther and I'm wondering if you could speak to that and how that gets worked out in his writing and his politics well I mean begin by saying that when you think of the full range of his career and what he would write it's very striking that they that the first autobiography would would begin with what happened to two on Hester that that kind of atrocity what would be there you might even say it's it's even sort of a scripted moment you know Here I am I'm supposed to tell you about slavery I mean begin straight off with with withheld my my aunt Hester was was beaten and so forth by his own master by his own by his own master and who might be his father yes yes what I was trying to suggest a minute ago is that is that when he begins the next autobiography and and then the last one he doesn't begin with on Hester mm-hmm and although interestingly enough I'm thinking now in the beginning of my bondage and my freedom he does once again begin with family yeah and he begins with the grandmother and grandfather that he that he lives with this grandmother being the mother of five daughters one of the daughters being his mother and all five daughters off on some plantation somewhere none of them are there and that's that's where he he begins with begins the the second the second narrative he's an orphan and I know if any time you ever used the term you know I am an orphan but it is a central fact of his life and this is where the loss idea that you brought up all memoir is about retrieving loss I mean our lives are lost somehow every day and if we write on them what we're trying to retrieve it and then manipulate our reader at the same time but he has a great deal of loss and I think tremendous scarring in his soul psyche mentality whatever we want to call it I don't try to over psychologize that but he experienced or saw every kind of savagery slavery could wreak on PBS and he comes out of slavery with a tremendous rage and I've always thought I don't know wonder how you think about this we're here talking about literacy and the power of words his great good luck is that he became such a genius with words because he could process that rage in language yes the rest of his life like nobody else if he couldn't where would he what would he do with that rage where would he that's that's an excellent point because you know we all know outrage can shut people down but Douglas found an energy in it any and he found an eloquence in it and I'm glad you make the point about him being that an orphan I mean what really goes on in the early pages of that second derivative it's just how the rift of family he is yeah yeah no eruptive home any conception of loneliness and and finding out that you know in a year or two he's going to be taking on a 12 mile walk and where he will become a slave on the plantation of the man who actually owns him and you know part of what he tells him that story is how his grandmother's role in all of this is to take him there and then once she's certain that he's playing with his siblings and his cousins she'll leave and indeed he finds out that she's left when one of the children come up to him and says you know free food granny's gone granny's gone and you know with that even begins the rest of his children abandoned abandoned which leads me to thinking I mean don't know exactly how I want to put this yet but it needs me to to think a bit about the family that he and anna-marie created for children what they were trying to do now one of the things that is gratifying was the whole idea that they created a family and they were married altogether in 44 years before she passed away on the other hand you know as you learn his life story you realize how little he was at home you know some of these speaking tours were taker year-and-a-half or more so it's a little disconcerting to me to think about how he created a family and what wasn't there yeah I got into all kinds of cult of socks on that issue that I spare you I kept asking a couple of friends you know to read this and read that for me and because I was calling him the absent father abandoning his children and one friend who said oh go lighter on him that's what men had to do in the 19th century by the way on this question of the white plantation just before we leave that and open it up to you I hope there's always been a lot of mystery about Douglass's autobiography Xand one sense like you know what maybe is he making up and whatnot we know a great deal about what he made up and did not make up because of particularly of a book by Dickson Preston called the young Frederick Douglass published in 1980 but also I had this I had a number of incredible experiences out on the Eastern Shore and that the people who now own the white plantation which is stole their same house some same outbuildings are the fifth generation direct descendants of the Lloyds they have now finally embraced Douglass they're proud of the fact of the most important person from the state of Maryland in American history was a slave on that on that land and the kitchen house in which he watched his aunt Hester Beaton is now a very fancy remodel department but the fireplace is still there and so is the crawlspace next to it where he hid and I've been privileged to stay there twice sitting in front of the fire reading the stories from White House and one day one at the Times I was there a year or two ago there's among the many many nature metaphors in the autobiographies there are lots of them whether it's their water metaphors or fowl metaphors or flowers and so on his Douglass describing walking around the WHI plantation when he's seven years old and always watching the black birds the flocks of black birds and imagining himself on their wings and I would always land in the trees and then away they go and he wishes he's on their wings so one morning very early I went out for a walk and there they were thousands of blackbirds I thought he didn't make that up and then there's the sailing ships on the Chesapeake yes make that up either amazing moment when you realize in literature that some metaphors are not just metaphors they are metaphors but they're not just metaphors at least to a lowly historian that ain't just a metaphor anymore you know there they were and they were incredibly loud and he talks in the narrative about how those blackbirds the cacophony of those black birds could take over the plantation and silence everything else and I thought yeah so that's memory put to the service of the power of autobiography as persuasion and anyway he had an uncanny memory it isn't of course always accurate but nobody's memory is always accurate but one of the things you have to do if you study this guy is you you have to try to understand if you can what do we actually remember childhood and he engaged in a great deal of effort to reconstruct that childhood and he gets almost every name accurate he gets places accurate timing accurate the storytelling he puts it in is his own question but I think what you said David is important and I wanted to read one last quote that it lines up with something that a Robert rode in the narrative which is Douglass is remembering remembering places and names and in some ways fundamental ways wrestling control of those memories by handling them and in that sense owning the names of the people who were once in effect who wants in effect owned him and so I think it's a nice way to kind of it in that portion yeah quick along those lines you you mentioned how he mentions the names and so forth that was a very important feature of that first autobiography you know he you names names yes I mean they it is in that sense if I may is the a tell-all book [Music] you know he names the plantation owners he he he names the overseers and and of course there's that wonderful wonderful moment no that's a wonderful but it's wonderful in terms of how it's written when he tells us about that evil overseer by the name of mr. severe and that's the guy's name and you think it's a Toni Morrison not and it's not actually I'm there's not a guy named gore yes and and yeah and of course Gore the man who replaced severe was fired because he wasn't profane enough and so they brought in somebody named gore but he has to be fiction yes but here's the thing about but about severe I read maybe you're the one his name was actually and I'm not sure how he pronounced it but it was SE v IE are and but in Douglass's narrative it's severe and rebelling by intention yeah talk about intentional right I just want to mention one other thing and maybe it's something that some of you want to join in on David among others has mentioned that Frederick Douglass was the most photographed American of the 19th century and I think there lots of things to think about why that happened how that came to be why indeed he wanted to be photographed and so forth and let me just end on that and throw that out as something that we might talk about something you might talk about and of course we want to hear anything else that you want to bring up we have one person with Mike and if you're gonna act you make sure you speak into the mic if you're gonna ask a question and I'll call on you if you raise your hand well you just introduced a na sure hi I'm Jennifer thank you professor is very interesting I wanted to ask about sort of this going off of the metaphor in the use of blood and the idea of the move of the the three V's you referenced towards violence this need that he has of redemption and sort of the as the war the civil war begins really just putting down with such severity this slave power that he references professor blight you you write that he fashioned the apocalyptic fate of the Confederacy and I thought that was a really interesting way to put that my question is is how in in your both of your opinions does sort of the lack of that apocalyptic fate change him and as he moves forward obviously into political positions how can we see that sort of affecting him as the writer as the orator and as a person Wow thank you well he actually experienced what he had most finally hoped for in the Civil War not that he predicted it all but a bloodbath in which the United States would be destroyed and reinvented redeemed if you like now one of the biggest themes of his life and I make it a huge theme in the book is what happens to the old radical outsider an abolitionist always outside of power always knocking on the doors politically who now lives to see his cause triumph in the middle of his life he's in his 40s and then is gonna live another 30 years to see that triumph all but betrayed erased eroded whatever you want to call it defeated what happens is the old radical outsider who becomes a political insider Douglass is our prototype and when we can name many many other people in the 20th or 21st century who fit this category in the wake of the civil rights movement and other places in the think of a Nelson Mandela whoa you know there are ways in which Douglass once he becomes an insider in Washington DC or is trying to be when he moves there in 1872 it gets his first federal appointment by 1877 and gets three more federal appointments from different presidents makes deals and some compromises to a certain degree but he never ever gave up on that vision that history is sometimes driven by these apocalyptic ruptures that too is an old testament vision of history mm-hmm that's worried that that's one of the places he gets it from he also got it from abolitionism it's all over abolitionism he learned some of that from Garrison in fact so his problem here by let's say the 1870s and 1880s is he's trying to defend reconstruction as it's being defeated he's trying to defend the 14th and 15th of amendments as they're being erase who wrote it any race by the Supreme Court by 1883 he's trying to defend the Republican Party which he never gives up on that is less and less and less a political organization interested in black civil and political rights he does attack the Republican Party at times and then he works like hell for them in election years because he has nowhere else to go it's a series of very difficult pragmatic deals he's making with the history he's living and he takes a pillar ring from the next generation of black leadership yes with whom he has some pretty ugly rivalries and I find that period of Douglass's life in some ways the most fascinating of all because it's the most human and modern but he still believed that history is full of these ruptures maybe by some divine intervention maybe just by the forces that humans create he could never tell you exactly how it came about but he employed all the biblical language necessary to make the case even into old age my name is Mike they're taping as thanks so much I'd like to go back to Robert's idea about being photographed the most during the 19th century the being photographed yes and that made me think of what David said when Douglas would make a speech and have his two sons with the books and you know pitching the books to the to the public how marketing savvy he was and I think it has to do you know that the photographs I think he realized probably the the power of communication through visual through through the image not just the auditory where on his writing yes and he wanted to show a the the picture of a black American who was very distinguished who's you know with with a lot of grace with a lot of aura to everybody possible that's his marketing savvy well it became almost like an expertise I think your points are very good and and and an accurate I would I would say that one thing that was was going on I said it was he was presenting broadly speaking an image of the race but he was also presenting himself there is a way in which how you pose how you dress how you comb your hair and on the meth so that for a photograph that is personal that is autobiographical then that it is a personal narrative Douglas in his later years felt that there wasn't enough attention to people who were in on some level making it who who had a house who had a kitchen you know who could actually put on some pretty nice clothes for Sunday all that kind of thing and he just felt that and and of course he was criticized for this but he felt that there was just too much attention to the sharecroppers and the people in the fields and whatnot when Douglas appears in one of these photographs he is not a man in the field and and and that was that was a very very particular message now another thing to think about is that I can't think of a a book that came out that didn't have one of his photographs oh yeah I mean and so that the front is part of what's going on here is that you you know you have the narrative but you have the image as well and and and he's asking you to to read both and to enter and to put that together over the last couple decades they've been really some marvelous work done on the photographs of Douglas and I I just recommend it if any of you are interested that you owe Google whatever and just just look at what's out there I can't help but think about you know Sojourner Truth and her even dry and she says I sell the shadow to support she's selling her image which is really a kind of you know constructed image of black middle-class she's got a book and reading glasses and we know that she can't read great question I know I know of no case of him actually selling his photographs he sold his books now what he did do when he he founds a second newspaper in Washington DC in 1872 the new national era which he and his sons published for three years and tell the one under and he lost a lot of money on it but they would the newspaper sold images of Toussaint L'Ouverture and sometimes also I wouldn't have been Martin Delany because he had a big falling out with Delaney they sold other but they they sold images of Tucson because tonight was such a symbolic figure by then employ communities but and he sold his books I don't know of any case he may have he may have gone out and peddled them but and once it ad I mean this is later on though wasn't he need representative of Haiti oh yeah yeah yeah yeah he was u.s. minister to Haiti and then the representative the nation of a Chicago world by the way if you don't know it or have it and you got space on your coffee table there's a terrific book called picturing Frederick Douglass but three intrepid editors John Stauffer Zoe trident Celeste beignet which is all that well like that we found too since it was published but has a hundred and sixty-two excellent photos of Douglass and a whole lot of other images on murals and it's it's a visual history of Douglass it's an absolutely stunning book it's the book I have it just came up a couple years ago it's an amazing and they found lots of new photographs by scouring the country including this amazing on that I put on my edition of bondage and freedom which was found in a Kansas City Art Museum and they had never displayed it it's this stunning profile of Douglass from 1857 I've never been displayed how did you not display this even I was thinking of some of your comments on on Douglas and Scripture and how John Collins the scripture scholar once said to me there was hardly any messianic eye movement in the years coming up to Jesus time that was not violent and and I remember sort of sorting through Isaiah once and you could see this sort of restorationist vision which was peaceful and the Lions was laid out with the lambs and then these very violent remarks so I can see how both Brown and Douglas would would would feed themselves with this kind of thinking but they went in different directions even though they knew each other hmm and I'm wondering was it because Douglass simply was political and brown wasn't or was there something about their own appropriation in terms of their own ideology that they took in how they synthesized scripture that made the difference well I want to be careful because John Brown is in the room here Norman performs John Brownback here so I want to be careful with this don't to stimulate any hi Norman how you doing they have very different temperaments very different temperaments and Douglas as he said himself was far less the warrior and Douglas famously said John Brown was by far more valuable dead than he'd ever been alive that's harsh but politically and in terms of historical memory he's probably right John Brown could die for the slave I could live for the slave Douglass said and in my living I did not live up to what he did Douglass made the utmost of the martyred John Brown and that Douglass understood was his best mode to make a literary use of John Brown he did it the rest of his life in fact when Douglass went to Europe tour and he had hoped it would be a vacation for 11 months with his second wife Helen and he kept getting asked to give speeches the speech they tended to all what was the speech on John Brown because of the fame of John Brown across the world I want her to know about that story Douglass by 1859 was looking for possible uses of violence but where he parted ways with John Brown is when he found out that the attack was gonna be on Harpers Ferry right the largest federal Arsenal until that point in time and he learns that somewhere in late 58 or early 59 until that point in time Douglass was deeply involved with Browns conspiracy as long as that conspiracy was about the idea of establishing what was a kind of militarized Underground Railroad Brown called a subterranean passageway the way Douglass came to understand that was gonna be this series of forts and bands of men that we're gonna funnel sleighs out of the upper south and somehow to freedom and cause caused havoc for the country Douglass was pretty much on board with that believe it or not until he found out Brown was planning to attack the largest Arsenal in the country and he said I'm out of here so it's it's they're different temperaments Douglass had become a political pragmatist by then too he's trying to make a way in this world of anti-slavery politics he's not yet the warrior the brown already was from his work in Kansas chapter 15 in my book it's a long chat one of the longest chapters in the book on that relationship between them it's incredible and fascinating and difficult [Music] professor Steptoe I know in your autobiography in America class you teach the narrative alongside Harriet Jacobs incidents in the life of a slave girl yes um how do you teach those two book texts together and what what do you hope your students get from that week well let me just begin with some fundamental features of the situation I offer both of them because I want to make sure that I offer a narrative by a man as well as a narrative by by a woman another key thing is to offer a narrative before 1850 and a narrative after 1850 and that is to say before and after the Fugitive Slave Act there's much too to look at in in in in that regard oh they're just other things as well including what the different experiences they have in escaping slavery and what they escaped to I would just be obvious and say that Douglass is no Bedford is very different from Harriet Jacobs is in New York and and and their experience is there and of course just going back to to gender let us not forget that how many Jacobs not just a woman she's a mother and one of the things that we look at carefully is what it meant for her to be a slave mother and how was she lived with that and so forth there's also an important thing to look at in terms of in terms of family we've already talked today about Hell Douglass was was less an orphan you know he saw his mother a couple times all that kind of stuff with Jacobs we we have so much to think about in terms of her relationship not just with their children but with her grandmother and all of those things that are that are going on so those are things that we're talking about I let me just say that in in my autobiography course the discussion isn't just about Douglass and Jacobs I begin the course with Mary rowlandson Indian captivity narrative and of course one of the things too to talk about there is rowlandson and Jacobs as captive mothers and what to see there and and how to put that how to put that together also with all of these books were just meeting them the whole question of literacy and how literacy plays a role in and how people survive how people gain gain a kind of freedom what kind of what I'm gonna call mischievous strategies literacy might think of bring about Jacobs has a wonderful good time arranging for letters that she's written to be somehow another transported to New York or even to Canada and then and then mailed to North Carolina so that number one quite quite people in North Carolina will think that she's in New York or or Canada when in fact you know she's in her grandmother's attic when Douglas is remembering his escape later he says right before he writes it now for mich d'If one thing I question Bianca one thing I do mention I mean it it's not really a parent and in in the in their narratives but but you know Douglass and Jacobs did overlap in Rochester for almost a year and indeed the building where his newspaper was on the first floor was the same building that Jacobs was pursuing any slavery activities on the second floor and he pretty much ignored her on that note I won at first I want to let folks know there is a reception on the second floor and everybody's invited to attend and to continue the conversation but before we close I would like to thank professor Bly and professor Steptoe for a wonderful conversation [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Yale University

Views: 5,502

Keywords: frederick douglass, gilder lehrman center, david blight, African American studies, robert stepto, crystal feimster, American studies, American history, literature, yale, macmillan center, Yale Broadcast

Id: 40_kyLcsLxg

Length: 87min 53sec (5273 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 02 2019