Frederick Douglass, Orator

Frederick Douglass was a great speaker before he was a great writer. Many African Americans were renowned as orators in the mid nineteenth-century, particularly preachers and anti-slavery lecturers. The most famous names include Sojourner Truth and Reverend Samuel Ward, Charles Remond and Reverend James Pennington. One writer described Sojourner Truth as having an “electrical” effect on her listeners. But even in this impressive company, Douglass stood out. He is thought to have given more than 2000 speeches in his lifetime. Public speaking was central to his anti-slavery work, but it also became a major strand of his livelihood. After the Civil War, Douglass earned between fifty and a hundred dollars for lectures—at the time these were handsome fees. But before the war, being an anti-slavery lecturer was tough. Discrimination was rife on trains and boats and in hotels. Proslavery mobs regularly surrounded the rooms where Douglass spoke; sometimes he was physically attacked. Moreover, the job was exhausting: it took him away from his family and involved long, difficult journeys. He spoke in freezing rooms, in tents, even out in rainy fields.

Despite these trials, Douglass dazzled on the platform. Contemporary accounts emphasize Douglass’s charisma and skill: “as a speaker he has few equals”; “in versatility of rhetorical power, I know of no one who can begin to approach the celebrated Frederick Douglass. He, in very deed, sways a magic wand.”[1] He was often described as “manly.” In the 1840s, the term not only signified masculinity, but a kind of character: frank, strong, courageous, and upright. The word registered the overall effect of hearing the man. Douglass was personally impressive at the podium, and he used that power to make the case for others who were downtrodden and enslaved.

Even quite early in Douglass’s career, some audiences found it difficult to believe that he had himself been a slave, and his polish and bearing made a powerful point in itself. His articulacy and eloquence undermined the racial arguments for slavery; they also challenged prejudice and segregation in the free states. Douglass’s presence in the lecture hall made a mockery of bigots. The Salem Register reported on a speech in 1842 that “He was a living, speaking, startling proof of the folly, absurdity and inconsistency (to say nothing worse) of slavery. Fluent, graceful, eloquent, shrewd, sarcastic, he was, without making any allowance, a fine specimen of an orator.” As this catalogue of qualities suggests, Douglass had a complex rhetorical arsenal; he could use homely images and vocabulary, or apocalyptic thunder. He drew at different times on the rhythms of church preaching, classical debate, and the reasoning of the anti-slavery movement. He could be moving, funny, indignant, and ironic. Above all, he was a magnetic performer, and a particularly brilliant mimic. One of his set-pieces was a parody of a “Slaveholder’s Sermon,” in which he impersonated a preacher who used the Bible to justify slavery. James Monroe saw him caricature “the holy tone of the preacher—the pious snuffle—the upturned eye—the funny affectation of profound wisdom.”[2]

Douglass was self-educated; he taught himself despite a system that kept slaves illiterate. So it may be significant that the first book he owned was a primer in public speaking. As a boy, he saved up to buy Caleb Bingham’s The Columbian Orator, an anthology designed to teach young people how to think and argue in a free republic. Its dialogues and speeches made public speaking central to the exercise of freedom. They exposed Douglass to American ideals, and he himself perceived the contrast with slavery. As an adult, Douglass excelled at exposing the American paradox. The tradition of The Columbian Orator rings in the famous speech of 1852, in which Douglass asked, “What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July?” Douglass tackles the national holiday with his trademark irony; he argues that while slavery exists, it is cruel hypocrisy to celebrate equality and freedom in the United States. The speech confronts white listeners with their privilege, and reminds them that African Americans are shut out from the national story.

Douglass also learned from the church. After his escape from slavery, he began preaching at the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church in New Bedford, and he must already have had a powerful effect on audiences. It was not long before he was asked to contribute to an anti-slavery meeting in Nantucket (in 1841); he gave three speeches in two days, and was hired as a full-time lecturer for the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society. Soon, Douglass was raising his voice for causes other than abolition, including women’s rights, Irish liberty, and temperance. The work was intensely stimulating for this fiercely intelligent young man; in some ways, speaking itself became a part of his education. In his 1855 autobiography, Douglass wrote of his first years as a lecturer, “I was now reading and thinking. New views of the subject [slavery] were presented to my mind . . . I was growing, and needed room.”[3]

That powerful intellect, partly forged at the lecture platform, was later manifested in Douglass’s books—most notably his three autobiographies and his novella, The Heroic Slave. It would also be developed in the newspaper he edited, called first The North Star and then Frederick Douglass’ Paper. But it was first clear in his speeches, many of which were afterwards published. It was as a lecturer that Douglass began to tell his own story, and the written books owe something to those early tellings. His famous impact on audiences may have fed back into his texts: great speakers understand their listeners, and respond in turn to their reactions. All these years later, we can only imagine the power of Douglass’s delivery, and his rapport with the lecture hall, but they may have left subtle traces in the published speeches, which we can still read.

On July 12, 1854, Douglass gave an address at Western Reserve College called “The Claims of the Negro, Ethnologically Considered.” It was an intervention in a major academic debate; it was an attack on slavery and prejudice, and it brilliantly demonstrated his rhetorical skills. Douglass took on the new school of “ethnologists” (what we would now call anthropologists), who were promoting theories of racial difference that underpinned and justified slavery. Josiah Nott and George Gliddon had just published a book called Types of Mankind, which was in effect inventing “race,” building “color” into a moral and intellectual hierarchy. They argued that non-whites were separately created, indeed not human.

In his speech, Douglass exposed such work as “scientific moonshine,” testing its credibility as a lawyer treats a witness.[4] He lined up opposing views, and combed through Nott and Gliddon’s text like a literary critic, examining the sneaky work done by a little word like “even.” Douglass quotes professors and poets, but he is no snob; he also tells of a bootmaker, who showed him the effects that different jobs have on the shape of a man’s feet. Ordinary folk can show the scientists that environment matters. The speech is impressively academic, but it is adept too. It sparkles intellectually, it flatters its audience, and in the end it calls them to a higher purpose, quoting the Bible to suggest that the “vocation of the Scholar” might be to join the battle against slavery.[5] Douglass answers Nott and Gliddon with his skill as well as what he says. Two centuries later, we can never fully experience Douglass’s effect on an audience, but we still catch a glimpse of it, when we read speeches like these.

Sarah Meer, Senior University Lecturer in English, is a Fellow and a Director of Studies at Selwyn College, Cambridge University. A specialist in nineteenth-century literature and culture, she is the author of Uncle Tom Mania: Slavery, Minstrelsy, and Transatlantic Culture in the 1850s (2005), and the co-editor of Transatlantic Stowe: Harriet Beecher Stowe and European Culture (2006).