Douglass Garrison Frederick Douglass, William

Douglass Garrison

Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison and Abolition

The economic, social and ideological underpinnings of the American southland during the nation's formative decades were provided by the myriad assumptions which enabled the 'peculiar institution' of slavery. A functionality and permissiveness to the system that predisposed the nation's transplanted African population to servitude and obsequiousness was based not simply on the brutal enforcement of labor and inferiority, but even more fundamentally on the fostering of a sophisticated psychological conditioning centered on a drastic deviation from natural conceptions of that which defines a man and his inherent humanity. To create a reality in which the ownership of one many by another many could serve to promote a relative harmony for white dominance, it was incumbent upon the slave-trader and the slave-master to rule through a form of mental distortion that could train out of the slave his inborn senses of independence, personal purpose and individual will. A central mode of both the works and the life of Frederick Douglass, this is an approach that while widely effective in maintaining a dramatically impractical circumstance throughout the antebellum south, can be evidenced to have run aground at the urging of American blacks determined to assert humanity against the institutional pressures which had sought to deny it. For one of the first great black American intellectuals and an abolitionist on the highest order of importance, this would be part of a revelation that would ultimately allow him to break free not just from the aggressive racist vestiges of slavery but also from the marginalizing politics and white patronage represented in prominent abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison which detained him from that elemental independence. In breaking loose from both the barbaric and benevolent forms of racialism which detained blacks as inferior to whites, and in subsequently forging his own political identity, Frederick Douglass forged a path for the philosophical realization of abolition.

At the heart of this accomplishment would be a lifelong academic evolution which would allow him to draw objective consideration of the religious, economic and political implications of the situation facing black Americans. As we consider this in relationship to Garrisonian politics, which though their namesake was a white Bostonian of high regard in his liberal circles, would represent the height of abolitionist radicalism in their time. Douglass, finding himself as a young man in the midst of this influential firebrand, would be vastly influenced by Garrison's hostility toward the falsehood of the American Constitution. We will address this point further hereafter as it will represent the breaking point between to men who were intimate friends and intellectual cohorts at various points in their respective careers. This is an association that would begin just as Douglass had begun his life as a free man, escaped to New England. By fortune and coincidence of cause, "in 1841, he saw Garrison speak at the Bristol Anti-Slavery Society's annual meeting. Douglass was inspired by the speaker, later stating, 'no face and form ever impressed me with such sentiments [the hatred of slavery] as did those of William Lloyd Garrison.' Garrison, too, was impressed with Douglass, mentioning him in the Liberator." (PBS, 1) We may even make the argument that without this guiding force, Douglass may not have taken the path that allowed the inception of his brilliant and crucial literary career. Most importantly, it is this career that would help to define him differently as a uniquely black abolitionist. Not in counterpoint, but in compliment to Garrisonian politics, Douglass would soon establish his political doctrines, derived as they were from a conception of the machinations of slavery from biographical experience.

Thus, in the seminal piece composed by Franklin Douglass the author, 1845's Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave, there is a clear indication that the very devices which the slaveholding establishment had employed to maintain the declining system were being turned upon them to hasten its deconstruction. The implementation of systematic dehumanization, the distortion of Christian values and the preeminence of the economic questions pertaining to slave labor, as is evident in the purely reasoned literary expressions of such well-educated African-American thinkers as Douglass, would all be emphasized in the rational dismantling of slavery's unnatural logic. Indeed, the eventual declaration of his own freedom comes from an intellectual development which Douglass describes in painstaking detail and which, from discourse on natural rights to the social progress simultaneously denied and implied by the United States Constitution, he examines as the cause for his certainty of slavery's inevitable collapse.

At its core, slavery had been an institution which could survive only by manufacturing a relationship between the slavemaster and the slave that detached itself from the natural order of human existence. To create a circumstance in which one man could be owned by another, the slavery establishment would persist upon claims that the black man was, in some way, less human than the white man. A central aspect of the ownership denoted by slavery would be the dehumanization of the enslaved man as both a matter of conception and action. In the work literary abolitionist antagonists such as Harriet Beecher Stowe, of the equally crucial 1852 text Uncle Tom's Cabin, and in figures such as Frederick Douglass himself, we are made to understand that this necessary dehumanization would fail the inalienable nature of man to wish his own destiny and to respond to the internal call for his own freedom.

By contrast of his eventual rise to independence, Douglass shows in a variety ways how the institution of slavery utilized psychological methods that would be introduced at the earliest ages in order to reinforce a sense among slaves of their human inferiority. In descriptions that draw explicit parallels between the treatment of slaves and that which one might show to an animal, Douglass illuminates the very literal ways in which blacks were conditioned to accept the natural order there implied. During his first eight years on the plantation of Master Lloyd, Douglass describes being dressed only in a single, long cloth shirt and exposed throughout the years to the harshness of the elements. Stabled as would be a farm animal, he makes all the more vivid this impression in his description of 'feeding time,' in which 'Mush' "was put into a large wooden tray or trough, and set down upon the ground. The children were then called, like so many pigs, and like so many pigs they would come and devour the mush." (Douglass, 64) With all respect accorded to Garrison, whom we will record further on the report of Douglass himself to have been well-acquainted with such ideas and practices, Douglass would be of a uniquely compelling disposition as he gradually came to attach his own bright dignity to the critical scrutiny of such practices.

This would allow him the important opportunity to examine the meaning and philosophical implication of such treatment with practical expertise. Through this, he denotes that such treatment was dual in its purpose. On the surface, this would serve the function of informing the slave as to minimalism of his personal rights, including bed, clothing and sustenance. Further though, this treatment would foster the formative understanding amongst slaves that their relative equivalence to livestock was to denote a status as being property rather than individual. Such indignity was intended to sever any connection to innately human instincts desirous of freedom or justice, with such incidents as the plainly described un-trialed executions of 'disobedient' slaves pointing to the extent to which this dehumanization could be employed to the disregard of equality. In the Chapter V murder of Demby, Douglass depicts an incident that indicates the institutional power of such dehumanization, using it to demonstrate that as a being categorized as something less-than-man, he was entitled to no protections by law or government against the subjective wrath of the white man.

This is an important theme to consider as Douglass becomes more learned and eventually more capable of articulating a political response to these conditions. To his ideological discord with Garrison, its centering on the idea of the Constitution, which Garrison was notoriously known to have burned in frequent public demonstrations against its conditional allowance of slavery, would diverge from Douglass here. Particularly, the understanding that the letter of the law should be expected to protect all men from such injustice was pursuant to upholding and amending rather than condemning of the Constitution. As we examine further hereafter the more effective commingling with mainstream political institutions that Douglass would eventually enjoy, it becomes evident that there were some just cause for the approach.

This underscores the emphasis on the powers of the mind that runs generously through Frederick Douglass' personal account. Indeed, as an intellectual, Douglass was made to stand trial on behalf of an entire population of black thinkers, given not the right, freedom, provision or admission toward any type of cerebral capacity. So the manifold struggle that Douglass undertook, simply for recognition as a man and, consequentially, a thinker, owed much of its advancement to his well-defined sense of appropriation. Stressing the shackles that slavery could latch to a man's mind, Douglass was given insight into the inherent transgression behind the bondage. And his ability to adopt such a perspective, while easy to underestimate from the distance of over a century, is quite remarkable given the overwhelming social constructions designed to deter that sort of thinking amongst his demographic. One of the more effective messages that he conveyed both through explication and allegorical demonstration is the inevitability that a man, endowed with the ability to think and propose and aspire, is bound only to torment when the physical conditions of his life are inhospitable to these ends.

And slave owners, Douglass indicated, seemed to know this fact very well, choosing more often than not to wield it as the best defense in keeping slavery afloat as a viable way of life. Particularly, he recalled one memory in which a white slave owner admonished another that there was nothing more dangerous than teaching a slave to read, expressing his certainty that, upon receiving an education, a man will cease to be a slave. It seems clear that Douglass regales his readers with such a moment to illustrate the transparency of a system so flawed at its seams that its highest perpetrators could note its precariousness. And even as he insists upon his gratefulness to God for making him a free man in the end, experiences of such logically inclined revelation would constantly remind Douglass that he was not meant to be a slave forever. Indeed, the overheard fear of this slaveowner would be prophetic of the bright future ahead of Douglass, whose literacy would open the portal to his rejection of shackles both intellectual and physical.

For all of the hostility and indignation that bubbled under his first sensations of injustice, it was not until he was allowed the freedom to educate himself that he came to a greater understanding of the horrid miscarriage of civility that had been dealt he and his brethren. "The more I read, the more I was led to abhor and detest my enslavers. I could regard them in no other light than a band of successful robbers" (Douglass, 61). There is a hard rawness and humanity to his new understanding of things. But this type of well-warranted cynicism is also given rectification by Douglass' evenhanded approach to the affairs of his own oppression. It is here that he begins to explore the manipulative inconsistencies of the slave system which had previously been obscured to him, most notably by the willful obstruction of educational development which afflicted America's black population.

Here, Douglass points with particular insight to the alleged benefits of Christianity which were afforded the slave, such as the encouraged celebration of holidays like Christmas. Slaves were not only expected not to toil on this holiday, which lasted from Christmas Eve to New Years Day, but were expected to become intoxicated in drink and celebration, much as was the case for the slave-master himself. But this fleeting and feigned equality, the author observes, is a fundamental insult to a people otherwise not afforded the luxuries of Christianity. He explains that "the holidays are part and parcel of the gross fraud, wrong, and inhumanity of slavery. They are professedly a custom established by the benevolence of the slaveholders; but I undertake to say, it is the result of selfishness, and one of the grossest frauds committed upon the down-trodden slave." (Douglas, 76) Providing the man with an incorrect sense of contentedness and even gratitude, this custom would create an undue correlation between Christianity and the comforts found in captivity. Certainly, this is a subversion of the religion's true profession toward brotherly love.

A profound insidiousness, we find, is at the base of the Christianity that so closely applied itself to the practice of slave-holding. The so-called 'benevolence' connected with a faith-based holiday would arise more from a wariness on the part of slave-holders to the independently industrious slave than from reverence of the holy time of year. In the week of rest afforded the slave, Douglass indicates, the slaveholder most desired to see those in his possession partaking of whiskey and repose, with those choosing to occupy themselves with personal labor or self-cultivation representing the greatest threat for insurrection. The likelihood of such, the author contends, was seriously diminished by the outpouring of generosity which enabled such entitled relaxation and inebriation. But the temporal and intended nature of this 'freedom' fails any test of true and just Christianity.

It is this condition that also inclines Douglass during his lifetime to have reflected considerably on the exclusion which blacks experienced from the celebratory occasions in American culture. Speaking on the 4th of July in 1854, he would contend strikingly that "I am not included within the pale of this glorious anniversary! Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. The blessings in which you this day rejoice are not enjoyed in common. The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity, and independence bequeathed by your fathers is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought life and healing to you has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth of July is yours, not mine." (Douglass2, 1) The proximity, of course, between patriotic and religious holidays is markedly close in this discussion.

Though Garrison and Douglass would eventually grow apart, this particular speech demonstrates the influence which the former had on the latter, identifying with similar rhetoric as early as 1829 the inherent hypocrisy in the celebratory nature of the 4th of July. In a speech to the Colonization Society, he said of slavery, "it is a gangrene preying upon our vitals -- an earthquake rumbling under our feet -- a mine accumulating materials for a national catastrophe. It should make this a day of fasting and prayer, not of boisterous merriment and idle pageantry -- a day of great lamentation, not of congratulatory joy. It should spike every cannon, and haul down every banner. Our garb should be sackcloth -- our heads bowed in the dust;our supplications, for the pardon and assistance of Heaven." (Garrison2, 1)

In this respect again, there is a clear consonance between Douglass and Garrison, the latter of whom succinctly denotes the shortcoming of slaveholding to understanding the proper implications of Christian goodness and the notion of each man being produced in God's image. He remarks "how accursed is that system, which entombs the godlike mind of man, defaces the divine image, reduces those who by creation were crowned with glory and honor to a level with four-footed beasts, and exalts the dealer in human flesh above all that is called God!" (Douglass, xvi) In denying the slave of the most crucial qualities of humanity, namely freedom, free will and the right to the inventions of his psyche, the slavemaster is here guilty of subverting the very formula of individuality endowed to each individual, blind of race. There is expressed here quite clearly a standard model for designing the properly indoctrinated slave which undermines his own sense of having been created in god's image. This becomes an increasingly relevant point upon exploration of the double-standard which imbued both blacks and whites of the antebellum era south with a reverence for Christian values. For Douglass, a graduating intellectual awareness would begin to illuminate the core hypocrisy at play.

Indeed, we find a literally articulated critique of this incongruity that would significantly benefit the public discourse over slavery in general. The utilization of Christianity as a means to enforcing in slaves subscribing thereto a conception of the justice in their captivity is revealed as being ambiguous at best and farcical at worst. Douglass' autobiographical treatise argues that the dispensation of faith amongst slaves could be implemented as a devastating tool against the interest in freedom. As a counterpoint to this forced understanding though, would be the self-directed adaptation of such faith to the provision of hope and comfort for those who had no earthly means of finding such. In his forward to Douglass' work, abolitionist Wendell Phillips refers to a notion proposed by the freed slave-turned-author that speaks to both the hypocrisy of Christianity's employ and to the unintended consequence of its invocation to the pursuit of freedom. According to Phillips, Douglass had come to recognize that "a slave-holder's profession of Christianity is a palpable imposture. He is a felon of the highest grade. He is a man-stealer. It is of no importance what you put in the other scale." (Douglas, xviii) In speaking of the 'other scale,' Douglass argues that no degree of white humbleness in the face of Christian good can erase the essential wrong which is slavery. The hegemonic machinations which had become affixed to the slaveholder's version of Christianity were tantamount to an outright abandonment of the values held between man and god. The egregious misdeed of slavery could in no way be espoused by the Christian god, though such would be the promontory idea passed from slaveholder to slave.

This chasm between the Christianity of the prophet Jesus Christ, underscored by ideals of generosity, fellowship and moral virtuousness, and that of the antebellum south, had created a faith denoted by its attachment to an imbalanced social structure and an ethically unsupportable collective consciousness to be shared by slaveholder and slave alike. In this way, Christianity could be seen less as a force contributing to the continuity of slavery than as an entity exploited to exceedingly human ends.

By bringing to the fore of an essentially evil system the gospels of Jesus Christ, the slaveholder would succeed in associating such with a code of goodness with profound ideological influence communicable to both races. The white loyalty to Christianity would be paralleled by an evolving black subscription thereto. More even than conveying a false sense of godly permissibility to this state of human relations, Christianity would help to suggest an equal footing for both races in a context to be enjoyed in the hereafter rather than on the mortal plane.

For the slave, the reality of this system would have been difficult to perceive as economic. Particularly due to the clouding presence of Christianity, the fundamentally monetary value of slave labor could be regarded as secondary to an order which was generally portrayed as naturally aligned. However, for Douglass, there is evidence that the device of Christianity would help to maintain and subsequently mask what were often amoral motives. The possession of one man by another, and the obedience of the former to the latter, was a business arrangement packaged in a portrayal of religious proclamation.

Douglass would acknowledge as much in his sharp rejection of the Christian explanation for slavery. Addressing those of his brothers still held in captivity, Douglass wonders, "Does a righteous God govern the universe? And for what does he hold the thunders in his right hand, if not to smite the oppressor, and deliver the spoiled out of the hand of the spoiler?" (Douglass, 82) Douglass thus acknowledges that the use of Christianity for the enforcement of slavery has little if nothing to do with god. Douglass would outright declare that the distinction between god's will and the slavemaster's is founded on the latter's loyalty to a spiritless social structure of economic exploitation and, if founded upon anything else, malicious racism. The emphasis on the former slave's Christianity, Douglass will go on to contend, must be founded on a deeply personal faith in the just hand of a god who is repulsed by slavery. Here, the author attempts to remove from its implicit economic container the importance of Christianity as a means to personal salvation.

There is a support to this idea in Garrison's writing, interestingly, which by its sheer explication of the contrast between slaveholding and Christian virtue helps to clarify the manipulative manner in which religion had been exploited to control the impulses of slaves. In resistance to this system, Garrison would content that "the abolitionism which I advocate is as absolute as the law of God, and as unyielding as his throne. It admits of no compromise. Every slave is a stolen man; every slaveholder is a man stealer. By no precedent, no example, no law, no compact, no purchase, no bequest, no inheritance, no combination of circumstances, is slaveholding right or justifiable." (Garrison1, 1)

We can see here how Garrison and Douglass took a strength tht was precipitated on this belief, in fact, that the institution of slavery was bound for destruction. A number of historical factors with which Douglass intermingled demonstrated this point to him, and in some regard, would also factor into the break in his association with Garrison. The first of these incidences would be the raid on Harper's Ferry by slave rebel John Brown. To this, Oakes (2007) reports that "years later, in a reflective mood, Douglass acknowledged the circumstances that lent John Brown's raid its significance. A growing number of northerners had come to view slavery as immoral, he noted. After 1956, 'the whole land rocked with this great controversy.' An 'explosive force' had already weakened the Union; the public mind was agitated to its 'topmost height'; the North and South had reached their 'extreme points of difference.' Leading politicians were proclaiming that all hope of compromise 'had nearly vanished.' Only then, 'as if to banish even the last glimmer of hope for peace between the sections, John Brown came upon the scene.'" (Oakes, 103) It appeared at this juncture in his own life to Douglass that a moment of revolution was occurring, even as he had worked to distance himself from the militant acts of John Brown, which he believed were counterproductive to achieving a mounting political relevance. It would perhaps be this experience, which caused him to flee from potential repudiation by his own friendship and consultation with Brown, that would also stimulate a greater moderation of political tactics and the inherent break from Garrison.

As much as any other force, in fact, we may see fit to attribute this break in ideology to presence of Abraham Lincoln and the promises which he brought to a national crisis seeming increasingly to tilt toward the abolition of this deeply flawed institution. To Douglass, Lincoln seemed a valuable ally to the cause and a justification for coalescence to a constitutional resolution of this crisis. Indeed, in the new president, "Douglass liked what he saw, especially the address Lincoln had given at the outset of his campaign for the Senate. It was Lincoln's famous 'House Divided' speech, and Douglass quoted it approvingly and at length. Lincoln pointed out that the best efforts of leading politicians to quell the agitation over slavery had failed. Indeed, they were doomed to fail, Lincoln warned." (Oakes, 4) It was most certainly in this area that Lincoln and Douglass, and indeed we may also say Garrison, agreed, that slavery was bound for a violent demise and that it was necessary to prepare for the difficulties that would be inherent to this change. Such difficulties and the political intricacies of the slave system underscore the economic imperatives which drove Douglass to this point, with his intellectual development producing unique insights.

In his work for a ship-builder in Fell's Point, Douglass relates a circumstance which most directly suggests that economic motives were entangled both with the religious and psychological inclinations supporting the structure of slavery. Earning a scant $1.50 a day for his labor, which he describes as a wage contracted and entitled only to him, Douglass bitterly recounts being forced by his master upon his reporting each week to surrender this full sum without protest. He explained of his master that this was "not because he earned it, -- not because he had any hand in earning it, -- not because I owed it to him, -- nor because he possessed the slightest shadow of a right to it; but solely because he had the power to compel me to give it up. The right of the grim-visaged pirate upon the high seas is exactly the same." (Douglass, 110) Indeed, even beyond forcing the unpaid toiling of men and women under the pretense of possessing their lives, this seems an all too telling demonstration of the greed underscoring the racially-based power structure. It would require an increased recognition that his rights as a man alone were to protect him from that treatment that would allow Douglass or any of his fellows to be loosed from such terms.