Frederick Douglass

1818-1895 · American · Abolitionist Oratory, Constitutional Argument, African American Political Thought

You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man.

Frederick Douglass was born a slave on Maryland's Eastern Shore and taught himself to read from The Columbian Orator, a schoolbook anthology of speeches; it gave him, he said afterwards, the power of speech and with it the knowledge of his own condition. He escaped in 1838, was discovered as a speaker in 1841, and spent the next half-century on platforms in America, Britain and Ireland. He never wrote a treatise on the art. He practised it against hostile audiences for fifty years.

Topics Frederick Douglass addresses

• chattel slavery
• learning to read as a slave
• the Columbian Orator
• the corruption of the slaveholder
• the slaveholding church
• the underground railroad
• the Fugitive Slave Law
• escaping to the North
• the break with Garrison
• disunionism
• the Constitution as an anti-slavery document
• the Slave Power
• colonization and emigration
• Free Soil politics
• the Fourth of July oration
• abolition by moral suasion
• John Brown and the raid
• arming black soldiers
• emancipation as a war measure
• the Fifteenth Amendment
• the Negro's hour
• the collapse of Reconstruction
• lynch law
• the color line

Questions to put to Frederick Douglass

Slavery and the Making of a Man

• How did learning to read change you?
• What did the Columbian Orator teach you about your own condition?
• How does slavery corrupt the slaveholder as well as the enslaved?
• What made you decide to escape, and how did you do it?
• Why do you say we should see how a slave was made a man?

The Constitution and the Abolitionist Movement

• How did you come to see the Constitution as an anti-slavery document?
• Why did you break with Garrison over the Constitution?
• Was paying Hugh Auld for your freedom a surrender of principle?
• What's wrong with the argument that the free states should secede?
• How should abolitionists use the ballot and the government?

The Fourth of July and American Hypocrisy

• What is the Fourth of July to an American slave?
• How can you praise the founders and then call their legacy a mockery?
• What did you mean by calling the slaveholding church a lie?
• How does the Fugitive Slave Law expose what the Union really stands for?
• Can a nation built on slavery ever make good on its founding words?

War, Emancipation, and Arming Black Soldiers

• Why did you press Lincoln to make the war about emancipation?
• What was at stake for you in arming black soldiers?
• Should you have gone with John Brown to Harpers Ferry?
• How did fighting in the war change what freedom could mean?
• What did the Fifteenth Amendment accomplish, and what did it leave undone?

Reconstruction, Lynching, and the Color Line

• What happened when Reconstruction collapsed and the troops withdrew?
• How do you answer the charge that lynch law is a response to black crime?
• Why do you say the Negro's citizenship is still on trial?
• Did holding federal office soften your willingness to fight?
• What will it take to make the amendments real in practice?

Testimony, Oratory, and Self-Made Men

• How do you use your own life as an argument?
• What makes testimony on the platform different from a written treatise?
• Why did you write three autobiographies telling the same life?
• What do you mean when you call yourself a self-made man?
• How did you learn to hold a hostile audience?

Converse with Frederick Douglass on Simposeum. Replies are grounded in Frederick Douglass's own writing, cited to the page.