It is difficult to imagine the environment in which a person is forced to exist to write the things outlined above. What drives my investigation is this question: amid the extreme context of American slavocracy, how can we account for the robust subjectivity and agency of Frederick Douglass? In this context of extremity, a situation in which most contemporary psychological theory suggests the human spirit would be vanquished, how does Frederick Douglass emerge to become one of the most prolific and freest thinkers of the nineteenth century? In the context of extremity, how does a person experience himself as human? How can he still imagine and operate from a robust sense of self and the agency to self-determine?
To analyze the life of Frederick Douglass, it is necessary to begin at the end. For in his fourth and final autobiographical reflection, published just three years before his death, Douglass reflects on the Supreme Court’s devastating decision to overturn the Civil Rights Act of 1875. His conclusion to his final anthology stands in stark contrast to the seeming conviction with which he concludes his third autobiography , written just six years after the landmark Civil Rights Bill of 1875 when Douglass was at the pinnacle of his life’s achievements. The code by which Douglass lived seems to have yielded unimaginable dividends: “I have taught that the ‘fault is not in our stars but in ourselves that we are underlings,’ that ‘who would be free, themselves must strike the blow’…forty years of my life have been given to the cause of my people, and if I had forty years more they should all be sacredly given to the great cause” (p. 488). Yet, as Martin Luther King Jr. toward the end of his life—in an interview with Sander Vanocur1—expressed how his dream of democracy had become more of a nightmare, so Frederick Douglass ended his final autobiography on a note of tempered resignation at the nadir of the nineteenth-century Reconstruction era and the dawn of an emerging twentieth-century Jim Crow reign of terror.
Ever since his epic battle with Covey the Negro-breaker, “striking the blow” to be free from the slave power had ordered Douglass’ philosophical, political , and social framework of thinking, as well as his sense of identity and subjectivity . But that “blow” was not just for himself. His cause was his people. This is a mark of generativity : an emotional maturity that precipitates an internal desire for the well-being and prosperity of one’s biological offspring—or others that may symbolize one’s posterity and the continuation of one’s lifework (Erikson 1980), in Douglass’s case, his people as a race.
That same mature ego strength apparent in his interest in the well-being of his people is especially evident in his 1874 address to students at the Indian Industrial School. In that address, entitled Self Made Men, he indirectly likens himself to one who has been able to make the best of his personal gifts and talents and achieve much despite the “efforts of society and the tendency of circumstances to repress, retard, and keep them down” (p. 7), an obvious encouragement for his audience to do the same. In his first three autobiographies , Douglass’ closing reflections had to do with exterior themes—ideas, values, and aspirations that were connected to the external world. He is thinking beyond his own personal survival, tapping into larger ideas that can bring freedom. For example, in the first edition of the Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881), he concludes his work with a more positive assessment of exterior social conditions for himself and his contemporaries, as well as his contributions to the Reconstruction era. In what he perceived to be (at that time) a final exhortation to his fellow black colleagues, Douglass wrote:
I have aimed to assure them that knowledge can be obtained under difficulties; that poverty may give place to competency; that obscurity is not an absolute bar to distinction, and that a way is open to welfare and happiness to all who will resolutely and wisely pursue that way; that neither slavery, stripes, imprisonment, or proscription, need extinguish self-respect, crush manly ambition, or paralyze effort; that no power outside of himself can prevent a man from sustaining an honorable character and a useful relation to his day and generation…forty years of my life have been given to the cause of my people, and if I had forty years more they should all be sacredly given to the great cause.2 (p. 488)
Nevertheless, circumstance has a way of disrupting fantasy of the American dream. Indeed, life has a brutal way of robbing us of the illusions of safety, security, orderliness and that human progress is somehow linear. The most formidable meaning-making task of his life challenged Douglass in his final anthology of 1892, for in 1883 the Supreme Court had ruled the Civil Rights Act of 1875 unconstitutional. All was lost! In the wake of the catastrophic collapse of Reconstruction , Douglass must have wondered what was the meaning of his life’s work. With the promise of Reconstruction shattered—for Douglass and millions of others—how was hope of the future and the movement for freedom to be redefined? At first glance, it seems that Douglass concludes his life -story on a high note, determined to think positively about the context that precipitated the writing of this fourth edition:
Contemplating my life as a whole, I have to say that, although it has at times been dark and stormy, and I have met with hardships from which other men have been exempted, yet my life has in many respects been remarkably full of sunshine and joy. Servitude, persecution, false friends, desertion and depreciation have not robbed my life of happiness or made it a burden…from first to last I have, in large measure, shared the respect and confidence of my fellow-men…I have had the happiness of possessing many precious and long-enduring friendships with good men and women.3 (p. 752)
Are his final words an affirmation of American innocence and idealism and a trivialization of the horrors of the slavocracy ? Do they ignore the dismantling of Reconstruction and the dawn of the Jim Crow era? Not at all. Rather, Frederick Douglass’ words reflect an act of agency , the will to self-determine, an interior show of force to survive within a psychosocial matrix riddled with blowback and retaliation against the forward-moving progress of a now defunct Reconstruction era. In contrast to previous autobiographies , Douglass’ closing words in his final biopic read as a resistance against interior despair. Despite the sociocultural context that suggested that his life and life’s work did not matter, Douglass responded with a counter-hegemonic ending narrative that asserted that he and his life’s work were still meaningful. Under the overwhelming weight of structural evil , hegemony, and hopelessness precipitated by the removal of federal troops from southern states and the decision of the Supreme Court to rescind the Civil Rights Bill of 1875, Douglass composed a life-giving closing narrative —a life -story with sufficient integrity to withstand the load of hopelessness and the fog of despair.
If the reader is unconvinced by this interpretation of Douglass’s concluding words in his final autobiography , a portion of his speech of January 9, 1894 at the Metropolitan AME Church in Washington, DC, just over a year before his death leaves no question as to the despair that Douglass was attempting to resist. Decisively countering the erroneous and growing public sentiment that mob lynching in the Jim Crow south was justified due to the alleged (but unfounded) rape of white women by black men, as well as the growing momentum to disenfranchise black citizens, Douglass (1894) lamented the degenerative state of the Union:
In so many ways then, where Douglass found himself in 1894 is where so many of us found ourselves in 2017 after eight years of a black presidency. There is something hauntingly consistent and repetitious about the life-cycle stages of a nation experimenting with democracy.I have sometimes thought that the American people are too great to be small, too just and magnanimous to oppress the weak, too brave to yield up the right to the strong…He is a wiser man than I am, who can tell how low the moral sentiment of this republic may yet fall. When the moral sense of a nation begins to decline and the wheel of progress to roll backward, there is no telling how low the one will fall or where the other may stop…The Supreme Court has surrendered, State sovereignty is resorted. It has destroyed the civil rights Bill, and converted the Republican party into a party of money rather than a party of morals…The cause lost in the war, is the cause regained in peace, and the cause gained in war, is the cause lost in peace. (pp. 23–24)
This book is a psychobiography of one of the most prolific African American writers and thinkers of the nineteenth century: Frederick Douglass (1818–1895). It is primarily a psychoanalytical examination of Frederick Douglass’s four autobiographies : Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845), My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881), and the revised edition of Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1892), hereafter referred to as books 1, 2, 3, and 4, respectively. To understand and interpret Douglass’ life better, I examine not only the cultural, political , and religious environment that influenced the pers...