The Political Thought of Frederick Douglass

In Pursuit of American Liberty

Nicholas Buccola

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781479867493
• eBook ISBN: 9780814725412
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

2013 Finalist, 26th Annual Oregon Best Book Award
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font-family: "Times New Roman";}Frederick Douglass, one of the most prominent figures in
African-American and United States
history, was born a slave, but escaped to the North and became a well-known
anti-slavery activist, orator, and author. In The Political Thought of
Frederick Douglass, Nicholas Buccola provides an important and original
argument about the ideas that animated this reformer-statesman. Beyond his role
as an abolitionist, Buccola argues for the importance of understanding Douglass
as a political thinker who provides deep insights into the immense challenge of
achieving and maintaining the liberal promise of freedom. Douglass, Buccola
contends, shows us that the language of rights must be coupled with a robust
understanding of social responsibility in order for liberal ideals to be
realized. Truly an original American thinker, this book highlights Douglass's
rightful place among the great thinkers in the American liberal tradition.Podcast — Nicholas Buccola on Frederick Douglass and Liberty.

1
The Facts and the Philosophy
Frederick Douglass as Political Thinker

Introduction

By 1860, Frederick Douglass’s patience was wearing thin. After spending nearly two decades as an antislavery activist and enduring the many setbacks of the 1850s—the congressional compromises, the Dred Scott decision, the execution of John Brown—he admitted to reaching a “point of weary hopelessness.”¹ The American people, he wrote, claim to accept the “civic catechism of the Declaration of Independence” and yet with three million people held in bondage around them, they are not moved from “the downy seat of inaction.” Douglass argued that the persistence of this “terrible paradox” was not due to a “failure to appreciate the value of liberty,” but rather because the American “love of liberty” was “circumscribed by our narrow and wicked” selfishness.²

Douglass devoted his near six decades as an orator, writer, and public official to convincing his fellow Americans to purge this narrowness and selfishness from their love of liberty. His aim, in short, was to persuade the American people to accept a new liberal creed that would replace narrowness with egalitarianism and selfishness with humanitarianism. His life’s mission, he said in 1888, was “to hasten the day when the principles of liberty and humanity expressed in the Declaration of Independence and the constitution of the United States shall be the law and the practice of every section, and of all the people of this great country without regard to race, sex, color, or religion.”³ This book is about the political philosophy that animated his mission. I argue that Douglass believed his goals could only be accomplished if the classical liberal commitment to individual rights was coupled with a robust conception of mutual responsibility. Two ideas were at the core of his political thought: a belief in universal self-ownership and a commitment to a doctrine he called “true virtue.” According to the idea of universal self-ownership, every human being is the “original, rightful, and absolute owner of his own body,” and according to the doctrine of true virtue, each individual has extensive obligations to stand up for the rights of others.⁴ Douglass’s embrace of these foundational ideas was rooted in the experience of slavery and his quest to abolish it. His hatred of the cruelties of slavery led him to an acute appreciation of the importance of individual rights, and the challenges he confronted as an abolitionist led him to believe that an ethos of “each for all and all for each” was necessary to secure these rights.

I believe an exploration of Douglass’s political thought is worthwhile for two major reasons. First, Douglass was a prominent and unique voice in one of the most important periods in American political history. The problem of slavery raised fundamental questions about the nature of the American polity. What are the foundations and limits of democratic authority in the United States? What rights do individuals possess? Are individual rights universal? What obligations do individuals have to one another? By drawing on his experiences as a slave, Douglass was able to offer a distinct perspective on these and other basic questions of political philosophy. He set himself apart from most of his contemporaries by defending a far more inclusive and morally demanding liberalism. Unlike so many of his predecessors and contemporaries, Douglass’s natural rights philosophy was truly universal in its application and his “outsider” status pushed him to articulate a much more urgent view of the obligations individuals have to one another. Second, I believe the spirit of Douglass’s ideas continues to be relevant to contemporary debates about political theory and practice. We are confronted, as Douglass was, with problems that cannot be addressed by the language of liberty alone. Instead in discussions of public philosophy and policy, contemporary citizens and statesmen are grappling with how to balance our commitment to rights with a greater sense of the obligations we have to others. As we confront the myriad challenges of our age, we would do well to reflect on the ideas of Frederick Douglass, who in the face of some of the biggest political crises this country has ever confronted, attempted to show that the promises of freedom are more likely to be realized in communities of responsible individuals.

Frederick Douglass: A Life of Agitation and Service

Although relevant moments in Douglass’s life will come up again and again in what follows, this is not a work of biography and my analysis proceeds thematically rather than chronologically. The details of Douglass’s life have been ably described by Douglass himself and by a number of excellent historians.⁵ Before discussing Douglass’s political thought, though, I would like to provide a brief description of his life. He was born into slavery in Tuckahoe, Maryland, in 1818. Over the course of the next twenty years, he experienced the full spectrum of slavery from the relative freedom of life as a “city slave” in Baltimore to the horrors of life on a plantation run by the infamous “slave-breaker” Edward Covey.⁶ At age 20, Douglass escaped from slavery and spent a brief period working as a common laborer in Massachusetts. Within a few years of attaining his freedom, he was “discovered” by the abolitionist leader William Lloyd Garrison and joined the abolitionist lecture circuit. Soon after joining the circuit, he faced a problem: his oratorical skills so impressed his audiences that many began to doubt whether or not he truly was “a graduate of the peculiar institution.” This (among other things) led his Garrisonian mentors to attempt to rein in their new colleague. “Give us the facts,” John A. Collins instructed Douglass, “we will take care of the philosophy.”⁷ Douglass did not take this advice, and the American political tradition is all the richer for it.

Douglass spent the 1840s and 1850s agitating on behalf of abolition. He lectured widely, authored autobiographies describing his life as a slave, and edited abolitionist newspapers—The North Star from 1847 to 1851, Frederick Douglass’ Paper from 1851 to 1860, and The Douglass Monthly from 1860 to 1863. In his speeches and writings, Douglass drew on his experiences as a slave and his study of natural rights philosophy in an attempt to convince his listeners and readers of the evil inherent in the slave system. In addition, Douglass lent his skills of persuasion to other progressive causes such as women’s suffrage, temperance, the abolition of capital punishment, equal rights for immigrants, and universal public education.

During the Civil War, Douglass used his voice and his pen to push President Abraham Lincoln and other Republican leaders to acknowledge that the conflict was about slavery and could not be resolved without the abolition of that institution.⁸ In addition, once he felt that the war was being waged for the right reasons and when he became convinced that black soldiers would be granted equal pay and treatment by Union commanders, he used his influence to recruit on behalf of the Union cause. After the war, Douglass continued his work as a progressive reformer, turning his attention to achieving equal citizenship for freedmen as well as continuing to speak and write in favor of the causes listed above.

During the 1870s and 1880s, Douglass established himself as a staunch supporter of the Republican Party. His support was rewarded with several opportunities to serve in Republican administrations. First, in 1871, he was selected by President Ulysses S. Grant to serve as secretary to a commission charged with the task of investigating the annexation of Santo Domingo. Then, in 1874, Douglass was again called into service by President Grant, this time to serve as the president of the Freedman’s Saving and Trust Company, an institution established to provide financial assistance to freed slaves. In 1877, Douglass was appointed by President Rutherford B. Hayes to serve as U.S. Marshal in the District of Columbia before he was appointed to become Recorder of Deeds for the District in 1880. Douglass’s last appointment came when he agreed to serve as American consul-general to Haiti from 1889 to 1891. Douglass continued to agitate on behalf of progressive causes until the day he died. On February 20, 1895, he attended a meeting of the National Council of Women in Washington, D.C. Shortly after he returned home to prepare to lecture that evening, he collapsed and died instantly.⁹

Like many other important figures in the history of American political thought, Douglass never published a comprehensive treatise of political philosophy. Over the course of his public career, though, he did produce three autobiographies, thousands of speeches and editorials, and volumes of correspondence from which we can cull a fairly coherent picture of his answers to many central normative questions in politics. In this book, I attempt to reconstruct that picture. In so doing, I have tried to be mindful of the fact that Douglass was not, first and foremost, a philosopher. Instead, Douglass is most often viewed, quite rightly, as a reformer and statesman. When interpreting his writings and speeches, then, it is necessary to keep in mind that he was a political actor who was attempting to achieve particular objectives. As such, although my analysis proceeds thematically instead of chronologically, I have tried to be mindful of the contexts in which Douglass was writing and speaking. While it is vital to keep these contexts in mind, my primary aim in this book is to explain the core commitments of Douglass’s political philosophy, which I contend was remarkably consistent over time. I invite the reader, then, to think of Douglass as a sort of philosophical statesman. He was a political actor whose ideas were to some extent conditioned by the demands of the politics of his time, but he was an actor who remained faithful to a set of core ideas. My hope is that this book will provide readers with a deeper understanding of those core ideas. I am not the first to offer an interpretation of Douglass’s political thought; so before proceeding to my argument, it is appropriate to say something about the interpretations offered by others.

Situating Frederick Douglass in the American Political Tradition

In The Political Philosophy of Thomas Jefferson, Garrett Ward Sheldon describes three approaches to the study of political ideas:

(1) the historical approach, which examines the language used by a society to discuss political problems; (2) the political science approach, which studies the role of political language in political activity; and (3) the approach of political philosophy, which, more abstractly, examines the concepts in past political ideas and their relation to other theories found throughout the history of Western political thought.¹⁰

This study of Douglass’s political thought draws on all three approaches, but relies most heavily on the third. When I began this project I was motivated, at least in part, by a desire to address what I took to be a glaring lack of scholarly attention to Douglass as a political philosopher. The canonical interpretations of the American political tradition failed to even mention Douglass and, at the time I began this project, there had not been a book-length study of Douglass published by a political theorist.¹¹ Sometimes gaps in the literature are there for good reason, but I did not believe this was the case for Douglass.¹² After all, how could it be that one of the most prominent Americans of the nineteenth century, a man who was deeply engaged in the most important moral and political battle of that century, was so ignored by political theorists?

Although Douglass had been ignored in the canonical interpretations of American political thought produced in the twentieth century and did not become the subject of a book-length study by a political theorist until almost a decade into the twenty-first, the cupboard of research on Douglass as a political philosopher is not completely bare. Indeed, like many other iconic figures in American political history, his political philosophy has been a matter of interpretive dispute. As you will see in my argument in chapter 3, in one sense the categorization of Douglass’s political philosophy is simple: he was a liberal. This is only noncontroversial, though, if we adopt a general definition like the one offered by political theorist Judith Shklar. “Liberalism,” Shklar wrote, is a “political doctrine” with “only one overriding aim: to secure the political conditions necessary for the exercise of personal freedom.”¹³ If we adopt this sort of broad definition, then it is fair to say that most American political thinkers are within the liberal tradition.¹⁴ As numerous scholars of American political thought have pointed out, it is precisely for this reason that we must dig deeper into the liberal tradition in order to appreciate the diversity that exists within it.¹⁵ Scholars of American thought have divided the liberal tradition in a variety of ways, but perhaps the most basic division is between “classical” and “reform” liberalism. According to political theorist Kenneth Dolbeare, classical liberals emphasize self-reliance, natural rights, private property and limited government intervention in social and economic affairs.¹⁶ Returning to the language used in Shklar’s general definition above, classical liberals believe the conditions are met for the exercise of personal freedom when a limited government protects the rights of individuals to life, liberty, and property. Reform liberals share the classical liberal belief in individual rights, but worry about whether or not genuine freedom can be exercised under conditions of economic and social inequality. Reform liberals contend that true liberty can only be realized in communities that empower individuals to fulfill their potential. This empowerment, reform liberals contend, comes from individuals feeling a greater sense of obligation for one another’s well-being than classical liberalism seems to demand, and from a willingness to accept government intervention in social and economic life in order to promote greater equality.

Interpreters are divided on how to classify Douglass, but the majority identifies him with the classical liberal tradition.¹⁷ Interpreters in this majority connect him to the contemporary political spectrum by contending that he is best thought of as the founding father of black conservatism in the United States and hear his arguments echoed on the contemporary right from thinkers like Thomas Sowell, Shelby Steele, and John McWhorter.¹⁸ According to this reading, the defining features of Douglass’s political morality are his commitments to natural rights, limited government, and a self-help individualism that would later be popularized by Booker T. Washington in the early twentieth century, and celebrated by Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas in our own time. Another set of interpreters identifies Douglass as a thinker who was keenly aware of the myriad forms of inequality that threaten the exercise of personal freedom and, as such, embraced a political philosophy that departed significantly from the core tenets of classical liberalism. Before proceeding, I would like to provide brief sketches of each side of this interpretive divide.

In her short book American Citizenship, political theorist Judith Shklar offered an interpretation of Douglass as a classical liberal. Douglass is a central figure in Shklar’s arguments throughout the book, but of particular interest for my purposes is her discussion of Douglass in the context of the late-twentieth-century “ideological conflict” over social welfare programs.

One side accuses its opponents of being a paternalistic elite who want to eliminate poverty by paralyzing the helpless poor. The second group charges the other side with being harsh populist achievers who blame the victims unfairly, and who in disregard of actual conditions and needs simply want to put everyone to work for a tiny wage and to no good end.¹⁹

Shklar calls the latter group “the defenders of the helpless poor” and the former group the “party of individual effort.” The defenders of the helpless poor, representing the left of the political spectrum, view the poor as “social victims who are being denied racial equality, opportunities for decent work and education, and access to normal public goods.” Douglass’s ideas, Shklar contends, are on the other side of the divide: “The opposing party of individual effort, like Frederick Douglass, hopes that the government will do nothing more than ensure fair play for all. Anyone who truly wants to w...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 The Facts and the Philosophy: Frederick Douglass as Political Thinker
• 2 “Every Man Is Himself and Belongs to Himself”: Slavery and Self-Ownership as the Foundations of Douglass’s Liberalism
• 3 From Slavery to Liberty and Equality: Douglass’s Liberal Democratic Politics
• 4 “Each for All and All for Each”: Douglass’s Case for Mutual Responsibility
• 5 “Friends of Freedom”: Reformers, Self-Made Men, and the Moral Ecology of Freedom
• 6 “Man Is Neither Wood Nor Stone”: Top-Down Moral Education in Douglass’s Liberalism
• 7 Conclusion: Frederick Douglass in the American Mind
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author