The "Wisdom of the Hour" Willed to Black Americans in Douglass's "Slavery"

Abstract

The "Wisdom of the Hour" Willed to Black Americans in Douglass's "Slavery" Kelvin C. Black (bio) As Leslie Leonard notes in her introduction, our understanding of Frederick Douglass's "Slavery," unpublished till now, profits from being placed in conversation with his contemporaneous speech "Lessons of the Hour" (1894).1 One of the most striking points of connection between these two late-life works is Douglass's apparent resumption of a position he held briefly prior to his famous change of opinion in 1851 on the proslavery character of the Constitution. Namely, Douglass appears to take back up in "Slavery" the position he espoused in 1849 that the American people lacked the "moral power" to reform the institutional and interpersonal life of the nation in ways that would defend against Black subjugation.2 His career after his change of opinion up to "Lessons of the Hour" and "Slavery," a period of approximately forty-three years, is marked by his belief that the "noble purposes of the preamble"3 reflect the true character not only of the Constitution but also of the "People of the United States" who formed it.4 However, in "Lessons of the Hour" Douglass states that the disenfranchisement of Black Americans in the wake of Reconstruction "has shaken my faith in the nobility of the nation."5 This admission is striking given that his career following his change of opinion seems to have been rooted in the strategic, and perhaps even good faith, calculation that the moral power of white Americans could be increased and then directed in the service of Black American liberation and social equality. Douglass seemed to believe that such a thing was possible both by affirming the pervasive sense among white Americans that the nation's historical foundations and cultural touchstones were virtuous and then [End Page 25] by instructing them how to view that foundational virtue to be fundamentally at odds with Black enslavement and social inequality.6 Remarkably, Douglass's "Slavery" appears to do away with this long-held calculation to increase the moral power of white Americans, in favor instead of a new one that seeks to fortify the moral power or "character" of Black Americans to "bear and forebear" their subjugation.7 Conspicuously absent from Douglass's essay is his familiar defense of the foundational virtue of the nation's ideals, as articulated in the Declaration of Independence and in the Constitution. Instead, he now contends that "[submission to slavery] implies the possession of those strong elements of character upon which the best institutions of mankind are predicted and permanent-ly founded."8 Statements like this one and others throughout the essay hold out the tantalizing possibility that the Black American experience of subjugation might provide better foundational virtues than the ones that allowed the American institution of slavery to stand. This call to "remagin[e] the world," as Leonard describes, "through a fresh set of ideals and ethics,"9 is reminiscent of Douglass's erstwhile Garrisonian goal of a national moral regeneration along explicit antislavery principles.10 His late-life vision of national moral regeneration, however, appears to place its trust in the eventual triumph of Black American character instead of in the moral suasion of white Americans. Notably, William Lloyd Garrison's notion of moral regeneration also argued against violent resistance. Whereas Garrisonian nonresistance is rooted in a pacifism modeled on the life of Christ, Douglass's argument against violent resistance by Black Americans in "Slavery" is rooted in what he describes as a pragmatic recognition of the "super-ior force [sic],"11 not character, of one's oppressors.12 Douglass is not on principle opposed to violent struggle in "Slavery" but rather rejects it based on strategic considerations of its viability as a means for collective liberation.13 In his vindication of Black American "submission" as a shrewd strategy for group survival and eventual triumph, Douglass evinces a worldview more in line with Sun Tzu than with the authors of the Gospels. If we then view Douglass's late-life emphasis on Black forbearance of oppression as a tactic, we must in turn understand that emphasis as following from his assessment of the Black American predicament...