Leslie Leonard's "Introduction to Frederick Douglass's 'Slavery'"

Abstract

Leslie Leonard's "Introduction to Frederick Douglass's 'Slavery'" Jewon Woo (bio) Frederick Douglass's 1894 essay, "Slavery," now gains our attention, thanks to Leslie Leonard's introduction and annotated edition.1 Although the essay never appeared in print and has been repeatedly left out of the various collections of his writings, it has survived in the Library of Congress archives.2 Their re(dis)covery of his essay reminds us of the timelessness of Douglass's work on Black liberation and the civil rights tradition. "Slavery" also intervenes in our ongoing conversation on the role of history in the context of nineteenth-century literary studies. As Leonard notes, Douglass's essay provides modern readers with clear historical linkages between enslavement and postbellum violence, and reaches into our contemporary iterations of the same structures. An effort to find the significance of early historical texts that challenge and transcend "the values and mores of people in their own times" may be belittled as mere "presentism."3 However, Douglass assures his readers that the past must not stay in "their own times," in contrast with apologists of slavery who insisted that it be relegated to a definite time frame antithetical to the present. Leonard's representation of Douglass as a historian and political philosopher suggests that demonstrating the past of racial slavery is not a presentist fashioning of racism but both a critical reckoning of its force shaping present conditions and a prophetic envisioning of the future. Douglass in "Slavery" aims his argument at emerging generations who "now know little or nothing about it either in theory or in practice."4 Instead of detailing the author's firsthand experience with the institution and abolitionism, his essay theorizes slavery as a system of [End Page 21] power through a comprehensive examination of history, philosophy, literature, and religion. This analysis requires readers to understand the slavery past in the context of the post-Reconstruction present of anti-Black violence and systemic racism, calling for the abolition of slavery and its afterlife at various levels of the nation. Interestingly, who might be his target audience in "Slavery" remains unclear. As Leonard points out, Black public intellectuals have crafted "a usable past for Black Americans"; Douglass must have had young Black readers in his mind to remind them that their ancestors "saved the American Republic from ruin, and invested it with a power and glory."5 At the same time, he invites white audiences, buttering them up with the familiar trope of Black patience and resilience as "the wisdom of the hour."6 However, Douglass emphasizes the resilience of Black Americans not to appease white fears of Black resistance but to demand that the nation acknowledge enslaved people's contribution to its economic, political, cultural, and spiritual foundation. He warns that if American historiography continues to exclude African American voices from its narrative, the nation as a whole will not avoid the destructive influence of anti-Black racism. Indeed, the absence of a direct interlocutor—you—from the essay's invocation of racial justice forces us, the human family, to reimagine radically new Americans who as a collective can eradicate the remnant of slavocracy and its operating power structure.7 Leonard aptly calls Douglass's essay "a text of reactivation" because, in circling around the slavery past, post-Reconstruction present, and anti-racist future with full citizenship of African Americans, he "recounts, rediscovers, and recapitulates" slavery.8 Likewise, the present in Black historiography is infused with the unresolved past and prophetic desire for the time to come, in opposition to the oppressor's attempt to rationalize history as a linear narrative of past events to justify the present as a result of progress and advancement away from the past. His approach to nonlinear historical time is not unfamiliar in the Black intellectual tradition. David Walker in his Appeal weaponizes biblical history to condemn the current oppression of people of African descent, arguing that God determines divine time from alpha and omega in his judgment of human atrocities. With the same biblical notion of time, Anna Julia Cooper insists that Black women as "the heirs of a past which was not [their] fathers' moulding" are destined to...