It would not be long after Garnet's Address was given that Frederick Douglass would begin to affect his own transition to the radical viewpoint. During the year 1844, Douglass, at the urging of several persons, carefully crafted a heavily censured version of his own story. The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, published in 1845, was a direct departure from the role of the fugitive slave in the world of William Lloyd Garrison.
First, it described as the turning point of Douglass's life, a particularly violent encounter: Douglass's fight with the slave breaker Covey. Here is a man who is determinedly opposed to the use of violence to effect the freedom of any slaves on any level, reclaiming his self-esteem through the thorough drubbing of his white master.
This battle with Mr. Covey . . . rekindled the few remaining embers of freedom, and revived within me a sense of my own manhood. It recalled the departed self-confidence, and inspired me again with a determination to be free. The gratification afforded by the triumph was a full compensation for whatever else might follow, even death itself. He can only understand the deep satisfaction I experienced, who has himself repelled by force the bloody arm of slavery. . . . I now resolved that, forever when I might remain a slave in form, the day had passed forever when I could be a slave in fact. I did not hesitate to let it be known of me, that the white man who expected to succeed in whipping, must also succeed in killing me.
Secondly, and more importantly, Douglass�s narratives were political acts with a single goal foremost in view--the establishment of racial equality by the swiftest means. The lack of insight into Douglass's personal mind in his autobiographies was due to "his own conception of the slave narrative genre, which he admittedly viewed as less concerned with the freeing of the ego than with the embodiment of the struggle for certain democratic and egalitarian ideals."
As Wilson J. Moses said, "When W. E. B. Du Bois titled the 1940 edition of his own narrative the Autobiography of a Race Concept, he revealed an important truth about black autobiographical writing: It often reduces the individual to an abstraction and converts the author into a mere representation of racial oppression. Douglass, like Du Bois, realized that he had converted his life into an expression of a 'race concept.'"
The Narrative and his subsequent exile in England gave Douglass the opportunity to expand his sense of self-possession. After experiencing intellectual freedom from the organization of the American Anti-Slavery Society and from Garrison�s philosophy, Douglass was more prepared to express his own position, even if he would not fully break away from Garrison until much later. Throughout this period, Douglass grew increasingly flexible in his interpretations, and by the end of his English tour was independent enough to indirectly condone a slave uprising in the event of war with Britain:
When these slaveholders declaim about shouldering their muskets, buckling on their knapsacks, girding on their swords, and going to beat back and scourge the foreign invaders, they are told by these friendly monitors [the slaves], "Remember, your wives and children are at home! Reflect that we are at home! We are on the plantations, you had better stay at home and look after us. True, we eat the bread of freemen; we take up the room of freemen; we consume the same commodities as freemen: but still we have no interest in the state, no attachment for the country: we are slaves! You cannot fight a battle in your own land, but, at the tap of a foreign drum--the very moment the British standard shall be erected upon your soil, at the first trumpet-call to freedom--millions of slaves are ready to rise and strike for their own liberty."
While not an outright and unconditional support for the use of violence, this passage should be seen as evidence of Douglass's slowly shifting perspective on the subject. In comparison with his speech given six years earlier in Massachusetts (see above) there is a marked difference in Douglass's attitude toward revolt.
Soon after his return to America, Douglass and Garnet were both delegates to a national black convention in New York in October 1847. The two were appointed to a committee on the "best means to Abolish Slavery and Caste in the United States," where they immediately disagreed on Douglass's continued assertion of Garrison's ideology concerning condemnation of the churches, the use of political action, and pacifism. In this instance, the debate between the two ended up in a compromise. While Douglass succeeded in obtaining a condemnation of slave revolts, Garnet was able to modify Douglass's overarching criticism of both religion and political action.
Again at this convention, Garnet repeated his Address to the Slaves, and while the delegates still did not adopt it, they were much more willing to listen, according to Joel Schor, and in fact advised blacks in all areas of the country to instruct their children in the art of warfare. This combination of Garrisonianism and militancy in the 1847 convention was evidence that the pendulum had begun to swing away from the nonresistance of the 1830s and early 1840s towards what would be the pinnacle of the abolitionist movement on the eve of the Civil War.
In general black militancy increased after 1847. Garnet, unable to get a convention to do it, published his Address on his own that year, in a pamphlet that also included Walker�s Appeal to the Coloured Citizens. Joel Schor, in his biography of Garnet, says, "After 1847 . . . the Douglass faction was compelled to give ground to the Garnet faction in order to maintain effective leadership among blacks." Until the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860, abolitionists grew increasingly critical of what they saw as the proslavery stance of the federal government.
In 1848, Douglass and Garnet, at a meeting of the Liberty Party in New York, participated in a debate over the interpretation of the Constitution. At this time Douglass was still very much in favor of the Garrisonian viewpoint. He argued that the Constitution supported slavery and denied the rights of black men, and that the North ought to secede from the Union, as they clearly had a right to do, in order to be free of the wickedness of slavery. He would still be arguing the same two years later: "I would rather lose my right arm, than to put a vote in an American ballot box."
Garnet�s argument was that the doctrine of Liberty and Equality which the framers of the Constitution had fought a war over did include blacks and slaves. The Preamble, in which the intentions of the document were set out, clearly applied to all men. If America were not living up to this standard, it was the fault of men and not the law. Regardless of the legal arguments, the Garrisonian position of non-participation in the Union dramatically reduced the range of weapons that could be used against slavery. It also increased the popular perception of abolitionism as a "fringe" or extreme movement.
That same year the National Colored Convention in Ohio adopted a resolution to distribute five hundred copies of Garnet�s Address. Although they never carried out this resolution, the growing frustration of black leaders with the policy of nonresistance is clear. Only a few months later, on May 31, 1849, Frederick Douglass would make a bold statement in favor of slave insurrection:
I should welcome the intelligence to-morrow, should it come, that the slaves had risen in the South, and that the sable arms which had been engaged in beautifying and adorning the South, were engaged in spreading death and devastation there. There is a state of war at the South, at this moment. The slaveholder is waging a war of aggression on the oppressed. . . . [S]hould you not hail, with equal pleasure, the tidings from the South, that the slave had risen, and achieved for himself, against the iron-hearted slaveholder, what the republicans of France achieved against the royalists of France?
The Compromise of 1850, which saw enacted a harsh and arbitrary Fugitive Slave Law, was seen by anti-slavery activists as a complete victory for the proslavery forces in America. Besides the recovery of fugitive slaves anywhere in the American territories, slaveholders were able to convince the government to declare, in essence, that it would not interfere with the introduction of slavery in any new territory or state. The act increased tensions throughout the country, as more people saw it becoming evident that stronger action was needed to end slavery in the United States. Militancy was becoming more attractive.
The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 further increased sectional tension over slavery, and anger among abolitionists. The slavery wars that broke out in Kansas in the wake of the Act seemed to prove that only militant, perhaps even military, action would be sufficient to defeat the slaveholders. Finally, abolitionist sentiment ran so strongly in the North and West that a national movement based in small part on anti-slavery was born. Although many abolitionists applauded the formation of the Republican Party, Douglass, like many others, would reject their platform in favor of the "Radical Abolitionist" Party, saying, "[the Republicans] do not give full recognition to the humanity of the Negro."
As sectional strife increased, so did the militancy of many abolitionists. As for Frederick Douglass, throughout the 1850s, he was increasingly anti-Garrisonian on the issue of the Constitution and the Union, and he continued to be vocal about the "slave�s right of revolt":
"we yet feel that its [slavery�s] peaceful annihilation is almost hopeless . . . and we contend that the slave�s right of revolt is perfect and only wants the occurance of favorable circumstances to become a duty. . . . We cannot but shudder as we call to mind the horrors that have marked servile insurrections--we would avert them if we could; but shall the millions for ever submit to robbery, to murder, to ignorance, and every unnamed evil which an irresponsible tyrant can devise, because the overthrow of that tyrant would be productive of horrors? We say not. The recoil, when it comes, will be in exact proportion to the wrongs inflicted; terrible as it will be, we accept and hope for it."
The decision of the Supreme Court in 1857 that the slave Dred Scott had not been emancipated by his residence in a free state sent shock waves throughout the nation. Amid calls from Northern abolitionists to secede from a Union seen as corrupt and unjust, Frederick Douglass made a speech (probably May 1857) which showed just how far he and the abolitionist movement as a whole had come since their rejection of Garnet�s Address to the Slaves in 1843:
Step by step we have seen the slave power advancing; poisoning, corrupting, and perverting the institutions of the country. . . . The ballot box is desecrated, God�s law set at nought, armed legislators stalk the halls of Congress, freedom of speech is beaten down in the Senate. . . .The time may come when even the crushed worm may turn under the tyrant�s feet. Goaded by cruelty, stung by a burning sense of wrong, in an awful moment of depression and desperation, the [slaves] at the South may rush to one wild and deadly struggle for freedom. . . . I base my sense of the overthrow of slavery, in part, upon the nature of the American Government, the Constitution, the tendency of the age, and the character of the American people.
This speech is completely radicalized. Douglass has preserved little sense of the hope of "moral suasion" effecting an end to slavery. Instead he is relying on the political and legal sensibilities of the American people, and their understanding of the power and universality of the ideology behind the founding documents of the American republic. Should politics fail, he says, we can expect the slave to strike for himself. This is precisely the position the Henry Highland Garnet took in his Address, yet it has taken Douglass fourteen years to come to an agreement.
Douglass�s eventual acceptance of militancy had its roots in his changing concept of the "Black Man" as an ideal--that is the role and position, the characterization, and the national identity of Douglass himself and by extension all black Americans.
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The Black Abolitionists Home Page
Part I--Black Abolitionism 1830-1849�
Part III--Black Abolitionism and Black Manhood�
