In Our Time - Frederick Douglass

Episode Date: February 8, 2018

In a programme first broadcast in 2018, Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the life and ideas of Frederick Douglass, who was born into slavery in Maryland in 1818 and, once he had escaped, became one of that century's most prominent abolitionists. He was such a good orator, his opponents doubted his story, but he told it in grim detail in 1845 in his book 'Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave.' He went on to address huge audiences in Great Britain and Ireland and there some of his supporters paid off his owner, so Douglass could be free in law and not fear recapture. After the Civil War and the abolition of slavery, he campaigned for equal rights for African-Americans, arguing against those such as Lincoln who had wanted freed slaves to leave America and found a colony elsewhere. "We were born here," he said, "and here we will remain."WithCeleste-Marie Bernier Professor of Black Studies in the English Department at the University of EdinburghKaren Salt Assistant Professor in Transnational American Studies at the University of NottinghamAndNicholas Guyatt Reader in North American History at the University of CambridgeProducer: Simon Tillotson.

This is the BBC. Thanks for down learning this episode of In Our Time. There's a reading list to go with it on our website, and you can get news about our programmes if you follow us on Twitter at BBC In Our Time. I hope you enjoy the programmes. Hello, Frederick Douglas was born into slavery in Maryland in 1818, and once it escaped, became one of that century's most prominent abolitionists. He was such a good orator, his opponents doubted his story,

but he told it in grim detail in 1845. in his book, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass an American slave. He went on to address huge audiences in Great Britain and Ireland, and there some of his supporters paid off his owner so Douglas could be free in law and not fear recapture when he returned to America. After the civil war and the abolition of slavery,

he campaigned for equal rights for African Americans, arguing against those such as Lincoln who had wanted freed slave to leave America and found a colony elsewhere. We were born here, he said, and here we will remit. Maine. With me to discuss Frederick Douglass are Celeste Marie Bernier, Professor of Black Studies at the University of Edinburgh, Karen Salt, Assistant Professor in Transnational American Studies at the University

of Nottingham, and Nicholas Gaiet, a reader in North American history at the University of Cambridge. Celeste Mary Bernier, what were Frederick Douglass's strongest memories of his early childhood? As a man born into slavery in Maryland in 1818, he was born as Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey. and for Douglas, the defining moment of his life was understanding that he didn't know the exact date of his birth, and he barely knew his mother. One of the powerful questions Douglas returned to throughout his entire existence, enslaved and free, was that slave mothers have many children, but they have no family. And so Douglas, growing up in Maryland, lived a life as an enslaved child, bearing witness to atrocities, horrors and cruelties, he described it, in the prison house of bondage. And the defining moments for Douglas,

in slave child were seeing women, children and men, bodies and souls tortured, persecuted and maimed in the service of chattel slavery. His mother died when he was six or seven. She seems to have been a most remarkable woman. His father was white, but he didn't know who it was

and he never found out. We think he must have been a slave owner. Yes, there are different theories about who his father was, and Douglas maintained publicly, of my father I know nothing. Privately, certain manuscripts have come to light to suggest that, in fact,

Colonel Lloyd was, one of the sons of Colonel Lloyd was his father, but it's pure speculation. For Douglas, the defining inspiration for his life was Harriet Bailey, his mother, a woman who, in all the miles around the county, had learned how to read him, right, and was Douglas' inspiration.

Yes. You went over, I mean, it's almost unbearable to read. I read the book the other night, and couldn't stop reading it, but couldn't stop putting it down to take another deep breath, really. The whipping by black women, mainly by white men, often drunk and stripping the women to their waist and lashing them until they bled again and again and again, and children and so on.

I've said that, maybe to get it out the way, or maybe to set the tone of the base of the book. He also had experiences of white boys his own age in his childhood. Can you talk about that and what influence that may have had on him? Well, it's very powerful you begin with the bloodstained gait of women who have been brutalized, and Douglas' commitment to that sense of brutalisation and bearing witness was also to talk about black female resistance in that moment. And so he talks about that later in life and resistance by any means necessary. In terms of the white boys who influenced him,

Douglas was a trickster. So as a man born into slavery with no power, he found all kinds of ways of seeking empowerment. So those white children, he would trick into helping him increase his standard of knowledge. And so as a child, he would use chalk, he would use bribes of food in order to get white children to help him to learn and to make his letters and to become the great orator and thinker that he became later. Can you just give the listeners one or two instances of the way he set himself out to learn in his childhood?

As a child, Douglas, early on, and he writes very consciously about being enslaved as a child of six, as you mentioned, Melvin, about having a great consciousness of the moral wrong of slavery and of the great importance of learning. And so at the point in which he goes to Baltimore when he leaves Maryland, as a young child, he's in the family of the Olds, and Sophia Olds starts to, the white mistress, starts to teach him to learn to read and write.

Now, her husband isn't very happy about this and says, if you give him an inch, he'll take an L. And Douglas talks very powerfully about at that moment I knew what learning meant. To be learned was not to be enslaved. And so for Douglas, literacy was the path not only to physical freedom, but intellectual freedom. And this lovely woman who he described so charmingly

just turned against him. Yes. I wouldn't teach him anymore. Yes. And it got worse as time when we're done. So that's the beginning. She'd sewn some seeds there, and then he went on from that. Nick, Nick, I'd. How in Trent, let's give us overview of slavery in the United States at that time, at the time of Douglas's early life. Well, Douglas is born at a moment of transition, I would say, 1818 in the history of American slavery.

I mean, if you go back and look at the founding generation and the founding fathers, pretty much all of them rhetorically committed to the idea that slavery was wrong and that slavery might end. And in the northern state, so north of the Chesterpeake region, where Douglas was born, that had happened by 1804. So all of these northern states had embraced an immediate emancipation of slavery or had put laws on the statute books gradually emancipating slavery. There was also a hope, even in the Chesapeake region and in Virginia, so in the upper part of the southern states, that slavery might end among some anti-slavery campaigners.

And that was rooted in the idea that the economics of slavery had changed. So the traditional kind of money-making aspects of slavery, particularly revolving around tobacco, have begun to fade away, the soils have become exhausted, tobacco wasn't the profitable crop that had once been. However, at that moment, so 1820, 1830, 1840, there is a huge shift towards cotton and this new cotton complex, which is located in the lower south. So these new states opening up, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, these are the places where the cotton crop is exploding. So the cotton crop increases in terms of the number of bales produced between 18,000.

1820 and around 1838 when Douglas escapes from slavery by about four and a half times. So the cotton production is increased by four times. By 1860, it will be 10 times. So slavery is taking off in the lower south. And for Douglas growing up in Maryland, that has a very important consequence, which is even though they don't grow cotton in Maryland, if Douglas steps out of line in any way, the threat is that he will be sent into cotton country,

a threat of a kind of living death, a dislocation from everything he has known. But let's get it straight. He was still brought up as a slave. He was still, he was whipped, he was. Absolutely, absolutely. Maryland had a harsh slave regime. However, the place where slavery is attaining its zenith, I mean, both as a force for dehumanization and economically as a force for profit for white people, is in a lower south. So for Douglas, he both lives in proximity to, I mean, in the midst of an institution that's brutalizing, but with a threat of an even worse brutalisation if he steps out of the line. And I should just say, Melvin, that that's actually a threat that also free black people in Maryland face. So when he goes to Baltimore, even people who are born free are threatened with being taken into slavery.

If they step out of line in some way, if they break the law. When you say people are born free, you mean black people are born free? Free black people like his wife, Anna Murray, if she had committed a crime or if she found herself held for a debt, then she was also subject to the threat of being sent to the deep south into cotton country. How did the slave-owning Americans reconcile the right to liberty with enslavement? Well, that's an interesting question. I mean, in effect, it's an impossible act of reconciliation. If you think about the intellectual maneuvers that white Americans,

especially powerful white Americans make, before 1830, generally speaking, the justification for slavery is it's a necessary evil. So, in effect, it's something that's been. entailed on the United States and it's very hard to get rid of. And many of the founders in particular contrast the British emancipation struggle where in effect Britain is charged with emancipating slaves who will become free in the Caribbean with their problem dilemma, which is if they free slaves, they'll have to live alongside them. So in a sense, the problem of anti-slavery in the United States is also a problem of integration and are great hopes for integration amongst anti-slavery

campaigners. Even people like Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, so the kind of leading founders rhetorically commit to this. But there are great hopes for integration, which by 1815, 1820 are beginning to fade away. And in Maryland, where Frederick Douglass is growing up, one of the most powerful solutions to slavery amongst those people that think it's wrong is when black people are freed, they should be sent to somewhere else. So in effect, what you get in Maryland is the idea that even if you can persuade a slaveholder that they should abolish slavery, the long-term future of black people is to be sent outside the United States. So in effect, what you don't get, even amongst the anti-slavery campaigners,

is a commitment to integration and equality. It's a commitment to expulsion. And we know that when Douglas reached his full power and went face-to-face with Lincoln, he brought that up and stood his ground very strongly. So this boy who's seen his aunt whipped from a cupboard, watched her whip, and he was obviously morally aware. How did Karen, Karen, Solt, but how did he become? politically aware.

I mean, I think Douglas' life is one of those where you can see an awareness of becoming a person and an awareness of the systems with which he's living amongst that aren't recognizing him as a human and a person. He's an object, as an object. He can be left like bicycles and horses and so on.

Sold, sold off. Progeny can be sold off. People can put that into their wills, future children that have never been born. And as you said, certain groups of people, it doesn't matter who they have chosen to love, people could decide that they need to breed with a certain person or that certain people's bodies belong to somebody else and they could brutalize them however they might like.

So Douglas' politicization, I think, starts with the recognition that he is an actual person and that he's a person who has not only rights in terms of, I like you, you're my friend, I can even walk over here, I can breathe over here, I can eat when I want to, but also that he has the rights to things like, liberty, that he has the rights to things like freedom. And Celeste Marie was just talking about the trickstering work of trying to, of Douglas to recognize spelling and letters and words.

And so he starts to listen around that same time period with these young boys who are reading things like the Colombian orator. And he's able to... This is when he's gone to Baltimore, off the plantation for a while. That's right. So he has this... He's there for a while, then he goes back, but he's more genteel-like. Absolutely. Well, it's a different sort of enslavement. These are, These are moments where people can be sold off to work for somebody else's debt. They may be able to go off and work for a bit of their own wages, but they're supposed to give those wages back over to their master.

Sometimes even in Maryland, people could use that wage work that they did to even buy themselves out of enslavement. So it was a very kind of precarious kind of freedom, if you will, and to a certain extent, where he's able to sort of walk around and have these sets of interactions. But things like listening to these young boys, and the Colombian orators is very radical book. It's got Socrates, it's got Cicero, it's got actual parliament speeches in it. And it is really founded on this idea of liberty and freedom and equality. And here you have a man who's trying to tell these young boys, I'm a slave. I'm actually enslaved.

And he's listening to these. And he's able to trick them into getting some money where he can then go and he buys himself a copy. He goes in and he memorizes this book. Book of speeches, the drive is liberty and the fulfillment. moment of you. Well, I mean, it's supposed to be one of those things of elocution and it's supposed to be able to sort of teach you about oratory and the power of speech. But imagine a person who isn't imagined a person with where they live and the power with which you start to read about freedom and you read about rights and that sort of, I think that the disconnect between that world is not mine, right? And that doesn't

seem fair. That doesn't seem equal. That doesn't seem right. Or even just. especially if you're living in a place that is supposedly founded on independence that's founded about supposedly being against tyranny, yet basically entrenched in it is this idea that there are groups of people who not only can they be enslaved, but it is a right for people to enslave them. What risks was he taking when he decided to escape? He tried once and had failed. He had a tremendous fight with his overseer, such a fight.

He won it and the overseer kind of left him alone, but it was always in greater danger. What risk is he taking? Yeah, I think we have to go back and revisit that. Because he doesn't say much about it. He protects the people who helped him to such an extent that, in a sense, the most vital part of the book, it's a brilliant piece of writing. I'm not mentioning these people because they will come to harm. I'm not mentioning where I want because my roots will come to R-O-U-T-E-S will come to harm.

And he lays it out wonderfully, thoughtfully and carefully. And then it's in New York. Yes. Well, but we have to think to go back to the scenes of brutality in his fight with Kobe, who is referred to at the time period as a slave breaker. And I think that actually is one of the biggest moments of escape for him. And he actually says that within the narrative where after that moment, after this intense two-hour battle where an individual,

because he's now sin after coming back from Baltimore and having this sort of bit of freedom of freedom and experience, where he is now thinking, I am now being forced to go back onto this plantation, and it is not the future that he wants for himself or others. And he becomes a recalcitrant, right, and gets sent to corrective. But once he goes there in that moment, and this battle with Kovey, he does think I'm doomed, I'm lost, I don't know where I'm at. But then he has this moment where he says,

I am now going to only be a slave in fact, but not in form, right? And that moment starts, I think, the escape, if you will, that then becomes an actual physical escape, attempt to come to an escape later on, which we then anticipate that it involves him disguising himself as a sailor. So he goes to New York and he was helped by the woman who became his wife, an extraordinary one. She ran the Underground Railway when they ended up in America and so on so.

So he's in New York. He's not taken up. He finds a way to get employed. He finds a way. finds a way, but he is still worried about being sent back. So he goes north, he goes to New England and so on. From that, we have to move fairly swiftly to this young man quite soon begins to speak in public, difficult at first,

and he becomes an abolitionist. Can you just tell us how he got to the stage of being an effective public voice in the early days? Douglas and oratory is a lifelong song. Douglas believed in oratory, as well as education more generally, as the route to emancipation, as you've all beautifully described. And for Douglas, oratory was the way in which to get past the dominant written word and to communicate freedom.

As a child listening in the kitchen, he heard first generation enslaved people talking about the Middle Passage from Western Africa to the US. And so Douglas listened. And so before Douglas was an orator, he was a listener. And one of the powerful moments that the person who knew him describes is before he gave any speech as a free man, he asked to be on his own and he communed with what he described as the memories of those who suffered in slavery. So he felt very strongly that he was speaking as a witness, that he was a representative who was bearing the stories of those who lived and died in slavery.

So when he's in the north at the moment of becoming an orator, becoming an abolitionist, the common misconception is that he meets white abolitionists, the great famous founding figures such as William Lloyd Garrison, and he has that moment of public recognition. Douglas describes vehemently to the day he died, I began my public speaking with enslaved men in Maryland. They taught me how to debate, as Karen was talking about, they taught me how to reason, they taught me how to theorise freedom. And so for Douglas, his whole conception of abolition and oratory was that he described it that language must have power

to speak to those who die and suffer. But power must have presence, and the presence was still with white abolitionists, isn't it? Nick, I think that. Yeah, very much so. So he was drawn into. them, he sought them out for his own purpose

he was always there but a man apart. He found his way into an anti-slavery movement which was I mean the first thing to say is that northern anti-slavery the majority of people in the north who would declare that they were opposed to slavery were not willing to promote

the immediate abolition of slavery. So the people that we call the abolitionists people who were in a way the kind of harbingers of the 1860s moment of emancipation, they were a tiny minor I mentioned earlier that idea that the solution to slavery for many moderate whites, I put moderate in quotation marks, was colonization. So the idea that you would free slaves and then you would send them to Africa or the Caribbean or somewhere else.

That was the majority view among white moderates. So the abolitionists are a tiny sliver. And in the 1840s, the early 1840s when Douglas encounters them, there is the beginnings of a split within that abolitionist movement between on the one hand those people who believe that slavery is so immoral, that the nation itself is kind of stained to its core with this sin, and that the Constitution and the political process are fatally compromised. So that side of the abolition movement,

which becomes identified with William Lloyd Garrison, the Boston printer, the guy who edited the Liberator, perhaps the most famous white anti-slavery newspaper in American history, that side of the fence, very committed to the idea that the political process and the Constitution can't help to solve the problem. Douglas, from his earliest moments in this movement, is a much more political animal. And he becomes identified with

and associates with the other side of this abolitionist movement that sees politics and maybe even the US Constitution as offering some hope. But it's just a kind of accident and circumstance that he ends up initially with the Garrisonians. So the first people that kind of draw him into the anti-slavery movement are those people associated with this kind of moral high ground,

you know, moral boycott kind of understanding of abolition. And Douglas outgrows them in a way. And crucially, one of the things that they want from Douglas when they hear him speak is for the people, the audiences in the North, to be persuaded of his authenticity. And Douglas bristles against this because the suggestion from one white abolitionist that he should offer more of the plantation in the way that he addresses them, that he should in a way kind of make his speech more coarse, offends Douglas. And it's one of the moments, not the only one, at which he realizes that there is an element of performance and of positioning and of branding about this whole. anti-slavery enterprise. And that's a theme, I think, that carries on through the rest of his working life. The amazing thing is he never gives in. And we still, I mean, I'm still dazzled by the way he got to where you described he got to. And he's number, we have to carry

on the story and there he is. Now let's get onto this 1845 autobiography, Karen, narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass and American slave, which had an massive impact in America and a massive impact in Britain and in Europe. Yes, a bestseller. I mean, I think, you know, I think as Nick has just described, these anti-slavery movements or these meetings, there became a kind of almost like a trope to bring in an enslaved person or a fugitive or former enslaved person who could testify, right? They could tell their story. And that became one of these sorts of things that Douglas would do. He would actually show up and he would give these very powerful speeches, sometimes being provoked to actually try to display the scars on his back. Although he stopped doing that quite soon.

Exactly. And I think that the tensions that Nick is starting to describe are tensions Douglas is starting to recognize in terms of telling his story and trying to propagate this message. The narrative is still written. Because I think that the sense of becoming is really quite crucial and important. And it will galvanize. It will do its work in terms of people picking it up.

Newspapers will account and talk about exactly what you described, Melvin, that harrowing feeling of reading this story and how is it possible that this brutal system is actually being perpetuated within the country and allowed to continue the dehumanization of particular peoples. But there's also at the same time this sort of other message that's starting to happen amongst the press where they starting to doubt the veracity. This person is well too, well spoken. And these were charges that were sometimes made at the actual meetings itself is that you don't look like a slave. You look well to well-dressed, Douglas. You couldn't possibly have been a person who would have been. He's also very good-looking, handsome.

Absolutely. The most supposed to be the most photographed man in 19th century. I hope we get to more things about images and the conversation. But this is an individual. Again, back to my conversation before about the consciousness and this idea of becoming a person and the power that that might have. This is something that is not lost on Douglas. So this wasn't just the narrative creating and writing about the accounts of what happened.

He knew that this was going to. to be the record of his existence, a testimony to a brutal system and a demand for the country for change, which is one of the reasons why the narrative, every single edition and even future, because he will revisit this biography many, many times, will have a photograph at the front of him. So here's this person that's saying, this is who I am. So that narrative, actually, even though you were describing hiding the names of certain people, that narrative names names. It names locations. It puts places to people, especially those who

were involved in enslavement. And that puts him under threat. So it is well read. It is circulated. It is translated into multiple languages. But it is also the thing that's going to send him out of the country because he is going to feel the threat of retribution. Yeah. And he doesn't fail to name the plantation owners and so on and so forth. So, Leszt, he came to Britain, stayed here about two years. It was a tremendous success in Britain. Craft sold out, or sold the Manchester Free Trade Hall and great meeting, particularly in the north of England, but also in Ireland.

Coming to the UK changed Douglas' life. He writes to friends back home, and he says, I feel myself a new man. And for Douglas, at that point, as Karen's described, he's a fugitive from slavery. So he publishes his narrative, there's fear of reprisals, and he's on the run when he comes to the UK. And for Douglas, that moment to stand before audiences and say, I come to you as a witness. I carry the institution of slavery on my back

and I speak to you from within that institution. At that point, he's not legally free. And so for Douglas to speak to crowded auditoriums, he would regularly speak to more than 2,000 at a time. For Douglas, the commitment he had and the change and the real value it had for him, Melvin, was to understand the human rights struggle in every lens and every perspective. So he came with slavery as his defining existence and his mission was to end

bondage of all kinds. But at the same time, he heckled his audiences in Ireland and he said to his well-dressed women and men, how many disfigured, maimed and mutilated beggars have you stepped on to come to hear me speak? Can you integrate into your life a sense of human rights and justice? Can you take what I tell you and not have a sense of catharsis, not laugh over what I'm saying, but use it to affect real social change. And part of the great speech in Manchester Free Trade Hall is your religious people and how can you possibly be religious people and not on my side against this terrible thing that is going on. He was also, just to get this in, he was amazed that he was in a constitutional monarchy which did not have slavery. And that question of the Christianity of the State versus the Christianity

of the soul, the question of the stains on the Republican government versus the virtues of a monarchical government that is sheltering him in the main of the British lion were paradoxes that weren't lost on Douglas. And he didn't, he never pulled his punches when he went to Ireland, instead of saying, oh, thank you very much for having me. He said, I've never seen such poverty. It's disgraceful. He hit the Irish very hard. The Irish government, the Irish controlling force. I hear the British, really. I suppose London, very hard. He was such a political animal because he also, when he got back to the United States, I think absolutely whitewashed prejudices that he had in Canada and that did exist in Britain in the mid-19th century as a means.

as saying in monarchical Britain, I am treated as a perfect equal, whereas in the United States, supposedly committed to Republican equality, I'm treated as inferior. So I think actually he was able to recycle aspects of that experience and idealize aspects of that experience in Britain for political gain in the US. I spoke very earlier on, what you all did, about the way that the horrifying thing in the book is the lashing, lashing, lashing, lashing, lashing, lashing, of women, and particularly by black women, by white men. It's not, not therefore, it's not such a jump that he was one of the few men to speak at the great women's suffrage convention at Seneca Falls in America in 1848. Yeah, I'm conscious of setting

us up with two distinguished female historians of Douglas here, but I'll set it up and then you can tell me where I'll get it wrong. I mean, in a way, women's rights is in a fascinating position in regards to anti-slavery, and there are two different origins stories for women's rights in the 1840s. One of them sees the anti-slavery, the abolitionist movement, as the kind of cradle of women's rights. So it's the place where women, especially middling and elite women in the early 19th century, have developed a kind of public prominence. They've moved into civil society, even though they don't have the vote, and they're disabled in all kinds of ways socially, legally because of their marriages. But they've had this kind of public prominence through charity and through

benevolent work. And the abolitionist movement in the 1830s provides women with an even more kind of intent. This is in America. This is in the United States. So I said there are two versions of this origin story. So one version sees this anti-slavery platform as offering women an even greater opportunity to participate in the public sphere, and it radicalizes and politicizes them further, and then leads to the demand for women's rights. The other version says that actually the unsexism and the chauvinism of men within parts of the abolitionist movement actually holds women back. So in effect, what happens is that even as the male-led abolitionist movement promotes the rights of black people, particularly black men, ultimately, it's not.

not doing the same for women. So what you get Seneca Falls in 1848 is the first women's rights convention. So to talk about full political and civil equality for women, Douglas is a speaker. Douglas is very committed to this movement, but he's already experiencing tensions with some of the leaders of the women's rights movement because they want to get women's rights onto the agenda in the same place as the end of slavery and rights for black people. And in a sense, the sequencing of these struggles for rights, for black rights for freedom and women's rights becomes a problem. points of contention. Karen, can I turn to you? Yes.

Anyway, but he started to change the narrative about slavery. Could we, could you concentrate, you say what you're going to say anyway, but could you also bring in that speech in 1852, what to the slave is the 4th of July? Yes, I'm just going to pick up quickly, I think, what Nick was talking about, about cynical falls and women's rights, because we've been talking right now about Douglas's recognition of the last. and whipping and the brutality and the suffering and the pain of black women.

So it's not lost to him that there is this women's rights movement that is not recognizing these women as part of it. So you were describing Nick talking about the men in relationship to anti-slavery. And yet there are significant amounts of women, black women, who are talking about human rights

and also are talking about ending slavery. People like Sojournal Truth or Harriet Tubman. We have another person who will write a slave narrative named Harriet Jacobs. So there is not this notion that is only Douglass trying to occupy this position. There are other sort of voices that are trying to talk about pain and the same tensions about whether or not their rights and bodies and voices will actually get a stage and a play in that space. And that's, I think, something that shows up in what to the slave is the Fourth of July. It's one of those sort of commemorative events, these sort of Fourth of July sort of celebrations.

And so this is 52. An anti-slavery society is invited, Douglas. to speak. So he's been touring and speaking like this in lots of different places. They bring him up him to the stage. And again, we've been talking about Douglas's rhetorical moves. Douglas is like, oh, I'm a bit nervous. I'm talking to those people. I'm going to whip together this talk and just going to give it off the cuff. Okay, that's great. And then he gives us a sort of bit of a history of how we got there. This is a declaration. This is the independence. And then he kind of goes, but wait, this is an independence that's not mine. This notion of what you're describing of liberty and freedom is also one that I can't have. So you've pulled me as a chained person in front of you.

Are you mocking me? That's what he asked this audience. Are you mocking me by having me speak at this independent celebration, recognizing that enslavement means that I am not free. I have no voice. I am not even human within this country. And I love this speech because I think one of the fundamentals about it really questions these ideas of political freedom. It really brings to bear the incompatible ability of allowing slavery to perpetuate in a space and what his body must represent, standing in front of these people who have no problem asking him to come and speak at this. It's this prominent, important orator. But he's like, we are flawed. This country is flawed. So he leaves people with a bit of a nugget. He says, you're young still. You're a young nation. There's a possibility that

you could figure this out. So get on with it. It's amazing the way he takes them on again and again. Celeste Mary, it's been mentioned a few times about him using his image, and they're consciously using his image, and one makes an assumption that he wasn't a vain man, but he saw the point about it, as Karen explained to us, near at the beginning of the programme, and he was the supposed to be the most photographed man in 19th century, America. What impact did that have? Do we know?

Douglas throughout his life believed in the relationship between activism, authorship and artistry. And at the moment of speaking on the abolitionist tour, he talked about the fight being not becoming a political object, as we've all described, but as a living, breathing human being. And he understood the need not for being recorded in what he described as ledgers,

but instead in literature and art. So he spoke repeatedly about, we are chattel records in the official archive. We are nameless, faceless and bodiless. He talked endlessly that language has no power. Images are mute. And he himself, coming out of slavery, making his escape, came not only with physical wounds, but psychological struggles.

Now, the importance of his image and the way in which it's been described is a wonderful question to ask Melvin, and is central to Douglas' ideas of self-making, but also self-unmaking. What we all know about him is the celebrated fame and the beauty. What we don't know is the personal torture. When he writes to a woman he thought was his sister in the 1840s, he describes, I look so ugly, I hate to see myself in the glass. So for Douglas, photography was a tool and a weapon. Karen spoke of it in his narrative that was a way of self-representing.

It was also a way, as he described it, of creating the face of the fugitive slave, not of Frederick Douglass, but a way of bringing back into his own memory and the consciousness of those who saw him, the life of Frederick Augustine's Washington Bailey, the man who lived in slavery. So Douglas used degerotyping technology to show struggle, to show what he described as the inner via the outer man. Nick, thank God. Civil Warwickard in 1861.

Quite soon, Lincoln sought out, Douglas. What form, what was the result? Yeah, so maybe I should say a tiny bit about Lincoln. Just to be clear, I mean, when Lincoln became president in 1861, he was at the head of the very first national party in the United States, the Republican Party that was committed to, limiting slavery, but not committed to abolishing it. That's key to understand, because from Douglas' perspective, he supported Lincoln in 1860,

but he was also very ambivalent about how quickly Lincoln's election might help to end slavery. And in many ways, the relationship between them was characterized, particularly in the early years, with great disappointment. So, for example, when Lincoln gave his inaugural address in April of 1861, Douglas was really disheartened because he felt not entirely inaccurately that Lincoln was willing to make any compromise to keep the South in the Union, providing the South committed to not extending slavery further. So when he listened to Lincoln in April 1861, he felt very clearly that Lincoln was not the anti-slavery deliverer. The following year in 1862, he hasn't met Lincoln yet.

He doesn't mean until 1863. The following year in 1862, Lincoln summons a group of black people from Washington to the White House and tells them they should be doing more to encourage colonization, that the end of the Civil War could be hastened if African Americans were willing in effect to expatriate themselves. Douglas is furious. In his newspaper, and we haven't mentioned his newspaper work, but he is incredibly important through the work he does in editing newspapers from 1847 all the way through 1863.

In his newspaper, he lacerates Lincoln. It's only in 1863 when he meets him to discuss getting black people into the Union armies that he feels that he's attained more of an accord with Lincoln. He meets him again in 1864. Still isn't completely sold on the idea of Lincoln, because he hasn't supported Lincoln's re-election yet when he meets him in August of 1864. But he, in the end, feels that Lincoln is the best political deliverer he can imagine in this moment. And to continue on the political side, Karen, it'll surprise many people perhaps, that he actively recruited for young black people to join the Army of the North, including his two sons, who did join.

Now, what was that all about? I mean, I think what's significant kind of taking on from Nick's conversation, I think it gets back to this question about politics. While Douglas, as I was mentioning before, with the what to the slave is the Fourth of July, while Douglas is saying, you know, you're mocking me, why am I here? He does make it clear that there is a role for people of African descent in the political structure of the country. By the time we get to something like the war itself, there is this feeling, and I think he knows that the war, it needs the bodies of people of. of African descent, they have to go and fight for their own liberty. And Lincoln is struggling with this. He deeply struggles with whether or not that is something that is acceptable because it hits

right back up with what is supposed to happen actually after this war might be finished and this question of integration. And Lincoln will actually get to the point even in 1863 where he's now imagining colonization in both Colombia or in Haiti for people who might be either brought in who are escaped or moved on. By the time he meets Douglas in 1863, that has now fallen, the notion of Haiti. And there is now Douglas getting ready to talk to him. And he tries to persuade him to bring people in and to actually then allow them to be commissioned in officers and to actually make the pay situation be something that is equal. And you start to see the struggle

about you can be a body, right? You can be even the rationale for why the war is ultimately happening. But you get no say in it, right? This struggle about whether or not, night you get to actively participate. Lincoln is persuaded. He was finally ultimately persuaded in terms of moving forward. But when Douglas goes out and he starts to talk to people in his sons and others, they are galvanized in terms of trying to fight because to not fight, right, means that you're accepting the situation exactly the way it is. And that is, it's almost unbearable for individuals who are living in this place where unfreedom is there, is their reality. What Karen said is so important, I just want to say that what Douglas realizes is,

is that black people fighting constitutes a prima facie case for citizenship and equality. And he is absolutely right and proved right with regard to Lincoln, in a sense that the one group of African Americans that Lincoln acknowledges during his lifetime may be entitled to the vote are people who have fought in the war. Can we take this story on then? So the Civil War finishes. Then what? Where's Douglas? Where's ideas, Celeste.

Douglas, the politician, starts to come really to life in this post-Civil War period. At this point, I think it's also important to reflect on the Douglas myth and the Douglas question of the family are all working alongside him. So Douglas, as you mentioned, Melvin, is married to Anna Murray. At this point, he has five children who are all engaged in working on the newspapers with him. They're all political thinkers. They're all radical philosophers. So Rosetta, his firstborn child, is someone who is teaching at this point in the post-Civil War moment. She's someone who writes to her father in the 1860s and says,

I feel myself in bondage. Frederick Douglas Jr. has a campaigner and activist for civil rights. He was a recruiter for the 54th during the Civil War. He writes about freedom is our watchword. Lewis Henry, his eldest son, who fights and watches Gould Shore die in front of him at Fort Wagner during the Civil War, writes to his father, I will fight by every means necessary. I will not die a coward. And Charles Remont, his youngest son, lives on to 1920 and sees the First World War and talks about again we fight for our rights. And this notion of fighting for freedom. This notion of fighting for freedom. This notion of continuing that fight for freedom is something that Douglas is invested in. Douglas, the public icon is invested in, but Douglas, the private, fallible individual, and Douglas, the family are committed to. It's part of grassroots activism that continues to galvanise, enslaved and free, to think through that question about the emancipation of the slave, but as Douglas' family members described it in Rosetta in particular, who, by the way, was editing a lot of his speeches and making and working on their style with him, talked about the emancipation of the free people.

what it is to deal with a freedom that is in name only. So Douglas and all the family members and all the activists he works with Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman and all the freedom fighters, are really thinking through what is freedom and what is freedom as opposed to liberty and what to do with the bondage that remains, what to do about the rise of the Ku Klux Klan,

what to do about lynching? Finally, going around the table, starting with UKARN, what difference did Frederick Douglas make and what is his legacy in your view? I think the difference is transparent. If you spend any time with Douglas' papers that the listeners should know they can access through the Library of Congress. They've digitized almost all of those papers that are there, and people can read through them and see the script, the almost unreadable script that Douglas will have. And he was a scrapbooker.

So he kept a lot of newspaper accounts of him and talks that he might give. And in there, you can actually see letters from individuals writing to him, telling him that listening to the talk he gave transatlac. transform their lives or that they are desperate for him to recognize or come or contribute to stuff. And you can see the letters that he might give back. And so you have this individual, I mean, I have to agree with Celeste Marie that he is one of a larger set of a community of people who are interested in human rights and freedom fighting. But he starts to recognize, especially towards the end of his life. He's often referred to as the Lion of Anacostia. And Anacostia is this area in Washington, D.C., where his prominent house is, that's now a national

part, that he is this lion figure and is actually this figurehead of a larger movement. It's an uncomfortable place to be, but it's one that he recognizes, I am a voice to try to look for for future change, but he's struggling to recognize the future he's imagining for the country with what's emerging towards the end of his life. And because the reconstruction has not changed things. So that's Marie. A piece of advice he wrote to his grandson was be strong, be cheerful, be brave. another final snippet we have that he writes,

I have never lost heart or hope. And for Douglas, the lesson really is keep going, never give up, never turn away, and as he insistently maintained, if there is no struggle, there is no progress. That is life against death. Slavery rested on assumptions of black inferiority, so one of Douglas' huge contributions was to demonstrate that that was absolutely not the case in any of the many fields in which he distinguished himself and finding his voice, finding a voice for African-Americans,

and in effect dealing not just with slaveholders and with the people that we might identify as the kind of obvious bad guys in 19th century American history, but with the supposed good guys as well, finding ways to navigate the expectations of benevolent white people who were not as benevolent or not as woke as they imagined themselves to be.

That was Douglas' triumph. Well, thank you very much to Council, Celeste Marie Bernier and Nick Gaiet. Next week we'll be discussing fungi, molds, mushrooms and mildews, without which the terrestrial ecosystem of the earth would simply not work. There you go. Thanks for listening.

And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. Should we talk about reconstruction? Yeah. I mean, just really briefly. Yeah. I don't know if people know about this stuff, but for reconstruction, the crucial thing is to remember

that this 12, 13, 14, 14 year period of American history from around 1863 until 1877 is the place where the rubber hits the road on whether the emancipation of slavery is actually going to produce an equal society. You have 4 million African Americans being freed into a world still controlled by slaveholders and the white men who effectively politically made that society in the South.

And you have a federal government which is committed to trying to avoid slavery coming back again in exactly the same form, but which has limited capacity, potential and commitment actually to doing the incredibly hard work necessary to bring white Southerners into an acceptance of black equality. And that's the terrain for Douglas, between 63 and 77, the terrain he tries to navigate. And it's a very difficult task, partly because Douglas has always said that the key thing for white people to realize is that black people can be self-reliant, that black people can be left alone with fair play and they will rise. And what he encounters is an astonishingly pernicious and powerful system dedicated to denying black self-determination.

So it's very hard for him to exist in that world. And I think in that reconstruction moment, we think of the atrocities of slavery and its abuses, but we don't think of the atrocities and abuses of reconstruction. And we don't understand the realities of union soldiers going in and raping women, children and men. We don't understand the physical and psychological bullying and abuse that happened, and how that really went under the radar. And whilst there's a name for slavery, there's no name for unfreedom. And Douglas spoke endlessly about how, as an enslaved person,

individuals would have to speak in code in order to get ideas past the master. and he talked about Pigsfoot was the way in which enslaved men in particular spoke of freedom. If you were looking for Pigsfoot, you were looking for freedom. And so Douglas's notion of coded messages, Douglas's notion of a language that worked within black radical community activism versus a language that worked for white politicians and national freedom struggles was always how to sustain equality and the fight for equality in the face of discourses of liberty that failed.

Which is why I think the question you've raised in Melbourne about Haiti and Santa Domingo is really important, because here's this moment of this country that goes through this, you know, fairly brutal, long revolution and emerges in 1804. And for Douglas, and for a number of other people within of African descent, within the Americas,

Haiti is this representation of a potential black political future. It is a fearful place for certain sets of people within the United States about what it might mean. Exactly. About what it might mean

if their slaves then become charged with this possibility. But from a political standpoint, Douglas is quite entrenched by what does this actually mean to have a nation actually try to operate with people recognize, have citizenship actually engaging in politics. And towards the end of his life, he will actually represent the United States as an actual,

you know, minister to from the U.S. to Haiti. And we'll get to experience and be amongst that place, and actually we'll then see once again what happens when the U.S. officials will try to, at this point, they're trying to acquire territory, a colding station, essentially, most St. Nicholas, it all falls apart, right? Douglas gets blamed, and in the press, the press just go after him. And the thing that they say consistently is that you are more Haitian than American Douglas. And you've used your racial affiliation to essentially bury the United States.

And that's why we have lost this colon station. He said, no, that's not actually what happened. In fact, he'll write about this consistently. That what happened was people came in and try to demand territory to take it from a group of people who it's their rights to have their own land. What do you think you could come in and just say, give me this space? You need to negotiate and treat them as real people. And that's why we've essentially lost this moment. And he will resign his post.

So he's only in it for two years. But he really will see the difficulties of actually negotiating and sitting at table at a table with people of African descent and actually treating them as real political. people and having this set of exchanges. And he will go on later on at the World's Fair of 1893 to represent as a co-commissioner along with another individual named Preston, Haiti's pavilion that's there. And he'll give even more rousing speeches about what the future for black people would look like politically in Haiti but also within the United States. I mean, Douglas caught some heat from African Americans for the fact that during the 1870s, he agreed to occupy

sinecures or kind of posts that were offered by Republican presidents. So the number of different posts he held which symbolically were really important in a sense this is the first time an African American had ever been in these kinds of jobs. Yeah, the US Marshal and DC so I mean all these jobs.

There was a tendency for some people more radical and younger black leaders to see Douglas as someone who had either sold out or had taken the easy route, taken preferment rather than going down the radical route. And in effect, I think you have to understand in the 1870s in particular Douglas's heartache at the fact that all that he had fought for up until 1865 appeared to be coming apart

and he does become much more directly radical in the 1880s and especially the early 1890s about the failures of reconstruction. So it's not the case that for the rest of his life he becomes this person who's a mouthpiece for the Republican Party increasingly white, even reaching out to white Southerners for their vision of reconstruction. He does actually hold on to this much more critical idea. It just takes them a while to get it out. It's really there in the 1880s and the 1890s. And it's at that point in the 70s where he fights for another freedom.

So I spoke earlier about him being an author and an activist. And for Douglas, words were power. Oratory was power. And so he wrote 7,000 items. He was the most photographed American, black or white, but he was also a virtuosic writer. He wrote not only autobiographies. He wrote novels. He wrote plays.

He wrote performance pieces. He wrote essays. He wrote history. He wrote, as he described it, one of the most boring lectures ever on William silent where people were falling asleep in the alleyways just because he wanted to test out his metal as a writer and a thinker. And that notion of freedom of thought, that notion of freedom of philosophy and the right to philosophical inquiry in and of its own sake was for him the most radical political argument of humanity. Yeah. And I think again, going back to those papers

that are amazingly digitized and available, people can see all of this now. They can follow this arc. I mean, it's really well put together. And in fact, I should know this, but just recently I noticed that Douglas has written a manuscript about Tucson Louverture. And it's, and it's, it's just, there's four. And so it's, I knew about one, but the idea that there would be that many. And that's the thing about those, those papers is, because a lot of some of the stuff isn't published. Some of it is stuff he rewrites and rethinks about over time.

But you really start to see the process of thought, the ability for him to want to communicate and engage in particular things, but the constant demand and change that the world that he envisions for himself and for his children and his grandchildren and other people of African descent, that it needs to rise up. It needs to get better to be able to allow equality for all sets of people. And I think that's the thing for me, going back to our conversation before about legacies, is I feel galvanized reading Douglas's work. You were saying, Melvin, about the brutality and the difficulty in having to put the book down occasionally. But when you pick it back up, you realize that this is a person who wants more for everybody, right?

and that's the thing that you realize I need to be more for everybody as well. Yeah, I mean, things like appropriation, intersectionality, I mean, all of these kind of contemporary debates. Intersectionality might not be an easily available word. Well, I mean, Kimberly Crenshaw, an African-American legal theorist, her vision that in effect struggles over gender, struggles over race, even struggles over class, have to be understood as being connected and linked. All of that is in Douglas. And not just in Douglas, it's in the most accessible and the most beautifully written speeches, lectures and books. So I would tell the audience to seek them out. And in that spirit, it's in Douglas because he spoke to James McKeon Smith, Henry Highland

Garner, Sir Jonah Truth, Harriet Jacobs. And that notion of the black radical philosophy and the black radical philosophical usable tradition that activists use today is all there in their writings. Absolutely. And I think it crosses the Atlantic world. There are Haitian writers who end up talking and politicians to Douglas. But I think the thing is, is you start to realize that this isn't just a conversation about an exceptional figure and a conversation about one exceptional man. This is one man who is like a node, if you will, that you can map out what politics, what future, what radicalization and what equality can look like across multiple communities. Thank you all very much. And here's the producer. Yeah, I'm sorry to interrupt it all. Would you like teal coffee?

And stop talking. No. You switched off 10 minutes again. No, no, no, we didn't. Oh, William the Silent. Oh, I'd love a tea, please. Yes, please, thank you. Sure, thank you very much. In our time with Melvin Bragg is produced by Simon Tillotson. Hello, I'm Jenny Murray.

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