83 Frederick Douglass’s Narrative, arguments over slavery, and Black Christianity

On August 1st, 1844, Ralph Waldo Emerson gave a speech, “Address on the Anniversary of Emancipation in the British West Indies,” in which he expressed hope that history was moving in the direction of freedom. “There is progress in human society,” he claims at the end, a “blessed necessity by which the interest of men is always driving them to the right,” and increasingly that right is seen as the voice of “Freedom.”

H.D. Thoreau was sitting in attendance. So was an emerging Black voice in the anti-slavery movement, going by the name of Frederick Douglass. Douglass would publish his Narrative a year later through the American Anti-Slavery Society.

Emerson had published his famous “Self-Reliance” essay in 1841 as part of his first essay collection. In both the “Address” and in “Self-Reliance,” he uses a Transcendentalist framework to argue that the basic unit of freedom and expression in any community is at the level of the individual—who, he qualifies in the “Oversoul,” is intimately united with the divine. Anyone and anything is potentially an oracle.

In the “Address,” he uses the language of power as much as freedom. Some of this language comes from his admiration of the Haitan revolution (1791-1804) and other slave uprisings. Whereas many white citizens expressed anxiety and even dread about these forms of rebellion, Emerson embraced them as signs of positive power:

This passage and the address more generally can feel puzzling for some modern readers because its argument against slavery is not explicitly about equality. In fact he doesn’t mention the idea of equality at all in the “Address.” Instead, he clearly emphasizes that other component of the Declaration of Independence—freedom. Not only that, but freedom in this “Address” and “Self-Reliance” is expressed positively rather than negatively. Rather than a “freedom from tyranny,” it’s about a freedom to contend with others and even fight them: “[Nature] appoints no police to guard the lion, but his teeth and claws … .” Freedom as power to fight and struggle.

This framing of freedom as power is helpful for thinking about the kind of development we find in Frederick Douglass’s Narrative. The slave narrative, or autobiography, is often presented as a “literacy narrative” (meaning: it’s about an individual’s path to becoming fluent in a language), but it’s also much more than that. Parts of Douglass’s story are indeed about mastering language and the importance of literacy to his eventual freedom—an emphasis on literacy that Benjamin Franklin advocated for so much in his own Autobiography. But alongside these moments Douglass intersperses violence and struggle. The Narrative demonstrates just how different a “rags to riches” story will look for a former slave.

Before discussing more about the Narrative and Douglass’s background it will help to get a general overview of his life and career.

Here are some important points mentioned by the video:

• He was born Frederick Bailey in 1817/18
• His mother was an enslaved woman, his father white. She lived on a different plantation and died when he was young.
• One of his slaver’s wives taught him to read and write.
• Douglass later held secret meetings to help others read.
• One of the most famous episodes in Narrative involves Douglass’s interactions with Covey.
• Douglass married a free black woman, Anna Murray, in 1838. She supported their family before he could contribute.
• He escaped to New York City.
• They settled in MA where he became a famous orator who radicalized others against slavery.
• Douglass worked with Garrison at The Liberator.
• His Narrative was published in 1845.
• He partnered with Delaney in 1847.
• The Compromise of 1850 made it easier for Southern slave owners to track down escapees. Douglass protested the act.
• Douglass consistently appealed to his faith and beliefs.
• He lobbied Lincoln during the 1860s, ultimately leading to the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863.

Douglass’s Narrative, Slave Narratives, and Antebellum Anti-Slavery pamphlets

The introduction to the 1999 Yale Press edition of the Narrative, written by John W. Blassingame, offers excellent background to the book’s publication history.

One of the most obvious precedents for Douglass’s Narrative is the broader captivity narrative genre, tracing back to the early Spanish and British colonial texts by authors such as Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca and Mary Rowlandson. One of the first texts published by a Black author and slave was the captivity narrative by Briton Hammon from 1760. British colonial captivity narratives used a framework of providence and adopted typological thinking to portray being captured by natives as a form of exile and returning home (or, in the case of Hammon, to his master) as deliverance.

In the 19th-century this captivity narrative genre was transformed former Black slaves to become the slave narrative. James Olney’s article on slave narratives from 1984 famously points to a standard structure for this genre, based largely on Douglass:

As a proviso, however, Olney clarifies that Douglass’s own Narrative both crystallizes this structure while also transcending it: “he goes beyond the single intention of describing slavery, but he also describes it more exactly and more convincingly than anyone else.”^[1] The Narrative is indeed about the institution of slavery, but it’s also about the moral and spiritual development of the author. It can be read as a slave narrative, an autobiography, or a literacy narrative.

Douglass was familiar with Franklin’s Autobiography, Blassingame points out, probably as far back as the 1830s, in Caleb Bingham’s Columbian Orator.^[2]

But the primary inspiration was mostly like the abolitionist polemics and narratives published in the decades leading up to Douglass’s freedom. “Between 1838 and 1844 Douglass avidly read such antislavery publications,” especially The Liberator and Theodore Dwight Weld’s American Slavery as It Is, a “repository of human horrors” that included personal narratives.^[3] American Slavery as It Is was published by the American Anti-Slavery Society, the publishing house that Douglass ultimately chose for his own Narrative.

Douglass’s Narrative and pro-slavery arguments

When moving from early American captivity narratives to the slave narratives of the antebellum 19th-century, it’s highly relevant that these types of stories were published by abolitionist institutions. They were intended as polemics. The stories were arguments and proofs.

One pro-slavery strain that the personal narratives contended with was economic and political, best represented by George Fitzhugh’s Sociology of the South, or, The Failure of Society (1854). Fitzhugh famously argued that the North’s more laissez-faire approach to society, a kind of free market capitalism, produced more slavishness and inequality than the patriarchal system in the South. He was one of the earliest writers to argue that the North induced wage slavery. The patriarchal institution of Southern slavery actually benefits the slaves, Fitzhugh argues, since they can rely on their morally and intellectually superior white masters.

The latter argument about the spiritual and moral benefit was emphasized by many, including certain Protestants. These more religious interpretations proposed that slavery was beneficial to African Americans because it allowed the white masters to steer slaves towards the gospel. It was providential, they argued, that slaves were transported from Africa to the New World, because otherwise they would be lost.

Yet another religious strain was inspired by certain evangelical-fundamentalist strains within the Second Great Awakening and its urge to return to more biblical foundations. One of the clearest articulations of the biblical argument for slavery can be found in William P.N. Fitzgerald’s sermon-treatise, A Scriptural View of Abolition and Slavery. His tract is probably the most detailed account of why, according to some antebellum Protestants in the South, the Bible is consistently pro-slavery. The treatise runs through the Old and New Testaments pointing out how the Bible consistently justifies the institution of slavery. It’s a pro-slavery treatise crammed with Bible verses.

It’s against these pro-slavery arguments (economic, moral, and biblical) that Douglass’s Narrative contends. We can read his autobiography as a polemic against them, dismantling each one in the front matter, throughout the story itself, and in the Appendix.

For the spiritual argument, look for how Douglass navigates the complexity of whether white influence can ultimately have a beneficial impact on a slave’s spiritual life. For the biblical argument, look for how Douglass distinguishes between the religion of white slavers and his own take on Christianity.

The Black Church and Douglass’s Narrative 

Anti-slavery arguments existed well before the Second Great Awakening. Some of the most strident opposition came from Pennsylvanian Quakers—Ben Franklin’s religious background.

But just as the Second Great Awakening revised the Puritan legacy and laid the foundation for more fundamentalist expressions of Christianity, it also inspired the evolution of the Black Church, particularly its Methodist Episcopalian expressions.

Henry Louis Gates, Jr. published The Black Church in 2021 and then joined forces with PBS to produce a three-part series on the evolution of the Black Church. Episode 1 (requires membership) covers the early American and antebellum periods, including the era of Frederick Douglass (I highly recommend the book and/or PBS series if you’re intrigued by this topic.). There’s too much to summarize here, but there are a few threads worth emphasizing.

Ring shout: First, Gates points out that Black Christianity preserved part of its African heritage in the “ring shout.” This first appeared during the First Great Awakening (the movement that Phyllis Wheatley was partly inspired by).

Revising typology: Second, it’s commonly known that the Black Church adapted the exodus narrative that was also such a crucial part of Puritan typology. We can see this in songs such as “Go Down, Moses,” which supposedly gained currency during the underground railroad (Harriet Tubman was referred to as Moses).

What’s remarkable about this adaptation of the exodus narrative is that it transforms the Puritan emphasis on escaping from the Roman Church, embarking across the Atlantic, and building a city in the wilderness, into an escape from white masters in the South who were themselves mostly Protestant Christians. In Black Christianity, Luther’s Roman Church (the anti-Christ and his minions) became the white Christian slavers, the Atlantic crossing (exile) became the deep South, and the New World became Northern cities (Zion/New Jerusalem).

In Douglass’s writings, we can see this Black Church spin on typology in his essay, “What to a Slave Is the Fourth of July?”

Progressive Christianity: Finally, one way to read Douglass’s revision of Christianity is in how it combines aspects of typology with the emphasis on freedom in the Declaration of Independence. We can see in Douglass’s Narrative and other anti-slavery writings a proposal to view Christianity from a rights-based perspective (what’s now called “progressive Christianity” within the Church). The litmus test for true religion, he seems to argue, is how consistently it advocates for the freedoms and justice of those within a community, not just whether it adheres to orthodoxy. Progressive strains of Christianity tend to argue that true religion includes socio-economic equality and freedom, not just invisible kingdom-building and spiritual betterment. Since the antebellum period, the Black Church has stressed the link between spirituality and political activism.

This “justice” strain is not entirely new. The Hebrew prophets, especially Jeremiah, emphasized the importance of caring for the poor, the outcasts, and victims of war; and 18th-century Quakers launched faith-based abolitionist campaigns. But Black Christianity in the 19th-century interwove threads from the Declaration of Independence with the jeremiads of the later Hebrew prophets to declare a unique form of American religion.

Douglass and the AME Zion Church

After escaping to the North, Douglass became a licensed reverend in the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church in New Bedford, Mass. The AME Zion church had officially formed in 1821 and Douglass was instrumental in its growth. In 1840, for example, a new AME Zion church was founded in Elmira, New York, after Douglass delivered an anti-slavery sermon/lecture there.

The AME Zion Church is also where Martin Luther King, Jr. launched his civil rights career. Today it remains a source of leadership for Black spirituality and civil rights, commenting on contemporary movements such as Black Lives Matter (in 2020 the Proud Boys infamously destroyed a BLM sign on property that belonged to the AME Church in Washington, D.C.).

The website is titled: “The AME Zion Church: The Freedom Church.”