Frederick Douglass

Self-Made Man

Timothy Sandefur

• Publisher: Cato Institute
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781944424862
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

Born into slavery in 1818, Frederick Douglass rose to become a preeminent American intellectual and activist who, as statesman, author, lecturer, and scholar, helped lead the fight against slavery and racial oppression. Unlike many other leading abolitionists, Douglass embraced the U.S. Constitution, believing it to be an essentially anti-slavery document guaranteeing that individual rights belonged to all Americans, of all races. Furthermore, in his most popular lecture, "Self-Made Men," Douglass praised those who rise through their own effort and devotion rather than the circumstances of their privilege. For him, independence, pride, and personal and economic freedom were the natural consequences of the equality that lay at the heart of the American dream—a dream that all people, regardless of race, gender, or class, deserved a chance to pursue.

This biography takes a fresh look at the life and inspirational legacy of one of America's most passionate and dedicated thinkers. As detailed in this compact and highly compelling work, Douglass—in some ways a conservative, in other ways a revolutionary—espoused and lived the central idea of his work: we must be free to make ourselves the best people we can be.

1. Early Years: 1818–1826

Frederick Douglass was born in 1818 on the Wye House plantation, which is still standing near Easton, Maryland. His mother gave him the name Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey.* Wye House’s owner, U.S. Sen. Edward Lloyd, was often away in Washington; during those times, his property—including the more than 1,000 humans he owned—was administered by Captain Aaron Anthony, who also owned his own small farm and a few slaves, including Douglass.

Anthony was also likely Douglass’s father, although Douglass never knew for sure. As for his mother, he had only flickering memories of nighttime visits, and a vague notion that she resembled the drawing of an Egyptian pharaoh he later found in a book. “The practice of separating mothers from their children,” he explained, “was a marked feature of the cruelty and barbarity of the slave system; but it was in harmony with the grand aim of that system, which always and everywhere sought to reduce man to a level with the brute.”¹

In his mother’s absence, young Frederick was raised by his Grandmother Betsey, who lived in her own log cabin, apart from the slave quarters on Anthony’s Holme Hill Farm, in what is now the tiny community of Cordova. Douglass described his early childhood as joyful, though obviously poor. He could spend his days fishing in the mill pond and chasing squirrels. But at about seven years old, he was taken to live at the “Great House,” 17 miles away on the main Lloyd property.

There he was placed in the care of Aunt Katy, a cruel woman who resented being forced to tend to Frederick, partly because it took away from the resources she could bestow on her own children.² She often denied him food, either so she could feed the others or as punishment. One evening, when the hunger became unbearable, he stole a handful of corn; he had set it on the hearth to warm when his mother appeared on one of her rare visits. He quickly scarfed up the kernels, but not before his mother realized what was happening. Taking pity on him, she gave him a gingercake and, while he gobbled it down, “read Aunt Katy a lecture which was never forgotten.”³ But the victory was short lived. It proved to be the last time he saw his mother, and he remained in the custody of the merciless Aunt Katy.

Too young for field work, Frederick was assigned small errands, cleaning tasks, and the meager education that was allotted to slaves. This consisted mostly of discipline and rudimentary religious instruction. Increasingly, in the decades that followed, the Christian churches of the United States would struggle over the morality of slavery, but on the plantation, the message was unambiguous: slavery was a holy institution, decreed by God, who made some to rule and others to serve. This propaganda was a powerful device for weakening the incipient individualism of those kept in servitude, strengthening the resolve of the tiny master class, and assuaging guilt among whites who, like Captain Anthony, owned few slaves, or none at all. Mark Twain, a rough contemporary, recalled of his own Missouri boyhood that he “had no aversion to slavery” growing up. “I was not aware that there was anything wrong about it. No one arraigned it in my hearing; the local papers said nothing against it; the local pulpit taught us that God approved it, that it was a holy thing, and that the doubter need only look in the Bible if he wished to settle his mind . . . ; if the slaves themselves had an aversion to slavery they were wise and said nothing.”⁴

Alongside religious sanction, the master class used other techniques to keep the racial categories in line and prevent the uprisings that were always their nightmare scenario. This was one of the key distinctions between American slavery and the versions practiced in other nations and other times. Among the Greeks and Romans, for instance, slavery was based not on ideology, but on class status and the fortunes of war. During the first half of the 19th century, American slave owners developed the color line into a comprehensive philosophy that tightened slavery’s vise. Anti-miscegenation laws, laws forbidding the teaching of slaves to read, and laws that restricted free black Americans from traveling or becoming citizens became more common. But it was not just upper-class whites who drew and enforced the color line. Poor whites were just as likely to embrace racism as was the master class. As William Freehling observes, “contradictory cultures love scapegoats.”⁵ Douglass was to find as a laborer, and even as an abolitionist, that racism was just as common among working-class whites in the North, to whom it served economic and even psychological needs, as it was among southerners. After the Civil War, when race-hatred impeded the efforts of industrial leaders, white workers still clung to it, demanding that their labor unions admit only white members and that managers refuse to hire blacks or Asians.

The legal, ideological, racial, and religious rationalizations for slavery were intended primarily to reinforce the mores of that institution among whites. Far more practical and ruthless measures of punishment and indoctrination maintained the institution among the slaves. The overriding point of this training—one might say, domestication—of a young slave was to obliterate individuality. The institution’s survival depended on that. It was the theme of everything slave masters inflicted on the oppressed race—from illiteracy to the disruption of the family to the arbitrariness of punishments to the satirical names masters often gave their slaves—Zeus or Jupiter, for instance. “The first work of slavery is to mar and deface those characteristics of its victims which distinguish men from things,” Douglass explained. Thus, the master’s “first business” was to “blunt, deaden, and destroy the central principle of human responsibility” and specifically the slave’s conscience:

Conscience is, to the individual soul, and to society, what the law of gravitation is to the universe. It holds society together; it is the basis of all trust and confidence; it is the pillar of all moral rectitude. Without it, suspicion would take the place of trust; vice would be more than a match for virtue; men would prey upon each other, like the wild beasts of the desert; and earth would become a hell.

Nor is slavery more adverse to the conscience than it is to the mind. This is shown by the fact, that in every state of the American Union, where slavery exists, except the state of Kentucky, there are laws absolutely prohibitory of education among the slaves. The crime of teaching a slave to read is punishable with severe fines and imprisonment, and, in some instances, with death itself.⁶

About a million and a half people were kept in slavery in the United States when Douglass was born. By the time he escaped, 20 years later, this number had risen to two and a half million, concentrated largely in the Deep South states between Louisiana and Georgia. Upper South states like Maryland had a reputation for practicing a less severe form of slavery than the cotton and sugar plantations of the Deep South, with more opportunities for interaction between the races and milder discipline. But the masters on the Lloyd plantations where Douglass lived were also said to be crueler than most. Whatever its form, slavery remained—despite the pretensions of the master class—a system by which physical labor was brutally extracted from a distinct group of people through the persistent violation of their individuality.⁷

Abolitionist Senator Charles Sumner once said that the “single object” of slavery was “to compel labor without wages.”⁸ Modern slavery scholar Orlando Patterson defines slavery as “social death.”⁹ But it would be more precise to say that the master aimed to transform the slave into an automaton by obliterating his sense of personhood. “Freedom of choice is the essence of all accountability,” Douglass wrote. Therefore, to make a man a slave, one must first “rob him of moral responsibility.”¹⁰ To accomplish that goal, the masters had to deny slaves at least three things: history, law, and the fruits of their labor.

History is a shared tradition about one’s origins and the glorification of the achievements of ancestors, which gives one a sense of purpose and a role in the progress of the world. History can generate pride and solidarity among a people. Enforced illiteracy and propaganda kept history away from slaves, leaving them with only oral traditions and family histories that the master class regarded as quaint or ridiculous. This history-deprivation also bred among slaves a sense of being “pegged down to one single spot.” Lacking a conception of their part in the progress of a nation or a people, enslaved people were encouraged to regard themselves not as dynamic and full of potential, but as static and fixed in the landscape. If the slave could be deprived of a past, he could not imagine a future. “The enthusiasm which animates the bosoms of young freemen, when they contemplate a life in the far West, or in some distant country,” Douglass wrote, “could have no place in the thought of the slave.”¹¹ This reticence to travel obviously served the interests of the master class.

Depriving slaves of law was also essential. Law establishes consistent rules that are mutually obeyed by ruler and ruled alike. Unlike a system of command-and-obedience, law gives shelter to the underprivileged, since the powerful must submit to it, and the powerless can use it to effectuate their own desires. Slaves were almost universally denied standing to invoke law, on the theory that, as the North Carolina Supreme Court frankly explained, “[t]he slave, to remain a slave, must be made sensible, that there is no appeal from his master; that his power is in no instance, usurped; but is conferred by the laws of man at least, if not by the law of God.” For courts or government officials to regard the slave as a legally independent being would “chang[e] the relation in which these parts of our people stand to each other.”¹² To be truly subjugated, the slave had to be law-starved. Even such relatively innocuous matters as legal recognition of marriage might have tied a master’s hands.

The lawless quality of slavery descended even to the plantations themselves, which operated less on the basis of strict and scrupulously followed protocols than through arbitrary and vague edicts. Indefinite or ambiguous rules give the enforcer discretion to punish whatever and whenever he likes. “A mere look, word, or motion,—a mistake, accident, or want of power,—are all matters for which the slave may be whipped at any time,” wrote Douglass. A slave could even be punished for being too diligent. “Does he answer loudly, when spoken to by his master, with an air of self-consciousness? Then, he must be taken down a button-hole lower, by the lash.”¹³ Slaves found various strategies to compensate for this deprivation—folk customs, poetry and humor, and traditions like jumping the broom. But as much comfort as these gave, they were inadequate compared with the persistent lawlessness of their condition.

Eradicating the profit motive also flowed from the logic of slavery: slaves were property, so it made no sense to say they themselves could own property. But depriving them of opportunities for profit also rendered it impossible for them to plan for the future, prevented them from becoming economically independent, stifled a crucial source of self-esteem, and suppressed the incentive to undertake their own projects—all of which might prove dangerous to masters. Slaves were sometimes even punished for suggesting better ways to accomplish plantation tasks. Although denying slaves rewards for hard work or initiative was economically inefficient (it discouraged invention and entrepreneurialism), that inefficiency was a price plantation owners were willing to pay.¹⁴ Slavery was productive enough to satisfy the master class. And thanks to property restrictions on voting and legislative malapportionment, it was the masters who made the important political decisions. Plus, the economic outlook for slavery began to improve when the cotton gin was invented and new western lands were opened for cultivation with the purchase of Louisiana in 1803.

In any event, slavery was not really about economics, at least not to the masters, who professed to scorn the materialism and profit-seeking of their capitalist Yankee cousins. America’s founding fathers had generally viewed slavery as a regrettable institution or a necessary evil, but the first generation of southerners after the Constitution came to see slavery as a matter of nationalism and even humanitarianism. South Carolina’s John C. Calhoun, the arch champion of slavery, called it a “positive good” because it provided the best life for those he saw as racially inferior and gave the master race leisure for the finer pursuits. Southerners “fancy themselves more generous and noble-hearted than the plain freemen who labour for subsistence,” wrote John Quincy Adams in his diary after an 1820 conversation with Calhoun, but this was mere “vain-glory in their very condition of masterdom.”¹⁵

While most southern whites could afford no slaves, or very few, even poor whites could benefit psychologically by being able to feel themselves part of the master race. Thus, during the three decades before the Civil War, southerners concocted a culture of pseudo-chivalry, heavily influenced by romantic authors like Sir Walter Scott. Plantation owners fancied themselves lords and ladies, commoners played faithful yeomen or flamboyant soldiers, and questions of filthy lucre were disregarded as beneath one’s notice. Southerners, Adams concluded, “look down on the simplicity of a yankey’s [sic] manners because he has no habits of overbearing like theirs, and cannot treat negroes like dogs.”¹⁶ According to Kenneth Stampp, one of the leading scholars of slavery, the institution is best seen not as an economic model but as “a social pattern made venerable by long tradition and much philosophizing.” For those who were “emotionally and ideologically committed to the agrarian way of life” and to the “idea that those who lived on the land were more virtuous than those who engaged in commerce and industry,” slavery was highly efficient and a powerful tool for satisfying the lust for domination—a commodity forever in demand.¹⁷

One epigone of that lust was Captain Aaron Anthony. Relatively speaking, he was not a particularly severe overseer, but he and his family were emblematic of the system. Douglass’s first encounter with the absolute power whites had over blacks came when he witnessed Anthony beating his teenaged aunt Esther Bailey, who “possessed that which was ever a curse to the slave girl—namely, personal beauty.”¹⁸ Anthony was infatuated with her—Douglass does not disclose what exactly their connection was, if any—and ordered her not to see Ned Roberts, a young enslaved man she liked. She and Roberts, of course, could not marry, but they continued to meet in secret. When Anthony caught them, he flew into a rage. He stripped Esther to the waist, tied her hands over a beam in the cooking shed, and beat her bloody with a three-foot club made of cowhide. Seven-year-old Frederick, watching through a crack in a wall, never forgot her screams.

Overseers like Anthony, and the subordinates who helped him maintain order, were generally kept at arm’s length by the genteel class of southerners, who regarded them with a mixture of fear and contempt but could not do without them. Among the strictest was Orson (or Austin) Gore, one of the Lloyd family’s overseers. Gore was a swaggering, cool, unapproachable man, a true-born tyrant with “a stern will, an iron-like reality.”¹⁹ On one occasion in 1823, he began whipping a young man named Bill Denby. When Denby tried to flee, Gore drew a pistol, gave him the count of three, and then calmly shot him through the head.

Anthony and Colonel Lloyd protested, but Gore answered that such severe methods were essential to discipline, and the matter was dropped. Murder with impunity was not uncommon on the plantations.²⁰

More common, however, were those ordinary interactions through which human sympathy might briefly shine, only to have the window slam shut again, thus emphasizing the impenetrable barrier between black and white, slave and free. That seems to have happened often in Doug...