Chapter 13 - Temperance

Summary

Frederick Douglass’s perspective on temperance had much in common with the arguments articulated by northern free black conduct writers, reformers and institution builders. Like many of them, Douglass believed that the rhetoric and daily practice of temperance served the larger fight against slavery and racism by contributing to the forms of black self-mastery, independence, and self-determination most feared by proponents of slavery in the United States. Alcohol consumption, meanwhile, cultivated exactly the kind of dependence preferred by slaveholders. Emphasizing its revolutionary potential for African Americans, Douglass characterized temperance as essential for the black freedom struggle throughout his career, continuing to make his case for temperance even in the last decades of the nineteenth century when African Americans faced the specter of the rise of Jim Crow and the encroachment of new forms of oppression and servitude.