6 - Antislavery Eloquence: The Critical Response to Douglass’s Antislavery Speeches and Journalism

Summary

Novels and slave narratives constitute two major forms of abolitionist literature, but forms that are less frequently discussed as literature were also crucial to the abolitionist cause. The sermon and the public political speeches that were a staple of nineteenth-century literary and political culture can easily be ignored by twenty-first century readers, but scholars have come increasingly to realize how essential they are to understanding the development of the literature of slavery and freedom. This is particularly the case for students of Douglass’s work. The emphasis on Douglass’s oratory and journalism among Douglass scholars in recent years has meant that in addition to historians, biographers, and literary scholars, individuals in the fields of political science, rhetoric, and communication have all been drawn to Douglass’s writing. Recent work on Douglass has become increasingly interdisciplinary, and the insights that different disciplines have brought to bear on Douglass’s work have often complemented each other richly.

Because so much of Douglass’s journalism and so many of his speeches were clearly argumentative in their focus and intent, criticism that engages them often engages with Douglass’s larger ideas more than with questions of form. Small wonder, then, that philosophers, political scientists, historians, and law and literature scholars have all found this aspect of Douglass’s career particularly worthy of their attention. The critics and scholars discussed in this chapter have been especially concerned with Douglass’s views and rhetoric on such matters as black nationalism versus assimilation, natural law versus constitutionalism, and the meaning of the American founding documents.

Although most readers of Douglass’s work and most of his biographers have commented to some degree on Douglass’s speeches, this chapter focuses specifically on those critics and scholars who have offered extended readings of Douglass’s speeches. Interestingly, the focus on Douglass’s speeches begins quite early in his recovery as a canonical literary figure, only to be pushed to the background by criticism on the autobiographies before reemerging in the past twenty years.

Writing in 1931 in The Negro Author: His Development in America to 1900, Vernon Loggins found that Douglass’s contributions to African American literature went beyond his autobiographies.