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The Shadows of the Past and the Work of the Future: Frederick Douglass's Temporal Theory of Democracy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 February 2021

Nathan Pippenger
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Abstract

Throughout his career, Frederick Douglass linked the achievement of an egalitarian, multiracial democracy to Americans’ perception of their collective past and future. In so doing, I argue, Douglass developed a distinctive, temporal account of democratic peoplehood. For Douglass, temporal continuity lent force and content to demands for equality—demands which would succeed only if the whole demos cultivated a specific orientation to its collective past, present, and future. Douglass offers a productive contrast to contemporary democratic theory, which often misses the importance of temporality suggested by his account and thereby risks surrendering its powerful egalitarian resources. Moreover, temporality provides a new lens on what many interpreters see as an episode of inconsistency in Douglass's thought: his brief, quickly abandoned contemplation of colonization proposals in the spring of 1861. Ultimately, Douglass turned to temporality in order to decide whether democracy for African Americans required affiliation with, or disaffiliation from, the United States.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 83 , Issue 2 , Spring 2021 , pp. 219 - 241
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of University of Notre Dame.

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Footnotes

For their thoughtful guidance on this paper, I thank Richard Ashcroft, Kevin Duong, Nina Hagel, Desmond Jagmohan, Simon Stow, the journal's anonymous reviewers, and its editor, Ruth Abbey. Previous versions were presented at the Berkeley Graduate Political Theory Workshop and at meetings of the APSA and the Association for Political Theory. This research was funded by a Naval Academy Volgenau Fellowship. The views expressed are the author's and do not reflect the official position of the U.S. Naval Academy, Department of Defense, or the U.S. Government.

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38 Frederick Douglass, “Great Britain's Example Is High, Noble, and Grand: An Address Delivered in Rochester, New York, on 6 August 1885,” in Frederick Douglass Papers, Series One, 5:200–201. The final line of this passage quotes the concluding lines of John Greenleaf Whittier's 1847 poem “My Soul and I.” See Whittier, John Greenleaf, “My Soul and I,” in The Complete Writings of John Greenleaf Whittier, vol. 2 (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1892), 227Google Scholar.

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45 The most plausible alternative to this result of an episodically constituted demos is a totally unbounded one: because it is difficult to specify a reasonable limiting principle even to the supposedly more restrictive all-coerced approach, both all-affected and all-coerced principles seem, as Sarah Song notes, “to push toward a global demos.” See Sarah Song, “The Boundary Problem in Democratic Theory: Why the Demos Should Be Bounded by the State,” International Theory 4, no. 1 (March 2012): 53, https://doi.org/10.1017/S1752971911000248.

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50 Here, the question of immigration reappears, since high levels of migration also change the composition of the demos. Douglass explicitly addresses this issue in the 1869 “Composite Nationality” speech, maintaining that Chinese immigrants should be welcomed if they can be integrated into American political institutions: “Do you ask if I would favor such immigration? I answer, I would.” As I noted earlier, this speech illustrates Douglass's embrace of a multiracial (not merely biracial) view of American democracy. See Douglass, “Our Composite Nationality,” 251, 256.

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63 For an overview of the strains on Douglass's US nationalism in the 1850s, and an argument that scholars have exaggerated the strength of that nationalism, see Levine, Robert S., Dislocating Race and Nation: Episodes in Nineteenth-Century American Literary Nationalism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), chap. 4CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

64 Frederick Douglass, “The Inaugural Address,” Douglass’ Monthly, April 1861, 433, Anacostia Community Museum Archives.

65 Ibid., 435.

66 Frederick Douglass, “A Trip to Hayti,” Douglass’ Monthly, May 1861, 449, Anacostia Community Museum Archives.

67 Ibid., 450.

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69 For a related account of Douglass's brief foray into procolonization thought, see Hooker, “ ‘A Black Sister to Massachusetts,’ ” 692–93.

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83 Douglass, “Trip to Hayti,” 449.

84 Frederick Douglass, “Haiti and the Haitian People: An Address Delivered in Chicago, Illinois, on 2 January 1893,” in Frederick Douglass Papers, Series One, 5:510.

85 Hooker, “ ‘A Black Sister to Massachusetts,’ ” 692. In contrast, Hooker notes, “Black fugitive thought, for example, has generally been concerned with the creation of autonomous spaces for black freedom (such as maroon communities) at the margins of or outside colonial states and their successors” (ibid.).

86 If civil war had not arrived and democratic refounding in Haiti had, for whatever reason, proved impossible, Douglass—stuck between impossibility at home and impossibility abroad—might have been forced to explore a nonstatist strategy of the sort he otherwise abjured. Yet he seems not to have reached such a conclusion during his life. Into the 1890s, he continued to profess his belief in the possibility of multiracial democracy and the futility of separatism, declaring, a year before his death, that the colonization movement “tends to weaken [the African American's] hold on one country while it can give him no rational hope of another. . . . To have a home, the negro must have a country.” See Douglass, “Lessons of the Hour,” 598. Thanks to an anonymous referee for raising this point.

87 Douglass, “Work of the Future,” 521 (emphasis added).