Selected Speeches

Overview

The collected speeches and writings run to six hundred and fifty pages in the usual selection, and they cover half a century: Douglass began lecturing for the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society in 1841 and gave his last speech in 1895, a few hours before he died. He was the most photographed American of the nineteenth century, more than Lincoln or Whitman, because he understood what images did and sat deliberately.

There is no reason to read a volume of this size front to back. It is a collection of occasions, and the way in is by period, because his position changes.

Three phases are worth distinguishing. In the 1840s he is a Garrisonian: the Constitution is a covenant with death, the Union should be dissolved, and moral persuasion is the instrument. By the early 1850s he has broken with Garrison, decided that the Constitution rightly read is an antislavery document, and started arguing for political action, which cost him friendships and his platform. After 1865 he is a Republican elder statesman, and his subject becomes the gap between formal freedom and actual power.

The speeches are meant to be heard. They are long by modern standards, two hours was normal, and they are built with the architecture of the period: extended periods, classical allusion, direct address, and a rhythm that carries. Reading them aloud is not affectation but the only way to see how they work.

The argument

What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?, 1852. The one to read first, and generally reckoned the greatest speech in American history. He was invited by the Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society to speak on Independence Day, and he spoke on the fifth.

The first third is a genuine and generous tribute to the founders: they were great men, they loved liberty, they staked everything on a principle. The second third narrows: the question is whether the principles they announced are extended to us. And then the turn, which is the most famous rhetorical move in American oratory. He asks what the Fourth of July is to the American slave, and answers that it is a day revealing the gross injustice and cruelty of which he is the constant victim, that the celebration is a sham, the boasted liberty an unholy licence, and the shouts of liberty and equality hollow mockery. He asks whether he is expected to argue that slavery is wrong, and refuses: the time for such argument is past, what is wanted is scorching irony rather than convincing argument.

Then, at the end, hope, and it is not conventional. He draws it from the very forces he has attacked: the spread of commerce, the impossibility of confining ideas, the Constitution read as he now reads it.

Power concedes nothing, 1857. From an address on West India emancipation, and the passage is the most quoted thing he ever said. The whole history of progress shows that concessions have been born of struggle; those who profess to favour freedom and deprecate agitation want crops without ploughing and rain without thunder; the limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those they oppress.

The Constitution. His break with Garrison is documented in several pieces and it matters. Garrison held the Constitution to be proslavery and burned a copy in public. Douglass, after study, concluded that its text nowhere names slavery, that it should be read by its words and not by the intentions imputed to its framers, and that it was therefore a charter that could be used. That decision put him inside American politics rather than outside it, and every later argument from the founding documents, including King’s, works in the space he opened.

After emancipation. The later speeches are less quoted and more instructive. What the Black Man Wants, in 1865, answers the question of what should now be done with a single demand: the ballot. He is unsparing about the alternative, that a people freed without power is simply handed back to its former masters under another arrangement.

The Freedmen’s Monument oration of 1876 is the hardest. Speaking at the unveiling of a statue paid for by freed people, with Grant and the Supreme Court present, Douglass praises Lincoln at length and sincerely, and also says plainly that he was the white man’s president, that he was ready to sacrifice Black people’s interests to the Union, and that those listening were his step-children rather than his children. It is a model of how to honour someone accurately.

And the last decade is dominated by lynching. In Lessons of the Hour, delivered in 1894, he takes apart the rape charge used to justify it, point by point, and argues that it is a pretext of the same kind as earlier pretexts, invented after the older justifications for violence had become unusable.

Woman suffrage. Douglass attended Seneca Falls in 1848 and seconded the resolution for the vote when others hesitated. He then split bitterly with Stanton and Anthony over the Fifteenth Amendment, holding that for Black men in the South the vote was a matter of immediate survival and could not wait for a universal measure. He never abandoned the cause, and he died on the evening of a day spent at a National Council of Women meeting.

How to read it

Begin with the Fourth of July speech, aloud if possible, and give it the ninety minutes it takes. Everything else is clearer afterwards.

Then take one piece from each decade: What the Black Man Wants from 1865, the Freedmen’s Monument oration from 1876, and Lessons of the Hour from 1894. Reading them in sequence shows a man revising his strategy as the country closes doors.

Notice the structure he uses repeatedly: concede fully, at length, and then turn. He never sets up a straw opponent, which is why the turns land.

Read the Narrative alongside the speeches. The book is the credential and the speeches are the argument it bought him the standing to make.

Keep the audiences in mind. He is often speaking to white abolitionists who consider themselves his friends and whom he is criticising, and the calibration of how much to say is visible in the prose.

Questions it raises

• Douglass grants the founders’ greatness at length before turning it against their heirs. Is that rhetoric, or the actual shape of his position?
• He decided the Constitution was antislavery on the basis of its text rather than its framers’ intentions. Is that good interpretation or useful interpretation?
• Power concedes nothing without a demand. Is that a description of how change happens, or a counsel that rules out some ways of pursuing it?
• He held Black male suffrage to be more urgent than universal suffrage. Was that a judgement about urgency or a choice between constituencies?
• The Lincoln oration honours and indicts in the same speech. Is that the right way to commemorate anyone, and can it be done without one half cancelling the other?
• Fifty years of argument, and he ended it attacking lynching. What does that trajectory say about what emancipation accomplished?