Frederick Douglass and the Power of Words

In last week's column, we saw Frederick Douglass taking the reins in his life, controlling one thing he could control: his education. This week, we examine another form of control.  Thanks to his self-education, Douglass was able to write his story, imposing a new form of control on his life by converting it to words.

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Imagine you have endured a harrowing experience.  You can't go back in time.  You can't erase the experience.  What can you do?

If you're Frederick Douglass, you tell your story.

After escaping slavery in 1838, Douglass told his story multiple times — in three autobiographies, as well as countless speeches, which he delivered as part of the abolitionist movement.

In the abstract, turning events — instances of actual reality in the tangible world — into words, which amount to mere lines on a page or sounds in the air, seems futile, even silly.  Words are powerful things, though, among the most powerful things ever to have existed on the earth.

Words preserve events, exposing them to scrutiny, making them available to all the world for lessons and inspiration.  If Douglass had not told his story, much of what he endured and much of what he did to respond to his trials would have disappeared forever.  After all, the vast majority of people do not commit their lives to writing, and if they do they usually are writing for a small audience, perhaps — in the case of a diary — only for themselves.  In the case of slavery, furthermore, many of the people who knew what it entailed because they imposed it on others would not want to expose or preserve the reality of the oppression, family separations, physical abuse, and hunger.  For them, such suffering was better left unsaid and unwritten for public consumption.

In an early portion of his second autobiography, My Bondage and My Freedom, Douglass makes evident the secret nature of some of the worst offenses of slavery when he writes about Maryland's Eastern Shore, where he was enslaved.  A remote expanse of land separated from the rest of the state by the Chesapeake Bay, the Eastern Shore was almost like a separate planet.  Douglass explains:

Public opinion is, indeed, an unfailing restraint upon the cruelty and barbarity of masters, overseers, and slave-drivers, whenever and wherever it can reach them; but there are certain secluded and out-of-the-way places, even in the state of Maryland, seldom visited by a single ray of healthy public sentiment — where slavery, wrapt in its own congenial, midnight darkness, can, and does, develop all its malign and shocking characteristics, where it can be indecent without shame, cruel without shuddering, and murderous without apprehension or fear of exposure.

In writing about this part of the country and about slavery in general, Douglass was holding both up for inspection at a time when slavery was a divisive issue in the United States.  Douglass and other opponents, such as fellow writer Harriet Beecher Stowe, knew that ending it meant persuading others to take action.  In her novel Uncle Tom's Cabin, Stowe sought to evoke emotional responses from her readers by presenting heart-rending scenes of the impact of slavery on characters such as Uncle Tom and Eliza.   

Stowe did her homework, but her novel was just that: a novel, a fictional rendering of the lives of enslaved men and women, as well as the owners and others.

Douglass, on the other hand, was telling a true story, his own story, and he did so in a style that was often remarkably objective, even matter-of-fact.  It was not that he thought the scenes he was describing were not capable of arousing powerful emotional responses.  Rather, perhaps, he was building his credibility by delivering this information in a way that suggested he was not being carried away by his emotions and going out of his way to persuade us with loaded language.  Perhaps he felt the scenes spoke for themselves, and he wanted his readers to convince themselves of the cruelty and unnaturalness of what he was describing.  In a description of a stable and carriage house owned by Colonel Lloyd, owner of many slaves, he says:

This establishment was under the care of two slaves — old Barney and young Barney — father and son. To attend to this establishment was their sole work. But it was by no means an easy employment; for in nothing was Colonel Lloyd more particular than in the management of his horses. The slightest inattention to these was unpardonable, and was visited upon those, under whose care they were placed, with the severest punishment; no excuse could shield them, if the colonel only suspected any want of attention to his horses — a supposition which he frequently indulged, and one which, of course, made the office of old and young Barney a very trying one. They never knew when they were safe from punishment. They were frequently whipped when least deserving, and escaped whipping when most deserving it.

Elsewhere Douglass does use some more subjective language, but here he is dispassionate.  A subtle, yet powerful indictment of slavery comes in the final two sentences: "They never knew when they were safe from punishment. They were frequently whipped when least deserving, and escaped whipping when most deserving it."  I suspect Douglass would agree with me that no one ever truly deserves a whipping for anything, but the chief point here is that slavery is an irrational, disordered institution.  It does not operate according to conventional, logical standards.  In short, not only is it morally wrong; it's a flagrant violation of logic.

This indictment is part of a larger story, one that Douglass used to expose the evils of slavery.  This story was possible because of the power of words.