Timothy Sandefur - Frederick Douglass: Self-Made Man

In February 1818, Frederick Douglass was born to an enslaved mother on a Maryland plantation. By the time he died, at the age of 77, he was a world-renowned intellectual, bestselling author, sought-after speaker, international diplomat, bank president, and civil rights leader. As the nation pauses to commemorate the bicentennial of this remarkable mans birth, it is worthwhile to recall not just his own triumphant narrative, but the ideas and principles that he articulated better than almost anyone in American history.

A curious feature of existing books about Douglass is that they often focus more on his heroic personal story than on the ideas that formed the basis of all his work. In one sense, thats understandable: few American biographies are as inspiring as his. But Douglass was also a scholar and writer of immense skill and a political leader whose actions were consistently guided by his commitment to the principles articulated in the Declaration of Independence: all people are born free and equal, with inherent rights, which nobody may justly violate. Each person owns himself (or herself; Douglass was an outspoken feminist), and nobody is entitled to dictate our choices.

Some Douglass scholars disregard critical aspects of his political views. They emphasize his belief in armed resistance to slavery but downplay his belief that the Constitution was fundamentally an anti-slavery document, or that black Americans must integrate into white society, rather than separate themselves from it. For example, in 2009, Angela Davisa former member of the Black Panthers and the Communist Party, and a recipient of the Soviet Unions Lenin Peace Prizepublished an edition of Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass; in it, she focuses on the injustice and illegitimacy of slavery but makes no mention of Douglasss later embrace of the Constitution and rejection of the anarchist version of abolitionism that he espoused at the time he wrote the Narrative. Her notes make no mention of Douglasss hostility to communism, his skepticism of labor unions, his unequivocal opposition to black nationalism, or his allegiance to limited government and free enterprise. Other scholars have openly condemned Douglass for his bourgeois belief in laissez-faire,

In fact, individualism was the centerpiece of his creeda creed he embraced proudly and with full consciousness. The theme of his life was well stated in the title of his most popular composition, the lecture Self-Made Men, which he delivered over 50 times in the last half of his life. Personal independence is a virtue, he declared in that lecture, but there can be no independence without a large share of self-dependence, and this virtue cannot be bestowed. It must be developed from within. Douglasswho taught himself to read, then taught himself the principles of political philosophy, and then rose through his own efforts to become one of the nations foremost intellectualswas preeminently a self-made man. And in his mind, the United States should be a society for the self-made.

Independence, pride, and personal and economic freedom were to his eyes the natural consequences of the basic principle of equality that lay at the heart of the American dreama dream all people, without regard to race, deserved a chance to pursue. Douglass believed, and with good reason, that if Americans would adhere to their Constitution, theirs would be a free, dynamic, sometimes rough and boisterous society, but one in which people could and should make themselves. And he had little patience for fashionable nostrumssuch as socialism and spiritualismthat offered fantasies of revolutionary transformation or utopia, or promised to relieve people of the burden of making themselves. When todays scholars downplay or criticize his belief in individualism, private property, free enterprise, and constitutionalism, it says more about them than about him.

Two centuries after his birth, it is worth taking a fresh look at Douglasss lifeboth as a spokesman for and a representative of this creed of individualism and freedom. In some ways a conservative, in other ways a revolutionary, he both espoused and lived the central idea of his work: we own ourselves and must be free to make ourselves the best people we can be.

This book would not have been possible without the kind help of many people. Thanks most especially to Deborah J. LaFetra, John McKee Barr, Christina Sandefur, Roger Pilon, Jonathan Blanks, and Craig Biddle.

Like most people born into slavery, Frederick Douglass never knew his exact birthdate. He once made an educated guess, picking February 14, 1817, but late in life, he learned that he had been off by a year. Still, to hear him tell itand it is always best to hear him tell it, in the three versions of the autobiography he publishedhe was in a larger sense born in August 1834. That was when, pushed to the end of his endurance, he wrapped his hands around the throat of Edward Covey and held on until blood ran down his fingers.

The 16-year-old Douglass had been sent to Covey to be broken when his master, Thomas Auld, decided Douglass was too insolent. Covey ran a sort of corrective labor camp for slaves with too much spirit. For a year, he brutally ground away at Douglasss sense of self-worth, putting him to hard labor from sunrise to sunset, giving him only small servings of tasteless food, and subjecting him to random punishments for minor infractions. For the first six months, Douglass was whipped once a week, with sticks or rawhide thongs.

Such treatment was an essential component of the system of racial chattel slavery that dominated the culture and economy of the early United States, particularly in the South. But while the master class treated slaves as beasts of burden, they still knew in their hearts that each person in servitude nevertheless remained a person, and that this ineradicable humanity was the weak point in the whole system of slavery. It was the basic source of all the uprisings, rebellions, conspiracies, running away, and troublemaking on the plantations where millions of enslaved black people labored every day. Demolishing their humanity was therefore the masters primary mission. Arbitrary punishment meted out for the breaking of subjective, undefined rulesfor impudence or disrespectwas just part of the masters systematic assault on the slaves sense of individualism. Bondsmen were meant to know only terror, suspicion, and dependence, lest they form alliances and rise up against the masters. They were to be kept illiterate and uneducated, and their natural affectionsincluding among familieswere to be broken or manipulated to serve the masters interests. Their lives were to be subjected to no rule other than the masters will. Thus, Covey would beat Douglass arbitrarily, or sneak up on him while he was working and lash out at him for failing to accomplish some impossible taskall with the goal of reducing him to the status of a paranoid and obedient animal.

Eventually, it worked. After weeks of relentless abuse, the young man felt his spirit break, and [t]he dark night of slavery closed in upon me. After one especially savage attack, he tried his last option, walking miles in the hot summer sun to his owners store to beg for mercy. Thomas Auld only shrugged and sent him back.

Somehow, on the return to Coveys farm, Douglass found something new within himself. The next morning, when the slave-breaker appeared out of nowhere and attacked again, he resisted. Whence came the daring spirit necessary to grapple with a man who, eight-and-forty hours before, could with his slightest word, have made me tremble like a leaf in a storm, I do not know, he wrote. [A]t any rate, I