Frederick Douglass's Travels

Douglass is an interesting figure because he has two transatlantic personas. The first is as a fugitive slave and abolitionist when he takes his two year journey to Ireland and Great Britain in 1845. The second is as post minister to Haiti and wealthy cosmopolitan traveler in the late nineteenth century. Fionnghuala Sweeney's book Frederick Douglass and the Atlantic World has got me thinking about how best to address his work in this chapter. Initially, I was going to deal primarily with "The Heroic Slave" and insurrection and mutiny, but I don't know if that's going to cut it. Part of the problem is that Douglass, far more than either Stowe or Delany, revisits maritime scenes in his writing over and over from his early days learning to write by watching the ship builders' markings in Baltimore, to his apprenticeship as a ship's caulker, to his sailor's disguise when he makes his escape, to his subsequent trips to Ireland, Africa, and Haiti. Haiti in particular is something he revisits in his writing both during abolition and in the Reconstruction Era.

The answer might be to deal with "The Heroic Slave" in two different registers. The first would be as I intended: within the context of the 1850 and the history of insurrection and mutiny. The second would be in the context of Douglass's larger project of self-fashioning through rewriting his autobiography. In a similar fashion to how Delany seems to return to Africa as a way of reversing the Middle Passage, Douglass seems to write about his voyages as a way of reconfiguring his view of the sea away from that first apostrophe as he looked over Chesapeake Bay in The Narrative of the Life. Between 1845 and 1882, Douglass goes from yearning to be on the "gallant decks" of the ships leaving Baltimore, to observing of voyage to Egypt that "Nothing in my American experience...ever gave me such a deep sense of unearthly silence, such a sense of vast profound, unbroken sameness and solitude, as did this passage" (Douglass, Autobiographies, 1008).The yearning in the latter quote is quite different from the that of the Chesapeake Bay soliloquy. There is something of Melville's Ishmael in his tone. Yet if being bound to the shore is representative of bondage to him, this "sameness and solitude" smacks more of desolation than anything else.

There's also the issue of Haiti. Prior to the Civil War he invokes Haiti to both point to a successful slave revolution and to talk up how white fears of slave insurrection are behind the United States' failure to recognize Haiti as a sovereign nation. After the Civil War Haiti represented the best argument against white hegemony as a black republic, despite its persistent instability.

I'm not sure how much of the Reconstruction era Douglass stuff is going to go in there but it's worth knowing about at any rate. Maybe I can somehow address it in the Billy Budd chapter as a way of demonstrating how these issues persisted after the Civil War.