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.

Dred cont'd

Eureka quote of the day: 

There is always something awful in the voice of the multitude. It would seem that if the breath that a crowd breathed out together, in moments of enthusiasm, carried with it a portion of the dread and mystery of their own immortal natures. The whole area before the pulpit, and in the distant aisles of the forest, became one vast surging sea of sound, as negroes and whites, slaves and freemen, saints and sinners, slave-holders, slave-hunters, slave-traders, ministers, elders, and laymen, alike joined in the pulses of that mighty song. A flood of electrical excitement seemed to rise with it, as, with a voice of many waters the rude chant went on...(Stowe 322-323)

I really like this idea of the collective voice of the people transforming into a sea, the dark side of democracy being this enthusiasm potentially capsizing the ship of state a la Heimert. The potential of connections between these disparate groups is undermined by this enthusiasm. The shared experience eradicates differences but not in the way that would open them up veiwing commonalities. Instead all we have is this "rude chant," this blind surrender to their noise and no knowledge that their noise is just noise. 

This also highlights a problem I keep running into with this project in that sometimes the maritime imaginary is about sailor and slave narratives, sometimes it's about the space of the ship, and sometimes it's about the sea and I either need to deal with each part distinctly or push the others aside and concentrate on one. 

The more I read the more I'm thinking that this chapter should focus mainly on Dred and talk about "The Heroic Slave" and Blake less centrally which doesn't make total sense considering that Dred is the one work that doesn't deal directly with insurrection at sea. However it is a good way to test my theory that texts aren't about transatlantic slave trade nevertheless contain within them an awareness of the Middle Passage. I first thought about doing this with Uncle Tom's Cabin and talking about Tom's trip down the Mississippi as operating as an inland Middle Passage. And with Dred the constant movement of slaves, the awareness of always being in danger of sold away speak to the way in which that inter-state slave trade is forever connected to the Middle Passage. 

Of course this might all change when I'm gathering notes for Blake and "The Heroic Slave." Hopefully I'll settle on something soon.