This blog post is the second of two about the abolitionist Frederick Douglass (celebrating his 200th birthday) and part of a series called “Hidden Folklorists,” which examines the folklore work of surprising people, including people better known for other pursuits. The first post, “Frederick Douglass: Free Folklorist,” is available at this link.
The 1850s brought new concerns for the community of abolitionists with which Frederick Douglass had aligned himself. The Fugitive Slave Act attempted to oblige citizens in free states to return slaves to their masters. It criminalized the efforts of those who participated in the Underground Railroad. Slaves headed north now had to run all the way to Canada in order to reach a jurisdiction that would not return them to slave states. Douglass himself was free, but activities to assist fleeing slaves that he and other abolitionists participated in had become much more dangerous. In addition, the “compromise of 1850” engineered by Henry Clay set up a system of a balance between slave and free states. Douglass, who was a fierce opponent of Clay both personally and politically, felt that this system would only serve to prolong slavery and to make northerners more complacent. Some abolitionists, including Douglass’s mentor, William Lloyd Garrison, accepted the compromise as a way to preserve peace. Douglass’s first hand knowledge of the suffering of slaves would never allow him to accept anything but freedom for those still held in slavery. In 1853 he said the compromise of 1850, “reveals with great clearness the extent to which slavery has shot its leprous distilment through the lifeblood of the Nation.” (Address delivered at Broadway Tabernacle, New York, p. 12.)
Douglass had always read widely and during this time he seems to have been especially interested in law and ethnology. Law, especially constitutional law, was a possible route to arguments against the growing web of legislation that attempted to make slavery legal under the United States Constitution. Ethnology became of interest as he was already using understanding of culture, especially the culture of slavery, in his speeches to raise the consciousness of people in free states. But the work of some ethnologists was being used in arguments in the United States Congress to support the continuation of slavery. Douglass sought out ethnological writings by various authors on the concept of “race” in the hopes of finding arguments that would help bridge the divide between African and European Americans. He was deeply disappointed.
In 1854 Douglass gave a speech, “The Claims of the Negro,” to the Philozetian Society at Western Reserve College in Ohio. Douglass described the views of a number of ethnologists on the subject of race. This was at a particularly dark moment in the study of human beings. Many ethnologists in Europe and the Americas sought a scientific basis for discrimination against large groups of people. It was not a coincidence that these “races” were groups that western countries wished to rule, colonize, or keep in bondage.
It is the province of prejudice to blind; and scientific writers, not less than others, write to please, as well as to instruct, and even unconsciously to themselves, (sometimes,) sacrifice what is true to what is popular. Fashion is not confined to dress; but extends to philosophy as well–and it is fashionable now, in our land, to exaggerate the differences between the negro and the European. If, for instance, a phrenologist, or naturalist undertakes to represent in portraits, the differences between the two races–the negro and the European–he will invariably present the highest type of the European, and the lowest type of the negro.
The European face is drawn in harmony with the highest ideas of beauty, dignity and intellect. Features regular and brow after the Websterian mold. The negro, on the other hand, appears with features distorted, lips exaggerated; forehead depressed–and the whole expression of the countenance made to harmonize with the popular idea of negro imbecility and degradation. — The Claims of the Negro, Ethnologically Considered: an address before the literary societies of Western Reserve College, at commencement, by Frederick Douglass, July 12, 1854 (page 20)
This was the