Frederick Douglass
Gates, Ed. Henry Louis Jr.
BOOK REVIEWS F rederick Douglass was born into slavery on a Maryland plantation in or about 1818 (slaves' birthdays were rarely recorded) and died full of honors and achievements in 1895. He never...
...As a believing Christian, however, Douglass was concerned above all with slavery's impact on the soul...
...Slavery," he wrote, "soon proved its ability to divest her of her excellent qualities, and her home of its early happiness...
...A brilliant orator and a powerful stylist, Douglass was one of nineteenth-century America's master-spirits...
...T oday, we take the evil of slavery so much for granted that the full force of Douglass's argument can easily elude us...
...Learning would spoil the best nigger in the world...
...Thus, when Douglass declares in his third autobiography, Life and Times, that "the abolition of slavery has not merely emancipated the negro, but liberated the white," he is not simply indulging in a fine turn of phrase...
...He always carried bread with him—"for I was much better off in this regard than many of the poor white children of our neighborhood"—which he would exchange for reading lessons...
...Douglass was especially moved by an imaginary dialogue between a slave and his master, in which the slave convinces the master to emancipate him: It is scarcely necessary to say, that a dialogue, with such an origin, and such an ending—read when the fact of my being a slave was a constant burden of grief—powerfully affected me...
...These words had a lasting impact on Douglass: From that moment, I understood the pathway from slavery to freedom...
...After "the world's greatest experiment in debt-financed economic stimulus," he contends, "we find ourselves boxed into a corner from which there are no pleasant exits...
...Education being among the most menacing influences [to slavery]," he wrote, "it is the most cautiously guarded against...
...It was in order "to dispel all doubt by such a revelation of facts as could not be made by any other than a genuine fugitive" that he undertook to write his autobiography...
...It is a point of view—call it Christian realism—that is conspicuous in modern political discourse mainly by its absence...
...In his quest for an education, Douglass enlisted the help of local white children...
...The crucial scene takes place when Douglass is about eight years old, and has left the plantation to live with a white family in Baltimore...
...Library of America/ 1,126 pages /$35 reviewed by JOSEPH SHATTAN I had ever been a slave," Douglass wrote...
...Human nature is so constituted that it cannot honor a helpless man, although it can pity him...
...My Bondage and My Freedom (1855...
...In fact, a better case could be made for the opposite...
...This, then, is what his Narrative seeks to explain—how a young slave boy acquired a passion for knowledge, and how he succeeded in educating himself despite tremendous obstacles and opposition...
...provided food for peoples' bellies evenas it shackled their minds and spirits...
...As Douglass put it in his second autobiography, Bondage and Freedom, (which largely amplified and expanded on the incidents described in the Narrative), "The slaveholder, as well as the slave, is the victim of the slave system...
...People doubted if Joseph Shattan is a writer living in Silver Spring, Maryland...
...In Facing Up, Peterson refers to Reagan policy as a Robert D. Novak is a nationally syndicated columnist, television commentator, and editor of the Evans and Novak Political Report...
...As an orator, Douglass mentioned, but never dwelt on, the "whippings, scourgings, brandings and chainings," inflicted on slaves by their masters...
...Especially galling to Douglass were slaveholders' efforts to keep their human chattel in a state of ignorance...
...He never knew his (probably) white father, and was separated during infancy from his black mother...
...Harvard Business School Press/256 pages /$27.95 FACING UP: HOW TO RESCUE THE ECONOMY FROM CRUSHING DEBT AND RESTORE THE AMERICAN DREAM Peter G. Peterson Simon & Schuster/411 pages /$22 reviewed by ROBERT D. NOVAK 70 The American Spectator April/May 1994...
...A nigger should know nothing but to obey his master," Douglass quotes him The American Spectator April/May 1994 69 but she became even more zealous than he in preventing Douglass from learning to read, forcing him to resort to all sorts of ruses to further his self-education...
...For Douglass, man is first and foremost a spiritual being, and any system that sets out to undermine his spirituality deserves to be destroyed, regardless of T he conventional wisdom of the nineties, turning experience and common sense on its head, is that higher taxes promote economic growth while lower taxes can always be counted on to make things worse...
...A man without force," he observed, "is without the essential dignity of humanity...
...What he most loved, that I most hated...
...Unfortunately, not only did his new mistress obey her husband's injunction, FREDERICK DOUGLASS: AUTOBIOGRAPHIES Edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr...
...In 1838 he escaped from slavery and eventually became a leading abolitionist...
...Slow to develop, the painful consequences of supply-side economics as practiced in the Reagan years have been slow to recede—as the one-term presidency of George Bush attests...
...and Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1893...
...During the Reagan and Bush years, he writes, "I felt increasingly like a Republican abandoned by his party...
...The fundamental impulse of the Reagan administration to relax tax burdens, Malabre writes in Lost Prophets, was "nonsense of the worst sort...
...B ut if slavery was a giant conspiracy designed to "shut out the light of education" from slaves' minds, how, critics asked, did Douglass—only recently a slave himself—acquire his broad education and astonishing fluency...
...Alfred L. Malabre, Jr., economics editor of the Wall Street Journal, and Peter G. Peterson, Wall Street financier, add to the confusion with books that accomplish an astonishing rewrite of recent American economic history...
...What he most dreaded, that I most desired...
...and the argument which he so warmly urged against my learning to read, only served to inspire me with a desire and determination to learn...
...That is why the argument that not all slaves were beaten and chained, that some had relatively decent masters and were actually better off, materially, than poor whites, made no impact on him...
...and I could not help feeling that the day might come, when the well-directed answers made by the slave to his master...
...This illustrates another great theme of Douglass's: slavery's adverse impact on white slave-holders...
...In this and similar ways, Douglass eventually learned to read and write...
...Peterson served as Richard Nixon's secretary of commerce and refers to himself as a "Republican fat cat...
...Now, the Library of America has brought together in a single volume his three autobiographies—Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845...
...Douglass's first venture in autobiography, his Narrative, came after he had already achieved considerable_ stature as an abolitionist spokesman, and was prompted by what many saw as a contradiction in his central argument...
...would find their counterpart in myself...
...Products of secular and material civilization, we are apt to condemn slavery mainly on the grounds of its physical cruelties and material deprivations...
...That which to him was a great evil, to be carefully shunned, was to me a great good, to be diligently sought...
...Containing stirring speeches by Sheridan and Fox, Chatham and Pitt, the book "added much to my limited stock of language, and enabled me to give tongue to many interesting thoughts, which had frequently flashed through my soul, and died for want of utterance...
...Under the whole heavens, there is no relationship more unfavorable to thedevelopment of honorable character, than that sustained by the slave-holder to the slave...
...and even this it cannot do long, if the signs of power do not arise...
...While both are thus in a sense outsiders, in the larger picture Malabre and Peterson are squarely in the liberal mainLOST PROPHETS: AN INSIDER'S HISTORY OF MODERN ECONOMISTS Alfred A. Malabre, Jr...
...It is hard to imagine Douglass going along with all those "progressives" who endorsed contemporary slaveryCommunism—on the grounds that it...
...Once he became literate, Douglass was influenced by a very popular school book, The Columbian Orator, the only book he owned while a slave...
...These physical cruelties," he argued, "are as a few grains of sand on the sea shore . . . compared to the stupendous wrongs which slavery inflicts on the mental, moral and religious nature of its hapless victims...
...the material comforts it (falsely) promises...
...CI "mad drunken bash" driven by the "nonsense that we could put our fiscal house in order without raising new taxes...
...Before you mistake these two books for leftovers from the 1992 Clinton campaign, consider: Malabre clearly regards himself as a conservative and once was a leading journalistic advocate of Milton Friedman's monetarist school...
...From early childhood to his dying day, he saw slavery primarily as a spiritual evil—"the fatal poison of irresponsible power"—that wreaks havoc (though in different ways) on black and white alike...
...His new mistress, "a woman of the kindest heart and finest feelings," gladly begins teaching the young slave how to read, but her husband quickly puts an end to her lessons...
...He is an apparent loser in the internal Balkan wars at the Journal and now has been put to pasture for the most part...
...A man's character greatly takes its hue and shape from the form and color of things about him...
...as saying...
Vol. 27 • April 1994 • No. 45
