The following post is part of a series on the rise and fall of the self-made man in American culture.
It is perhaps a measure of the unique
reach of the early nineteenth century version of the self-made man that it was
finally able to breach a barrier that had once seemed impossible to overcome:
slavery. Henry Clay suspected that slavery inhibited his attempts to champion
the self-made man; Abraham Lincoln acted decisively to end it for that reason.
But only African Americans themselves could truly realize the possibilities of
emancipation. As would soon become apparent, this would not be easy, even after
slavery was destroyed. But the nation, and the idea, now seemed big enough to
contain such a possibility.
The most impressive demonstration of
what a self-proclaimed self-made man could be was Frederick Douglass. Born in
bondage circa 1818 – “slaves know as little of their ages as horses know of
theirs” he notes at the start of his famous autobiography – Douglass began his
life on a plantation on the eastern shore of Maryland, the child of a mother he
barely knew and an unknown white man. And yet, as he and others were keen to
note, the deprivations he suffered as a slave were relatively mild. He spent a
significant stint of his childhood in Baltimore – once again, city as
greenhouse of self-making – under the tutelage of a white woman who taught him
to read. Douglass continued to practice his skills while working as an
assistant in a local shipyard before being sent back to work as a plantation
hand (where he tried to teach his fellow slaves to teach until he was ordered
to desist). Rented out to a notorious slave breaker named Edward Covey,
Douglass was brutalized until he finally stood up and asserted himself. After
being jailed for failed attempt to escape to freedom in 1836, he returned to
Baltimore, gaining a number of skills, among them caulking, that allowed him to
become quite valuable to his owner. But his determination to escape to freedom
was finally realized in 1838, after which he chose the name that made him
famous (based on a character in a Sir Walter Scott novel), married, and settled
in Massachusetts. Douglass eventually moved to upstate New York and founded a
newspaper that became an important instrument in the struggle against slavery.
But it was Douglass’s own life story,
made legend in his now classic slave narrative, which proved to be his most
important weapon. First published in 1845 – longer editions were issued in 1855
and 1888 – the pointedly titled Life
Story of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself –
catapulted him to the forefront of the abolitionist movement. Douglass had a
great story to tell, and he told it with prose that was stirring in its
eloquence.
It is, in a number of decisive ways, a
story of gender identity. While the myth of the self-made man tends to view
manhood as the pre-existing foundation for success, Douglass’s manhood was
itself a product of his own manufacture. Indeed, the essence of slavery was
precisely the lack of such an identity. In his deepest misery at the hands of
Covey, Douglass noted, “I was broken in body, soul, and spirit. My natural
elasticity was crushed, my intellect languished, my disposition to read
departed, the cheerful spark that lingered about my eye died; the dark night of
slavery closed upon me; and behold a man was transformed into a brute!”
Conversely, freedom meant reclaiming that identity. “You have seen how a man
was made a slave,” he declared in the famous line of chiasmus from the most
dramatic scene in the book, “[now] you shall see a slave made a man.”
This act of self-construction is
presented as an act of will, and yet it was one that echoed generations of
earlier Americans, white and black, who declined to claim complete agency.
Douglass acknowledged a destiny delivered by a higher power. “From my earliest
recollection, I date the entertainment of a deep conviction that slavery would
not always be able to hold me within its foul embrace,” he writes early in the
autobiography, “and in the darkest hours of my career in slavery, this living
word of faith and spirit of hope departed not from me, but remained like
ministering angels to cheer me through the gloom. This good spirit was from
God, and to him I offer thanksgiving and praise.” Douglass was much criticized
for pointing out the religious hypocrisies of slave owners, so much so that he
felt compelled to include an appendix in the book disclaiming any intention of
apostasy. But a deep vein of spirituality animated Douglass’s writings,
notwithstanding the superstitions among slaves he lamented in the text and the
rage he occasionally directed at those he believed acted in bad faith.
This helps explain the missionary fervor
of Douglass’s career as an abolitionist, one that was expansive enough to
include ardent advocacy of woman suffrage as well as Irish rights in the face
of British oppression. Like Emerson, Douglass was a public intellectual. But he
was much more what we would consider a social activist. And yet he also
reflected the tenor of his time in his belief that freedom was an act of
individual emancipation no less than a collective and political one. “Let the
black man get upon his person the brass letters ‘U.S.’; let him get an eagle on
his button, and a musket on his shoulder and bullets in his pocket, and there
is no power on earth which can deny that he has earned the right to citizenship
in the United States,” Douglass wrote, advocating the use of African American
soldiers in the Civil War (initially forbidden, they eventually became a
significant factor in the outcome). In another piece at the time, he asserted
that black Americans were fighting “for principle, and not from passion,” and
that these soldiers were achieving “manhood and freedom” of their own making.
To the end of his life – he lived until
1895 – Douglass remained a committed American integrationist. This wasn’t
always easy. Though he was an important functionary in the Republican Party in
the decades following the Civil War, Douglass was disappointed by its ebbing
commitment to freedpeople and its increasing graft and corruption. But even as
some of his contemporaries, notably Martin Delany, began advocating what we
might call an early form of black nationalism, Douglass continued to believe in
the United States as a place were Americans could, should, and ultimately would
be masters of their own destinies. He would arguably be vindicated, but it
would take a very long time.
Douglass was not only facing stiff
racial winds. The bold sense of civic purposes that had characterized the
United States in the decades before the Civil War, and which had animated a
wide array of social movements, had stalled. Insofar as there were such
movements – the Populists come to mind as an important example – they were
marked by more of a sense of mass organization, or, alternatively, a growing
emphasis on scientific management (Douglass’s protégé Ida B. Wells, who had a
similar fiery spirit, relied on statistics and reporting in leading an attack
on the epidemic of lynchings that occurred in the South in the 1890s). The
self-made man remained a fixture on the American landscape. But his profile was
shifting, away from the civic orientation that marked an era that stretched
from Franklin to Lincoln. More than his predecessors, the new one had a
pecuniary flavor.
