Frederick Douglass vs The Revisionists
Tell us what you really think.
The most charitable thing I can say to the average American is something of a quote from Malcolm X. “You’ve been hoodwinked, bamboozled, led astray.” And even that quote is not a real quote so you know we’re dealing with the miasma of the interwebz. The library is still my friend, as are used bookstores like Alibris and AbeBooks. Without these sources, you don’t have a complete picture. The internet makes it too easy to get bogus, partial and biased information. So I’m here to help.
Exhibit A: Slave Mentality
What have people been led astray by? Firstly by their own desire to seek proof to a conjecture, in other words their own confirmation bias. Every year around the Fourth of July, I hear arguments in support of the idea that America itself is and always was anti-black racist in principle and therefore today’s African Americans have no business celebrating a goddamned thing. Of course, some folks make less strenuous arguments still pointing in that general negative direction. OK that’s them having issues with their first order epistemic skills. In other words they are lying to themselves by believing that they should have the same ideas and priorities as 19th century American slaves. Sucks to be them.
Exhibit B: Historical Revisionism
But even people who don’t have that problem still have the secondary problem with is, as I alluded to in the first paragraph, a consequence of the media industrial complex’ fast and loose attention to fastidious truth. This is exacerbated by the failure of many scholars to buck the populist trends of their own colleges and universities who are handing out Africana Studies PhDs like participation trophies. Of course there are degrees of incompetence at the scholarly level, and we all just have to pay attention to ancient wisdom: caveat emptor. I know some of you are impatient, so let me cut to the chase here.
You don’t even know what Frederick Douglass said about Independence Day.
Distraction One. When
Frederick Douglass’ famous speech was delivered in 1852, nine years before the beginning of the Civil War. Think about it. According to recent biographer David Blight whose book I read when it first came out:
In his annual message of December 8, 1863, Lincoln declared that “the policy of emancipation . . . gave to the future a new aspect.” This “new reckoning” might now remake America into “the home of freedom disenthralled, regenerated, enlarged.” Douglass could not have said it better, but came close. Embarking on a new speaking tour in fall 1863 and winter 1864, he honed one of his greatest speeches. In “The Mission of the War,” the black leader declared that however long the “shadow of death” cast over the land, Americans should not forget the moral “grandeur” of the struggle. The shuddering scale of death in this war had to be rendered sacred, Douglass contended in this signature oration, or the slaughter could not be defended. “The mission of this war,” Douglass pronounced, “is National Regeneration.” Together, Lincoln and Douglass, rarely in purposeful tandem and against overwhelming odds, had provided the subjunctive and declarative voices of the Second American Revolution—and by the last year of the war, they were nearly the same.
Blight, David W.. Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom (p. 415). Simon & Schuster. Kindle Edition.
Hmm. A Second American Revolution. Maybe that’s what we might call Juneteenth a celebration of, but maybe I’m just showing my bias.
My Own Bias
My own bias in this matter is fundamentally the opposite of the other two flaws I mentioned. I decidedly do not have a slave mentality and I don’t bother to read slave narratives to inform how I should view America. I am a data engineer, a creature of the great aspirations of late 20th century America. I wanted to be an astronaut on the cutting edge of the Space Age in the spirit of scientific discovery, something certain idiotic people have described as white. Secondly, as a data engineer, I have a professional discipline to insure the completeness and integrity of data provided over computer networks. This requires skills akin to scholarship and are not subject to political machinations, wishful thinking or conspiracy.
So it is in that spirit that I provide both a pull quote and a pointer to several documents I have downloaded today most of whom have excerpted, abstracted and otherwise provided inferior versions of completeness and integrity. I will do so eschewing the temptation to take some shreds of Douglass’ own words to suit my purposes. At any rate, my ultimate purpose here is to destroy the problem of Exhibit B. This serves a larger population, and quite frankly I don’t have the patience or determination to cajole, correct or coddle people who identify as slaves. In other words, I’m trying to help people who want to see the whole truth and decide for themselves and the ADOS crowd are decidedly not that.
The Entire Archive
Here’s the Github repo of all the documents I’m talking about. You should be able to download it without a problem.
The Best
The Most Authoritative
The most authoritative source I could find is this PDF from the Library of Congress which is taken from Douglass’ own newspaper.
The Second Most Authoritative
This is the one I would use for a reference because I trust its transcription from the original, not that I have checked. But it doesn’t editorialize and I believe it to be complete. It’s from the National Humanities Center.
The Third Most Authoritative
This is from NewsOne. I haven’t heard of them before but it looks like the full text to me.
Tied for Third
From US History .org. Not bad. I’m not sure it’s the whole thing, but it looks close.
The Rest
These all editorialize and have less than the full text.
I’m giving you a chance to give Douglass the final word so that you can see what he really said on that day, nine years before the Second American Revolution. It’s going to take some time and diligence to compare and contrast these editorial abstractions of Douglass. Doing this sort of curation is becoming simpler for the independent honest broker. That’s enabled by technology. But it is also easier for the charlatan. When I don’t have BBQ to grill, I’ll talk more about a conspiracy theory about Black History Month in which I’ll bring this up again. For now, know that you’ve got the goods.
Sorry. The pull quote for all these was too much work.