6

Serially Speaking

On a rainy day in August 1844 in Concord, Massachusetts, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Frederick Douglass shared a lecture platform in the entry hall of the town’s courthouse. The event, which had been scheduled to take place outside but had been hastily moved under cover because of the rain, marked the tenth anniversary of the abolition of slavery in most of Britain’s colonial possessions, and it was here that Emerson gave his first ever anti-slavery speech, entitled ‘The Emancipation of the Negroes in the British West Indies’.¹ One awestruck woman in the audience wrote that ‘[w]hen the last word was spoken, it still lingered in our ears, and silence alone seemed a fitting expression of our deep and absorbing delight. The faint clapping of hands, which a few attempted, died away immediately as inappropriate to the occasion.’² The other speakers on the bill that day, Samuel Joseph May and Frederick Douglass, had a hard act to follow.

We do not know if Douglass and Emerson met and talked that day in 1844. Certainly, they were politically a long way apart at that point. What changed them both, and aligned their thinking about America, democracy, and slavery, were the extended periods of travel they both undertook in the 1840s. In the revolutionary period between 1845 and 1848 they both toured and lectured in Britain, and this transformative experience brought their politics much closer. Douglass was in the UK from August 1845 until April 1847, and six months later, Emerson arrived in October 1847.³ Douglass had had to leave America for Europe to evade capture after publishing full details of his life as a slave in his 1845 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself. He remained the property of Thomas Auld of Maryland, and subsequently of Auld’s brother, Hugh, until 1847. In December 1846, while he was in England, his friends, led by Ellen and Anna Richardson of Newcastle, raised the funds to purchase his freedom. As Douglass put it to the last of his British lecture audiences, ‘I came here a thing… I go back a human being’.⁴ On his trip, Douglass spent significant time in Scotland, Ireland, and Wales as well as in England; and, as we have seen in Chapter 1, Emerson made a brief but significant visit to Paris.⁵ Emerson also spent a large portion of his trip in the north of England. Between them, they both saw much more than just London, and enough to complicate and trouble any easy view of Britain and the British. After his trip to Europe, Emerson was already more directly politically engaged than he had ever been before, and Douglass returned to the US speaking not as a slave arguing against the horrors of slavery, but as an intellectual arguing for black citizenship.

The Lecture in the 1840s as a Serial Form

‘Speech! Speech! The live, calm, grave, clear, pointed, warm, sweet, melodious, and powerful human voice is [the] chosen instrumentality’, wrote Douglass in 1849.⁶ Both Emerson and Douglass recognized the potential of the lecture to represent America’s ‘transition state’, as Margaret Fuller put it.⁷ During the 1840s, they reimagined the public lecture as a form which could model social transformation. Both used the lecture series and serialized print forms to model and perform the change in their thinking, using fast-developing print and transport technologies to mobilize and mediate their voices and their bodies in novel ways. In their different ways, both men used the lecture form to discuss work yet to be done. They took up its incomplete and developing form to discuss the subjects of incompletion and development. But neither of them viewed the lecture as ephemeral. It was a form exhaled from their written and printed work, and their lectures were assiduously reported, often verbatim, in newspapers in print as soon as they were given. Their lectures were, then, one of the links in the print-serial chain of communication for these two men.

By 1844, Emerson had already realized that ‘the lecture, drawn from the daily harvest of his journals, and finally to be distilled into an essay, was to be his form, or lack of,’ suggesting that in Emerson’s mind the lecture formed the middle stage of his mediation of ideas from notebook to essay.⁸ His lectures were, therefore, always a work in progress. As his friend, Bronson Alcott, said of him, ‘[h]e does his work well for he never produces any finished piece of work. That is his great excellence.’⁹ As authors and editors of printed text, and as stylists of great individual power, both Douglass and Emerson appreciated the draw for audiences of the visible embodiment of the printed voice. They both used lecture tours as a useful, and often plain necessary, source of income too. They both knew that the lecturer had to deliver himself, and they met this challenge in different ways. It was in Europe that Douglass developed a lecturing style that was ‘peculiarly his own’.¹⁰ Douglass was perhaps echoing the older Emerson, whom he admired as an orator, when he wrote that ‘[t]here must be harmony between the speaker and the thing spoken, or there is no power, point or significance in the address’.¹¹ For Emerson, who had visited Europe before, this 1847 return changed his thinking decisively and shifted him towards a much fuller understanding of the scale of social oppression and exclusion both in his own country and in the wider world.

For both Emerson and Douglass, the most obvious model for the lecture podium was the pulpit, and they both designed and performed their lectures to move and change their audiences. Douglass’s model was the more evangelical, and drew upon his considerable experience as a preacher in the late 1830s in his role as an ordained minister at the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church in New Bedford, Massachusetts. He felt that writing and publishing alone would not win hearts and minds, arguing that ‘humanity, justice and liberty demand the service of the living human voice’.¹² Emerson also thought of public speaking as an urgent medium that represented ‘the renovation & exaltation of preaching into real anxious instruction’, but his Unitarian background meant that his model of preaching was a more constrained one.¹³ Douglass addressed large public anti-slavery and temperance meetings with mixed audiences, often ‘truly of the “popular” cast—the bone and sinews rather than the ornamental part of town’.¹⁴ Even in Britain, Douglass often lectured to big crowds, whereas Emerson’s audiences in America and England were smaller and more genteel, so that ‘few free blacks, recent immigrants, or indigents heard him’, although the American lyceum audience did generally include ‘women and men, merchants, journeymen, and apprentices, as well as other intellectually curious persons’.¹⁵ Douglass learnt to transition between improvising speeches at large unruly meetings and lecturing from notes to smaller and more attentive audiences. Emerson did not share this flexibility as a speaker, as is clear from reports of his address to a large anti-slavery gathering in 1849, where he was reported as ‘hesitating, stammering and stumbling through a disconnected speech like a drunken man in the dark. He is all intellect, but cannot make an impromptu speech.’¹⁶ A second account of this occasion excuses him because ‘he was afflicted with a hoarse cold’, but confirms his paralysis on the platform: ‘[s]everal times he looked up into the sky and far off into the woods as if for help in his difficult and unaccustomed task; but the ideas only seemed to put on more fantastic airs in the scholar’s brain, and…the audience only caught a glimpse of what he was striving to express’.¹⁷ While Emerson was an impressive lecturer, Douglass was the more skilled orator, and the more used to controlling large audiences. He had learnt from the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, whom he once said ‘possessed that almost fabulous inspiration, often referred to but seldom attained, in which a public meeting is transformed, as it were, into a single individuality’.¹⁸

‘[T]here was no public lecture till Emerson made it’, declared Emerson’s friend Bronson Alcott.¹⁹ This was a loyal statement, but not strictly true. The public lecture series had come to prominence in the 1830s as it developed out of popular education and reform movements in Britain and America.²⁰ Sean Franzel has made a compelling case for the importance of the Romantic lecture in Germany in ‘reimagining the spaces and scenes where knowledge production and transmission [took] place’ at a time of intense revolutionary possibility.²¹ He traces the development of the ‘dialogic’ lecture form from Kant, through Fichte and Schlegel, and he shows how they developed ‘series’ of lectures designed to be repeated as a form of communications technology.²² Before the 1830s, public lectures in Britain were generally understood as one-off performances, even if the same lecturer offered several lectures over a season. Between 1805 and 1807, for example, the Rev. Thomas F. Dibden gave twenty-two lectures on ‘English Literature’ at the Royal Institution in London, but they were, apparently, ‘the most non-narrative talks about literary history ever given…[w]ith little attention to authors, periods, or phases of national development’.²³ People went to see and hear fashionable lecturers such as Davy, Roscoe, Coleridge, and Hazlitt rather than to listen attentively to their lectures.²⁴ Peter Patmore in 1820s London was not alone in his scepticism about public lectures which, he feared, encouraged an ‘anxious craving’ and a ‘superficial semblance of knowledge…[by] their mixed and popular character’.²⁵ The ‘mixed character’ of lectures was to continue to worry commentators through to the mid-century, but it also offered the lecturer an opportunity, because, as Gillian Russell points out, through, ‘his use of the arts of performance, the capacity to attract an audience through manipulation of speech and gesture, the lecturer could harness the power of the actor while importantly remaining in his own character, not subjecting himself or his audience to the uncertainties of impersonation’.²⁶ The lecture was a performance, but not an ‘act’. The distinction was a useful one in helping the lecturer to assert authority outside the institutional frameworks of church or university. Emerson aimed for a lecturing style that had the philosophical seriousness of the great university lecturers such as Hegel or Schelling, while retaining the civic accessibility of the public lecture. But the flagrant publicity that necessarily attended his ‘celebrity’ lectures made him cringe. He wrote to his wife from London in 1848: ‘[t]onight I am to cry aloud in the cave of the Winds of Exeter Hall. Ah could you see the advertising Vans that go up & down the Strand announcing to all millions in huge red letters that RWE is to speak, you would pity me & believe that we must pay the full price of all we get.’²⁷

By the mid-1840s, the lecture had multiplied into the ‘lecture course’ and was establishing itself as a modern phenomenon across the cities of Europe and America. At a time when universities did not yet offer ‘courses’ organized on a developmental model of unfolding complexity, Emerson’s friend Margaret Fuller was already sensitive to the pedagogic possibilities of the serial form for modelling the progressive accrual of knowledge.²⁸ Every winter from 1839 to 1843, she had run her own series of ‘Transcendental Conversations’ in Boston for women, and each session started with a lecture from Fuller.²⁹ Her first series comprised thirteen weekly sessions on ‘Greek Mythology’; then ‘The Fine Arts’, ‘Ethics’, and finally, ‘Woman’, the series which she adapted into an 1844 essay, ‘The Great Lawsuit’, and which subsequently became her most famous work, Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845). Fuller enjoyed the sociability of a serializing culture, remarking that she could ‘listen in an omnibus, or at the boarding house, to the conversation suggested by last night’s lecture’.³⁰ Literary historian Donald Scott tells us that ‘[by] 1846 the citizens of Boston could choose from twenty-six different “courses” of lectures’ over one winter season.³¹ In Boston, Fuller, also writing in 1846, felt that ‘the lecture, though of such banyan growth among us, seems not to bespeak any deep or permanent tendency’.³² She worried that the public lecture offered a short cut to shallow knowledge recycled from European sources, rather than creating an original American perspective. Donald Scott has suggested that there was ‘a kind of gluttony to the quest, a frenetic drive to accumulate as much as possible, to store it up and have it on hand for any contingency’.³³ Yet both Fuller and Scott concede that the lecture is a responsive and flexible form, well suited to a fast moving, forward-driven historical moment. Fuller saw the fashion for lecturing as an intermediate stage in the development of a fully American culture, which ‘[w]ait[s] the form that grows from the spirit of the time’.³⁴ American lecture audiences, for Scott, were ‘made up of people who perceived themselves in motion, in a state of preparation or expectation’, and the lecture form ‘was responsive to new situations requiring particular knowledge as well as to the development of new knowledge’.³⁵ In 1846, Margaret Fuller allowed that ‘[w]e must not then quarrel with the lecture, the only entertainment we have truly expressive of New England as it is in its transition state, cavilling, questioning, beginning to seek’.³⁶

‘A lecture is a new literature’, Emerson ruminated in his journal, ‘which leaves aside all tradition, time, place, circumstance, & addresses an assembly as mere human beings,—no more.’³⁷ He imagines the lecture as a new deterritorialized literary form, untethered by nation or more local forms of allegiance. For Emerson, a lecture should access a universalized language which can speak to all ‘human beings’, with ‘all the breadth & versatility of the most liberal conversation’.³⁸ And after his transformative trip to Europe in 1846, Douglass, too, started to address his lectures to ‘universal man’.³⁹ When Emerson had first started lecturing after the death of his first wife in 1831 and the religious crisis which had culminated in him resigning his position as a Unitarian minister, he had mused much on ‘how to practise this new profession of the Lecturer’.⁴⁰ He had balked at the difficulty of the thing: ‘[i]t has never yet been done well. It is an organ of sublime power, a panharmonicon for variety of note. But only then is the orator successful when he is himself agitated & is as much a hearer as any of the assembly. In that office you may & shall (please God!) yet see the electricity part from the cloud & shine from one part of heaven to the other.’⁴¹ The electrical image of transmission was to become a common one in both Emerson’s and Douglass’s lectures, and also in audience and newspaper accounts of their performances in the 1840s. The effect of Douglass’s lectures was ‘electrical’: Emerson felt that his was ‘a convertible audience’ and he aimed to ‘electrify [it] by perpetual affirmations unexplained’, aiming to galvanize his listeners out of passive listening and into active thought.⁴² Electricity crackles and flows through accounts of spiritualism in the same period, and attention to this use of electrical imagery to signify the transmission of messages from ‘elsewhere’ reveals some of the complexity of the lecture as performance. Like the spiritualists in the late 1840s, Douglass and Emerson were offering themselves as the conduits of universal truths, and they were addressing new and socially mixed audiences, endeavouring to establish authority, whilst fashioning a new media form.⁴³ Douglass thought of the lecturer as ‘a modern invention’, and he conceptualized the lecture, and its subsequent newspaper transcription, as a newly integrated media form that ‘performs the work of instruction on a grand, yet economical scale, dispensing to thousands what before was only received by fifties, and doing in one hour what before could only be accomplished in weeks’.⁴⁴ It was no coincidence that public lecturing was growing in popularity from the 1830s onwards at the same time as a mass-printing revolution was under way. For Douglass and Emerson in the 1840s, lecture and print were the complementary media of a single practice.⁴⁵ Both men fangled a new genre from novel combinations of the oral and the written: retooling and merging the speech, the sermon, the lecture, the address, the essay and the performance.⁴⁶ The railroad was as important to their careers as the printing press because Emerson and Douglass were both mobile ‘speaking writers’, meaning that they spoke publicly as much as they wrote, and both were as well, if not better, known for their speaking as for their writing.

From early in his career, Emerson self-consciously exploited the potential of linked lectures. He wrote his lectures as ‘series’ to be delivered at regular intervals across time. He did chop and change the order for different performances in different places and he would sometimes switch in a different lecture if he thought it would work better for a particular audience.⁴⁷ Douglass, instead, tended to give one-off lectures in a lot of different venues, travelling from place to place. He had set up a printing press in 1847 with black abolitionist Martin Delany and John Dick, a Scottish printer who emigrated in 1847 to work with Douglass. Their weekly newspaper, the North Star, first appeared on 3 December 1847. Douglass declared in his first editorial that, ‘[w]e shall stand in our paper as we have ever stood on the platform,’ and he pursued a punishing parallel schedule of speaking engagements alongside his editorial work.⁴⁸ The lecture circuit and the print circuit were plugged into each other. Douglass remembered that when he first arrived in Rochester in 1847, ‘I lectured every Sunday evening during an entire winter…I did not rely alone upon what I could do by the paper, but would write all day then take a train to Victor, Farmington, Canandaigua, Geneva, Waterloo, Batavia, or Buffalo, or elsewhere, and speak in the evening, returning home afterwards or early in the morning, to be again at my desk writing or mailing papers.’⁴⁹ He created for himself a syncopated practice of speaking, writing and editing. While he did not represent his lectures as a ‘series’ in the same way as Emerson, his subject in every media after 1847 was the ongoing and incomplete development of democracy in America. The lecture form lent itself to modelling historical and political development and progress, both through its extrapolation into series and because the lecture always positions its audience insistently in a physically shared present.⁵⁰ It was therefore peculiarly adapted to creating a contemporary sense of a historical present. The public lecture was a form under construction in the 1840s and both Douglass and Emerson seized upon its radical possibilities.

Douglass and Emerson in Europe

In Europe during this socially unstable time, Emerson and Douglass could both see that the idea of nationhood was doing emancipatory work. Both witnessed the foreign struggles for enfranchisement and for what Hannah Arendt would later call ‘the right to have rights’, and both actively engaged in these debates.⁵¹ Both started to develop new theories of citizenship. In Britain, both met Chartist leaders and attended Chartist meetings. The powerful new constitutions that resulted from many of the European revolutions inspired Douglass to think about the American Constitution afresh, but most extreme for him was his experience of the growing crisis in Ireland, and his political friendship with Daniel O’Connell, the celebrated Irish nationalist. The year 1845 saw the first failure of the potato harvest in Ireland, and, although Douglass left before the famine reached its miserable height, the newspaper he set up on his return to America, the North Star, ran weekly reports on the famine alongside those on the progress of the European revolutions.⁵² Emerson was surprised to find himself moved by the spirit of the French Republic in 1848, and the series of lectures he delivered in London immediately after he returned from Paris are important in marking a transition in his thinking and a rescaling of his model of historical development.

Nevertheless, it may seem impertinent, or even distasteful, to compare these two men. Emerson enjoyed all the privileges of his white, male, educated status, including being able to project his ‘mind’ to an audience, while giving little thought to his body, beyond complaining of ‘rough riding’ and having to take ‘the last & worst bed in the tavern’ when he was on the lecture circuit.⁵³ But whenever Douglass lectured in America, he put his life at risk, and he was routinely physically assaulted, thrown out of railroad box cars and omnibuses, and pelted with rotten eggs and vegetables. In Britain he was free from physical attack, although not from other forms of racism, and he still had to endure a viciously racist commentary on the progress of his British tour in the American press: one New York paper said his British audience must ‘have turned out, as they would turn out to see an orang-outang or hear the bray of a wild ass, to see of what materials a runaway slave is made, and how a thick-lipped orator can talk’.⁵⁴ Emerson might have likened himself to a ‘Massachusetts Indian’ when he was lecturing in London, jokingly suggesting to his wife that his appeal to his British audience was purely ethnographic, but Douglass really was treated as a ethnographic curiosity, and worse. Entirely free from Douglass’s exhausting daily battle with racism and contempt, Emerson was a famous and highly sought-after speaker on the lyceum circuit by the 1840s. But because of his black skin, Douglass was not invited to speak at an unsegregated American lyceum until 1854.⁵⁵

More troublingly still, Nell Painter has described Emerson as ‘the philosopher king of American white race theory’, and he was indubitably influenced in the 1830s and early 1840s by Carlylean ‘we Saxon’ ideas of racial hierarchy.⁵⁶ In 1843 and 1844, for example, he was touring a lecture called ‘The Genius and National Character of the Anglo-Saxon Race’ even as he spoke, in August 1844 on an anti-slavery platform, of ‘[t]he old indecent nonsense about the nature of the negro’.⁵⁷ His research for this anti-slavery speech, according to Len Gougeon and Joel Myerson, had ‘eradicated most of his lingering doubts about the equality of blacks and their ability to compete successfully in a free society’.⁵⁸ But Nell Painter disagrees, pointing out that his hatred of slavery ‘in no way reflected racial egalitarianism’.⁵⁹ It is true that when he was drafting this 1844 speech, Emerson was fretting about whether Frederick Douglass was worthy to be invoked as the archetype of the ‘Anti-slave’:

So now it seems to me that the arrival of such men as Toussaint if he is pure blood,

or Douglas [sic] if he is pure blood, outweighs all the English & American humanity.

The Antislavery of the whole world is but dust in the balance, a poor squeamishness

& nervousness[;] the might & the right is here. Here is the Anti-Slave…now let them

emerge, clothed and in their own form.⁶⁰

The anxiety about ‘pure blood’ betrays a polygenist position influenced by ‘scientific’ racism, and perhaps particularly by the polygenism of Harvard professor Louis Agassiz. Douglass’s name was removed from the speech when Emerson discovered that his father was white, or mixed race.⁶¹ Painter notes that Emerson seems at his most ‘multiculturally aware’ around the time of his second trip to Europe in 1847, for example writing in his notebooks that ‘La Nature aime les Croisments [sic]’.⁶² The ferocity of Emerson’s opposition to the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act is remarkable, but if his experiences of 1848 had made Emerson change his mind about the importance of anti-slavery activism, Painter is right that it does not seem to have permanently changed his mind about race. Writing in July 1853, Emerson turns seriality against black people, when he describes the ‘Negro’ as ‘standing…in nature below the series of thought, & in the plane of animal & vegetable existence’.⁶³ And in an earlier 1852 journal entry entitled ‘Races’ he had observed that ‘Nature every little while drops a link. How long before the Indians will be extinct? Then the Negro? Then we shall say what a gracious interval between man & beast!’⁶⁴ Barbara L. Packer has suggested that Emerson’s ‘desire to see black people disappear arose not from irrational prejudice, but from [his] despair of seeing them successfully assimilated into a human race [he] needed to see as progressive’.⁶⁵ This seems an overgenerous interpretation of an undisguisable and fundamentally violent and racist fantasy of black extinction. That Emerson dissembles and hides behind the figure of ‘Nature’ absent-mindedly dropping ‘links’ is disappointing from a man otherwise so rigorously sincere and humane. It also sounds a warning note, for, while Douglass, as we shall see, will use his experiences of 1848 to model a version of universalist seriality that is emancipatory for black people, in the early 1850s Emerson’s thinking is already exposing the ascendancy of a different mode of seriality, one which will rebound against the possibility of full black citizenship in the so-called ‘racial science’ that will, as I will discuss in the third volume of this series, become increasingly influential up to the Civil War and beyond.

However, my intention is not so much to compare Douglass and Emerson as to place them back where, in relation to one another in the 1840s, they actually were.⁶⁶ Emerson was much older than Douglass, who was only about 26 to Emerson’s 41 when they shared the platform on that rainy August day in Concord in 1844, and the two men operated in different (if overlapping) spheres.⁶⁷ They never became personal friends, but their careers continued to touch and cross. There were some professional connections: Emerson’s editorial team took out a regular advertisement for the Massachusetts Quarterly Review in Douglass’s paper the North Star, which also carried frequent updates on Emerson’s appearances—announcing in its columns, for example, his 1848 ‘Mind and Manners in the Nineteenth Century’ series of lectures in London.⁶⁸ Douglass certainly admired Emerson, and he drew on Emerson’s ‘Uses of Great Men’ (1850) in his novel The Heroic Slave.⁶⁹ But a purely comparative approach would be inadequate here. This is no simple story of influence, but rather of how the internationalism of 1848 came to bear upon the political and literary work of two very different public intellectuals in America. The effects of their European visit on their subsequent thinking about slavery, democracy, and America, are considered in detail in the next chapter. When Richard Hardack suggests that ‘Douglass transforms himself from the personal “I” to the representative “we”, not just to become an Emersonian representative man for his fellow blacks, but to establish who is within and outside the abolitionist community’, he is only half right.⁷⁰ It was quite impossible for Douglass to ‘become an Emersonian representative man’, because it was unclear in antebellum America who or what he could represent, and unclear to some in America, too, that he was a ‘man’ at all. As Douglass himself acknowledged, more in a tone of sorrow than of militancy, ‘[f]acts are facts; white is not black, and black is not white. There is neither good sense, nor common honesty, in trying to forget this distinction.’⁷¹

Despite their important differences, and also because of them, thinking about Emerson and Douglass together can reveal something important about the enormous, and still largely unacknowledged, effects of the European revolutions of 1848 in America.⁷² Without the explosive events of 1848 on another continent, it is possible, even probable, that the American Civil War would not have happened, or would not have happened in the way it did. Emerson and Douglass were two of the most influential and important witnesses to these European revolutions, and their experiences of social unrest abroad and the political lessons they learnt there caused them to recalibrate their thinking about America in ways which materially affected that country’s political future. The 1848 movement engendered a new kind of universalist and internationalist thinking about race and humanity, just as the political reaction to the revolutions unleashed the liberalism that would ultimately unpick this universalism and entrench racial discourses in national thinking. Both Douglass and Emerson returned to America with an expanded view of the structural determinants that made people into un-people, things, or abject non-subjects. They were also both innovators in a new syncopated media form which capitalized on the newly fast distribution of print and of bodies by the railroads. Through their lectures (both spoken and printed), essays, and newspaper articles, they were able to react speedily, urgently, and repeatedly to the crisis of American democracy by appearing both in person and in print with reliable regularity. As the public lecture was developing into an important a new media form in the 1840s, Emerson and Douglass undoubtedly addressed different kinds of audiences, but in both cases their lectures and speeches were highly self-conscious and studied performances.

Ralph Waldo Emerson Gives a Lecture

To get to the lecture theatre in the Manchester Athenaeum, you had to climb three flights of stairs. On the evening of Thursday 4 November 1847, the night Emerson was to lecture on ‘Swedenborg the Mystic’, the place was thronging and the stairs were blocked by queues of people waiting to hear him. When the lecture-room doors were opened, there was quite a press and it was hard to get in and find a seat in the ‘crowded’ auditorium.⁷³ When the American lecturer ‘glided in, and suddenly appeared at the reading desk’ it was difficult to see him, as he held his lecture script under a gas jet which cast a shadow over his face.⁷⁴ He started immediately: there was ‘[n]o loss of time in bowing, but instant commencement, almost before the clapping (which he seemed not to hear) had subsided’.⁷⁵ Physically he cut a slight figure. He was described in racialized terms as ‘very Yankee to look at, lank and sallow’ or, as another observer put it, ‘sallow and emaciated’, and he wore a plain black suit, which gave him the appearance of a ‘country schoolmaster’.⁷⁶ His most noticeable feature seems to have been his nose, described by one in the audience as a ‘very prominent Wellington nose’.⁷⁷ When his face did come into view it appeared ‘rigid’ and ‘wooden’. He eschewed the ‘blandishments [and] vehement gesticulations of modern orators’: he was not a member of the ‘jumping, stamping, plunging and shoulder-dislocating school’.⁷⁸ Instead, ‘[h]e stands at an acute angle towards his audience, and limberly, and has barely a gesture beyond the motion of the left hand at his side’.⁷⁹ His stance was tense and rigid: ‘[h]e uses no action, save occasionally a slight vibration of the body’, and he kept ‘two or three fingers of [his] hand pressed to the palm as if holding strongly to some reservation’.⁸⁰ Occasionally his boots creaked and distracted the audience.⁸¹ The Gateshead Observer noted that ‘[h]e reads with a clear enunciation and a slight American accent…There is not the slightest attempt at oratory—no enthusiasm about him’.⁸² His Manchester friend Francis Espinasse remembered that he always read his lectures in a ‘grave monotone’ with very little emphasis.⁸³ A friend sitting next to William Rossetti at Emerson’s lecture on ‘Napoleon’ was chilled by what he called ‘the impersonal demeanour of Emerson, his impassivity, [and] total want of sympathetic vital relation towards his audience’.⁸⁴ Emerson would read solemnly from a script for fifty minutes, sometimes losing his place, and ‘sometimes absolutely stopping in the middle to turn over a page or two, and perhaps choose what to omit’.⁸⁵ His voice was ‘nasal and American’ and ‘[h]e read words of passionate admiration—of reprehension—of dissent, and of contempt, and his voice hardly varied; his countenance still less’.⁸⁶ He was not always audible to everyone in the auditorium, having, of course, no means of amplification: the Preston Guardian, reporting his lecture on ‘Domestic Life’ on Wednesday 15 December 1847, recorded that at one point ‘Mr. Emerson here repeated a translation by Mr. Walter Savage Landor of some lines of the Greek poet Menander, on the “Consolations of Friendship,” which were recited in too low a tone to be distinctly heard in the gallery’.⁸⁷ And when he had done, much to the surprise of his audience ‘[s]uddenly, he closed his MS., and was off and away, while we were yet pondering the meaning of his last exquisite sentence’.⁸⁸ All that was left of him was the lingering vibration of an impersonal voice of ‘musical richness and depth’ divorced from the man himself, who had left the room by the time the audience erupted into‘[Great Applause]: rising en masse, hearty cheering, and waving of hats, etc.’⁸⁹

What on earth did Emerson think he was doing? And why did people flock to see him if he was such a shockingly inept speaker? Emerson’s ‘impersonal demeanour’ was in truth a careful performance.⁹⁰ Public lectures in Manchester at this time were, according to one critic, ‘events staged chiefly for entertainment’ which might generate some educative by-product.⁹¹ Many of the lecturers lured their audiences with promises of special effects: William Carpenter who lectured at the Manchester Athenaeum on ‘Revelations of the Microscope’ invited his audience to come down at the end of the lecture and look at the ‘beautiful objects’ under the microscopes.⁹² Mr J. Pope Fox, Superintendent of the Electric Telegraph Company, lectured at the Mechanics’ Institution in July 1847 and brought along ‘some beautiful telegraphic apparatus, and on the wall of the theatre, was suspended a beautiful electric clock, in motion’.⁹³ And when in January 1849, William Sturgeon gave a course of lectures at the Royal Manchester Institution on ‘The Present State of Electricity and Magnetism’, he promised that ‘a powerful electrical charge will pass through the body of the lecturer, and afterwards discharge a model of a piece of artillery’.

Which brings us back to the gawky and solemn Emerson, whose ‘delivery [was] indifferent and careless’ and who offered no effects, tricks, optical amusements, or anything other than the sound of his own voice, reading from his script.⁹⁴ But this was not, of course the whole story. Powerful electrical charges were also, it turns out, passing through bodies during his lectures. He vibrated ‘as if the intensity of his thoughts was escaping, like the electricity of a battery’, and ‘ever and anon some striking thought, strikingly expressed, produced a ripple of response from the audience’, or they would catch ‘some lighter flash of that humor that always played about the horizon of his mind like heat-lightning…like an electric spark thrilling as it went, and then exploded in a thrill of plaudits’.⁹⁵ In 1849, the Boston Post said Emerson ‘does not lecture’, instead ‘he lets off mental skyrockets and fireworks—he spouts fire, and conjurer-like draws ribbons out of his mouth’.⁹⁶ An old lady remembered in 1899 that when she heard Emerson lecture in Manchester in 1847, she had the odd feeling that his eyes saw ‘through the walls and out into infinite space’.⁹⁷ ‘His influence is of a curious sort’, mused Harriet Martineau; ‘[h]e is a man so sui generis, that I do not wonder at his not being apprehended till he is seen’.⁹⁸ James Russell Lowell agreed: ‘we do not go to hear what Emerson says so much as to hear Emerson’.⁹⁹ What was it, then, about the ‘motionless, emotionless’ Emerson that so captivated audiences and ‘wound the tendrils around the heart’, in the words of one of his British audience members?¹⁰⁰

There may have been ‘not the slightest attempt at oratory’ in Emerson’s performances, but he had studied his new medium hard.¹⁰¹ ‘[I] hear a great many lectures’, he wrote to his wife from England.¹⁰² He heard Professor Wilson on Moral Philosophy; Sir William Hamilton on Logic; Mr Owen at the Royal College of Surgeons; he heard Buckland and Sedgewick speak at the Geological Society; and Faraday, ‘who is reckoned the best lecturer in London’.¹⁰³ And, as we have seen in Chapter 1, when he travelled to France in May 1848 he missed witnessing the Paris journée at first hand because he was listening to Michelet lecturing on Indian philosophy. And he ‘went to the Sorbonne and heard a lecture from Leverrier [sic] on mathematics’, but was a little disappointed that ‘[i]t consisted chiefly of algebraic formulas which he worked out on the blackboard, but I saw the man’.¹⁰⁴ For Emerson, as much as for his own audiences, one of the chief pleasures of the lecture was the chance to share the unmediated presence of ‘the man’. When Emerson heard Lamartine speak in the Chamber of Deputies in Paris in 1848, he remarked that ‘he did not speak however with much energy, [but] delivers himself with great ease & superiority’.¹⁰⁵ He ‘delivers himself’: this moves closer to Emerson’s ideal of the lecturer’s role. In his first Manchester Athenaeum lecture, ‘The Uses of Great Men’, Emerson announced: ‘life is not a chimera, but a sincerity’. Sincerity was Emerson’s secret weapon. It was his own ‘special effect’. He performed sincerity in his lectures. He delivered himself, ‘a total transfusion of himself into the minds of men’.¹⁰⁶ The halting, the losing his place, the style that one Liverpool listener described as ‘plain and intelligible’, adding ‘he is fully in earnest’: all of these, as James Russell Lowell well knew, were ‘artfully’ performed: ‘the deliberate utterance, that seems waiting for the fit word…as if the perfect phrase lying written there on the desk were as unexpected to him as it is to us!’¹⁰⁷ Another observer of Emerson’s performance also noticed this technique: ‘[t]he initial sentences were pronounced in a low voice—a few words at a time, hesitatingly, as if then extemporaneously meditated, and not, as they really were, pre-meditated and forewritten’.¹⁰⁸ But Emerson also said to his audience: ‘[p]recisely what the painter, or sculptor, or epic rhapsodist feels, I feel in the presence of this house, which stands to me for the human race, the desire, namely, to express myself fully, symmetrically, gigantically to them, not dwarfishly and fragmentarily’.¹⁰⁹ It is clear, then, that Emerson’s own attitude to his lecturing was ambivalent. While he knew that it was ‘to see the man’ they came, he worked hard in the lectures to distract the audience’s attention from himself. For Emerson, ‘expressing himself fully’ meant abandoning the personal and ‘singing’ or ‘vibrating’, to use two of his favourite metaphors, as a conduit of ‘truth’ for his audience.

Nancy Craig Simmons has written of ‘intimacy’ between Emerson and his audience, but this is not quite right.¹¹⁰ Emerson saw his audiences as representative of the human race, and in this sense his relationship to them was not ‘personal’. ‘To the public success or failure of his lectures he appeared to be profoundly indifferent’, Espinasse commented.¹¹¹ And here again, we are moving closer to the heart of the Emersonian performance. Emerson wanted to move each of his listeners and assure them of their own instinctive powers and potential, but he did not address them as individuals. His Boston Transcendentalist beliefs in the oneness of the universe, and in man’s oneness with nature, meant that, far from being indifferent to his audience, he did not perceive a boundary between himself and it. He refused to perform ‘celebrity’ or ‘personality’, which would enforce a divide between himself and his auditors. He spoke in enfolding generalities. In a lecture of 1843, he sketched the ideal lecturer:

With his first words he strikes a note which all know. As he catches the light spirit of the occasion, his voice alters, vibrates, pierces the private ear of everyone: the mob quiets itself somehow,—everyone being magnetized, and the house hangs waiting on the lips of one man. Each man whilst he hears, thinks he too can speak, and, in the pauses of the orator, bursts forth the splendid voice of four or five thousand men in full cry,—the grandest sound in nature.¹¹²

Emerson has been often criticized for this ideal of impersonality.¹¹³ He wrote: ‘I wish to speak with all respect of persons, but sometimes I must pinch myself to keep awake, and preserve the due decorum. They melt so fast into each other, they are like grass and trees, and it needs an effort to treat them as individuals.’¹¹⁴ Such a vision of mystical unity plays oddly against his insistence on the singularity of great men such as Shakespeare, Montaigne, Goethe, and so on. Yet he insists even on these heroes as ‘Representative Men’, refusing them a singular individual contact with the real and historical. They become, in his lectures, transhistorical figures who belong to all of us and to all time. Sharon Cameron has shown how in Emerson’s writing ‘the impersonal is set against “the fury of personality” ’, and self-trust against self-abolition.¹¹⁵ He played a similar game in his lectures, which wheeled between images and analogies startlingly down-to-earth and ‘homespun’, drawing his audience close to the materials of their daily lives, and then suddenly soaring away again into vast and electrical eloquence. The effect for the listener could be vertiginous. Elizabeth Gaskell felt she could take the ‘thoughtful beaut[ies]’ of Emerson’s lectures ‘as texts to think upon in my quiet hours’ once she had disentangled them from a ‘golden mist’ that was ‘connected only by some gossamer link of association in his mind’.¹¹⁶

Frederic Douglass Gives a Lecture

Three years after he had escaped slavery, a ‘[y]oung, ardent, and hopeful’ Frederick Douglass was spotted by William Lloyd Garrison, and recruited by his campaign to tour the lecture circuit for the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society.¹¹⁷ One of Douglass’s earliest speeches at Lynn, Massachusetts, in October 1841 gives a sense of his performances at this time. He had been recruited to appear and speak as a representative mutilated slave. He was introduced as a ‘graduate from the peculiar institution…with my diploma written on my back!’¹¹⁸ And Douglass followed this introduction by saying that other abolitionist speakers ‘can depict [slavery’s] horrors, [but] they cannot speak as I can from experience; they cannot refer you to a back covered with scars, as I can; for I have felt those wounds; I have suffered under the lash without the power of resisting. Yes, my blood has sprung out as the lash embedded itself in my flesh.’¹¹⁹ Douglass was directed as to what to say by William Lloyd Garrison and the abolitionists, and even on how to say it: he was a fine speaker, but he was warned that it was ‘[b]etter [to] have a little of the plantation manner of speech than not’.¹²⁰ They told him just to ‘[b]e yourself…and tell your story’, but as Douglass’s story was not at all about ‘being himself’, but rather about representing slavery, the performances were to prove tediously repetitive and soon they became another form of servitude: ‘to go through with it night after night’, he later remembered, ‘was a task altogether too mechanical’.¹²¹

Despite his misgivings, Douglass learnt his new profession fast and worked hard on improving his lecturing style.¹²² He attended public lectures whenever he could, including some of Emerson’s, and lectures by other stars of the circuits such as Wendell Phillips, Daniel Webster, Charles Sumner, and William H. Channing.¹²³ An audience member who heard him speak twice at the beginning of his career in 1841 remarked on how his speaking style had ‘strikingly improved’ in three months.¹²⁴ He described Douglass’s second performance attentively:

This is an extraordinary man. He was cut out for a hero. In a rising for Liberty he would have been a Toussaint or a Hamilton…A commanding person—over six feet, we should say, in height, and of most manly proportions. His head would strike a phrenologist among a sea of them at Exeter Hall and his voice would ring like a trumpet in the field…As a speaker, he has few equals. It is not declamation—but oratory, power of debate…He has wit, argument, sarcasm, pathos—all that first-rate men show in their master efforts. His voice is highly melodious and rich and his enunciation quite elegant, and yet he has been but two or three years out of the house of bondage.¹²⁵

Douglass’s ‘port’, ‘deportment’, or ‘comportment’ are carefully observed in accounts of his early lectures. A reporter for the Boston Courier in 1842 applauded not only Douglass’s ‘language’ but also his ‘manner’.¹²⁶ Many of the educated Ministers of a ‘lighter complexion’ who spoke on the same platform, he said, ‘might well be desired of emulating the appropriateness of [Douglass’s] elocution and gesticulation; the grammar and the accuracy of his sentences’.¹²⁷ Alighting on an ‘appropriate’ style of self-representation and behaviour was no easy matter for a fugitive slave, although the early black press had already established a monitory discourse of self-help, etiquette and deportment. In 1828, the abolitionist paper Freedom’s Journal had warned that ‘[i]t don’t look good to see a gentleman going through the streets eating apples, nuts; nor does it look any better to see them breaking open letters and sauntering along with their faces buried in them, leaving other people to turn out for them’.¹²⁸ In 1842, an audience member described Douglass as having the ‘port, and the countenance, and heroic “assurance”, and almost the stature of the Roman Coriolanus’.¹²⁹ While Plutarch’s Coriolanus shows his scars to the people in the marketplace, Shakespeare’s Coriolanus refuses to make a spectacle of himself, as to do so would be an act of humility he is not prepared to perform.¹³⁰ And as soon as he was able, Douglass seems to have stopped directly referencing his own victimization and his own body in his lectures. Many critics have noticed the contrast between Douglass’s public performances in the early days of his fifty-year career and the dignity of the elder statesman after the Civil War. Paul Giles, for example, describes ‘Douglass’s work of the 1840s’ as involving ‘a conception of public performance that underlines its links with the popular genres of oratory and melodrama, where again the emphasis is upon embodying pathos rather than alienating it discursively into narrative form’.¹³¹ But this account misses or jumps over an important change in Douglass’s self-presentation towards the end of the 1840s, a change which was certainly gestating as he travelled around Ireland and England between 1845 and 1847.

In the summer of 1845, Douglass travelled to Europe without Garrison, who only joined him there the following summer.¹³² The greater control that Garrison’s absence gave him over his solo performances allowed Douglass to change subtly the way in which he presented himself. In Ireland and England, he ended his performances by displaying a variety of whips, chains, and other tools, drawing the audience’s attention away from his own body and towards the technological systemization of slavery in America.¹³³ In Dublin in 1845, for example, Douglass ‘exhibited, amid great sensation, several instruments of torture in common use on the slave states’.¹³⁴ On New Year’s Day 1846, lecturing in Belfast with the American minister the Rev. Mr Buffum, Douglass showed

an iron collar with three long spikes thrown out from it, which prevented the slave from laying his head on a pillow, if he had one. The collar now shown had been taken from a young female slave…when taken from the girl’s neck, some of the skin and hair were still attached to it.…Mr. B. then exhibited the cow-skin instrument of torture. When he first had it, it was covered with blood. A ‘thrill of horror’ ran through the vast assembly on the exhibition of these accursed instruments.¹³⁵

The torn and mutilated slave’s body has left behind shreds and stains of suffering: the dried blood, skin and hair adhering to the collars and whips which cause a ‘great sensation’ and a ‘thrill of horror’ in the audience. Audrey Fisch has suggested that black anti-slavery speakers provided a kind of ‘spectacle’ for British and Irish audiences, and Douglass was clearly aware that many of his audience members had come to see a ‘real’ black slave, to experience his bodily presence, and he knew, too, that the thrill of anti-slavery horror was not entirely unpleasurable to his audience.¹³⁶ And he was conscious of other contexts for his appearance as a black man on stage in Britain. The fashion for blackface minstrelsy in the UK was at its peak in the mid-1840s: the American blackface singing group the Ethiopian Serenaders were touring Britain during Douglass’s lecture tour.¹³⁷ To complicate the picture, at the same time the black classical actor Ira Aldridge was performing as Othello in British theatres when Douglass arrived.¹³⁸ Black performance was a novelty that was not altogether new, and both tragic and comic modes were available.¹³⁹ Douglass used the whole range. He was an excellent mimic, and he would, for example, channel the voice and gestures of a Southern preacher addressing a slave congregation, in a performance which started with him ‘spreading his hands gracefully abroad’ and then declaiming ‘Oh, receive into your souls these words of the holy apostle, “Servants, be obedient unto your masters.” (Shouts of laughter and applause)’.¹⁴⁰ Douglass’s mimicry allowed him to perform his blackness in a dialogic version and thus show its constructedness to his audience, while making them laugh.¹⁴¹ In August 1846, Douglass spoke in London at the Crown and Anchor on the Strand at a meeting for the formation of the Anti-Slavery League. He delighted his audience by imitating the sermons given to slaves, and exposing the racial ‘theory’ that was perpetuating their oppression:

He created some men white, others he created black. Some he created to be masters, others he created to be slaves; and he gave them powers adapted to their circumstances. Look at yourselves. You have strong and large and horny hands; you have robust bodies; you have black skins and woolly hair. Your masters have small hands, and long, delicate fingers; they have weak constitutions, white skins, and long hair. You are better adapted to labour, to endure the heat than they are. They are better adapted to think, and manage, and direct than you are.¹⁴²

James Russell Lowell admired Douglass’s speaking body, claiming that his ‘very look and bearing’ bore down on his audiences as an ‘irresistible logic’ against slavery and oppression.¹⁴³ Thomas Wentworth Higginson, watching Douglass on the platform, could see how the ‘stumbling…heavy slavery gait’ of the oppressed could, with emancipation, ‘develop…into the superb stature and distinguished bearing of Frederick Douglass’.¹⁴⁴ Another contemporary observer said that ‘[Douglass] was more than six feet in height, and his majestic form as he rose to speak, straight as an arrow, muscular, yet lithe and graceful, his flashing eye, and more than all, his voice…made up such an ideal of an orator as the listeners never forgot’.¹⁴⁵ George L. Ruffin felt that, his writings notwithstanding, ‘Douglass’s greatest effect is on his immediate hearers, those who see him and feel his presence.’ He claimed Douglass’s style was not ‘quick and flashy’, but rather ‘steady and intense’, although he also recalled ^‘sudden and unbidden outburst[s] of passion and indignation…as though Aetna were there’.¹⁴⁶ Douglass seems to have started his lectures quietly and calmly with little gesticulation, and amplified the volume and expression as his performance went on. He frequently concluded a lecture by ‘stepping to the front of the platform with head thrown back, outstretched arms and voice that rang out like a clarion’.¹⁴⁷ Clearly Douglass’s dramatic finales contrasted strongly with Emerson’s trail of falling cadences as he scuttled off the stage.

In Leeds at the end of 1846, Douglass’s lecture was reported rapturously: ‘none can look upon him but to feel that he is a man possessed of all the faculties and powers which make men noble’.¹⁴⁸ Douglass’s manliness was often remarked on in the press: ‘[t]here was no emasculation in the speeches of Douglass; no effeminacy.’¹⁴⁹ He was described by the Leeds Times as a ‘son of Africa’ who was one of ‘nature’s noblemen’.¹⁵⁰ But, as Fanuzzi has pointed out, ‘[t]he praise for Douglass’s body did open a debate over racial identity in a way that served the interests of his detractors’.¹⁵¹ In other words, acknowledgement of his black, or ‘African’ body, even when framed positively, kept that body front and centre, as a focus and a distraction from his message in a way that Emerson’s white body never was. Of course, Douglass was aware of the difficulty of the appropriateness of his appearance. Speaking on 18 May 1846 in London, he said that after giving anti-slavery speeches for four years in America, ‘my manner was such to create a suspicion that I was not a runaway slave, but some educated free negro…They said, he appears to have no fear of white people. How can he ever have been in bondage?’¹⁵² Elizabeth Cady Stanton remembered hearing Douglass speak in Boston and wrote in her diary that ‘all other speakers seemed tame after Frederick Douglass’: he ‘stood there like an African prince, majestic in his wrath’.¹⁵³ His ‘erect carriage’ suggested ‘something majestic’.¹⁵⁴ The word ‘majestic’ recurs often in descriptions of Douglass, disavowing its own racism: feigning a compliment while Douglass’s exceptionality is insistently marked. But not everybody responded to Douglass’s majesty so enthusiastically. He was also charged often with ‘insolence’.¹⁵⁵ In Ireland, he stayed with the publisher of the second edition of his 1845 Narrative, an abolitionist friend of Garrison’s, Richard Webb. In May 1846, Webb confided to a friend that ‘[h]e is in my opinion by much the least likeable and the least easy of the abolitionists with whom I have come into intimate association’, adding that his house guest was, ‘absurdly haughty, self-possessed and prone to take offence’.¹⁵⁶ The scandal of the black slave who dares to appear ‘self-possessed’ uncomfortably reveals white abolitionist racisms. Clearly, the Garrisonian abolitionists had strong ideas about the appropriate comportment of the ex-slaves they employed. It is revealing, however, that when Douglass dropped in on Webb again some months later in October that year with Garrison, Webb wrote to the same friend: ‘I forgot among the droppers in last night to mention Frederick Douglass who looked stately and majestic—with an air that makes Garrison a mere baby beside him.’¹⁵⁷ It seems that in Webb’s estimation, and perhaps more generally, Douglass’s public identity was already shifting.

Soon after Douglass arrived in Ireland, the constitutional nationalist campaigner Daniel O’Connell invited him to a repeal meeting in Conciliation Hall in Dublin.¹⁵⁸ Douglass was deeply impressed by O’Connell’s oratorical power, recalling that ‘his eloquence came down upon the vast assembly like a summer thunder-shower upon a dusty road’.¹⁵⁹ At the end of the meeting, Douglass was invited up on stage to speak, and recalled proudly that O’Connell ‘playfully called me the “Black O’Connell of the United States” ’.¹⁶⁰ O’Connell spoke against American slavery as well as for Catholic emancipation in Ireland, explaining that ‘[m]y sympathy is not confined to the narrow limits of my own green Ireland; my spirit walks abroad upon sea and land, wherever there is oppression I hate the oppressor’.¹⁶¹ Douglass’s spirit also started to ‘walk abroad’ as he began to rethink slavery in a more transnational and abstract way.¹⁶² His speeches in Ireland became less focused on the institution of slavery and more concerned with the mechanisms of oppression and the barriers to democratic citizenship. Recognizing the degrading effect of alcohol abuse on the poor from his own experience on the slave plantations, for example, Douglass spoke often and passionately on temperance in Ireland.¹⁶³ At a temperance meeting in Cork he asserted that ‘[a]ll great reforms go together’.¹⁶⁴ And in Limerick on 10 November 1845, he informed his audience that America ‘was … not a true democracy, but a bastard republicanism that enslaved one-sixth of the population’.¹⁶⁵ This was a new way of thinking for Douglass. Rather than addressing the cruelty and horror of slavery as an offence against human rights, he focused on the entire American population, ‘one-sixth’ of whom were excluded from American ‘democracy’. Instead of displaying the tortured slave’s body, he demands that the black body be abstracted and counted into the national body alongside the white. Douglass was beginning to see disembodiment and abstraction as politically necessary to a democracy.¹⁶⁶ By the time he had finished his tour of Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and England to return to America, Douglass had changed his view of his career, and he was never to appear again on the lecture platform to speak as a slave. Technically, of course, he was no longer a slave due to his manumission while he was in Europe, but his self-representation also changed from 1847 onwards: he returned to America after his ‘two years of semi-exile in Great Britain and Ireland’, self-reinvented as an editor, a lecturer, and a public intellectual.¹⁶⁷ He also returned in possession of his own time, and ‘the happy owner of a watch’, which he later remembered as an important material symbol of his new-found independence.¹⁶⁸

With a new understanding of the importance of political abstraction for the future of the black population of America, Douglass now struggled to obliterate himself and to erase his body from the audience’s attention, in order to make his words heard more clearly. But the high visibility of his blackness meant that such a disappearing act was much harder than for Emerson. Robert Fanuzzi has suggested that, by assiduous adherence to the rules of rhetoric and gesture which he famously first encountered as a slave in Caleb Bingham’s The Columbian Orator: Containing a Variety of Selected Pieces; Together with Rules; Calculated to Improve Youth and Others in the Ornamental and Useful Art of Eloquence (1797), Douglass was able to re-make himself as ‘white’. He argues that the performance of oratory was a self-abstracting act which aligned the speaker with print rather than with the voice and body, so that Douglass ‘found no obstacles to appearing in the public sphere as if he were embodied as a white male’.¹⁶⁹ As we have seen, both Emerson and Douglass thought of their lecturing work as part of a communications chain of writing and printing, all of which were rhetorical tools for campaigning. Douglass was certainly astute in his use of his ‘majestic body’, but Fanuzzi surely underestimates the problems that Douglass faced as a black intellectual.¹⁷⁰ He was to become the most photographed American of the nineteenth century, and the many images of him that survive attest to and insist on the seriousness and dignity of the black thinker and statesman.¹⁷¹ But the difficulties of his black body remained, and in 1854, Douglass was complaining about being unable to pass ‘unnoticed and unobserved’. His conspicuousness was partly due to his growing celebrity, but was also, as he himself acknowledged, due his blackness: ‘our dark complexion…allows anybody and everybody to claim a portion of our time and attention’.¹⁷² The move from ‘I’ to ‘we’ and from ‘my’ to ‘our’ in his speaking and writing performs the conflict between Douglass the exceptional thinker and theorist and Douglass the representative black man. Douglass’s ‘extraordinariness’ was a problem for him. He was extraordinarily talented. But he was also ‘extraordinary’ just by being black. Would he be more effective to the cause of anti-slavery as an embodied ‘representative’ of slavery, or as an extraordinary intellectual?¹⁷³ His trip to Europe helped him with the conundrum, for what he saw there made it clear to him that his cause was perhaps not what he had first imagined it to be. If he started to speak about oppression as a man, and not as a slave, the American-domestic cause of anti-slavery began to shrink to a parochial (although still vitally important) concern. For as a man, Douglass’s cause embraced slavery, but was also bigger than slavery: he would urge for no less than full black citizenship.

Conclusion

If the lecture was a developing communications technology in the 1840s, both Emerson and Douglass were early adopters. They used their lectures to perform presence in a public sphere increasingly mediated by print. But it would be wrong to understand the lecture at this time as a traditional oral or more ‘authentic’ form of communication than print. The lecture developed as part and parcel of that world of print. As we have seen, Emerson thought of the lecture as the middle term in a model of mediation that carried his ideas from his notebook, through the lecture, and into print as an essay. Douglass saw his lectures as part of his occupation as a newspaper editor, a means of advertising and extending the reach of his newspaper and, simultaneously, generating new copy for its pages in the shape of transcripts of his speeches and lectures. For all its promise of unmediated presence, there was nothing that was not mediated in any of their lectures either. Emerson performed a kind of abstracted sincerity: a display which was carefully designed to seem unlike a performance at all. He was able to efface himself as a lecturer because his white ‘Boston Brahmin’ status allowed him to appear as ‘unmarked’. Douglass’s black skin meant that he was intensely mediated by (white) others right from the beginning of his speaking career when he was enjoined to speak ‘like’ a slave on a plantation. Once he had freed himself from the Garrisonian roadshow, Douglass had to work out his own style of speaking. He experimented and learnt from other skilled orators on the circuit, but he also used his earlier experience as a Methodist Episcopal preacher and his talents as a mimic to develop a style of lecturing which was new. He spoke as a black intellectual, but because the near-complete abstraction of the white intellectual was unavailable to him, he forged a new dynamic style that fused direct address with theoretical argument. Both men were intensely aware of the mediation of their presence as lecturers. Although he hoped to make money from his lectures, Emerson disliked the advertising and publicity that surrounded his appearances and disavowed the commerce of celebrity, escaping instead into the disinterested intellectuality peculiarly available only to the elite white male. Douglass, unable to disappear in quite the same way, harnessed the publicity and fed it back through his newspaper, managing an orchestrated conversation with himself in speech and print. It was their lecturing that brought both of them to Europe, and the Europe of the turbulent late 1840s had a profound effect on their thinking and changed their models of citizenship for good. The European journeys made by Emerson and Douglass between 1846 and 1848 were to have an important impact on America, as the next chapter will show.

¹ In 1837, Emerson had given a speech addressing the slavery question obliquely through the issue of free speech. He was outraged by the murder of the abolitionist publisher Rev. Elijah P. Lovejoy. In this address, Emerson showed pity for the slave owners and the slaves. See Len Gougeon, ‘Historical Background’, in Len Gougeon and Joel Myerson (eds), Emerson’s Antislavery Writings (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995) and Len Gougeon, ‘Abolition, the Emersons and 1837’, New England Quarterly 54:3 (1981): 345–64.

² Herald of Freedom (16 August 1844), p. 26, quoted in Joseph Slater, ‘Historical Introduction’, in The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Essays, Second Series, ed. Alfred R. Ferguson and Jean Ferguson Carr, vol. 3 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1983), pp. xi–xli, pp. xxiv–xxv.

³ Douglass had arrived in Liverpool on 28 August 1845. On 4 April 1847 he left for Boston from Liverpool on the Cambria. Emerson sailed from Boston 5 October 1847 in the packet Washington Irving, and arrived in Liverpool in the evening of Friday 22 October 1847.

⁴ FD, ‘Farewell to the British People’ (30 March 1847), The Frederick Douglass Papers, ser. 1: Speeches, Debates and Interviews, vol. 2: 1847–1854, ed. John W. Blassingame and John R. McKivigan (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979), p. 29; hereafter abbreviated to FDP2. Paul Giles notes that ‘[t]his transaction caused a certain amount of controversy among U.S. abolitionists, many of whom maintained that it constituted an implicit recognition of the “right to traffic in human beings” and was therefore, by definition, immoral’: Paul Giles, ‘Narrative Reversals and Power Exchanges: Frederick Douglass and British Culture’, American Literature 73:4 (2001): 779–810, p. 781.

⁵ See John W. Blassingame, ‘Partial Speaking Itinerary’, in The Frederick Douglass Papers, ser. 1: Speeches, Debates and Interviews, 1841–1846, ed. John W. Blassingame et al. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979), pp. 1; lxxxvii–cii; xciv–cii. Hereafter abbreviated as FDP1.

⁶ North Star (23 November 1849).

⁷ F. O. Matthiessen in American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1941) suggested that the popular lecture was the solution to Emerson’s ‘quest for a form’. He is oblivious, however, to both Fuller and Douglass, and uninterested in the seriality of the form.

⁸ Matthiessen, American Renaissance, p. 23.

⁹ Bronson Alcott, ‘Fuller, Thoreau, Emerson…The Substance of “A Conversation” ’ (1871), reprinted in Ronald A. Bosco and Joel Myerson (eds), Emerson in His Own Time: A Biographical Chronicle of His Life, Drawn from Recollections, Interviews and Memoirs by Family, Friends and Associates (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2003), pp. 58–61, p. 60.

¹⁰ James M. Gregory, Frederick Douglass: The Orator (Springfield, MA: Willey & Co., 1893), p. 89.

¹¹ Frederick Douglass’s Paper (6 January 1854).

¹² North Star (23 November 1849).

¹³ RWE, RWE JMN 4, p. 314.

¹⁴ ‘Anniversaries—Anti-Slavery Society,’ Christian Inquirer (15 May 1847), quoted in Tom F. Wright, Lecturing the Atlantic: Speech, Print, and an Anglo-American Commons 1830–1870 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), p. 49.

¹⁵ Field, ‘ “The Transformation of Genius” ’, p. 472. Tom F. Wright records that in London Douglass lectured to three thousand people who filled London’s Finsbury Chapel almost ‘to suffocation’: Wright, Lecturing the Atlantic, p. 58.

¹⁶ [Anon.], ‘Anniversary of British Emancipation at Worcester. From the Herkinner Freeman’, North Star (31 August 1849).

¹⁷ [Anon.], ‘The Anniversary of the Abolition of Slavery in the British West Indies from the Christian Citizen’, North Star (24 August 1849).

¹⁸ FD, My Bondage and My Freedom, in Frederick Douglass Autobiographies, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. (New York: Library of America, 1994), p. 365. Abbreviated hereafter to FD, Autobiographies.

¹⁹ Bronson Alcott, The Journals of Bronson Alcott, ed. Odell Shepard (Boston, MA: Little, Brown & Company, 1938), p. 279.

²⁰ Carl Bode points out that there is no ‘exact chain of events to connect the first American lyceum to British predecessors’: Carl Bode, The American Lyceum: Town Meeting of the Mind [1956] (London: Feffer & Simmons, 1968), p. 3. On lecture culture in America see also C. David Mead, Yankee Eloquence in the Middle-West: The Ohio Lyceum, 1850–1870 (East Lansing: Michigan State College Press, 1951); Donald M. Scott, ‘Print and the Public Lecture System 1840–1860,’ in William L. Joyce et al. (eds), Printing and Society in Early America (Worcester, MA: American Antiquarian Society, 1983), pp. 278–99; Angela Ray, The Lyceum and Public Culture in the Nineteenth-Century United States (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2005); Tom F. Wright (ed.), The Cosmopolitan Lyceum: Lecture Culture and the Globe in Nineteenth-Century America (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2013); and Wright, Lecturing the Atlantic. On the British case, see Martin Hewitt, ‘Preaching from the Platform’, in Keith A. Francis and William Gibson, The Oxford Handbook of the British Sermon 1689–1901 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 79–96.

²¹ Mary Helen Dupree and Sean Franzel, ‘Introduction: Performing Knowledge, 1750–1850’, in Mary Helen Dupree and Sean Franzel (eds), Performing Knowledge, 1750–1850 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2015), pp. 1–24, p. 2.

²² See Sean Franzel, Connected by the Ear: The Media, Pedagogy, and Politics of the Romantic Lecture (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2013).

²³ Jon Klancher, Transfiguring the Arts and Sciences: Knowledge and Cultural Institutions in the Romantic Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 92.

²⁴ Jon Klancher points out that, unlike in the cities of Continental Europe, there was no university at this time in London, and institutions such as the Royal Institution and the Surrey Institution served to supply the want: Klancher, Transfiguring the Arts and Sciences, p. 53. In America, Tom F. Wright says that ‘[t]he first meaningful attempt at orchestrating lectures into regular courses was provided by Josiah Holbrook, a pioneering educationalist [who] founded an organization in Milbury, Massachusetts, in late 1826’: Wright, Lecturing the Atlantic, p. 11. Gillian Russell tells us that Coleridge’s lectures at the Royal Institution in 1808 ‘started in the afternoon in order to appeal to a fashionable clientele’: ‘Spouters or Washerwomen: The Sociability of Romantic Lecturing’, in Gillian Russell and Clara Tuite (eds), Romantic Sociability: Social Networks and Literary Culture in Britain 1770–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 123–44, p. 136.

²⁵ [Peter George Patmore], Letters on England, by Victoire, Count de Saligny, 2 vols (London: Henry Colburn, 1823), vol. 1, p. 228, quoted in Klancher, Transfiguring the Arts and Sciences, p. 54. The lectures were ‘mixed’ in other ways, too: Gillian Russell says that in the early development of the civic lecture, ‘[t]he didactic aims of lectures…legitimated female sociability to a greater degree than the morally suspect attractions of playgoing’. Russell, ‘Spouters or Washerwomen’, p. 132.

²⁶ Gillian Russell, ‘Spouters or Washerwomen’, p. 124. Russell discusses the radical John Thelwall, whose lectures were disrupted and often banned in the 1790s by (in E. P. Thompson’s phrase) ‘the forces of counter-revolution’. She shows how lecturing developed thereafter as a socially regulated and polite form of sociability.

²⁷ RWE to Lidian Emerson (21 and 23 June 1848), RWE Letters 4, p. 87.

²⁸ ‘On coming up to Magdalen [Oxford] in 1826, the Tractarian William Palmer was required to attend the lectures of Edward Ellerton on Herodotus. He found that the lecture simply comprised members of the class taking it in turns to construe the text without any further illumination on the part of the teacher.’ L. W. B. Brockliss, The University of Oxford: A History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), p. 248. See also L. W. B. Brockliss, ‘The European University in the Age of Revolution, 1789–1850’ in M. G. Brock and M. C. Curthoys (eds), The History of the University of Oxford, vol. 6: Nineteenth-Century Oxford, Part 1 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), pp. 77–133, in which Brockliss shows that the college tutorial system in Oxford and Cambridge meant that lectures were of little importance in British universities in this period, although they were more common in the Scottish universities. As Sean Franzel has shown in Connected by the Ear, lectures were already of national importance in Germany in the same period. In France, too, lectures were politically and nationally important until the lecturers started to be removed from their posts in the run-up to the 1848 revolutions.

²⁹ See Chapter 5 of the current volume and Eckel, Atlantic Citizens. Fuller covered a broad range of topics that became increasingly focused on social issues. Greek mythology provided the topics for the first series, which ran for thirteen weekly sessions at Elizabeth Peabody’s rooms in West Street; the second series in the spring of 1840 was organized around ‘The Fine Arts’. In the fall of 1840, Fuller repeated ‘The Fine Arts’; and in the spring of 1841, her class of men and women discussed Greek mythology again. The fifth series in November 1841 was concerned with ‘Ethics’; the spring series the following year focused on ‘Woman’ as influenced by family, school, church, society, and literature. The series on ‘Woman’ was a source of inspiration for Fuller’s 1844 essay ‘The Great Lawsuit and Woman in the Nineteenth Century’ (1845). In November 1842, the women discussed a variety of topics like ‘Persons who never awake to life in this world’, ‘Mistakes’, ‘Faith’, ‘Creeds’, ‘Woman’, ‘Demonology’, ‘Influence’, ‘Catholicism, Roman’, and ‘The Ideal’. In the winter of 1843–4, Fuller led her dwindling group through consideration of the general topic of ‘Education’, where they discussed ‘Culture’, ‘Ignorance’, ‘Vanity’, ‘Prudence’, ‘Patience’, and ‘Health’. At the end of the five years of classes, Fuller wrote nostalgically about her participants to William H. Channing: ‘On bidding me goodbye, they all and always show so much goodwill and love, that I feel I must really have become a friend to them’: MF to William H. Channing (Cambridge, 28 April 1844), MF Letters 3, p. 193.

³⁰ MF, ‘The Entertainments of the Past Winter’, The Dial: A Magazine for Literature, Philosophy, and Religion 3:1 (July 1842): 46.

³¹ Donald M. Scott, ‘The Popular Lecture and the Creation of a Public in Mid-Nineteenth-Century America’, Journal of American History 66:4 (March 1980): 791–809, p. 791. He says, ‘[a] course sometimes referred to a series of lectures given by the same person and devoted to one fairly broad topic, but it usually referred to the series of ten or twelve lectures, covering a broad range of wholly unrelated topics, given each week by a different person. Societies sometimes sponsored more than one course during a single season’: p. 794.

³² MF, ‘The Entertainments of the Past Winter’, p. 46.

³³ Scott, ‘The Popular Lecture’, p. 801.

³⁴ MF, ‘The Entertainments of the Past Winter’, p. 46.

³⁵ Scott, ‘The Popular Lecture’, pp. 801, 802.

³⁶ MF, ‘The Entertainments of the Past Winter’, p. 46. (emphasis original).

³⁷ RWE (5–6 July 1839), RWE JMN 7, p. 224.

³⁸ RWE Journal 1839, RWE JMN 7, p. 265. Here, I agree with Tom F. Wright that, contrary to the argument of many American critics, Emerson does not think of the lecture as a pre-eminently ‘American’ form of literature, but rather—importantly, as a pan-human one.

³⁹ FD, ‘The Revolution of 1848, speech at West India Emancipation celebration’ (Rochester, New York, 1 August 1848), printed as ‘Frederic Douglass’s Address (1 August)’ North Star (4 August 1848); also in Philip S. Foner (ed.), The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass, vol. 1: Early Years, 1817–1849 (New York: International Publishers, 1950) [hereafter abbreviated as FD Life and Writings 1], pp. 321–30, p. 323.

⁴⁰ RWE, RWE Letters 3, p. 137.

⁴¹ RWE JMN 7, pp. 224–5.

⁴² FD lecture reported by the Beacon (Akron, Ohio) and reprinted in the Anti-Slavery Bugle (17 August 1850), FDP1, p. xxx. Writing about lectures by the natural historian Agassiz, Emerson says: ‘I fear, Agassiz takes quite too much time & space in denying popular science. He should electrify us by perpetual affirmations unexplained.’ RWE Journal 1857, RWE JMN 14, p. 128.

⁴³ Douglass became a close friend of Amy and Isaac Post when he arrived in Rochester in 1848. He and Amy Post both attended the Seneca Falls Convention that year. The Posts were Hicksite Quakers and reformers and, in the same year, they had taken in Kate and Margaretta Fox, the two sisters at the centre of the ‘Rochester Spirit Rappings’. On 14 November 1849, the Fox sisters demonstrated their spiritualist rapping at the Corinthian Hall in Rochester. Isaac Post became a medium and published Voices from the Spirit World, Being Communications from Many Spirits, by the Hand of Isaac Post, Medium (Rochester, NY: Charles H. McDonell, 1852). The Posts were important radicals and activists at the heart of ‘an interracial movement for social justice’ and through their uptake of spiritualism, they connected it to feminism, abolitionism, and pacifism: Nancy A. Hewitt, Radical Friend: Amy Kirby Post and Her Activist Worlds (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2018), p. 91.

⁴⁴ [Anon.], ‘The Lecturer’, Frederick Douglass’s Paper 4 (Friday 13 January 1854).

⁴⁵ Discussions of Emerson’s lecturing career include Mary Kupiec Cayton, Emerson’s Emergence: Self and Society in the Transformation of New England 1800–1845 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1992); Thomas Augst, The Clerk’s Tale: Young Men and Moral Life in Nineteenth-Century America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), pp. 114–57; Bonnie Carr O’Neill, ‘ “The Best of Me Is There”: Emerson as Lecturer and Celebrity’, American Literature 80:4 (2008): 739–67; Martin Hewitt, ‘Aspects of Platform Culture in Nineteenth-Century Britain’, Nineteenth-Century Prose 29:1 (Spring 2002): 1; Martin Hewitt, ‘Ralph Waldo Emerson, George Dawson, and the Control of the Lecture Platform in Mid-Nineteenth Century Manchester’, Nineteenth-Century Prose 25:2 (Fall 1998): 1–24; Tom F. Wright, ‘Listening to Emerson’s “England” at Clinton Hall, 22 January 1850’, Journal of American Studies 46:3 (2012): 641–62. On Douglass as lecturer, see Amanda Adams, Performing Authorship in the Nineteenth-Century Transatlantic Lecture Tour (London: Routledge, 2014), pp. 21–32; Sarah Meer, ‘Douglass as Orator and Editor’, in Maurice S. Lee (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Frederick Douglass (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 46–59; Frederick Douglass and Ireland: In His Own Words, ed. Christine Kinealy, 2 vols (London: Routledge, 2018); and Robert Fanuzzi, Abolition’s Public Sphere (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2003).

⁴⁶ Both lecturers deliberately and provocatively blurred the line between ‘cultural, ethical, spiritual, and political action’: Paul Gilroy, Darker than Blue: On the Moral Economies of Black Atlantic Culture (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2010), p. 108. Gilroy is discussing Bob Marley’s music here, but the idiom of liberation can be traced back to the nineteenth century and was developed by both Douglass and Emerson.

⁴⁷ On his second European tour of 1847–8, Emerson read his new series of lectures, ‘Representative Men’, starting on 2 November 1847 at the Manchester Athenaeum, alternating on different days with lectures at the Liverpool Mechanics’ Association. The six lectures were ‘The Uses of Great Men’, ‘Swedenborg: The Mystic’, ‘Montaigne: The Sceptic’, ‘Shakespeare: The Poet’, ‘Napoleon: The Man of Action’, and ‘Goethe: The Man of Letters’. He omitted the lecture on Plato that he had included in the American reading of the series in 1845. The next week he began a concurrent series of four lectures (old and new) at the Manchester Mechanics’ Institution, including what was to become his number-one hit, ‘Domestic Life’. He stayed in rented rooms in Manchester and shuttled around the Midlands and the northern counties through December and January, and in February he went to Scotland. During this time he gave sixty-four lectures. ‘Domestic Life’ was the most often repeated—he gave it on fifteen separate occasions—and his ‘Napoleon’ lecture from ‘Representative Men’ he gave fourteen times. Townsend Scudder III, ‘A Chronological List of Emerson’s Lectures on His British Lecture Tour of 1847–1848’, PMLA 51:1 (March 1936): 243–8, p. 243.

⁴⁸ FD, ‘Our Paper and Our Prospects’, North Star (3 December 1847): 2.

⁴⁹ FD, Life and Times, in Frederick Douglass, Autobiographies, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. (New York: Library of America, 1994), p. 708; this edition is henceforth abbreviated to FD Autobiographies.

⁵⁰ Sean Franzel has pointed to the way that ‘the lecture focalizes the time and place of articulation of philosophical discourse by encouraging listeners (and later readers) to view the past through the lens of the particular present moment in which the lecture takes place’: Sean Franzel, ‘Constructions of the Present and the Philosophy of History in the Lecture Form’, in Mary Helen Dupree and Sean Franzel (eds), Performing Knowledge, 1750–1850, pp. 295–321, p. 296.

⁵¹ Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Meridian Books, 1967), p. 296.

⁵² See Benjamin Fagan, ‘The North Star and the Atlantic 1848’, African American Review 47:1 (Spring 2014): 51–67.

⁵³ RWE to Lidian Emerson (2 January 1856), RWE Letters 5:4.

⁵⁴ There is evidence that Douglass might have over-insisted on the lack of racism in Ireland in order to shame his American readers. McFeely records, for example, that when Douglass was busy with the ‘Send Back the Money’ campaign against the Free Church of Scotland, he was faced with notices posted around Belfast reading ‘Send Back the N**!’: William McFeely, Frederick Douglass (New York: Touchstone, 1991), p. 133. RWE to Lidian from London (21 and 23 June 1848), RWE Letters 4, p. 85. Oswego (New York) Daily Advertiser, quoted in National Anti-Slavery Standard (29 October 1846), requoted in FDP1, p. lix. Douglass also claimed that he felt free in London. He wrote to Garrison, quoting his favourite poet, Burns: ‘Botanic and Zoological gardens, Museums and Panoramas, Halls of Statuary and galleries of Paintings, are as free to the black as the white man in London. There is no distinction on account of color. The white man gains nothing by being white, and the black man losing nothing by being black. “A man’s a man for a’that.” ’ (FD to William Lloyd Garrison, 23 May 1846), quoted in FD Life and Writings, vol. 1, p. 170.

⁵⁵ In 1854, Douglass spoke about the Fugitive Slave Act (1850) in Manchester, New Hampshire, but black speakers were still a rarity. Tom F. Wright reminds us that ‘before the Civil War only a handful of black Americans, including Douglass, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and John Sweat Rock, achieved recognition as speakers on unsegregated lyceum platforms’: Wright, Lecturing the Atlantic, p. 43. FD records in Life and Times that when he had first escaped to Massachusetts, he was not allowed, due to his colour, to go to lectures in the New Bedford Lyceum. ‘Not until men such as Hon. Chas. Sumner, Theodore Parker, Ralph W. Emerson, and Horace Mann refused to lecture in their course while there was such a restriction was it abandoned.’ FD, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass from 1817–1882, Written by Himself, ed. John Lobb (London: Christian Aid Office, 1882), p. 179.

⁵⁶ Nell Irvin Painter, The History of White People (New York: W.W. Norton, 2010), p. 151. As a corrective to the white industry that has grown up around Emerson, Painter’s work is salutary.

⁵⁷ RWE, ‘New England, Lecture 1: The Genius and National Character of the Anglo-Saxon Race’, in Ronald A. Bosco and Joel Myerson (eds), The Later Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson 1843–1871, 2 vols (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2010), vol. 1, pp. 7–18. Hereafter abbreviated to RWE Later Lectures. First delivered in Baltimore on 10 January 1843; then in Philadelphia, New Jersey, Montreal, New York, and Rhode Island. RWE, ‘An Address…on…the Emancipation of the Negroes in the British West Indies’, in Gougeon and Myerson (eds), Emerson’s Antislavery Writings, pp. 7–34, p. 29.

⁵⁸ Len Gougeon and Joel Myerson, ‘Historical Background’, Emerson’s Antislavery Writings, pp. xi–lvi, p. xxviii.

⁵⁹ Painter, History of White People, p. 186.

⁶⁰ RWE, ‘Holograph, First Draft of Emerson’s “Emancipation of the Negroes in the West Indies,” 1844’, quoted in Henry Louis Gates Jr., ‘Frederick Douglass’s Camera Obscura: Representing the Antislave “Clothed and in Their Own Form”’, Critical Inquiry 42 (Autumn 2015): 31–60, p. 31.

⁶¹ Emerson had attended Louis Agassiz’s lectures and the men were friends (see n. 42 in this chapter). Henry Louis Gates Jr suggests that the reference to Douglass may have been removed when Emerson realized that they would be sharing a platform and the reference might embarrass his fellow speaker, but Douglass is permanently removed from the printed editions of the speech too, and it seems more likely that Emerson’s explicit worries about ‘pure blood’ are the cause. Douglass was mixed race: Gates reminds us that ‘Douglass transformed his father from a white man to possibly being a “nearly white” mulatto between his first and his second autobiographies’: Gates, ‘Frederick Douglass’s Camera Obscura’, p. 41. David Bromwich has suggested that Emerson was not showing his own prejudice but rather accommodating that of his audience, and speculates that he ‘didn’t distrust the pseudo-biology enough to think he could afford to omit the pedantic qualification’: email to Gates (18 March 2015), Ibid., p. 42. But the difference between monogenesis and polygenesis is far from ‘“pedantic’ in this period, and Emerson’s later musings on race in his notebooks suggest his energetic engagement with the ‘pseudo-biology’.

⁶² Painter, History of White People, p. 187.

⁶³ RWE, quoted in William H. Gilman et al. (eds), ‘Introduction: Emerson in his Journals’, RWE JMN 1, pp. xiii–xliii, p. xxv (my emphasis). This suggests Emerson sees black people as existing ‘outside’ the series of white people, and therefore suggests a polygenist position. Gilman also quotes RWE in an essay called the ‘Sad Side of the Negro Question’ [in which] he repeats that ‘the Negro is created on a lower plane than the white, & eats men and kidnaps and tortures, if he can’ adding that ‘the brute instinct rallies & centers in the black man’: p. xxv.

⁶⁴ RWE JMN 13, p. 54.

⁶⁵ Barbara Packer, ‘Emerson and the Overgod’: paper delivered at 1994 meeting of the American Historical Association, San Francisco, quoted in Tracy Fessenden, Culture and Redemption: Religion, the Secular and American Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), p. 219.

⁶⁶ Of course, both Douglass and Emerson developed their separate positions in relation to many other influential thinkers too, and Robert Levine is right to warn of the danger to historians of ‘making Douglass the representative black male of the time’, even if Douglass did hope to achieve this, because it can ‘elide some of the most significant dialogues and exchanges of antebellum culture’. Levine’s book assesses the important relationship between Douglass and his co-editor on the North Star, Martin Delany: Robert S. Levine, Martin Delany, Frederick Douglass, and the Politics of Representative Identity (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), p. 5.

⁶⁷ Because he was a slave, FD’s birth date is uncertain, but he estimated that it was probably around 1817 or 1818. Foner puts it in February 1817: Foner, ‘Preface’, FD Life and Writings, vol. 1, p. 11.

⁶⁸ Advertisement for the Massachusetts Quarterly Review which started publication on 1 December 1847, conducted by R. W. Emerson, Theodore Parker and J. Elliott Cabot, North Star (21 July 1848). This advertisement recurs regularly. [Anon.], ‘Mr. Emerson’s Lectures reprinted from the Inquirer, 3 June’, North Star (18 August 1848).

⁶⁹ Cynthia S. Hamilton argues that ‘[t]he rebellious slave of Douglass’s Narrative becomes, in My Bondage and My Freedom a representative figure in the Emersonian sense of embodying human potential’: Cynthia S. Hamilton, ‘Frederick Douglass and the Gender Politics of Reform’, in Alan J. Rice and Martin Crawford (eds), Liberating Sojourn: Frederick Douglass and Transatlantic Reform (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1999), pp. 73–92, p. 88. Hamilton argues that in My Bondage and My Freedom Douglass reappears as a kind of wild and free Huck Finn, ‘a genuine boy’: p. 88. Paul Giles argues that Douglass is more ‘Emersonian’ in the Narrative: ‘[w]e know that Douglass read and admired Emerson, and there are indeed many structural parallels between the writings of Emerson (and Thoreau) and Douglass’s 1845 Narrative’: Paul Giles, ‘Douglass’s Black Atlantic: Britain, Europe, Egypt’, in Lee (ed.), Cambridge Companion to Frederick Douglass, pp. 132–45, p. 132. Bill E. Lawson traces Romantic influences in his work in ‘Douglass Among the Romantics’, in Lee (ed.), Cambridge Companion to Frederick Douglass, pp. 118–131, p. 127. Robert Levine hears in Martin Delany’s rhetoric “[a]n abolitionist melange of the Bible, Shakespeare, Milton, Byron, and Emerson’: Levine, Martin Delany, Frederick Douglass, p. 47. Henry Louis Gates, Jr became ‘convinced of the direct relationship between…[Emerson’s ‘Emancipation of the Negroes in the British West Indies,’ 1844] and Douglass’s first slave narrative, published just one year later, through close textual analysis alone’: Gates, ‘Frederick Douglass’s Camera Obscura’, p. 41.

⁷⁰ Richard Hardack, ‘The Slavery of Romanism: The Casting Out of the Irish in the Work of Frederick Douglass’, in Rice and Crawford (eds), Liberating Sojourn, pp. 115–40, p. 115.

⁷¹ FD, ‘Colored Newspapers’, North Star (7 January 1848): 2.

⁷² See Roberts, Distant Revolutionaries; André M. Fleche, The Revolution of 1861: The American Civil War in the Age of Nationalist Conflict (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2012); Michael A. Morrison, ‘American Reaction to European Revolutions, 1848–1852: Sectionalism, Memory and the Revolutionary Heritage’, Civil War History 49:2 (2003): 111–32.

⁷³ [?Elizabeth Gaskell], ‘From our Manchester Correspondent, Emerson’s Lectures’, Howitt’s Journal 50:ii (11 December 1847): 370–1, p. 370.

⁷⁴ Douglas Jerrold’s Weekly Newspaper (10 June 1848), p. 750.

⁷⁵ [?Elizabeth Gaskell], ‘From our Manchester Correspondent,’ p. 370.

⁷⁶ AHC to Thomas Arnold (16 July 1848), in AHC Remains, p. 13. Report in the Gateshead Observer, quoted in Moncure Daniel Conway, Emerson at Home and Abroad (London: Trubner & Co., 1883), p. 262. When he met him at a dinner party at Baring’s in March 1848, the Bishop of Oxford found Emerson ‘a little Yankee, tall, thin, with no atrabilious look, and quite silent’: RWE Letters 4, p. 43 n. 153; ‘atrabilious’ means melancholy or irritable, literally ‘black bile’. Report of Emerson’s lecture in Cincinnati Gazette (27 January 1857), quoted in Field, ‘ “The Transformation of Genius” ’, p. 478.

⁷⁷ Report in the Gateshead Observer, quoted in Conway, Emerson at Home and Abroad, p. 262.

⁷⁸ [Anon.], Brooklyn Daily Eagle (24 February 1843), quoted in Nancy Craig Simmons, ‘Emerson and his Audiences: The New England Lectures, 1843–1844’ in Emerson: Bicentennial Essays, ed. Ronald A. Bosco and Joel Myerson (Boston. MA: Massachusetts Historical Society, 2006), pp. 51–85, p. 67.

⁷⁹ Description from 1857 in the Cincinnati Times, quoted in Robert D. Richardson, Emerson: The Mind on Fire (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1996), pp. 421–2.

⁸⁰ Conway, Emerson at Home and Abroad, pp. 260, 266.

⁸¹ Richardson, Emerson: The Mind on Fire, p. 421.

⁸² Gateshead Observer, quoted in Conway, Emerson at Home and Abroad, p. 261.

⁸³ Francis Espinasse, Literary Recollections and Sketches (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1893), p. 157.

⁸⁴ ‘“Napoleon” at Exeter Hall’ in Conway, Emerson at Home and Abroad, p. 271.

⁸⁵ [?Elizabeth Gaskell], ‘From our Manchester Correspondent’, p. 370.

⁸⁶ Ibid.

⁸⁷ [Anon.], ‘Domestic Life; A Lecture, by Ralph Waldo Emerson’, Preston Guardian (Saturday 18 December 1847).

⁸⁸ [?Elizabeth Gaskell], ‘From our Manchester Correspondent’, p. 371.

⁸⁹ Ibid., p. 370. ‘Panthea’ (Miss Sophia D. Collett), Reasoner (5 July 1848), quoted in Conway, Emerson at Home and Abroad, p. 262. ‘Panthea’ says, ‘[o]n Friday evening, June 30, Mr. Emerson gave his last lecture in this country’. This lecture, ‘Shakespeare’, was at Exeter Hall in the cheaper series of three lectures under the auspices of the Early Closing Movement. Richard Monckton Milnes was in the Chair.

⁹⁰ Stauros Dilberoglue, who attended Emerson’s lecture ‘Napoleon’ with D. G. Rossetti in London in 1847, recorded by Rossetti, in Bosco and Myerson (eds), Emerson in his Own Time, p. xvi. Gillian Russell tells us that Coleridge employed similar lecturing tactics: ‘Coleridge used silence, restraint, the kind of understated physical gesture that would be typical of more intimate contexts…in order to gain the attention of his audience, and in the process also establishing his credentials as a man to be trusted, speaking in his own character, not an assumed one.’ Russell, ‘Spouters and Washerwomen’, p. 140.

⁹¹ Howard M. Wach, ‘Culture and the Middle Classes: Popular Knowledge in Industrial Manchester’, Journal of British Studies 27:4 (October 1988): 375–404, p. 394.

⁹² Ibid., p. 390. Emerson heard Carpenter lecture at the Royal Institution in April 1848. RWE to Lidian Emerson (2 and 6 April 1848), RWE Letters 4, p. 51.

⁹³ [Anon.], ‘Lecture on the Electric Telegraph and Electric Clock’, Manchester Times and Gazette (Friday 9 July 1847).

⁹⁴ [?Elizabeth Gaskell], ‘From our Manchester Correspondent’, p. 370.

⁹⁵ A description of an 1857 lecture in the Cincinnati Times, quoted in Richardson, Emerson: The Mind on Fire, pp. 421–2; Espinasse, Literary Recollections, p. 157; James Russell Lowell, My Study Windows (London: Sampson Low, Son, and Marston, 1871), pp. 278, 281.

⁹⁶ [Anon.], Boston Post (25 January 1849): 2.

⁹⁷ John Arthur Hill, Emerson and His Philosophy (London: William Rider & Son, 1919), pp. 88–9.

⁹⁸ Harriet Martineau, quoted in Henry Crabb Robinson, Diary, Reminiscences, and Correspondences, ed. Thomas Sadler, 3 vols (London: Macmillan & Co., 1869) vol. 3, p. 319.

⁹⁹ Lowell, My Study Windows, p. 277.

¹⁰⁰ Letter of James Hutchinson Sterling to students of Glasgow University, The University Independent, Second Series, 3 (7 April 1874), quoted in Townsend Scudder III, ‘Emerson in London and the London Lectures’, American Literature 8:1 (March 1936): 22–36, p. 36. Sterling was an eminent Hegelian; ‘A Provincial Paper’, quoted in Conway, Emerson at Home and Abroad, p. 260. Alison Winter has argued that the audiences of the 1840s were easy to impress—unaccustomed as they were to the phenomenon of the public lecture, they responded readily and fairly uncritically to whatever was on offer: Alison Winter, ‘The Peripatetic Power of the “New Science”’, in Mesmerized: Powers of Mind in Victorian Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), pp. 109–36.

¹⁰¹ Gateshead Observer, quoted in Conway, Emerson at Home and Abroad, p. 261.

¹⁰² RWE Letters 4, p. 55.

¹⁰³ RWE Letters 4, p. 55.

¹⁰⁴ RWE Letters 4, p. 73 (emphasis added). Urbain Le Verrier was a French astronomer and mathematician best remembered for predicting the existence and position of Neptune using only mathematics.

¹⁰⁵ RWE Letters 4, p. 77.

¹⁰⁶ RWE, RWE Later Lectures vol. 1, p. 48.

¹⁰⁷ [Anon.], ‘Mr. Emerson’s Fifth Lecture’, Liverpool Mercury (Tuesday 30 November 1847); Lowell, My Study Windows, p. 280.

¹⁰⁸ Douglas Jerrold’s Weekly Newspaper (10 June 1848).

¹⁰⁹ RWE, quoted in Richardson, Emerson: The Mind on Fire, p. 422.

¹¹⁰ Simmons, ‘Emerson and his Audiences’.

¹¹¹ Espinasse, Literary Recollections, p. 157.

¹¹² RWE, ‘New England: Recent Literary and Spiritual Influences’ (30 January 1843), RWE Later Lectures, vol. 1, p. 44.

¹¹³ See Christopher Newfield, The Emerson Effect: Individualism and Submission in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996) and Sharon Cameron, ‘The Way of Life by Abandonment: Emerson’s Impersonal’, Critical Inquiry 25:1 (Autumn 1998): 1–31. Both criticize Emerson for his dishonesty in asking for submission and self-abandonment from his audience/readers.

¹¹⁴ RWE, ‘Nominalist and Realist’, in Joel Porte (ed.), Emerson: Essays and Lectures (New York: Library of America, 1983), p. 580.

¹¹⁵ Cameron, ‘The Way of Life by Abandonment’, pp. 10, 18.

¹¹⁶ [?Elizabeth Gaskell], ‘From our Manchester Correspondent’, p. 370.

¹¹⁷ FD, My Bondage and My Freedom, FD Autobiographies, p. 365. In fact, it was Mr William C. Coffin who spotted FD at speaking at the school-house in New Bedford and invited him to give his first speech at an anti-slavery convention at Nantucket. From 1841 to 1847, Frederick Douglass toured the abolitionist lecture circuit for the M.A.S.S. (Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society).

¹¹⁸ Mr John A. Collins, the General Agent of M.A.A.S., would thus introduce FD. FD, My Bondage and My Freedom, FD Autobiographies, p. 365 (italics original).

¹¹⁹ Frederick Douglass, ‘I have come to tell you something about slavery: An Address delivered in Lynn, Mass. In October 1841’, FDP1, p. 3.

¹²⁰ FD, My Bondage and My Freedom, FD Autobiographies, p. 367. William McFeely says that, ‘black antislavery speakers were always treated as visiting artists in a production of which the white Bostonians never dreamed of losing the direction’: McFeely, Frederick Douglass, p. 108.

¹²¹ FD, My Bondage and My Freedom, FD Autobiographies, p. 367.

¹²² I have not discussed Douglass’s early reliance on The Columbian Orator because so many others have already done so. For example, this speaking guide suggests that ‘[t]he conclusion of an address should be “brisk and sprightly; which may seem to arise from a sense of the speaker’s opinion of the goodness of his cause.”’ Caleb Bingham, The Columbian Orator: Containing a Variety of Original and Selected Pieces; Together with Rules; Calculated to Improve Youth and Others in the Ornamental and Useful Art of Eloquence (Hartford, CT: Lincoln and Gleason, 1807), p. 27.

¹²³ FDP1, p. xxiii. Edwin Parker suggested that Douglass had learnt his style from Wendell Phillips, whose oratical style ‘is more quiet than any orator we have ever heard, who pretended to have passion. It is the very style for an agitator because it has not agitation. You are not forewarned by it against excitement. You are lulled into insecurity, and before you know it, you find yourself on fire. We remember noting in one of his most inflammable appeals, a slight but significant indication of the entire repose of his body and arms; for the fingers of his right hand were carelessly dangling and playing on the side of the table upon which it rested, while he was delivering the very climax of his appeal. This repose of manner is rarely broken.’ Edwin Griffin Parker, The Golden Age of American Oratory (Boston, MA: Whittemore, Niles & Hall, 1857), p. 411 (the description is of Phillips); quoted in Fanuzzi, ‘The Trouble with Douglass’s Body’.

¹²⁴ Nathaniel Peabody Rogers, A Collection from the Miscellaneous Writings of Nathaniel Peabody Rogers (Manchester, NH: W.H. Fisk, 1849), pp. 203–4. Rogers was a white abolitionist from New Hampshire.

¹²⁵ Ibid.

¹²⁶ Boston Courier (26 May 1842), quoted in FD Life and Writings, vol. 1, p. 52.

¹²⁷ Ibid.

¹²⁸ Freedom’s Journal (16 March 1828), quoted in Frankie Hutton, The Early Black Press in America, 1827 to 1860 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1993), p. 108. Robert S. Levine discusses the discourse of ‘black uplift’ in the early black press in America in Levine, Martin Delany, Frederick Douglass, pp. 22–32.

¹²⁹ This was Nathaniel Rogers, editor of the Herald of Freedom abolitionist paper. ‘From the Herald of Freedom’, The Liberator (27 February 1842).

¹³⁰ Fanuzzi, ‘The Trouble with Douglass’s Body’, pp. 27–49.

¹³¹ Giles, ‘Narrative Reversals and Power Exchanges’, p. 784.

¹³² While in Ireland and England, Douglass gave more than three hundred talks and lectures, and appeared at a number of major reform conventions in Ireland and London. I am not the first to notice the importance of the European trips for both Emerson and Douglass. See Len Gougeon, ‘Militant Abolitionism: Douglass, Emerson, and the Rise of the Anti-Slave Author’, New England Quarterly 85:4 (December 2012): 622–57. On Emerson, see Reynolds, European Revolutions; on Douglass, see Cody Marrs, ‘Frederic Douglass in 1848’, American Literature 85:3 (2013): 447–73. On ‘the American 1848’, see Chapter 4 of Rogin, Subversive Genealogy.

¹³³ See Giles, ‘Narrative Reversals and Power Exchanges, p. 784.

¹³⁴ ‘Wednesday 17 September 1845 Music Hall Dublin: Antislavery Meeting’, Freeman’s Journal (18 September 1845). At the same venue on Wednesday 1 October 1845, in front of ‘a large and respectable audience’ FD gave a lecture for an hour and a half. He said ‘[w]hat the chairman had stated respecting the churches of America was true. They were all implicated more or less in the sin of maintaining the infernal slave system—of placing their brethren in chains like these, and flogging them with whips like this—(holding up to the audience some of the horrible instruments of torture used by the slaveholders.)’: [Anon.], ‘Anti-Slavery Meeting’, Freeman’s Journal (3 October 1845): 4.

¹³⁵ ‘Thursday 1 January 1846: Anti-slavery Society, Methodist Meeting House Belfast’, Belfast Commercial Chronicle (5 January 1846), in Kinealy (ed.), Fredrick Douglass and Ireland, vol. 1. Abolitionist James Needham Buffum toured Scotland with Douglass to protest against the Free Church of Scotland keeping money donated by American slave holders.

¹³⁶ Audrey Fisch, ‘“Negrophilism” and British Nationalism: The Spectacle of the Black Abolitionist Movement’, Victorian Review 19 (Summer 1993): 20–47. Fisch also suggests that the success of black speakers in nineteenth-century Britain was in part due to a British desire to discredit US democracy.

¹³⁷ See Sarah Meer, ‘Competing Representations: Douglass, the Ethiopian Serenaders, and Ethnic Exhibition in London’, in Rice and Crawford (eds), Liberating Sojourn, pp. 141–65. Meer suggests that blackface performance was at the peak of its popularity in Britain between 1846 and 1854. FD at first saw the advantages for abolitionism in blackface renditions of affecting slave songs like ‘Lucy Nell’, which he said ‘constitute our national music, without which we have no national music’ [FDP3, p. 48]. He also said slave songs express ‘the finest feelings of the human nature…[and] awaken the sympathies for the slave, in which Antislavery principles take root, grow up, and flourish’ [FDP2, p. 345]. But later FD changed his view, realizing that ‘[i]n the heat of the public debate over the Civil War, minstrelsy’s caricatures came increasingly to be interpreted as fair representations of the Negro’s character’: R. J. M. Blackett, ‘Cracks in the Antislavery Wall: Frederick Douglass’s Second Visit to England (1859–1860) and the Coming of the Civil War’, in Rice and Crawford (eds), Liberating Sojourn, pp. 187–206, p. 202.

¹³⁸ See Colin Chambers, Black and Asian Theatre in Britain: A History (London: Routledge, 2011).

¹³⁹ There was already a tradition of black orators such as Charles Lenox Remond and Samuel Ringgold Ward. Charles Lenox Remond made an eighteen-month visit to the British Isles in 1840–1 and he also spoke in Ireland. He met Douglass in America in 1842 and they sometimes lectured together. Douglass named his third son after Remond in 1844, but when Douglass returned from Europe after his tour, the two men disagreed as Douglass drew away from Garrisonian abolitionism. Samuel Ringgold Ward visited Britain to give a lecture tour in 1853. See Samuel Ringgold Ward, Autobiography of a Fugitive Negro: His Anti Slavery Efforts in the United States, Canada and England (London: John Snow, 1855).

¹⁴⁰ FD, ‘The Southern style of Preaching to Slaves: An Address delivered in Boston, Massachusetts on 28 January 1842’, FDP1, pp. 15–16, p. 16. At this meeting, a petition and address from the people of Ireland was presented, signed by the Irish nationalist Daniel O’Connell and leader of the Temperance movement Theobald Mathew, enjoining the Irish in America to ‘Cling by the Abolitionists!’ and to ‘treat the colored peopled as your equals’; p. 15. So when FD arrived in Ireland four years later he could have some confidence in Irish support of his cause. Douglass could also imitate the apologists of slavery such as John C. Calhoun, and, after their support of the Compromise of 1850, Henry Clay and Daniel Webster. The Compromise of 1850 was the Congressional effort led by Henry Clay and Stephen Douglas to compromise on the sectional disputes that seemed to be heading towards a civil war. On 7 March 1850, Webster gave his famous ‘Seventh of March’ speech, giving his support to the Compromise, which included the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 that required federal officials to recapture and return runaway slaves. The abolitionist community was, naturally, outraged. One observer marvelled at ‘the daring of that unlettered slave’ (Douglass) in making a ‘puppet show’ of these politicians with ‘[h]is astounding power of transformation’: National Era (28 July 1853), Quoted in FDP1, p. xxxii.

¹⁴¹ See Homi K. Bhabha, ‘Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse, October 28 (Spring 1984): 125–33, repr. in Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 85–92.

¹⁴² ‘Extract from a Lecture by John P. Parker against American Slavery’, Howitt’s Journal: The Weekly Record (22 May 1847): 41–2, p. 42.

¹⁴³ Robert T. Oliver, The History of Public Speaking in America (Boston, MA: Allyn & Bacon, 1965), p. 167.

¹⁴⁴ Thomas Wentworth Higginson, American Orators and Oratory (Cleveland, OH: Imperial Press, 1901), p. 76, quoted in Fanuzzi, Abolition’s Public Sphere, p. 83.

¹⁴⁵ Quoted in McFeely, Frederick Douglass, pp. 124–5.

¹⁴⁶ George L. Ruffin, ‘Introduction’ to FD, The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass Written by Himself (Boston: De Wolfe, Fiske & Co., 1895), p. 20.

¹⁴⁷ William H. Ferris, ‘Douglass as Orator’, Champion Magazine 1 (February 1917): 296–9, quoted in FDP1, p. xxxi.

¹⁴⁸ Inquirer (2 January 1847), quoted in Rice and Crawford (eds), Liberating Sojourn, p. 61. In My Bondage and My Freedom, FD refashioned himself as a Northern bourgeois man. Anne Goodwyn Jones argues that ‘[h]is emphasis on isolation, individual “self-made” achievement, literacy, professional success, democracy, and equality show his awareness of the meanings of manhood in his new and permanent region’: Anne Goodwyn Jones, ‘Engendered in the South: Blood and Irony in Douglass and Jacobs’, in Rice and Crawford (eds), Liberating Sojourn, pp. 93–111, p. 99.

¹⁴⁹ In Memoriam: Frederick Douglass (Philadelphia 1897), pp. 292–4, quoted in FDP1, p. xxxiv. See Michael Hutt, ‘“Making a Man of Him”: Masculinity and the Black Body in Mid-Nineteenth-Century American Sculpture’, Oxford Art Journal 15:1 (1992): 21–35. Hutt argues that manly form was an important credential for citizenship in this period.

¹⁵⁰ Leeds Times (26 December 1846), quoted in FDP1, p. 474.

¹⁵¹ Fanuzzi, ‘The Trouble with Douglass’s Body’, p. 38.

¹⁵² ‘Emancipation is an Individual, a National, and an International Responsibility: An Address delivered in London, England, 18 May 1846’, in FDP1, pp. 249–61, p. 250.

¹⁵³ Theodore Stanton and Harriet Stanton Blatch (eds), Elizabeth Cady Stanton, As Revealed in her Letters, Diaries and Reminiscences, 2 vols (1922, repr. New York: Arno, 1966), vol. 2, p. 311; quoted in Rice and Crawford (eds), Liberating Sojourn, p. 23.

¹⁵⁴ Quoted in FDP1, p. xxxix.

¹⁵⁵ Nathaniel P. Rogers described being tried by Douglass’s ‘insolent tyranny’ when a row broke out on the platform between Douglass and John B. Chandler in 1845: Herald of Freedom (13 June 1845), quoted in FDP1, p. xxxix. Rogers adds, ‘[h]is having been a slave—or now being one—does not entitle him to play the master’, suggesting the difficulty of finding a consensus on the social status of escaped slaves: FDP1, pp. xxxix–xl. American reactions were particularly strong when Douglass returned in 1847 from Europe: ‘Douglass lacks that modesty which is becoming in all public speakers, and especially one in his circumstances. He is altogether too self-sufficient.’ Northern Christian Advocate, NASS (17 November 1847), quoted in FDP1, p. xxxix.

¹⁵⁶ Richard Webb to Maria Chapman, Boston (16 May 1846), quoted in Tom Chaffin, Giant’s Causeway: Frederick Douglass’s Irish Odyssey and the Making of an American Visionary (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2014), p. 45.

¹⁵⁷ Letter from Richard Webb to Mary Chapman, Dublin (31 October 1846), BPL, Weston Papers, MS. A.9, 2, v.22, 1846, no. 109. Quoted in Fionnghuala Sweeney, ‘“The Republic of Letters”: Frederick Douglass, Ireland, and the Irish Narratives’, Éire–Ireland 36:1&2 (Earrach/Samhradh/Spring/Summer 2001): 47–65, p. 62.

¹⁵⁸ The meeting was on 29 September 1845.

¹⁵⁹ FD, Life and Times, FD Autobiographies, p. 682.

¹⁶⁰ Ibid., p. 682.

¹⁶¹ Ibid., p. 683.

¹⁶² Fionnghuala Sweeney agrees that Douglass’s Irish stay ‘mark[s] a transitional phase in Douglass’ emergence as a modern subject and in his negotiation of nineteenth-century models of socio-cultural identity’: Sweeney, ‘ “The Republic of Letters” ’, p. 49.

¹⁶³ Frederick Douglass reported how alcohol was used by masters against slaves in his Narrative: FDP Autobiographies, pp. 66–7. Father Theobald Mathew was credited with leading the temperance movement in Ireland and FD met him and took the pledge with him once more.

¹⁶⁴ FDP2, p. 58.

¹⁶⁵ FDP1, pp. 51–2 n. 9.

¹⁶⁶ Donald E. Pease has discussed the social model that ‘produced national identities by way of a symbolic social order that systematically separated an abstract, disembodied subject from resistant materialities, such as race, class, and gender’: Donald E. Pease, ‘National Identities, Postmodern Artifacts, and Postnational Narratives’, in Donald E. Pease (ed.), National Identities and Post-Americanist Narratives (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994), pp. 1–13, p. 3.

¹⁶⁷ Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom, FD Autobiographies, p. 389.

¹⁶⁸ ‘I could hardly indulge in the hope of some day owning a watch, yet in those hope-killing days of my slave life I did think I might somewhere in the then dim and shadowy future, find myself the happy owner of a watch…. If a man in those days had a watch, it was not allowed to remain a secret to the outside world. It was a sign of wealth and respectability.’ Frederick Douglass, The Story of My First Watch (New York: New York Standard Watch Company, 1894), pp. 5–6, pp. 5–6.

¹⁶⁹ Fanuzzi, ‘The Trouble with Douglass’s Body’, p. 36. Fanuzzi describes ‘a technology of citizenship…[that] was as much visual as it was literate’, and suggests that Douglass had learnt from The Columbian Orator how to ‘manifest the elusive quality of exemplariness’, p. 32, although this is rather contradicted by his remark that comments on Douglass’s body played into the hands of his ‘detractors’, p. 38.

¹⁷⁰ Fanuzzi, ‘The Trouble with Douglass’s Body’, p. 41. Fanuzzi subsequently revises his argument in ‘Frederick Douglass’s Public Body’, Chapter 3 of his Abolition’s Public Sphere, pp. 83–128, and makes a more coherent connection between Douglass’s black republican body and his use of print media.

¹⁷¹ John Stauffer, Zoe Trodd, and Celeste-Marie Bernier, Picturing Frederick Douglass: An Illustrated Biography of the Nineteenth Century’s Most Photographed American (New York: W.W. Norton, 2018). This second edition contains two newly discovered pictures of Douglass taken in Ireland.

¹⁷² Frederick Douglass’ Paper (3 February 1854), quoted in FDP1, p. xxviii.

¹⁷³ Elizabeth Duquette discusses the problem of exemplarity for Douglass in ‘Making an Example: American Literature as Philosophy’, in Russ Castronovo (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 343–57. Duquette focuses on Douglass’s lecture ‘Self-Made Men’, ‘first delivered in 1859 and repeated more than fifty times before its 1893 publication’, which she compares to Emerson’s lecture ‘Uses of Great Men’ [1850]: ‘Although Waldo Martin has pointed to crucial links between Douglass’s lecture and Emerson’s “Uses of Great Men,” it is worth noting that there are points of marked divergence between the two thinkers, especially on the idea of instrumentality’, pp. 347, 350.