Slavery and Oratory: Frederick Douglass in the History of Rhetoric

Abstract

The antislavery and antiracist oratory of Frederick Douglass is a powerful case study of the appropriation and transformation of the master's tools. Douglass's formative exposure to the classical rhetorical tradition is well known - but just as important are the ways in which he subverted it. He did so by developing a categorically new, hybrid role: the orator-slave. Slavery played an important part in the conceptual apparatus of the Ciceronian rhetoric that Douglass absorbed: it conceived of oratory as a willing, temporary submission to the harms that were commonly associated with slavery. An explanation of the force of Douglass's oratory should begin with his translation of the orator-slave identification from the metaphorical to the literal plane. Drawing on Douglass's self-education in rhetorical discipline and artifice, an account of the symbolic uses of slavery in classical rhetoric, and Douglass's own oratory, I reconstruct his claim to embody classical rhetoric in a uniquely vivid way.