Sounding the Slavery Debates: The Sonic Writing of Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison

Abstract: This article details how Frederick Douglass intervened on an extant catalogue of sonic imagery, descriptive reproductions of various sonic qualities of antislavery declamation that were deployed by abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison with the intention of soliciting an affective response in the reader. Analyzing the aural language that suffuses The Narrative of Frederick Douglass, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?,” and The Heroic Slave, and comparing and contrasting Douglass’s use of this language that of Garrison, this article contends that Douglass’ distinct sonic interventions made audible the limitations of a political affinity predicated on the cultivation of preexisting antislavery sentiments. Douglass’s revisions to, and embellishments upon, prevailing sonic antislavery rhetoric afforded him a sensuous, affecting language for conveying the need for the radical reorientation of moderate Northern sensibilities towards the disavowed interiority of the enslaved.