“A Blending of Opposite Qualities”

This chapter focuses on the blending of Frederick Douglass’s seemingly dissimilar perspectives. It starts off with a personal anecdote about how Douglass watched a speech against the Irish Force Bill in England’s Parliament and noted how the speaker, William Gladstone, used a mixture of persuasive language and menacingly accusatory language. Douglass showed a similar duality in his perspectives as a slave and then a free man. The chapter looks closely at the many microrevisions Douglass made to the same topics and experiences in his various autobiographies to show his struggle with finding the terminology to express his blended view. His revisions indicate how Douglass increasingly paid attention to philosophical analysis as time went on and reveal a man trying to express his political thought with terminology that had not yet been created because prior thinkers did not have the experience of being a slave. The chapter ultimately addresses Douglass’s understanding of democratic citizenship.