Slavery and Oratory: Frederick Douglass in the History of Rhetoric

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.