Frederick Douglass: Freedom's Voice, 1818-1845. - Review - book review

African American Review, Spring, 2000 by Leslie R. Miller

Gregory P. Lampe. Frederick Douglass: Freedom's Voice, 1818-1845. East Lansing: Michigan State UP, 1998. 350 pp. $45.00 cloth/$22.95 paper.

Frederick Douglass: Freedom's Voice, 1818-1845, is an ambitious first manuscript by Gregory P. Lampe--ambitious not for its sweeping narrative, but for its revisionist claims. Lampe asks his readers to rethink their conceptualization of Douglass's preparation for his oratorical career as an abolitionist, but while Lampe presents a thought-provoking reading of Douglass's life from his earliest years through 1841, he also overstates his revisionist claims and does not provide adequate credit to recent scholars of Douglass, such as William S. McFeely, who have at least in part shared a similar understanding of Douglass. For the years 1841 through 1845, Lampe provides a more detailed narrative and corrects the record of Douglass's daily abolitionist activities.

Lampe argues that students and scholars of Douglass have uncritically believed that Douglass was unprepared for his career as a public speaker when he became an abolitionist lecturer. By carefully tracing Douglass's experiences in slavery and the first few years of "freedom," Lampe reveals a number of important developments in his training. Through his listening to secular storytelling, religious preaching, slave songs, and spirituals, Douglass became educated in the oral tradition of slave culture. His move to Baltimore as a young child opened the door to literacy, and he was introduced to the influential Columbian Orator from which he began to learn not only the art of public speaking, but also anti-slavery arguments. According to Lampe, the key to understanding Douglass's strength as an orator is to remember that Douglass utilized lessons from both traditions, the oral tradition of slave culture and the classical rhetorical tradition. It was also during his years as a slave in Maryland that Douglass's for mal conversion to Christianity not only shaped his psyche, but also provided him with the opportunity to listen to white and black preachers and gain practical experience as a teacher.

Douglass's experiences during his first three years after fleeing slavery are also central to understanding the extent and nature of his pre-1841 training as an orator and abolitionist. Soon after his arrival in New Bedford, Massachusetts, Douglass became a leader in the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church. He eventually became a licensed preacher, which provided Douglass with access to his first formal training as a public speaker. He also became active in the New Bedford abolitionist movement. Through his interaction with black religious leaders and abolitionists, Douglass gained skills and confidence as a race leader as well as an orator and an abolitionist. It is within this context of religious and abolitionist activities, Lampe argues, that we need to understand Douglass's introduction to the famed abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison. Douglass was not a blank slate when he first heard Garrison speak and read his abolitionist newspaper The Liberator. "His identity both as an orator and an abolitioni st was established well before he heard Garrison speak." Yet Garrison's influence cannot be denied either, as Lampe himself asserts: "In essence, the Liberator became Douglass' textbook on abolition and Garrison became his teacher."

Proof of the importance of Douglass's independent thinking and development as an orator as well as the influence of Garrisonian thought comes to light in Lampe's discussion of Douglass's first months on the abolitionist tour. Within weeks of his entry into the abolitionist circuit, not only did Douglass speak of his personal experiences as a slave, but he also discussed a number of other issues, including the proslavery preachings of the church and racial prejudice in the North, subjects important to him not because he was a Garrisonian abolitionist but because he had been a slave and he experienced the North as a black man. His independent thinking and his discussion of a variety of subjects provide a more accurate picture of Douglass's position in the movement from the beginning. It was only over time, Lampe suggests, that Douglass became increasingly Garrisonian in his approach to abolitionism, although he never became an unquestioning voice for Garrison's arguments.

The vast majority of Lampe's work focuses on expounding and improving the record of Douglass's abolitionist activities from August 1841 through August 1845. Lampe persuasively demonstrates that many of Douglass's abolitionist activities in these years have not been adequately researched and examined. Through Lampe's use of texts of speeches and, when necessary (which is often), recorded reactions to speeches and published accounts of anti-slavery meetings, readers can understand the importance of Douglass to the anti-slavery movement in the early 1840s and his increasingly sophisticated presentation of the abolitionist message. Through Lampe's narrative one gets a sense of the grueling and at times dangerous life on the abolitionist lecture circuit and the conflicts that brewed between factions of abolitionists and among Garrisonian activists. Through his meticulous research Lampe discovered two previously unpublished speeches by Douglass from 1844 and a number of errors in the published record of Douglass's abolitionist activities. These speeches and his more accurate itinerary for the years 1839 through 1845 appear in a series of appendices.