“A Radical Revolution” in “Modes of Thought”: Mutual Acknowledgment and Collective Goal-Setting

Throughout his writings, Douglass appealed to temporal continuity in order to promote two intertwined democratic capacities: mutual acknowledgment and collective goal-setting. Mutual acknowledgment occurs when members recognize their political association as a collective inheritance, an outgrowth of a specific past which implicates them in present-day bonds of mutual obligation. Collective goal-setting refers to members’ recognition that their political activity takes place in light of, and in service to, a shared future which cannot be shaped democratically unless they act with a mind to the aspirations and perspectives of all their compatriots. For Douglass, acknowledgment and goal-setting required Americans not only to recognize the temporal continuity of their association, but to orient themselves toward it in specific and demanding ways: not only by recognizing the past's presence, in order to make demands for equality legible and compelling, but also by undertaking the future-facing transformations essential to achieving a genuine democracy.

The best-known component of Douglass's broader temporal democratic theory is his contention that American democracy was obstructed by white Americans’ failure to acknowledge the historical centrality of slavery. In an 1852 speech marking the anniversary of the Declaration of Independence (famous for its question, “What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July?”), Douglass worked to cultivate acknowledgment by revising the nation's commemoration of its founding moment. Although “commemorate” (from the Latin commemorāre) literally means to recount together, to be mindful and remember “in common,” Douglass showed that the nation's rituals actually impeded a genuinely common memory by excluding the experience and perspective of the slave. His response was to broaden the scope of the national “we” who participate in this politically loaded act of remembrance: “I shall see, this day, and its popular characteristics from the slave's point of view.” From that perspective, Douglass pointedly noted that the “the rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence, bequeathed by your fathers” was shared “by you, not by me.” To be clear, it was not the case that slaves had inherited nothing from the American “fathers”; rather, it was that for them, the inheritance of those same American political institutions meant something vastly different: “The sunlight that brought light and healing to you, has brought stripes and death to me.”Footnote ⁸

Douglass employs the language of inheritance to link past and present, thereby identifying and justifying bonds of political responsibility. “You have no right to enjoy a child's share in the labor of your fathers,” Douglass insists, “unless your children are to be blest by your labors. You have no right to wear out and waste the hard-earned fame of your fathers to cover your indolence.”Footnote ⁹ In order to earn the status that they themselves celebrated—as the worthy inheritors of free institutions—white Americans first had to acknowledge the lingering harms of the founding. Remarking that he has no need to recount “the great deeds of your fathers” to an audience familiar with their exploits, Douglass adds: “My business, if I have any here to-day, is with the present. . . . We have to do with the past only as we can make it useful to the present and to the future.”Footnote ¹⁰ To “do with the past,” for Douglass, was to understand and acknowledge its totality: Americans’ common inheritance contained the radically different experiences of freedom for some and slavery for others. In adopting the slave's perspective, Douglass deploys a cascade of second-person possessive pronouns that emphasize exclusion, distance, and separation from the national story—referring to “the birthday of your National Independence, and of your political freedom,” “your great deliverance,” and “your national life.”Footnote ¹¹ This invocation of distance—Douglass's “sad sense of the disparity between us”—is made explicit in the speech's climactic challenge: “What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence? Are the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice, embodied in that Declaration of Independence, extended to us?”Footnote ¹² Douglass's provisional answer is negative: “I am not included within the pale of this glorious anniversary! . . . This Fourth [of] July is yours, not mine.”Footnote ¹³

Yet despite this rhetorical invocation of division, Douglass's July 4th denunciation did not announce an impending civic divorce. To the contrary, he informed his audience that “notwithstanding the dark picture I have this day presented of the state of the nation, I do not despair of this country.”Footnote ¹⁴ In rejecting despair, he in no way retracted the serious allegation leveled at his audience: that in ignoring its full history, “America is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future.”Footnote ¹⁵ Rather, the speech summons listeners to incorporate slaves into a more inclusive vision of the American people. As Nolan Bennett has observed, Douglass's use of denunciation “hovers on a line between what the people were and who they can be.”Footnote ¹⁶ A temporal reading of the American demos links the acknowledgment of an unjust past to the achievement of a more just future, and so helps to draw that line. For all his castigation of its myopia, then, Douglass did not reject affiliation with American democracy. Placing his democratic hopes on a transformation of white Americans’ temporal perceptions, Douglass could not surrender his insistence on African Americans’ central (indeed, foundational) role in the nation's past, nor their rightful place in shaping its future.

The imperative of giving solid foundation to black claims for justice helps to explain Douglass's reliance on temporal framing to affirm his preference for affiliation over separatism, as well as his opposition to the idea of colonization. While colonization enjoyed support among many antebellum political leadersFootnote ¹⁷ skeptical that liberated slaves could ever share a country alongside white Americans,Footnote ¹⁸ Douglass viewed it as a denial of African Americans’ claim to a share in the American inheritance. As he argued in an 1851 speech: “I want to say on behalf of any negroes I have the honor to represent, that we have been with, still are with you, and mean to be with you to the end. . . . We have grown up with you, we have watered your soil with our tears, nourished it with our blood, tilled it with our hard hands. Why should we not stay here?”Footnote ¹⁹ Additionally, Douglass feared that the pessimism underlying colonization schemes threatened the social advancement of freed slaves. Explaining his view to a procolonization correspondent in 1856, Douglass argued that colonization would “extinguish the hope of ultimate elevation for the free negro in this Country,” would “unsettle all his plans of progress here,” and would “[rob] his future in this country of all that can gladden his heart and nerve him to manly endeavors.” For these reasons, he explained, “I can not do other than oppose the Colonization movement.”Footnote ²⁰ Douglass's temporal framing of the issue (“plans of progress”; “robs his future”; “we have been,” “still are,” “and mean to be . . . to the end”) informed his prescient commitment to a multiracial American democracy and incorporated the whole sweep of collective past and future into a diagnosis of the political present.

This diagnosis surpasses the comparatively limited modern view that reciprocity underwrites democracy's stability and reveals its implicit temporal structure. On this view, citizens who understand the shadow of the future to linger over their interactions have reason to peacefully accept defeat and demonstrate forbearance when they disagree. Danielle Allen, for example, contends that the “preeminent” democratic ritual is sacrifice, because democracies must frequently ask for citizens’ assent to decisions with which they disagree, or which may benefit others at their expense;Footnote ²¹ thus, she argues, citizens who comply “preserve the stability of political institutions,” offering a “sacrifice [which] makes collective democratic action possible.”Footnote ²² Willing sacrifice is underwritten by the possibility of future victory and the perception that other citizens will reciprocate: “People who offer up sacrifices do not do it for nothing; they always aim to engage equitable reciprocity.”Footnote ²³ Similarly, Ian Shapiro maintains that democracy is supported by the possibility that losers might someday enjoy victory, which encourages them to support a system in which they must occasionally experience defeat. In this way, Shapiro writes, democracies are sustained by “institutionalized uncertainty about the future.”Footnote ²⁴

While Douglass's understanding of democracy and temporality overlaps with this position, it envisions a more demanding civic psychology than is implied by mere reciprocity. Like reciprocity, the ideal of collective goal-setting evident in Douglass's writings associates democracy with a particularistic form of imagined futurity: when a demos deliberates, debates, bargains, and engages in all the practices that make up its decision-making process, its members do so in the light of what they all understand to be their shared fate. This presumes a stable set of participants who can credibly commit to collective action and fulfill those commitments over time. But whereas reciprocity may operate on an ultimately individualistic, self-referential logic (I may, for instance, peacefully accept electoral defeat in order to preserve the possibility of pursuing my own selfish goals in the long term), Douglass frequently portrays democratic politics as a collective enterprise which requires shared labor toward a common cause, for reasons that are largely public-spirited. Moreover, while an individual's reasons for engaging in reciprocal behavior need not rest on any particular stance toward, or knowledge of, the history of her demos, it was characteristic of Douglass to search, “by the light of the present, and by the experience of the past,” for guidance to “future condition[s],”Footnote ²⁵ even when uncertainties frustrated his attempts at prediction. As he said in 1882, “[Man] is a progressive being, and memory, reason, and reflection are the resources of his improvement. . . . I am, then, for remembering the past, for only out of the mists and shadows of the past may the thoughtful statesman read, with some degree of certainty, the probable events of the future.”Footnote ²⁶

The knowledge behind collective goal-setting is therefore not strategic and self-referential, but sociological and cultural. Some of his most suggestive remarks on this topic come from late 1862, in the wake of the announcement of the Emancipation Proclamation. Douglass insisted that a postslavery American future would require a transformed perspective on the collective American past, envisioning a monumental democratic task: “To-day we have to put down a stupendous rebellion. To-morrow we shall have to reconstruct the whole fabric of Southern society . . . then will come the time for the exercise of the highest of all human faculties. A profounder wisdom, a holier zeal, than belongs to the prosecution of war, will be required.”Footnote ²⁷ This “tremendous undertaking” required more than institutional reform, since the success of American institutions ultimately depended on the mindsets and attitudes of citizens: “The structure of the American Constitution and Government,” he argued, “imply the existence among the whole people of a fraternal good will, an earnest spirit of co-operation for the common good, a mutual dependence of all upon each and of each upon all.”Footnote ²⁸ While a despotic government demands “mere cold obedience,” a government that is “of, by and through the people” requires “a cordial co-operation,” for its “whole machinery is deranged when one of its parts fail[s] to perform its functions.”Footnote ²⁹

Douglass understood that “the conquered traitors” would not immediately cooperate in this way. “They must be set aside for a new class of men. . . . For this, we shall have to educate the people.” Douglass's demanding vision of civic education leaves no doubt that good will, cooperation, and mutual dependence were not vacant phrases gilding his rhetoric, but pillars of his democratic theory. These virtues could not serve their democratic functions unless they were imbued with content tailored to the circumstances of the United States, and especially the South. “The work before us,” he wrote, “is nothing less than a radical revolution in all the modes of thought which have flourished under the blighting slave system.” He warned that “neither the slave or the slaveholder can instantly throw off the sentiments inspired and ground into them by long years of tyranny on the one hand and of abject and cringing submission on the other.” Only with sustained effort would new mindsets and dispositions suited for an egalitarian future emerge: “Time, experience and culture must gradually bring society back to the normal condition from which long years of slavery have carried all under its iron sway.”Footnote ³⁰ It was not merely that a transformation away from what Nicholas Buccola has termed “the moral ecology of slavery”Footnote ³¹ was required in order to undertake what Douglass called the “arduous task of the future.”Footnote ³² It was that this new moral ecology had to be cultivated on the ruins of an oppressive, and widely misconstrued, past.

“The Past and the Time to Be Are One”: Disruptive Memory, Shared Futurity, and the Continuity of Democratic Peoplehood

Besides the contrast with reciprocity, in what respects does this account distinguish Douglass from contemporary theorists? His emphasis on the inheritance of institutions marked by slavery finds expression in Stephen Best and Saidiya Hartman's suggestion that the United States may still today reside in the “time” of slavery, and in their connection between slavery's history and the “contemporary predicament of freedom,” the “foreseeable futures” of which are “still tethered to” the past.Footnote ³³ Similarly, Douglass's concerns are partly captured in Charles Mills's idea of a “white temporal imaginary”: “multi-faceted and multi-dimensional in its consequences, structuring social affect as well as social cognition, and helping to constitute exclusionary gated moral communities protected by temporal, no less than spatial, walls.”Footnote ³⁴ Sharon Stanley has observed that the idea of “a living past, one that forever feeds the present and the future,” dismantles such temporal walls, since it “rules out” narratives of sharp historical discontinuity.Footnote ³⁵ Rejecting narratives of sharp discontinuity makes it impossible to sustain simplistic accounts of a new, postracial era; moreover, such rejections have furnished theorists with encouraging democratic resources and informed a revival of interest in reparations activism. Lawrie Balfour, for example, contends that “reparations politics does not just reiterate the importance of knowing one's history or even coming to terms with it, but it also points to a way of reconceiving society's relationship to the past”; in this sense, “one might alternatively see reparations activism as a way of unsettling the prevailing construction of past, present, and future” and “as a resource for imagining new futures.”Footnote ³⁶ Borrowing a distinction from Robert Westley, Balfour suggests that we might view the force of claims to justice as compounding, rather than diminishing, over time—understanding “the past as prologue,” rather than dismissing “the past as bygone.”Footnote ³⁷

Douglass's political thought anticipates such arguments about historical memory, including the subject of bygones—a topic on which his views were especially pointed. “You will have already perceived,” he told an audience in 1885, “that I am not of that school of thinkers which teaches us to let by-gones be by-gones; to let the dead past bury its dead. In my view, there are no by-gones in the world, and the past is not dead, and cannot die. The evil, as well as the good that men do, lives after them. . . . The poet and the seer to whom all avenues of truth are open, tell us that the past and the time to be are one, and that both are Now.”Footnote ³⁸ As in his speech on the meaning of July 4th and his reflections on the democratic functions of good will and cooperation, we here find Douglass draping elegant rhetoric over an unyielding critique. Packing his speech with poetical allusions to Longfellow, Shakespeare, and John Greenleaf Whittier, he does not simply refuse to forget the past in the name of reconciliation; he denies altogether that the “past” is a distinct era, collapsing it into the future, and both of them into “Now.” Critics, then and now, have alleged that arguments like these unhelpfully resurrect old animosities, miring societies in the past rather than helping them imagine new and better futures. Douglass acknowledged that remembrance may provoke civic acrimony, but he regarded such acrimony as evidence of unfinished democratic labor. As Jason Frank has observed, “In contrast to self-congratulatory narratives of historical reconciliation, Douglass offers a narrative of the American past that equates its full comprehension with ever-emergent forms of transformative democratic action and ‘unsettlement.’”Footnote ³⁹

As an episode from Douglass's life shows, not all who are wary of such unsettlement can simply be dismissed as guilty of complacency or bad faith. Even the antislavery US senator Charles Sumner—who in his era was, as Eric Foner writes, “perhaps the most principled egalitarian in Congress”Footnote ⁴⁰—repeatedly proposed, during and after the Civil War, that the names of battles be omitted from regimental colors, on the grounds that reminders of Union victory were likely to delay the work of national healing.Footnote ⁴¹ For this suggestion, Sumner was censured by his home state's legislature, a move that Douglass's newspaper at the time, The New National Era, referred to as a “Disgraceful Step.” Nonetheless, Douglass did not share Sumner's position on national unity and memory.

Douglass revisited the topic in 1882, acknowledging that “the doctrine of forgiveness and forgetfulness has been adopted by many of the noblest and most intelligent men of our country,” but declaring himself “wholly unable to accept it,” not out of a wish “to fan the flames of sectional animosity,” but rather out of a desire to “remember the causes, the incidents, and the results of the late rebellion.”Footnote ⁴³

A revised historical perspective does not, of course, dictate an exact policy of racial justice; for his part, Douglass seems to have been sympathetic to reparations, although he expressed skepticism, possibly on pragmatic grounds, toward Thaddeus Stevens's proposal to confiscate and redistribute Confederate lands.Footnote ⁴⁴ The point is rather that in order to have a clear discussion about such issues in the first place, a demos must engage in reflection about the historical perspectives which inform its public debate. Douglass understood that these acts of reflection are unsettling and contentious precisely because they always contain the latent possibility of redefining the demos.

In these ways, Douglass's temporal thinking anticipates and supplements contemporary scholarship on democracy, time, and memory. Yet it also advances a more controversial claim which, by connecting temporal continuity to a substantive account of democratic peoplehood, challenges other recent work in democratic theory. For Douglass, temporal continuity not only shaped how citizens should relate to each other; it also helped to demarcate the scope of the demos. His political thought demonstrates a keen sensitivity to the risks of delinking the scope of the imagined demos from that of the actual citizenry—in contrast to recent proposals which envision democracy apart from the ideal of a demos that is, and imagines itself to be, continuous over time. But what are the implications of such a delinking? Douglass's theory offers a bracing response: the disruption of a particular demos's temporal continuity—a drastic break in its ability to imagine a shared past or future—at minimum obstructs the achievement of democracy, and may well justify a breakup of the demos and the reestablishment of a new, separate polity.

Departing from this view, many contemporary theorists propose models of inclusion and schemes of decision-making that would entail regular disruptions of the demos, undermining its temporal continuity. For example, proponents of all-coerced or all-affected theories of democratic inclusion advocate processes of decision-making which imply an episodically constituted demos, rather than a stable group engaged in an ongoing project through which it collectively controls the conditions of its common life.Footnote ⁴⁵ Arash Abizadeh's defense of an all-coerced principle maintains, for example, that “political power is legitimate only insofar as its exercise is mutually justified by and to those subject to it,” meaning that democratic theory's “principle of legitimation extends as far as practices of mutual justification can go, which is to say that the demos is in principle unbounded.”Footnote ⁴⁶ In practice, this unbounded theory of democratic inclusion would generate demoi which constantly vary in composition. As Sarah Song observes, “What the affected interests and coercion principles actually require is different demoi for different decisions. Who will be affected or coerced by any single decision will vary from decision to decision, and as a result, democratic boundaries are not fixed but constantly changing.”Footnote ⁴⁷ For Song this would present “a serious problem of indeterminacy”—a world in which “the lion's share of democratic contestation would likely be devoted to determining who ought to have a say rather than to the policy issues at hand.”Footnote ⁴⁸ Similarly, Nancy Fraser observes that since “one can adduce empirical evidence that just about everyone is affected by just about everything,” and since neither empirical social-scientific evidence nor the all-affected principle can “identify morally relevant social relations,” the all-affected principle “falls prey to the reductio ad absurdum of the butterfly effect.”Footnote ⁴⁹

Notably, this temporal discontinuity would remain even if such indeterminacy problems could be solved. On Douglass's account, this would come at a cost: it is the durability of political boundaries that enables citizens to articulate claims on one another, since those claims are justified by reference to their shared inheritance and perpetuation of common institutions. The difficulties of attaining mutual acknowledgment and setting goals collectively would therefore vary according to the volatility of the demos's episodic composition, since demoi of perpetually shifting boundaries neither inherit a common past nor share in a common future.Footnote ⁵⁰ All-coerced and all-affected principles could avoid some of these problems if the political knowledge members needed in order to make a democratic decision were essentially self-referential—that is, if individuals needed only to consult their own interests and preferences in order to participate in a collective decision. But as I noted above, Douglass's thought resists this step: he believed that the “machinery” of democracy requires not simply self-referential knowledge, but “fraternal good will, an earnest spirit of co-operation for the common good, [and] a mutual dependence of all upon each and of each upon all.”Footnote ⁵¹

Douglass's theory thus entails a demanding isomorphism between state boundaries and the boundaries of the collectively imagined demos. This provision bears directly on contemporary debates over racial integration, and its logic is detectable in Elizabeth Anderson's recent callFootnote ⁵² for racial integration motivated by nationalized political co-identification. Integration, writes Anderson, is an imperative of justice that “requires the construction of a superordinate group identity, a ‘we,’ from the perspective of which cooperative goals are framed”Footnote ⁵³—an update of Douglass's “new class of men” who would be tasked with the development of a “new relation of liberty.”Footnote ⁵⁴ Employing temporally inflected language reminiscent of Douglass, Anderson argues that “the integrated ‘us’ . . . is the critical agent of racial justice that most urgently awaits deeper and richer construction.”Footnote ⁵⁵

Anderson's critics have expressed skepticism toward such calls for national identification. Tommie Shelby, for instance, has responded that it may be “entirely appropriate” for oppressed groups “to withhold some allegiance to the nation and to invest more in cultivating solidarity and mutual aid within the group,” postponing “full identification with and loyalty to the nation” until such identification arises naturally, as a result of the broader nation's sustained “commitment to equal justice by removing the unfair burdens on the oppressed.”Footnote ⁵⁶ Similarly, Stanley argues that in calling for an integrated civic identity “invested with fellow feeling,” Anderson “begs the question of where this fellow feeling actually comes from.”Footnote ⁵⁷ Stanley claims that “we may well be putting the cart before the horse” by asking citizens without experience in integrated spaces “to forge [at the national level] comparable bonds of solidarity” to those they already feel in their communities.Footnote ⁵⁸ Rather, we should imagine integration as an ongoing process-in-time, understanding solidarity “as constantly in flux for each citizen” while also promoting a normative conception of membership that seeks “the willing acceptance that one also belongs to a larger whole, to a democratic nation,” where “responsible citizenship . . . requires one to develop an understanding of the perspectives of unfamiliar groups, rooted in their different historical experiences and the different structural positions they occupy in the greater society.”Footnote ⁵⁹ Stanley acknowledges that “this vision maintains residential clustering,” but she argues that “one can well imagine the creation of a new sense of solidarity to the diverse region as a whole built on top of, but not replacing, more localized solidarities.”Footnote ⁶⁰

In understanding solidarity as a process-in-time—its plausibility shaped by history, its possibility lying somewhere in the future—these proposals exhibit a sensitivity, which Douglass would share, to the temporally conditioned nature of democratic capacities. But they do not share Douglass's strong sense that an account of temporal continuity constitutes a theory of democratic peoplehood. For Douglass, to insist on the place of African Americans in the nation's history and their rightful role in its future was simultaneously to assert a form of identification with the nation. For that reason, his account of democratic progress entailed the willingness of citizens to imagine their collectivity in historical terms and to identify with their fellow citizens on a national scale. Insofar as members of a demos inherit a common set of institutions through which they rule each other and perpetuate a shared future, they form (on Douglass's terms) an association that circumscribes democratic practices of mutual acknowledgment and goal-setting. To the extent that sub- or supracivic solidarity is prioritized over such identification, those democratic capacities are undermined.

By putting limits on their advocacy of affective and/or spatial separatism, contemporary skeptics of national identification occasionally adopt a weak version of this conclusion. Consider, for instance, Stanley's argument that while it would be premature to ask polity-wide solidarity of some citizens, democracies still need a “willing acceptance” from citizens that they belong to a larger whole.Footnote ⁶¹ In such accounts, solidarity as a process-in-time is proposed as a means of closing the gap between (predominantly local) forms of present-day identification and some form of national solidarity that awaits achievement in the future. But this spatial/temporal distinction—between local-present and national-future—risks indefinitely restricting the scope of collective goal-setting that, for Douglass, is already a prerequisite of genuine democracy, even under conditions of oppression. Even in the grim years after Reconstruction's end, Douglass warned that if Americans, including African Americans, limited their solidarity to some smaller portion of the demos, they would fail to engage in inclusive processes of mutual acknowledgment and collective goal-setting: “When we thus isolate ourselves we say to those around us, ‘We have nothing in common with you,’ and, very naturally, the reply of our neighbors is in the same tone and to the same effect.” For this reason, he regarded local forms of separatism with suspicion: “A nation within a nation is an anomaly. There can be but one American nation under the American government, and we are Americans. The constitution of the country makes us such, and our lines of activity should accord with our citizenship.” While he acknowledged that in certain cases, hostile circumstances warranted a certain degree of separatism, he nonetheless insisted that “these circumstances should only be yielded to the least practicable extent,” concluding that “our policy should be to unite with the great mass of the American people in all their activities and resolve to fall or flourish with our common country.”Footnote ⁶²

Although this aspirationally nationalist conception of a multiracial American democracy may seem to distance Douglass from what are sometimes regarded as more radical visions of racial justice, his argument implies sweeping psychological transformations among the demos—and far-reaching changes to the polity, should the cultivation of mutual acknowledgment and collective goal-setting prove impossible. To be sure, Douglass frequently affirmed his commitment to “fall or flourish” with the broader United States. But this preference for integrationist affiliation over separatism and colonization ultimately depended on his beliefs about the possible futures of American democracy. When those underlying beliefs changed, his political strategy changed as well.

“A Trip to Hayti,” “A Tremendous Revolution in All Things,” and the Consequences of Despair

I illustrate this by reading a suggestive moment in Douglass's career: an episode around the time of Lincoln's inauguration in 1861, during which he came to despair of a racially egalitarian future in the United States and briefly wavered on his long-standing opposition to colonization. Rather than treating this temporary shift on colonization as evidence of inconsistency, I reconstruct it as consistent with—indeed, as arising from—the temporal structure of his account of American democracy. When he briefly seemed to contemplate dissociation from the United States, Douglass was not simply reversing himself. Rather, his brief shift follows from his understanding of the temporally conditioned nature of democratic peoplehood. For Douglass, the democratic response to the impossibility of solidarity is not limited separatism within the broader polity, but mass exit and the establishment of a new polity. Viewed against the backdrop of his temporal democratic theory, Douglass's rapidly shifting views on colonization in the spring of 1861 reveal a challenging thinker whose underlying democratic theory remains consistent. That theory imposes profound democratic labor on citizens—or else demands that they follow, to their logical and drastic conclusion, the implications of political despair.

Between the secession winter of 1860 and the arrival of war the following spring, events moved too quickly for Douglass and his Monthly. In the decade before Fort Sumter, Douglass had been a prominent opponent of colonization proposals, scorning the skeptical view that white Americans and freed slaves could not inhabit a shared country. But after a series of setbacks in the mid-1850s—the Kansas-Nebraska Act (1854), the Dred Scott ruling (1857), and an increase in forthright proslavery ideology among Southerners—even this leading opponent of colonization moved closer to the pessimistic predictions on which the movement was premised.Footnote ⁶³

In the wake of these dispiriting developments, Douglass was initially energized by the secession crisis following the 1860 presidential election: at last, Southern intransigence seemed likely to catalyze a too-long-delayed confrontation with the Slave Power. Convinced that Northern politicians must rise to the conflict, Douglass was disheartened by the conciliatory tone of Lincoln's inaugural address in March 1861. The new president appealed to national friendship between North and South, emphasizing his disinclination to interfere with slavery where it already existed. Such rhetoric, wrote Douglass in the April 1861 issue of Douglass’ Monthly, was not only “vastly below what we had fondly hoped it might be”;Footnote ⁶⁴ it was a delusional attempt to disclaim the reality of the situation, a reality that both abolitionists and slaveholders now recognized: “No class of men in the country understand better than the rebels themselves the nature of the business on which they are engaged.”Footnote ⁶⁵ If the president was unwilling to confront the Slave Power even as the Union faced existential crisis, the future was far bleaker than Douglass had realized. This mounting frustration explains the otherwise surprising appearance, in the spring of 1861, of a Douglass’ Monthly essay modestly titled “A Trip to Hayti.” Douglass announced his plans to leave for Haiti around April 25, not only to “enjoy its delightful and soothing climate,”Footnote ⁶⁶ but to witness firsthand a polity whose existence refuted the familiar insistence that an “inferior race” could never govern itself.

Explaining the trip, he referred to recent shifts in his temporally driven thinking. “During the last few years,” he acknowledged, “the minds of the free colored people in all the States have been deeply exercised in relation to what may be their future in the United States.” As they came to realize that their hardships were likely to worsen, black Americans were increasingly likely to turn to an option Douglass had once vehemently rejected: “we propose to act in view of the settled fact that many of them are already resolved to look for homes beyond the boundaries of the United States, and that most of their minds are turned towards Hayti.”Footnote ⁶⁷ Douglass had at times in the past attempted to cast Haiti as a partial exception to his general opposition to African-American emigration. But as David Blight notes, Douglass “admitted that the real reasons for emigration were that blacks faced an apparently bleak future in America.”Footnote ⁶⁸ Douglass's political thought in the 1850s had rested on a rejection of this pessimistic conclusion, but in the early spring of 1861, before the war's beginning, that position had become difficult to sustain.Footnote ⁶⁹

However, just as he had announced this evolution in his thinking, events shifted anew. After the issue had gone to press, news arrived of the attack on Fort Sumter and the outbreak of war. Lincoln's appeal to national friendship had proved ineffectual, and at once, Douglass's view of the future changed again.Footnote ⁷⁰ His essay was suddenly obsolete. Canceling his trip to Haiti, Douglass printed this surprising addendum directly beneath the conclusion of the article: “Since this article upon Hayti was put in type, we find ourselves in circumstances which induce us to forego our much desired trip to Hayti, for the present. The last ten days have made a tremendous revolution in all things pertaining to the possible future of the colored people of the United States. . . . At any rate, this is no time for us to leave the country.”Footnote ⁷¹ Douglass's confident predictions of the early 1850s had informed his opposition to emigration. His willingness to contemplate emigration grew alongside his pessimism and reached its apex at his most acute moment of despair. Then, another turn of events produced another shift in his politics, as war portended “a tremendous revolution in all things pertaining to the possible future.” Douglass had spent the 1850s trying to reform Americans’ understanding of their national past, in order to shape a different and more democratic future. At the same time, the shifting horizon of possible futures altered his political strategies in the present.

Douglass's proposal to visit Haiti occurred after events had drawn his political thinking to conclusions he had previously denounced as the product of despair. By “despair,” Douglass referred to an affective state shaped by a political context. His celebration of the Emancipation Proclamation refers to the agonizing wait during Lincoln's “slothful deliberation,” when “the loyal heart was near breaking with despair,” and his advocacy of activism against difficult odds rests on the insistence that despair is not justified so long as political action remains possible.Footnote ⁷² “The gates of reason are still open to us; and, while we may speak and vote, we need not despair,” he declared in 1883.Footnote ⁷³

In other words, although despair is, like sadness or anger, a negative affect, it is not negativity per se that explains Douglass's newfound willingness in the spring of 1861 to countenance emigration. Instead, the shift can be seen as the product of a change in Douglass's perception of politics-in-time: Despair is distinguished from other negative emotions by its essential predictive element. Informed by an understanding of the past which shapes expectations about the range of possible futures, it captures the resignation accompanying one's conclusion that circumstances will not be changed. Sadness or anger may be firmly rooted in the present, but despair looks with hopelessness toward tomorrow. For as long as his politics had been informed by his confidence in the ultimate downfall of slavery, Douglass was able to endorse a strategy of engagement with the final goal of incorporation. In 1853, amid what Blight has called a “revival of colonizationist fervor,”Footnote ⁷⁴ Douglass declared: “Sir, I am not for going any where. I am for staying precisely where I am, in the land of my birth. . . . Let not the colored man despair then. Let him remember that a home, a country, a nationality, are all attainable this side of Liberia.”Footnote ⁷⁵ In 1894, he reiterated the point: “But the worse thing, perhaps, about this colonization nonsense is, that it tends to throw over the negro a mantle of despair. It leads him to doubt the possibility of his progress as an American citizen.”Footnote ⁷⁶ As it had forty years prior, Douglass's depiction of despair revealed a temporal, processual understanding of democracy (the “possibility of . . . progress as an American citizen”).

This underappreciated aspect of Douglass's political thought illuminates an important consistency in what is otherwise viewed as a striking aberration. Blight, for instance, introduces the episode this way: “A discouraged, even floundering Douglass all but reversed one of his long-standing positions by the spring of 1861.”Footnote ⁷⁷ Douglass was, by his own admission, discouraged in the months leading up to the Civil War. Nonetheless, as a democratic theorist, he did not, for a brief moment in 1861, drop his belief in the temporal nature of democratic peoplehood. Rather, what changed was his ability to believe in a democratic future for African Americans in the United States. Douglass had rejected emigration as inconsistent with African Americans’ place in the American past; as an abandonment of their political obligations in the present; and as incompatible with a free and egalitarian American future. When he lost faith in that final element—the prospect of a democratic future in the United States—his response was to search for it elsewhere. In a polity where nonwhites could self-govern, African Americans would achieve the democratic self-rule that seemed increasingly unachievable in America. The same temporal theory that had inspired a policy of national affiliation now informed a new (if short-lived) interest in colonization. As Hooker notes, “black fugitive commitments are most evident during those moments when Douglass despairs about the U.S.”Footnote ⁷⁸

The foregoing partly accords with Robyn Marasco's contention that despair is “a historical condition and a social situation,” and not simply “another name for unhappiness.”Footnote ⁷⁹ Questioning the view that “the politics of despair can only be reaction or resignation from the world,” Marasco refigures it “not as pathology or paralysis, but in connection with the passions of critique and the energies of everyday life,”Footnote ⁸⁰ as a “dynamic and restless passion that keeps things moving.”Footnote ⁸¹ In contrast, Douglass did indeed understand despair as linked (in certain respects) to resignation and paralysis; his speeches frequently exhort audiences to avoid it, in order that they might remain politically active. He worried that despair would encourage a sense of futility and withdrawal, and in this way prove a self-fulfilling prophecy that threatened the cause of racial equality. Yet in another sense (one that aligns with Marasco's understanding of despair's potential vitality), Douglass's moment of deepest despair did indeed inspire a motivation to “keep things moving,” but in a separate, reconstituted demos.

In this respect, Douglass's encounter with despair did not amount to a hopeless abandonment of political effort. Rather, it was a historically and sociologically informed judgment about the impossibility of democratic progress within the United States. Haiti allowed Douglass to imagine the pursuit of democracy in a different polity as a genuine possibility. “Our American press and American people, slaveholders and slave traders and all, are particularly anxious to make Haiti appear before the world as feeble, indolent, and falling to decay,” he noted in 1850.Footnote ⁸² But Haiti was “the theatre of many stirring events and heroic achievements, the work of a people, bone of our bone, and flesh of our flesh,”Footnote ⁸³ and this feature of his situation—the existence of a concrete, definite elsewhere, “the only self-made Black Republic in the world”Footnote ⁸⁴—makes it possible to see clearly the stakes of his temporal democratic theory. Throughout most of his career, Douglass was led by the logic of that theory to pursue liberation not on terms of disaffiliation, but rather, as Juliet Hooker writes, by seeking “the refoundation of the U.S. polity on more egalitarian terms . . . based on an expansive notion of multiraciality that would decenter whiteness to an extent that arguably has not been achieved to this day.”Footnote ⁸⁵ Although the reactionary politics of the late 1850s and the possibility of emigration forced Douglass to question whether he could still insist on a place in the American demos, the outbreak of war renewed that commitment.Footnote ⁸⁶ We should therefore think of Douglass's despair as replacing (however briefly) an apparently hopeless American future with a more promising Haitian one, one which kept his democratic aspirations alive. In this way, Douglass's seemingly drastic shift away from integration and American nationalism emerges as an understandable conclusion consistent with the architecture of his democratic theory. For Douglass, genuine democracy required citizens to cultivate past-facing and future-facing capacities suited to their common association, or else it required them to admit that the impossibility of cultivating those capacities entailed disbanding that association.