SOURCE: Wohlpart, A. James. “Privatized Sentiment and the Institution of Christianity: Douglass's Ethical Stance in the Narrative.” American Transcendental Quarterly 9, no. 3 (September 1995): 181-94.

[In the following essay, Wohlpart suggests that Douglass's relationship to Christianity is more complicated than many critics believe, suggesting that in the Narrative the author operates within accepted religious discourse while at the same time subverting it.]

In his “Introduction” to Critical Essays on Frederick Douglass, published in 1991, William L. Andrews rightly concludes in relation to the 1845 version of Douglass's autobiography that the primary critical debate in the 1980s was whether or not the Narrative signifies “Douglass's mastery of literary discourse—or its mastery of him …” (10). Several positions have been staked out in relation to this question, the first of which, exhibited in the readings of Wilson J. Moses, Valerie Smith and Houston A. Baker, Jr., holds that the hegemonic (i.e., white, Protestant, abolitionist) discourse co-opts Douglass in his attempt to write his identity. Moses, attempting to unravel Douglass's motivations for using certain oratory and literary forms (including, primarily, confinement to black vernacular and the slave narrative), concludes that Douglass's “life as a literary creation was a market commodity,” forcing him into prescribed and socially accepted modes of self-presentation (69). Valerie Smith likewise concludes that Douglass remains trapped “by the very rhetorical and ideological structures he seeks to undermine”; because he attempts to define his identity based on white manhood, he “lends credence to the patriarchal structure largely responsible for his oppression” (26-27).

Houston A. Baker, in his essay “Autobiographical Acts and the Voice of the Southern Slave,” most fully develops this position, demonstrating how, “In recovering the details of his past … the autobiographer shows a progression from baffled and isolated existent to Christian abolitionist, lecturer and writer. The self in the autobiographical moment … however, seems unaware of the limitations that have accompanied this progress” (102). Baker concludes that, in Douglass's move from private to public figure, he necessarily subjects his autobiographical self to “linguistic codes, literary conventions, and audience expectations” which deny that self “the authentic voice of black American slavery” (104). In direct opposition to such readings, several critics have attempted to demonstrate the way in which Douglass uses literary and linguistic devices to subvert the hegemonic discourse of his society and his literary project. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., suggests that Douglass, in exploring the relationship between a series of antitheses or binary oppositions, demonstrates that the discourse of white, Protestant society is a cultural artifice and is thus arbitrary, not natural: “There exists always the danger, Douglass seems to say, that the meanings of nonlinguistic signs will seem ‘natural’; one must view them with a certain detachment to see that their meanings are in fact merely the ‘products’ of a certain culture, the result of shared assumptions and conventions” (92). Similarly, Raymond Hedin details the way in which Douglass reverses important aspects of the expected literary forms of his audience; in offering a purified character (to subvert the roguish picaro of the expected form) and in refusing to bring his narrative to some sense of closure, Douglass, Hedin suggests, subverts the discourse of his readers.

In direct reaction to these two types of readings, both of which focus on the primacy of language and literacy, several critics have offered a position which attempts to stand both inside and outside the boundaries of the debate. Thad Ziolkowski outlines what he considers the “internal dialectic” of the Narrative, a conflict within and about the text's “project of representation that occurs between the spectacle of violences (both physical and symbolic) and the acquisition of literacy” (164). Ziolkowski suggests that in opposing unrepresentable violence to literary representation, Douglass operates both inside and outside the hegemonic discourse of his society, finally offering the “autobiographical ‘I’” as “an interface mediating [these] antitheses” (164). Ann Kibbey and Michele Stepto likewise describe the role of violence in the text, noting how violence operates as the enforcer of the master's language; in fighting Covey, Douglass takes control of the foundation of this language: “Douglass declares within slavery, and in defiance of it, his own indivisible individuality as a human being. He returns to the slaveholder the signifiers of slavery in the only form that an overseer can understand: the physical act” (184).

A detailed rehearsal of this criticism is significant to my reading for two reasons. First, I would like to note that constant to all of these interpretations is the unquestioned nature of religion and ethics, the assumption that some undefined American Christianity is an inseparable aspect of the language of Douglass's society. I do not mean to suggest that these critics never discuss religion or Douglass's attitude towards American Christianity. Rather, I am suggesting that any such discussion is subordinated to a discussion of literacy and language and thus does not attempt to analyze Douglass's use of Christianity in and of itself. Second, I would like to note that those few critics who do question the nature of Douglass's religious and moral message parallel the first two groups of critics outlined above, suggesting only that Douglass either is co-opted by the Christian framework in which he operates or subverts this framework. Critics have yet to suggest the possibility that Douglass might operate, as Ziolkowski and Kibbey and Stepto suggest he does in relation to the question of literacy, both inside and outside the boundaries of American Christianity. Indeed, it is the efficacy of this third position that I hope to describe in this paper, detailing the way in which Douglass develops an ethical stance that will at once challenge both the institution of slavery and the institution of Christianity.

In relation to the question of religion, the first critical position is represented in the reading of Vincent Harding, who suggests that American Christianity entirely co-opted Douglass's attempt to transform the slave system. In There Is a River, Harding claims that Douglass fails to indict American institutions, including religious institutions, that perpetuate slavery: “it was not the call to armed insurrection which was the hallmark of antebellum black radicalism, but a careful, sober capacity to see the entire American government, and the institutions and population which it represented, as the basic foe of any serious black struggle …” (200). Harding painstakingly details the way in which Douglass fails to offer such a vision in the Narrative, describing Douglass's religious convictions as a two-edged sword: “On the one hand, it had a profoundly strengthening effect, allowing Douglass to maintain himself in the midst of discouraging realities. But it also held the possibility of blinding him to the ultimate harshness of those realities, decreasing the sense of need to face them and organize against them with more than hope and faith, without losing either” (148). Thus, one edge of this sword suggested the absolute equality of all human beings and the immorality of the institution of slavery while the other edge suggested a passive faith in a divine providence that curtailed the necessity of radical human action. Such passivity, Harding concludes, rendered Douglass's attack on slavery inefficacious. In opposition to Harding, Sharon Carson and Lisa Margaret Zeitz emphasize Douglass's strong critique of “American Christianity” and his assertion of his own religious authority; Carson concludes that Douglass's Narrative is his call to testify and demonstrates his claim to “divine authority and religious sanctification for not only his opposition to slavery, but more important, for his own life, for his self-definition over and against any other definitions proffered to him by white society” (22). Rather than co-optation by Christianity, Carson and Zeitz suggest that Douglass subverts orthodox readings of slavery.¹

The recent close analysis of the role and status of the Christian religion in Douglass's 1845 Narrative has, so far, like the first two types of interpretations of the role of literacy and language, remained within the system, suggesting only the possibility that Douglass resides firmly inside the Christian framework of his culture, either to be co-opted by that framework or to subvert it. What I would like to suggest is that Douglass, in defining the ethical stance he would use to critique the slave system, operated both inside and outside the institution of Christianity. As I will demonstrate, Douglass understood the necessity of reacting against American Christianity because of its ability to co-opt the slave, defining the slave as nonhuman and indeed deserving enslavement. Douglass realized that the Protestant religion of America, as an institution, was corrupt because of its participation in and propagation of slavery. Indeed, as Kenneth Stampp notes, many slave masters “considered Christian indoctrination an effective method of keeping slaves docile and contented” (156). Yet Douglass also knew the necessity of maintaining an ethical and moral stance against the slave system and thus educed an ethics which, while derivative of the Christian religion, imperatively operated on a private and individual level in asserting the primacy of feelings and affections.

During the 1830s and 1840s, several Christian churches reversed earlier anti-slavery positions and either abrogated their duty in relation to abolishing the slave system or accepted slavery as not only an economic but also a moral imperative. According to Stampp, “In the eighteenth century and early nineteenth century, southern Baptists and Methodists exhibited considerable anti-slavery sentiment”; by the 1830s, however, “the southern wings of these churches changed their positions” insisting that “slavery had divine sanction, that insolence was as much an offense against God as against the temporal master” (157-58).² Central to the argument that denominations like the Methodists and Baptists offered for supporting slavery was a specific reading of the Bible, one which suggested that Africans, because of their color, were descendants of either Cain (thus, their color was the “mark of Cain”) or Ham (in which case their color was the mark of the curse of Ham). Because of this lineage, these Christian churches claimed, the black, heathenistic African was meant to be a servant to his or her white, Christian master.

Yet, as Douglass would have known, the reading of scripture to support slavery within American Churches was challenged, in some few northern Churches, with a counter reading and critique. In May of 1845, Wendell Phillips delivered a speech, later reprinted in William Lloyd Garrison's Liberator, attacking Christian churches “for their unchristian support of slavery” (qtd. in Mailloux 19). Phillips, and other commentators, viewed the biblical support of slavery as fallacious and offered a very different reading of biblical passages which suggested that slaves, as human beings, should be treated with love and equanimity. Significantly, the debate between the few northern congregations that spoke out against slavery and their largely southern counterparts led to the possibility of disunification between northern and southern branches of various Christian denominations. While such a split was indeed the direction that Garrison was moving, many of these congregations (and those individuals, like Margaret Fuller and, I believe, Frederick Douglass, viewing the debate from the outside) feared that such a breach would leave the slave system firmly intact and northern advocates of abolition without any power to create change in the system.³

In the first chapter of the Narrative, Douglass demonstrates his awareness of the use of the Bible to defend slavery. In discussing the mulatto children of the white slave masters, Douglass notes that

if their increase will do no other good, it will do away the force of the argument, that god cursed Ham, and therefore American slavery is right. If the lineal descendants of Ham are alone to be scripturally enslaved, it is certain that slavery at the south must soon become unscriptural; for thousands are ushered into the world, annually, who like myself, owe their existence to white fathers, and those fathers most frequently [are] their own masters.

(24)

Both Carson and Zeitz interpret this passage in light of its reference to the southern scriptural defense of slavery, concluding that Douglass destroys the “division of the human race into the enslaved (the descendants of Ham) and the enslavers, and advances, instead, the traditional Christian division of the race of man into the children of God and the children of the devil” (Zeitz 59). While clearly Douglass does suggest that the separation of humankind into two groups, those who will become slaves and those who will become masters, is no longer tenable in the South, he does so not in order to offer an alternate, Christian mode of valuing humans. Indeed the force of his argument suggests that he, rhetorically at least, accepts the fact that “the lineal descendants of Ham are … to be scripturally enslaved.” Rather, Douglass here attempts to describe his own position on the borders, between two worlds, as one who is a descendant of Ham and a descendant of a white master. As I have suggested, such a stance will allow Douglass the opportunity to offer a new ethical system.

The descriptions Douglass offers of various masters, including his own masters, reinforce the religious context of the Narrative. Of Thomas Auld, Douglass notes that, after attending a Methodist camp meeting in 1832, he became “more cruel and hateful in all his ways; for I believe him to have been a much worse man after his conversion than before” (67). Douglass explains the source of this increased inhumane treatment of his slaves: “after his conversion, he found religious sanction and support for his slaveholding cruelty” (67). Indeed, Douglass offers a particular example of such sanction, Auld's whipping of a young lame woman while quoting “this passage of Scripture—‘He that knoweth his master's will, and doeth it not, shall be beaten with many stripes’” (68). Likewise, Edward Covey, commonly known as a “nigger-breaker,” was also “a professor of religion—a pious soul—a member and a class-leader in the Methodist church” (70). Covey's system of breaking slaves was founded “in his power to deceive. His life was devoted to planning and perpetrating the grossest deceptions. Every thing he possessed in the shape of learning or religion, he made conform to his disposition to deceive. He seemed to think himself equal to deceiving the Almighty” (74).

Douglass furthers these depictions later in the Narrative. He notes, in a long diatribe against southern churches and their scriptural defense of slavery: “I assert most unhesitatingly, that the religion of the South is a mere covering for the most horrid crimes,—a justifier of the most appalling barbarity,—a sanctifier of the most hateful frauds,—and a dark shelter under … which the darkest, foulest, grossest, and most infernal deeds of slaveholders find the strongest protection” (86). He concludes that “religious slaveholders are the worst” masters, offering the examples of Reverend Daniel Weeden and Reverend Rigby Hopkins, “members and ministers in the Reformed Methodist Church” (87). While Douglass appears here to chastise all Christians (he claims that those Christians who hold slaves are the worst slaveholders), he clarifies his position in the “Appendix” to the Narrative: “What I have said respecting and against religion, I mean strictly to apply to the slaveholding religion of this land, and with no possible reference to Christianity proper. … I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ: I therefore hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land” (120).

As I have noted, several critics have interpreted these passages as Douglass's attempt to subvert the slaveholders' reading of the Bible. Zeitz claims that “Douglass uses Biblical phrasing primarily to refute the claim that Christianity sanctions slavery” (57). Ultimately, these readers suggest that Douglass remains firmly within the Christian tradition, merely reversing the terms of the southern slaveholders and countering their scriptural interpretations. Yet, as I have suggested, Douglass seems to be aware of the danger of remaining within the institution of Christianity and to realize the need to position himself both inside and outside the system in launching his critique. If one merely works within the system, using its terms (even if attempting to realign them) to critique the system, one runs the risk of co-optation.

Douglass suggests his awareness of these dangers in describing two important events. The first occurs while he is under the employment of Mr. Freeland and is successful in uniting with a community of fellow blacks interested in moral and intellectual advancement. To this end, Douglass and his fellow slaves create a “Sabbath school at the house of a free colored man” in order “to learn how to read the will of God” (89). After several months of religious schooling, Douglass becomes incited with the desire to try for his freedom: “But I was not willing to cherish this determination alone. My fellow-slaves were dear to me. I was anxious to have them participate with me in this, my life-giving determination” (91). Significantly, after gaining their consent, Douglass suggests that they should leave on the Saturday before Easter, reaching the North, and freedom, on the day of Christ's resurrection (93). If Douglass merely operates within the institution of Christianity in his Narrative as Carson and Zeitz suggest, then this plan, which originates from Douglass's religious union with other slaves and is to be instigated on the Easter holidays, should, ultimately, be depicted positively. Yet Douglass and his fellow slaves are eventually betrayed, captured and imprisoned; instead of a holy resurrection, the slaves find themselves cast into the very pit of hell and made all too aware of their status: “We had been in jail scarcely twenty minutes, when a swarm of slave traders, and agents for slave traders, flocked into jail to look at us, and to ascertain if we were for sale. Such a set of beings I never saw before! I felt myself surrounded by so many fiends from perdition” (98).

Douglass later reinforces the idea that operating within the institution of Christianity leads not to freedom but rather to deeper enslavement. In 1838, while living with Hugh Auld, Douglass determines to “try to hire my time, with a view of getting money with which to make my escape” (107). He applies to his master, Thomas Auld, who refuses his request, advising Douglass “to complete thoughtlessness of the future” (107). Douglass's determination, nevertheless, does not waver, and he next applies to Hugh Auld. While Hugh at first denies Douglass this privilege, he later realizes that it is to his own economic advantage to allow Douglass to hire his time, and so he grants him the right to contract his labor under certain terms, including the contingency that Douglass must pay a set fee at the end of each week. Again Douglass is making a move towards freedom, but his plan fails when, one Saturday evening, he fails to pay Hugh Auld for his week's work. The reason for his failure, I think, is significant: “This failure was occasioned by my attending a camp meeting about ten miles from Baltimore. During the week, I had entered into an engagement with a number of young friends to start from Baltimore to the camp ground early Saturday evening; and being detained by my employer, I was unable to get down to Master Hugh's without disappointing the company” (108-9). Douglass here reiterates the way in which institutionalized religion co-opts the slave; in describing how his attendance at a camp meeting (and his fellow slaves' attendance, the idea of community is significant) leads to the loss of privileges, and thus the chance at freedom, he reasserts his awareness that he cannot merely operate within the circle of American Christianity to challenge the slave system.

After several chapters which carefully delineate the life of a plantation slave, chapters which set up an antithesis to the life and identity that will be established in the remainder of the Narrative, Douglass concludes on a pious note: “From my earliest recollection, I date the entertainment of a deep conviction that slavery would not always be able to hold me within its foul embrace; and in the darkest hours of my career in slavery, this living word of faith and spirit of hope departed not from me, but remained like ministering angels to cheer me through the gloom. This good spirit was from God, and to him I offer thanksgiving and praise” (47). Douglass's direct and private application to God suggests his realization of the need to offer an alternate ethical system to the institutionalized Christianity of America. Indeed, the very next chapter, in which he begins his journey towards freedom, incipiently outlines such an alternate system. In describing Sophia Auld, Douglass notes that she “proved to be all she appeared when I first met her at the door,—a woman of the kindest heart and finest feelings. She had never had a slave under her control previously to myself, and prior to her marriage she had been dependent upon her own industry for a living … by constant application to her business, she had been in a good degree preserved from the blighting and dehumanizing effects of slavery” (48).

Sophia Auld's role is significant not only because of her willingness and ability to relate to Douglass with affection and kindness but also because of her willingness to teach Douglass how to read and write (49). In direct contrast to the depictions of the ultimate outcomes of the fellowships established in Douglass's Sabbath school and journey to the camp meeting, his depiction of the efficacy of his kind mistress privately and affectionately teaching him his letters cannot be mistaken: “From that moment, I understood the pathway from slavery to freedom. It was just what I wanted, and I got it at a time when I the least expected it” (49). Douglass here suggests that, in order to challenge the system of slavery, a system which blights the soul and dehumanizes both the master and the slave, one must act privately and industriously with “the kindest heart and finest feelings.” Asserting the role of private sentiment in an ethical stance which openly declares the immoral nature of the institution of slavery (and, by extension, the institution of religion), Douglass begins his counter critique of slavery with one foot outside the system.

But Douglass is aware of the possible inefficacy of the private sphere. Immediately after commencing to teach Douglass his letters, Sophia Auld is interrupted by her husband: “Mr. Auld found out what was going on, and at once forbade Mrs. Auld to instruct me further, telling her, among other things, that it was unlawful, as well as unsafe, to teach a slave to read” (49). Douglass's description of Hugh Auld's re-assertion of power, a power that ultimately derives from the public sphere, the marketplace (Hugh Auld goes on to explain to his wife that literacy will make a slave discontent with his situation and thus ruin him), suggests Douglass's awareness of the nineteenth-century debate over the roles of the private and public sphere, a debate paramount to a novel like Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin.⁴ In discussing this novel, Jane P. Tompkins argues that its moral force derives from the transformative force of the domestic sphere. Tompkins argues that “the popular domestic novel of the nineteenth century [and Uncle Tom's Cabin is “the summa theologica” of such novels] represents a monumental effort to reorganize culture from the woman's point of view,” offering a critique of American society and American institutions more radical than that offered by so-called high art (83).

Building on Tompkins' work, several other critics, including especially Amy Schrager Lang and Gillian Brown, concentrate on the dilemmas facing Stowe in her use of the domestic sphere as a transformative power to radically alter the conventions of her society. For instance, Lang suggests that Stowe's attempt to invest the “tearful prayers of women” with any political power should be viewed controversially, for women, in Stowe's domestic economy, did not hold the requisite public role to exhibit such a power; consequently, Stowe must create a male character, in the form of Augustine St. Clare, who combines “the knowledge and power of men with the goodness of women and thus … bridge[s] the gap between private feeling and public action …” (34). But St. Clare dies before he can act on these “private feelings,” suggesting that Stowe's form (and the social relations which invest that form) were incapable of positing a real solution to the problem of slavery. Gillian Brown, in Domestic Individualism: Imagining Self in Nineteenth-Century America, argues that Stowe's primary concern is the critique and reform of the very domesticity that she adheres to in order to alter the patriarchal society which informs the novel (and Stowe's world). Brown suggests that Stowe invests matriarchy with a transformative power through an advancement of what she calls “a feminized ethic of possession,” one based not on the marketplace (where masculine desires, never fulfilled, create chaos and instability, even in the domestic sphere) but on maternal self-denial (30-31).

Indeed, Douglass, too, suggests the possibility that private feelings will have no effect on the public institution of slavery. In the very next chapter, after Sophia Auld, urged by her husband, has quit teaching Douglass his letters, Douglass describes her moral degeneracy: “Slavery proved as injurious to her as it did to me. When I went there, she was a pious, warm, and tender-hearted woman. There was no sorrow or suffering for which she had not a tear. … Slavery soon proved its ability to divest her of these heavenly qualities. Under its influence, the tender heart became stone, and the lamblike disposition gave way to one of tiger-like fierceness” (52-53). Yet, significantly, at the very end of the Narrative, just before Douglass successfully escapes, Sophia Auld returns to her original, kind self. After receiving an unjust beating at Gardner's ship-yard, Douglass finds his way home and recounts his story to Hugh Auld:

irreligious as he was, his conduct was heavenly. … He listened attentively to my narration of the circumstances leading to the savage outrage, and gave many proofs of his strong indignation at it. The heart of my once overkind mistress was again melted into pity. My puffed-out eye and blood-covered face moved her to tears. She took a chair by me, washed the blood from my face, and, with a mother's tenderness, bound up my head, covering the wounded eye with a lean piece of fresh beef. It was almost compensation for my suffering to witness, once more, a manifestation of kindness from this, my once affectionate old mistress. Master Hugh was very much enraged. He gave expression to his feelings by pouring out curses upon the heads of those who did the deed.

(102)

Douglass emphasizes here that the Auld's were “irreligious” yet “pious,” suggesting a contrast between an institutionalized approach to slaves as mere chattel and a privatized approach to slaves as human beings who deserve and require affection and kindness.

While the Aulds may not offer any systemic challenge to the institution of slavery, they do offer Douglass the awareness that he is a human being, an awareness that is founded on a private, emotional response and is central to both a literal and a figural attempt to establish an identity and attain freedom. Douglass reiterates the importance of private sentiment to his ethical stance in the penultimate chapter of the Narrative. The section describing the fight with Covey begins with Douglass's all important chiasmus: “You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man” (77). Before Covey confronts him, however, Douglass privately meets with Sandy Jenkins in the woods, who “very kindly invited [Douglass] to go home with him” (80). Sandy advises Douglass to return home to Covey, but before going, he offers him a root which “would render it impossible for Mr. Covey, or any other white man,” to whip him (80). As Douglass notes later during his fight with Covey, some spiritual force guides him and gives him the strength to resist Covey's inhumane treatment. Unlike the Sabbath school and camp-meeting incidents, not only does Douglass here go it alone, without the help of the other slaves, but he also finds support from outside Christianity.

Douglass concludes, of this incident: “This battle with Mr. Covey was the turning-point in my career as a slave. It rekindled the few expiring embers of freedom, and revived within me a sense of my own manhood. It recalled the departed self-confidence, and inspired me again with a determination to be free” (82-83). Significantly, after this completely secular depiction of this central episode, he returns to religious imagery, suggesting his position both inside and outside the Christian religion: “It was a glorious resurrection, from the tomb of slavery, to the heaven of freedom” (83). Indeed, such a balancing act occurs throughout the Narrative, suggesting Douglass's ethical stance as one which straddles two positions. After describing Mr. Freeland as a man who “made no pretensions to, or profession of, religion,” Douglass counterpoints with his depictions of the two Methodist ministers, Reverend Weeden and Reverend Hopkins. Yet it is while Douglass is in the employment of Mr. Freeland, a man with no religious convictions, that Douglass begins his Sabbath school among the slaves.

As an escaped slave and a black man in a predominantly white society, Douglass had good reason to distrust any and all public institutions. In discussing the North's attempt to aid escaped slaves near the conclusion of the Narrative, Douglass notes: “I have never approved of the very public manner in which some of our western friends have conducted what they call the underground railroad, but which I think, by their open declarations, has been made most emphatically the upperground railroad” (106). Understanding that the institution of Christianity in America easily co-opted, and thus disempowered, the slave, Douglass realized the need to posit a private ethics in order to mount a real challenge to the institution of slavery. Indeed, the text of the Narrative itself is such a private stance: as an autobiography it presents the private feelings and experiences of a slave to a private reader in hopes of affecting his or her affections and thus altering his or her attitude towards slavery. Douglass's last paragraph reads: “Sincerely and earnestly hoping that this little book may do something toward throwing light on the American slave system, and hastening the glad day of deliverance to the millions of my brethren in bonds—faithfully relying upon the power of truth, love, and justice, for success in my humble efforts—and solemnly pledging my self anew to the sacred cause,—I subscribe myself, FREDERICK DOUGLASS” (126).

Douglass's Narrative thus “exploit[s] the natural focus of autobiography upon private experience and the single self” (Stone 64) in order to define a position both inside and outside the religious institutions which at once offered him freedom and enslavement. In counterpointing the (im)morality of the Christian religion with the ethics of a privatized sentiment, Douglass defines an ethical stance which cannot be co-opted by the Protestant religion of nineteenth-century America. Such a stance, centering on the efficacy of individual feelings and emotions, is derived largely from the sentimental and domestic ethics of the women's movement in the nineteenth century and is offered to critique both the institution of slavery and the institution of religion.

Like the question of literacy, where Douglass opposes the antitheses of violence and language in order to effectively master the hegemonic discourse in which he must, necessarily, labor, the question of ethics and morality opposes the antitheses of private sentiment and the Christian religion in order to constitute a new ethical stance. In the Narrative, Douglass demonstrates his recognition of the significance of attaining this position, a position on the margins where the disenfranchised black author has the ability to stand both inside and outside the institutions that he must critique but that have the power to co-opt that critique. In describing the slave songs that echoed in the old woods around the Great House, songs which revealed “at once the highest joy and the deepest sadness” and which sometimes explored “the most pathetic sentiment in the most rapturous tone, and the most rapturous sentiment in the most pathetic tone,” Douglass notes: “I did not, when a slave, understand the deep meaning of those rude and apparently incoherent songs. I was myself within the circle; so that I neither saw nor heard as those without might see and hear” (31). Douglass admits that existence within the circle circumscribes one's understanding (and thus one's ability to effect change), yet merely existing outside of the circle does not guarantee a clear comprehension of the meaning of slavery. As Douglass explains, Northerners also fail to read properly the meaning of these songs (32). Douglass thus implies that only that person who exists both inside and outside the institution of slavery can fully understand, and thus properly critique, its cruel and dehumanizing nature.

Notes

1. One other position might be mentioned, that of Donald Gibson who claims that Frederick Douglass ultimately situates himself outside of the question of religiosity in analyzing and critiquing the institution of slavery. According to Gibson, “Douglass saw that both proslavery and antislavery forces where [sic] busy using God for their own purposes, and that if God is responsible for whatever deliverance occurs, then He is also responsible for whatever deliverance does not occur. So, rather than saying that God supports or opposes slavery, Douglass said that He has nothing to do with it, except as His presence is made manifest in righteous human action” (94). While Gibson's claims are astutely supported with biographical and cultural contexts, he fails to explain where the moral or ethical critique of slavery originates if it does not originate in some mode or form of Christianity. Furthermore, as both Carson and Zeitz clearly demonstrate, Douglass's Narrative does not exist completely outside of Christianity as Gibson suggests.

2. See also Willie Lee Rose, Slavery and Freedom and Lester B. Scherer, Slavery and the Churches in Early America, 1619-1819.

3. For a discussion of the historical background to this debate, as well as to Fuller's and Douglass's position in relation to that debate, see Steven Mailloux. As Mailloux notes, it is Fuller's position both inside and outside the institution of Christianity that allows her to level an effective critique of the Southern position. See also The Bible Against Slavery: or, an Inquiry into the Genius of the Mosaic System, and the Teachings of the Old Testament on the Subject of Human Rights; originally published in the 1830s and revised during the Civil War, this text analyzes the development of the use of scripture to support slavery.

4. Douglass's role within the women's rights movement is well known. Not only did Douglass attend the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848, but he was instrumental in asserting the necessity of women's suffrage to change the system, what might be read as an insertion of the private into the public sphere.

Works Cited

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Carson, Sharon. “Shaking the Foundation: Liberation Theology in Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass.” Religion and Literature 24 (Summer 1992): 19-34.

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