Frederick Douglass’s Post-Civil War Performance of Masculinity

Before the Civil War, Frederick Douglass masterfully drew upon the abolitionist family protection campaign in his autobiographies, speeches, and articles. As a fugitive slave, he testified to the brutality of slavery: it had severed his bond with his mother, left him unacknowledged by his white father, and subjected his Aunt Hester to the violence of a jealous overseer. His autobiographies are peopled by the stock characters of the family protection campaign: the fatally beautiful slave woman; the lustful driver; the loving, traumatized slave mother; and the brutal slave mistress who violates the principles of true womanhood. He repeatedly inveighed against the practice of separating families in his speeches. This 1855 speech is just one example: “Every slaveholder claims the right to sell his slaves, who, having local attachments, families, wives and little ones… can be kept in submission by the threat of a sale and separation from all these” (“An Inside View of Slavery” 9). Douglass provoked his audience’s fear of loss, stoked it until he produced tears, and then used it to stimulate a loathing of slavery. He was an expert at the use of antislavery sentimentality.