Slave and Freedman
A Star Pointed North.
by Edmund Fuller.
New York, Harper, 1946. 361 pp. $2.75.
There Was Once A Slave : The Heroic Story of Frederick Douglass.
by Shirley Graham.
New York. Julian Messner, 1947. 310 pp. $3.00.
The appearance of Frederick Douglass in the North in 1841 put an effective and exciting instrument at the disposal of the abolitionists. Those who had formerly preached the evils of slavery in the abstract could now point to a living example redeemed out of bondage, a chattel who spoke and acted like a man. In the two decades before liberation, this fugitive slave played a prominent part in the feverish agitation to put an end to the South’s peculiar institution.
It is not for the details of his life, however, that we would welcome two new books on this man. Douglass himself gave us those in his autobiography, in a far more moving and more authentic manner. If these volumes have anything to offer, it is light on the nature of the reform movements in which the escaped slave participated. For his were years of continual crisis, of desperate fears and unlimited hopes, years when heated energies were turned toward the realization of a whole range of reforms for the improvement of humanity. In that context the Douglass story has a striking validity in our own day when good men are again fighting for good causes, and again find themselves enmeshed in unforeseen and frustrating consequences.
Precisely here, both these books fall short of their mark. Both take note of Douglass’ part as a reformer, but they diverge significantly in their discussion of the nature of the reform movement in which he acted. Miss Graham, throughout, proceeds under the naive assumption that all reformers were brothers under the skin: all meant well and therefore all were good. Furthermore, all reforms were created equal; the fight to repeal the English corn laws, for instance, was on the same footing as abolition. The agonizing disagreements over ends, as well as over tactics and methods, are dismissed or concealed beneath a false assumption of unity of ultimate objective.
Mr. Fuller’s novel is more accurate in this respect. Its author is aware that there was a fundamental difference between the principles of political action espoused by Douglass and the open violence of John Brown or the nonresistance advocated by William Lloyd Garrison. Although this author’s sympathies are with his hero and with his hero’s methods, he does set forth the divisive issues that often loomed larger for the reformers than the common enemy.
But Mr. Fuller cannot confront the logical outcome. His book ends with the Civil War despite the fact that its subject lived thirty years longer, and in those three decades discovered some of the consequences of his earlier political position. Douglass became a Republican party hack, grew personally wealthy by political office, was involved in the unsavory failure of the Freedman’s Savings and Trust Company, and served as unwitting tool for American imperialism in the Caribbean. Surely the latter half of this man’s career has light to throw on the earlier, and Mr. Fuller’s apparent unwillingness to contemplate the unpleasant fruit points to a failure to understand the parent stem. The later Douglass was undeniably the product of the earlier, but there is nothing in the account of the earlier to explain the acts of the later.
Miss Graham rushes in where Mr. Fuller fears to tread. The good and the evil are still distinct and discernible, and all those on the right side are good, although some are unaccountably misguided. Douglass is good, Senator Sumner is good, and President Grant is good, and all is befogged by a hopelessly cheerful vagueness as to motives, causes, and results.
We can no more be satisfied with such simple analysis in historical retrospect than we would be satisfied with it as a guide to current action. Increasingly we come to learn that, in politics at least, goodness is not all of one piece. Benevolence of intentions sometimes masks dangers that can only be exposed by examination of means and motives. And the good that men hope to do is often buried with them while derisive consequences live long after.
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