Douglass Prize Dinner Talk, February 28, 2002, Yale Club, New York
I accept this honor with a profound sense of gratitude. I am also fully mindful of how much we historians owe for the support of our work to our spouses and families, our colleagues, our fellowship and grant sources, to friends who read our manuscripts, and to our good luck to be writing in a field where there is so much enduring interest. Let me express my special thanks to the members of the Douglass Prize jury, to David Davis and the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Abolition, and Resistance at Yale University, and to Mr. Gilder and Mr. Lehrman for their extraordinary generosity and enthusiasm for American History. Indeed, in recent years the Gilder Lehrman Institute has established itself as one of the most important advocates for the study and teaching of American history in the United States.
Permit me also one minute to thank just a few scholars upon whose shoulders I have been riding for many years: Professor Davis, whose work on slavery in the Atlantic world has been the source of more insights than any of us can count; my dear friends Jim and Lois Horton who have taught me everything I know about the free black experience and so much more about the sheer joy of tackling hard questions about black history; to Bill McFeely, author of the finest biography of Douglass and much more, and a generous fellow-traveler on the Civil War era beat; to Ira Berlin, whose work has made us think differently about American slavery ever since he studied under Dick Sewell, the same mentor I was privileged to have at Wisconsin. And finally, let me say a public thank you to my editor, Joyce Seltzer, under whose stern tutelage I am grateful I landed some five-six years ago. On a summer day in 1996 she sat me down in a small restaurant in lower Manhattan, took an editorial whip to my hopelessly over-wrought book outline, told me to come back with only eight chapter ideas, and challenged me to think about big questions.
All of my academic life as a historian, Frederick Douglass has been either at the very heart of my work — the subject itself — or hovering on the edges, challenging, inspiring, prodding me to shape the questions and wonder about my answers. My first book was an intellectual biography of Douglass, most of my early essays involved the abolitionist or the post-Civil War thought of this former slave, and in 1992 I had the opportunity to edit and introduce a new edition of Douglass's Narrative. It was Douglass who first brought me to the subject of historical memory. So, as some of you will understand, to accept such an award in Douglass's name humbles me down to my bones. For all the times Douglass has infested my dreams, puzzled me through many a fitful morning of writing, and then saved me by filling in the gaps in my own prose with his incomparable eloquence, I am more grateful than I can say tonight. For many of us who write about the Civil War era or African American history and literature in the nineteenth century, there is ever one motto: "when in doubt, quote Douglass." In a Memorial Day speech in Madison Square here in New York in 1878, Douglass declared that the Civil War "was not a fight between rapacious birds and ferocious beasts, a mere display of brute courage and endurance, but it was a war between men of thought, as well as of action, and in dead earnest for something beyond the battlefield."
In the early nineties I used to say that I was eager to get beyond Douglass, to get him out of my life so I could get on with this project on Civil War memory and other work. Well, I’m happy to say that I am very glad tonight not to have Mr. Douglass out of my life. Indeed, I ran a check on my index in Race and Reunion for which individuals had the most entries (I had a very skilled indexer). And lo and behold, edging out Robert E. Lee in second place, and Booker T. Washington in third, who just narrowly topped Lincoln in fourth, there is Douglass with the most total mentions in a long book. He is still my subject I guess.
As we are gathered in a banquet tonight, go with me to an earlier celebratory dinner of far greater importance. On New Year’s Day, January 1, 1883, in Washington DC, an American flag hung at the end of a banquet room on Ninth street, and a sumptuous feast for more than fifty men filled the table. At 7:30, on this twentieth anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, former US Senator from Mississippi, Blanche K. Bruce, called the distinguished gathering of more than fifty African American leaders to the table to honor the sixty-four year old Frederick Douglass. The Washington Bee remarked that "never before in the history of the American Negro has there ever been such an assemblage of leading colored men." The event honored Douglass as black America's symbol of a people's journey from slavery to freedom.
The guests comprised a who's who of two generations of black politicians, civil servants, journalists, writers, professors, ministers, and soldiers. Douglass's two sons, Charles and Lewis, veterans of the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts regiment, attended the tribute to their father. Among the gathering were Congressmen and members of legislatures from South and North, men who owned their own businesses, prominent clergymen, and intellectuals of various kinds. Some among them had fiercely disagreed with one another about issues and strategies for best advancing the race, many with Douglass himself, a fact the guest of honor freely acknowledged. Rivalries, however, were left at the door and the generational divide was put aside to contemplate the meaning of emancipation.
As the gentlemen settled in for a long evening (they did not adjourn until 3 am), some forty toasts were offered to virtually every aspect of black life and aspiration. Douglass spoke last and delivered a speech in which he reached for the lodestar of recent American history. To hear Douglass on such an occasion must have been to feel one's inheritance, to almost see history flowing as a procession in time. "This high festival of ours is coupled with a day which we do well to hold in sacred and everlasting honor, " he said, "a day which may well count for a thousand years." The young journalist, and sometimes critic of Douglass, T. Thomas Fortune, remembered the occasion as a transcendent experience, a moment for the transmission of memory, where "tender youth" were instructed by "mature age."
Douglass no doubt made their hearts pump and their throats choak. He filled the room with Civil War memory, and gave the event an incantatory refrain which he used some fifteen times in a breathless expression of the nation's rebirth. "Until this day," he announced,
- Slavery, the sum of all villainies, like a vulture, was gnawing at The heart of the Republic; until this day there stretched away Behind us an awful chasm of darkness and despair of more Than two centuries; until this day the American slave, bound In chains, tossed his fettered arms on high and groaned for Freedom's gift in vain; until this day the colored people of the United States lived in the shadow of death… until this day it Was doubtful whether liberty and union would triumph, or Slavery and barbarism. Until this day….