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Frederick Douglass’s Rhetorical Legacy

This symposium, inspired by the 200th anniversary of Douglass’s birth as a slave on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, provides an occasion for a careful reconsideration of Douglass’s rhetorical legacy—both his written work such as autobiographies and editorials as well as his acclaimed oratory. A runaway slave who rose to become one of the nation’s leading reformers, Frederick Douglass (1818–1895) was primarily and perhaps most importantly a public communicator whose transformative power emerged from his powerful oratory and eloquent writing. Over the course of a public speaking career beginning in 1842 and ending with his death in 1895, he delivered over two thousand and five hundred known addresses, ranging from well-prepared lectures on behalf of numerous reform causes, lyceum lectures repeated to paying audiences across the nation, convention floor debates, political campaign stump addresses, memorial orations for figures such as Abraham Lincoln and John Brown, to impromptu talks when solicited by his many admirers. Douglass’s writings included thousands of editorials in the four periodicals he edited, a prolific assortment of journalistic pieces for other publications, and of course his three iconic autobiographies. Nineteenth-century Americans recognized Douglass for the power of his public speaking, and his oratory was always at the center of his work as a political activist and agitator. Douglass, as Diane Barnes argues, was the “most familiar African American in the nineteenth century” and remains an “American icon” (2, 5). The agitator and abolitionist spoke and wrote prolifically for over half a century on almost every significant social issue of the nineteenth century connected to a struggle for freedom, equality, and justice—slavery, woman’s suffrage, immigration, the postemancipation rights of black citizens, education, and much more. Throughout this powerful career in social reform, Douglass’s “rhetorical brilliance” both as an orator and author, established him not only as a vital public figure of the 1800s, but also as “one of the most enduring and consequential public voices in American history” (Lampe 290–91). Another inspiration for this symposium was the five-volume series of Douglass’s speeches published by Yale University Press and edited by the Frederick Douglass Papers under the direction Rhetoric Review, Vol. 37, No. 1, 1–76, 2018 Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLC ISSN: 0735-0198 print / 1532-7981 online DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/07350198.2018.1395263