The Slave's Cause on A House Divided

In an interview with the American Writers Museum, Manisha Sinha, answered the question, "What makes Frederick Douglass's work relevant today?" by saying:

"The story of Frederick Douglass and numerous other fugitive slave abolitionists is really an inspiring one and should be known to most American citizens. In seeking their own freedom enslaved men and women helped bring down an extremely powerful institution and expanded the boundaries of American democracy. I think it tells us that we can all be architects of our own liberation and confront oppression and injustice in our own times."

Note how she brings in "other fugitive slave abolitionists." One of the limitations of the genre of biography lies in its emphasis on the individual, which can deemphasize or obscure broader, more complex movements, organizations, or groups of people. A biographer might touch on them as her subject interacts with them, but the biographer still must follow her subject. Even in following her subject, she makes choices about the type of story she tells. To me, biography is almost like an experiment in which you watch the ways big ideas, events, and, movements, and so forth -- the Big Picture forces of history -- operate in an individual's life, and how an individual interprets and influences those forces.

For Frederick Douglass, one of those Big Picture historians is Sinha, author of The Slave's Cause: A History of Abolition, the winner of last year's 2017 Frederick Douglass Book Prize. For the past two to three decades, historians have chipped away at a "white savior narrative" of abolition that tended to start the story with William Lloyd Garrison. Not that there wasn't some merit to that narrative. After all, Garrison was a crucial figure in popularizing an organized abolition movement to a white, evangelical audience. Members of the Society of Friends also played key roles, and they, too were white. Still, the real impetus, organization, militant, and broad ideologies emerged from the people subjected to enslavement. 

Sinha's book synthesizes the vast body of literature into a full narrative that places African Americans at the center of abolition. She'd object to my characterization of her work as synthesis because she also delved deeply into anti-slavery pamphlets and correspondence, so her work is not solely synthesis. Yet, synthesis is not faint praise but a necessary and monumental task in pulling the conversation forward.

In her work, Douglass appears as one actor in a longer and larger African American-led, interracial movement. "Douglass was extremely important," she says in the interview below, "and he would be the first one to acknowledge others who were part of the movement, and that's why a movement perspective helped me."It's quite exciting to see him that way, rising to his power among all of these other activists.

Listen to her discuss The Slave's Cause on A House Divided podcast, recorded 2 August 2018.

Link to video

By the way, if you are in Chicago and can visit the Writers Museum, the exhibit "Frederick Douglass: Agitator" runs until December 31, 2018 in the Roberta Rubin Writer's Room.