Frederick Douglass’s Historical Turn
Chapter 4 tracks Frederick Douglass’s developing historical-temporal consciousness and his adoption of a presentist view of history that rhymes with Ralph Waldo Emerson’s philosophical presentism. In tandem with his embrace of political abolitionism, Douglass in his speeches and writings of the 1850s, began a sweeping philosophical engagement with the relations between past, present, and future and became what I will call abolitionism’s future historian—the historian of an abolitionist past that had not yet come to pass. Examining a series of recurring images—in My Bondage and My Freedom, The Heroic Slave, and most notably, in his remarkable 1857 speech on the Dred Scott decision—of Douglass gazing into the future, I argue for the centrality of a newly acquired present-oriented perspective as the animating feature of Douglass’s mature pre-Civil War politics and his vision of the possibilities of social and historical transformation.