Frederick Douglass in 1848

Abstract

When revolutions rocked Europe in 1848, Frederick Douglass responded almost immediately by framing these movements across the Atlantic in global terms. As the rebellions against monarchy spread from Paris to Prague, Douglass reprinted poems by Alphonse de Lamartine in his abolitionist newspaper, the North Star; wrote essays in which he tied class strife in the Old World to the contest over slavery in the New; and delivered lectures in which he heralded this upheaval as part of an international uprising against tyrants. "France," he declared, "is not alone"; it is "in direct communication with all the great cities" from London to Washington and Rome, "and the influence of her example is everywhere powerful." What the abdication of Louis Philippe, the dethroning of Metternich, and the Magyar uprising under Lajos Kossuth portended, according to Douglass's 1848 essay "The Revolution of 1848" (1999b, 106-7), was the eruption of a revolutionary zeitgeist throughout the Atlantic world, a "Spirit of Liberty" that, as he put it, united "the oppressed classes" and caused "thrones to crumble." Yet for Douglass the revolts of 1848 manifested not simply as political events but as a chronopolitical phenomenon. In Europe's upheaval, he discerned nothing less than a universal freedom drive that was transhistorical as well as transnational. As he insisted in his speeches, essays, and editorials, the sudden and seemingly miraculous overthrowing of kings in France, Italy, and Hungary was more or less coextensive with the American Revolution of 1776, with the British abolition of slavery in 1833, and with past and future slave rebellions throughout the Western hemisphere. What Douglass took from these revolutions Frederick Douglass in 1848 449 connection that cut across the nation's fictive histories, and these cosmopolitan temporalities, we shall find, pose much broader questions about the idea of "context" in US literary history.But to arrive at these theoretical considerations, we must first begin with the momentous upheavals of 1848.