Frederick Douglass's “Our National Capital”: Updating L'Enfant for an Era of Integration

Abstract

, to show that actually existing DC failed to meet those ideals. The bulk of the essay then shows that Douglass's speech has great affinities with L'Enfant's original ideas, with Douglass adding the crucially important category of race to L'Enfant's vision for the city. I also use a number of Douglass's other writings, including speeches, essays, and autobiographies, to show that "Our National Capital" can serve as a capstone for Douglass's career, in which he articulates how an urban environment should function if it is to live up to his ideals. INTRODUCTIONIn making their case for Frederick Douglass as a philosopher, Bill E. Lawson and Frank M. Kirkland argue that a central philosophical issue lay at the heart of all of Douglass's activism: "Douglass inserts a genuinely philosophical problem like a detonator into this many-leveled enterprise, viz., the dualistic and duellistic American experiment of constitutional democracy and slavery or tyranny."  In their persuasive reading, Douglass is the great theorist of the central American contradiction, the dual and dueling doctrines of liberty and slavery. At the heart of Douglass's career is a series of questions about the philosophical underpinnings of the flawed republic, questions that threaten to detonate and destroy the intellectual foundations of the country. But in addition to struggling with how to deal with those conflicting threads in his personal life, his political career, and his role as a racial ambassador, Douglass was also interested in interrogating the contradictions of the American experiment as they were embodied in the physical landscape of the most contradictory point of the country: Washington, DC. In short, Frederick Douglass was not just a theorist but specifically an urban theorist, one who thought deeply about Washington's symbolic role and articulated a way for the city to move beyond its slaveholding past and become the literal embodiment of the promises of America. The final decades of Douglass's career -the Washington years -have received relatively little attention from scholars; John Muller's  book Frederick Douglass in Washington, D. C.: The Lion of Anacostia appears to be the first of the hundreds of volumes published on Douglass to focus primarily or exclusively on that period of Douglass's life. The reasons for this inattention are obvious; Douglass won few political battles in his last decades, received political appointments far below what he and his biographers believed was his due, and took a number of positions (such as disapproving of the "Exoduster" migration to the Mid-west) that were unpopular with many blacks.  Nevertheless, his grasp of the political and social realities of DC remained striking, and his  speech "Our National Capital" articulated a cosmopolitan vision for the city which revised and updated the original dreams for D. C. to create a space which could repudiate the slaveholding past of the country and its capital city.  Douglass was, like the capital's designer Pierre-Charles L'Enfant, a cosmop...