Light or Fire? Frederick Douglass and the Orator's Dilemma

Abstract

Most scholarship on political rhetoric views it as an exercise in changing the minds of an audience. However, we see numerous examples of political speech aimed at those who already agree with the speaker, to motivate them to act on judgments they have already made. This kind of discourse is often dismissed as pandering, or the “red meat” rabble‐rousing that contributes to polarization. I draw upon Frederick Douglass to render a more complete account of this speech, which I term “hortatory rhetoric.” Douglass draws upon the prophetic tradition of Black Christian preaching to develop an alternative for when persuasion has reached its limit. This kind of speech raises a set of normative difficulties that differ from those raised by the rhetoric of persuasion, which Douglass helps us to think through. He provides a framework for understanding when it might be permissible or even desirable to abandon persuasion for exhortation.

Slavery and Oratory: Frederick Douglass in the History of Rhetoric

“…So an explanation of the force of Douglass’s oratory—in a world in which the Ciceronian tradition was still regarded as canonical—ought to begin with the way in which he translated the identification of orator and slave from the metaphorical to the literal plane: that is, with the way in which he defined his oratory as uniquely risky and therefore uniquely courageous, given his identification with the enslaved and his position on the racial margins. If Douglass was an imitator of Cicero (at a time when Black imitation of culture deemed white was especially fraught; Wilson 2003, 89), he was far from an uncritical imitator (see Hawley 2022). Rather, he was an example of the process by which “imitation [acts] as a prime cause of the evolution of oratory”—a process, ironically enough, theorized by Cicero himself (Fantham 1978, 2).…”