But even this last example illustrates a partial truth in Webb and Chapman's apprehensions about the pernicious effects of Douglass's popularity. As adamantly as Douglass defended Garrison, the very fact that it was he who was doing the defending highlighted the changing nature of Douglass's participation in abolition. And so even if we do discount Webb's allegations, we must recognize that the British environment did indeed put pressure on Douglass to assert his independence in the sense that it encouraged him to question and reevaluate his involvement in antislavery. This relationship between independence and self-examination was critical for Douglass. From the first pages of his Narrative, in which he lamented his unrecorded slave past, Douglass associated slavery with a lack of personal information. Thus, the transition from chattel to man was linked in his mind with the privilege of self-exploration and self-expression. It is for this reason that Douglass was so sensitive to condescension and paternalism in Britain; for someone engaged in such intense self-scrutiny, the suggestion that he needed "adult" supervision was especially troublesome, and challenged the progress he had made since his days on Auld's plantation.
Douglass's examination of his identity while in Britain was shaped partly by the nature and expectations of his audience, and partly by his own instincts for self-expression, development and growth. Fundamentally, before this new audience Douglass had to develop a role that incorporated both his antislavery duties and the shifting outlines of his self-perception. Though Douglass had more freedom to make these decisions than he had when touring in the United States under the direction of the AASS, he by no means had a tabula rasa upon which to sketch his ideal persona. His visit was part of an ongoing conversation among abolitionists about the most effective relationship between the individual agent and the cause espoused. In 1844, Henry Wright wrote to Wendell Phillips of the ideal antislavery lecturer in Britain: "It needs a White abolitionist to do the work there—a Colored one would not do half as well. The sympathy of Britain would flow out toward him personally, as a proscribed & deeply injured individual—rather than towards the Anti-Slavery cause. Sympathy with an individual...is of little use in our great struggle for human freedom."[95] If Phillips had agreed with Wright then, he must have changed his mind by the time of Douglass's proposed visit. Encouraging Douglass to go to Britain as the representative of both abolitionists and "his brethren in bonds," Phillips advised him, "Be yourself, and you will succeed."[96] His advice can be viewed as a response to Wright's earlier comment; whereas Wright suggested that to be successful overseas, the antislavery agent must repress his own individuality, Phillips proposed just the opposite: that Douglass's success would depend on the extent to which he was true to his own character and experiences, and was able to communicate them to his audience.
Though Douglass accepted the relationship between success and self-realization established by Phillips, ironically, he also followed the logic of Wright's suggestion, struggling to find the proper place for his own experiences in his antislavery personality. That struggle reveals the complex and paradoxical nature of Douglass's representative identity. Indeed, Douglass was perceived by his British audiences as something like a walking paradox, "a living contradiction...to that base opinion...that the blacks are an inferior race."[97] Similarly, Douglass claimed that as an "intellectual coloured man," he represented "a contradiction" to the racial theories of slave owners as well.[98] (SOURCE) Essentially, Douglass's role was paradoxical; he was meant to serve as an exceptional representative, challenging conventional stereotypes and breaking boundaries of prejudice by embodying their contradiction. As one enthusiastic supporter wrote from Wrexham, Wales, Douglass "is a living example of the capabilities of the slave, and though we do not expect all to be equally gifted, he proves that they are not what they have been mis-represented, mere chattels..."[99] Douglass represented the potential of American slaves, but a potential necessarily distanced from their degraded condition that provoked audience sympathy.
Despite this distance, Douglass initially based his representational identity upon his shared slave experiences. As he said before a Dublin audience "I am the representative of three million of bleeding slaves. I have felt the lash myself; my back is scarred with it; I know what they suffer."[100] (SOURCE) This attitude reflected the pressure applied by white abolitionists toward their black counterparts to define their antislavery personas strictly experientially. For all of the tolerance and equalitarianism of Garrison's Boston Clique, they placed definite restrictions on blacks' involvement in antislavery. Generally, Garrisonians assumed that blacks should limit their presentations to a narration of wrongs, and because of their presumed educational deficiencies, should resist undertaking a discussion of policy. "Give us the facts," Collins instructed Douglass during their western tour, "We will take care of the philosophy."[101]
As John Blassingame has suggested, it is quite possible that in his autobiographies Douglass exaggerated the tendency of white abolitionists to restrict his lectures to a discussion of "the plantation." The evidence from accounts of his speeches shows that as early as 1841 Douglass had expanded the scope of his presentations to include material beyond a narration of his own experience.[102] But even if Douglass did have more freedom than he admitted, the fact that he imagined this conspiracy in so many variations demonstrates the extent to which he felt restrained by the public role imposed upon him.
These pressures were further amplified by the demands of British audiences. Distanced from the cruel realities of slavery by the Atlantic, many audience members had never actually seen a slave before, and they expected Douglass to satisfy their curiosities, and often, to provide them with lurid accounts of brutality and violence. Thus, unlike his white counterparts, audience members rarely charged Douglass with sensationalism or extremism.[103] Like the exotic exhibits displayed in the Crystal Palace a few years later, Douglass's very presence, as well as his rhetorical talents, was meant to animate the imaginations of his audience, leading them past the image of the talented orator to the slave plantation itself.
At first Douglass satisfied these expectations without reserve, holding up before an Irish audience a whip still clotted with blood, and reminding them of his own scarred back; telling the horrible story, in graphic detail, of a slave whose ear was nailed to a post, and who in a desperate attempt to escape, tore herself away, leaving only the bloody ear behind (SOURCE); or recounting his early memory of seeing his own cousin Henny stripped naked and savagely beaten by his master.[104] (SOURCE) But as his celebrity increased, though he was still willing to describe the general brutality of slavery, and vividly narrated the experiences of other slaves, Douglass began to resist including examples from his own life. When he did offer such examples, he often apologized for them, justifying the material as absolutely necessary in order to "let the slave holders of America know that the curtain which conceals their crimes is being lifted abroad."[105] (SOURCE) Alternatively, Douglass avoided absolute self-disclosure by constructing imaginary or hypothetical scenarios of his experiences. In one striking example, Douglass led the audience in a frightening reverie in which he was once again a slave, and was sold down South by his old Master Auld in order to raise the extra money for a contribution to the visiting Free Church delegation.[106] (SOURCE) By May of 1846, Douglass could tell a London audience that unlike his speaking requirements in the United States—"to go into a detail of the cruelty practiced on the slaves"—before this audience he thought it more effective to "point out the means by which slavery is upheld."[107] (SOURCE)
There are several reasons for this shift in emphasis. In general, while overseas, American abolitionists concentrated on the ways in which slavery was supported by fellowship from abroad, as demonstrated by their ferocious battles with the Free Church and the Evangelical Alliance. Abolitionists were convinced that slavery could be eradicated if slaveholders were denied the oxygen of international support. As Douglass said, "I want the slave holder surrounded, as by a wall of anti-slavery fire, so that he may see the condemnation of himself and his system glaring down in letters of light. I want him to feel that he has no sympathy in England, Scotland, or Ireland."[108] (SOURCE) Additionally, Douglass admitted that his own sufferings with slavery were not representative; he was lucky to enjoy a relatively privileged and carefree life for a slave. Maryland slavery was considerably more "enlightened" than the plantations further South and, from an early age, Douglass enjoyed the favor, and even the indulgence, of his white masters and mistresses.[109] In the United States, under the direction of Garrison, Douglass was required to submit to the demands of abolitionist propaganda and present his own life as a sort of "extended historical narrative," repressing as much as possible those idiosyncratic elements of his personal history that did not reveal the general cruelties of slavery. Douglass broke free from these restraints to some extent in his Narrative, revealing specific place names and details of his life to verify his authenticity. But even in the Narrative, Douglass often sacrificed his individuality to the more general moral duty of denouncing slavery.[110] In Britain, Douglass took an even bolder step toward asserting his right to travel beyond the "simple narrative." In this sense, the public persona Douglass adopted in Britain should be considered as an oratorical variation of what Robert Stepto has identified as Douglass's liberating "acts of literacy": his Narrative in 1845, The North Star in 1847, and his novella "The Heroic Slave" in 1853.[111] Paradoxically, in Britain Douglass expressed his individuality not by asserting his self, but by extracting it—liberating it—from his antislavery routine. Thus, Douglass told one English audience, with the unmistakable air of one who owns his own story, "I could give you accounts of myself, but really I am almost tired of speaking of my own individual case to assemblies like this. I have suffered much, but nothing in comparison to thousands of others."[112] (SOURCE)
Since Douglass often provided graphic accounts of slavery nonetheless, these qualifications were probably more for his own benefit than for his audience's, not so much antislavery material as his transatlantic efforts at redefinition. Douglass resisted offering examples from his own slave life because, surrounded by the luxury of British society, and enjoying a newly confirmed sense of gentility, that slave past became increasingly more difficult to access. In one letter to Garrison, Douglass described the memory of the degradation of slavery as "more like a dream than a horrible reality." Ironically, this letter was in response to an accusation by an American pro-slavery apologist, who apparently knew Douglass when he was Frederick Baily. He claimed that Douglass could not have written the Narrative, for Baily was "an unlearned and rather an ordinary Negro." This is a variation of the charge that motivated the composition of the Narrative and ultimately sent Douglass overseas; that there was an unresolvable inequality of identities between the individual who experienced slavery and the individual who later narrated that experience. But though the trip abroad was brought about by Douglass's need to affirm in writing his slave past, it threatened to distance him from that past, and from that class of people whom he was called to represent. Beyond the sarcasm, Douglass was speaking seriously when he responded: "I can easily understand that you sincerely doubt if I wrote the narrative....Frederick Douglass, the freeman, is a very different person from Frederick Baily...the slave. I feel myself almost a new man—freedom has given me a new life."[113] (SOURCE)