“This Sea of Upturned Faces”: The Rhetorical Role of Audience in Frederick Douglass’s Constitutional Interpretation at Midcentury

Abstract

Abstract On 15 May 1851, Frederick Douglass let it be known in the pages of the North Star that he had come to a new interpretation of the US Constitution as an anti-slavery document, indicating his complete break with Garrisonian abolitionists. This essay argues that Douglass’s change in understanding the Constitution was propelled not only by specific political and personal events detailed in scholarship but also by his rhetorical engagement with audience. In the years leading up to this announcement, and especially in speeches delivered during his 1845-47 British tour and an 1850-51 lecture series in Rochester, New York, Douglass explored the nature of interpretation through figures of audience, including the oratorical critic, contrasting British and American assemblies, and summoned groups. He offered audiences lessons in transformative anti-slavery and anti-racist reading, presenting himself as one who reads for and with audiences and who reads audiences themselves to break through the interpretive lens of white supremacy. The essay ends with a brief look at the implications of this argument for understanding Douglass’s best-known address, “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” (1852).