American History through American Lives

I. Introduction

This unit seeks to provide usable questions and explorations to deepen student engagement with the language acts of Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth.  A study of the speech, writing, and presentation of these two 19th century activists should situate their stories in time and place through rhetorically analyzing speaker and audience relationships.  This is work that welcomes values and motivation conversations--work often glossed over in high school rhetorical analysis strategies, work that can contribute to a classroom culture of debate and contemporize older texts by stimulating historical thinking and inquiry.  Teachers are accustomed to filling in background knowledge and performing the ever-expanding work of contextualization, but for me, reading Douglass and Truth biographies causes how they express themselves to re-enter and re-animate their lives and vice versa while history as a timeline gains dimension. This unit asks you to put language alongside experience alongside events alongside theories of how persuasion happens.

I teach 11th and 12th grade English, so I’m imagining your older secondary students would take this dive with you, especially those students learning about American Literature.  We are required to teach Douglass’s first autobiography in my district, so this unit could be a companion to the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, while giving students a needed, black female take on the abolitionist and reconstruction years of the black freedom struggle (and where it overlaps the struggle for women’s rights).  I definitely think history teachers who take interpreting primary sources seriously could adapt this material to their designs.  Structurally, the unit begins by questioning one of my favorite acronyms and then by proposing a list of questions, not to replace it completely, but to define its limits and further it.  This battery of rhetorical inquiry questions can be used with any anecdote I describe, but of course, some stories exemplify some questions better than others.  The questions are widely applicable, but Douglass and Truth are worth fighting to understand more fully.  The questions then lead into activities about how lives speak. 

Let’s begin with one story among many.  Before reading David W. Blight’s Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom, I knew the self-fashioning Douglass from the 1845 Narrative.  The detailed and thick biography brought Douglass to life with episodes like I’ll share throughout the unit.  I paraphrase this one from Blight:

On May 7, 1850, in New York, during intense debate over the Compromise of 1850 and its Fugitive Slave Act, Douglass, at an American Anti-Slavery Society meeting crashed by a racist mob, faces off against an Irish-German ward boss and political thug, Isaiah Rynders, a lethal guy.  Rynders took the platform and claimed that blacks were part of the monkey species and that race mixing violated nature.  Douglass was compelled by fellow abolitionists to respond which he did, though frequently interrupted by Rynders at his elbow.  At one point Douglass asked the crowd, “Am I not a man?”  The gang leader then chimed in, “You are not a black man; you are only half a n*****.”  To which Douglass replied, “He is correct: I am, indeed, only half a negro, a half brother to Mr. Rynders.”  The crowd fell out, and Douglass seemed to enjoy the invitation to be cleverly combative.  Rynders later admitted that Douglass’s response was “as good a shot as I ever had in my life.”  Blight says many times throughout the book that “Douglass gave as he took” in contentious settings and back-and-forth newspaper smear jobs.¹

Here’s my first attempt at unpacking this story:  Douglass fried that man, and while his autobiography includes scathing analyses of slavery and not so subtle jabs at slaveholders, a small anecdote shows Douglass quickly and extemporaneously correcting a hateful term and making a joke while seeking connection through a willingness to debate and by suggesting a larger, human brotherhood.  He educated and entertained and didn’t disappoint either side of the race issue pre-Civil War that day.

Not too bad.  Often, to analyze the rhetorical situation, I give my students the acronym SPACECAT, a memory device, and a kind of built environment that stands for:

Speaker:  Frederick Douglass
Purpose:  To defend himself in public against a racist attack by a gang leader
Audience:  The American Anti-Slavery Society and the invading, intolerant mob
Context:  May 7, 1850 in New York during intense debate about the Compromise of 1850 and the Fugitive Slave Act, early in Douglass’s political life fighting for the abolition of slavery
Exigence:  Shots fired to start an insult battle.
Choices:  Douglass humorously outwits his opponent but also creates a connection while earning his respect.  Douglass also references the sexual politics of slavery.
Appeals:  ethos...shows his credibility when verbally sparring, pathos...arouses excitement, logos...his body presented as proof of his membership in the ranks of men
Tone:  restrained aggression, swaggery banter, punchy

SPACECAT is jazzy as far as acronyms go, and the teaching would certainly not end at SPACECAT.  But SPACECAT is answer oriented.  I want my students to resist quick answers and plug and play test strategies (this one is big in AP world).  The goal is to stay thinking longer.  CAT carries the weight of interpretation, and SPACE is mostly fill in the blank.  The first ‘C’ I often supply because the connections required typically need internalized frameworks that aren’t quite usefully there or that I only know because I researched it.  Students deserve a different kind of cat.  We need an inquiry-based rhetorical analysis.