Nick Bromell
University of Massachusetts, Amhert
Nick Bromell is the author, most recently, of "The Time Is Always Now: Black Thought and the Transformation of U.S. Democracy" (Oxford: 2013). He is the editor of "A Political Companion to W.E.B. Du Bois" (forthcoming, Spring 2018) and co-editor of the Norton Critical Edition of "My Bondage and My Freedom" (forthcoming). He is currently completing a study of Frederick Douglass's political thought for Duke University Press.
Most accounts of Frederick Douglass’s belief in natural law suggest that he first encountered the idea after he became an abolitionist.
In this paper I argue that – by his own account in “My Bondage and My Freedom” -- Douglass’s first cognizance of natural law occurred when, as an enslaved boy, he contemplated the world around him and from it received intimations of the moral law it both expressed and authorized. He gave these autobiographical accounts more philosophical treatment in his 1861 lecture, “Pictures and Progress.”
Douglass’s childhood response to the red-winged blackbirds on the Lloyd estate is one notable instance of how, according to him, his aesthetic, appreciative powers catalyzed his political awakening: "The tops of the stately poplars [of Colonel Lloyd’s garden] were often covered with red-winged black-birds, making all nature vocal with the joyous life and beauty of their wild, warbling notes. These all belonged to me, as well as to Col. Edward Lloyd, and for a time I greatly enjoyed them." These birds "belong" to him, imparting to him a sense of his own worth that makes palpable the injustice of his enslavement: "I used to contrast my condition with the black-birds, in whose wild and sweet songs Fancied them so happy! Their apparent joy only depend my sorrow. There are thoughtful days in the lives of children -- at least there were in mine -- when they grapple with all the great, primary objects of knowledge and reach, in a moment reach conclusions which no subsequent experience can shake. I was just as well aware of the unjust, unnatural, and murderous character if slavery, when nine years old, as I am now."
These experiential origins of his knowledge of natural law have has broad implications for our understanding of Douglass’s political thought. Of particular pertinence to this C-19 conference is its development of a way of conceiving human dignity that avoids human “speciesism,” a problem that confronts virtually all cases made for human dignity as the foundation of human rights. (Human speciesism is a term used by Peter Singer and other and animal rights activists and environmentalists; it refers to the belief that humans are entitled to more moral respect than non-human animals and the material world.)
