Frederick Douglass and the Work of Freedom: Hegel's Master-Slave Dialectic in the Fugitive Slave Narrative

Abstract

When Frederick L. Olmstead came face to face with slavery in his travels through the South, he wrote that it was “difficult” to treat a human as property, but “embarrass[ing]” to treat property as human. Olmstead's dilemma encapsulates the difficulties that white slaveholders had in objectifying their slaves. American slaveholders tried to treat the slave as property, but couldn't consistently maintain that stance because they understood all along that the slave was human. Furthermore, the owners had to exploit that humanity in daily practice in order to manage the slave as property. Alexis de Tocqueville saw this conflict in action when he visited the South and witnessed the treatment of slaves: “Not wishing to raise them to their own level, [the owners] keep them as close to the beasts as possible” (emphasis added). Tocqueville's qualification is important. The masters do not succeed in turning the slaves into beasts; they can only approximate doing so. (The “almost” that Tocqueville includes in the epigraph quotation above further suggests this key gap.) Tocqueville's phrasing shows that he sees slaves as people who are being degraded to the status of objects — but who are nonetheless not objects. Moreover, Tocqueville's use of “we” suggests that he is not the only one who sees them as people. For Tocqueville and others unnamed, the slaves retain their human connection. They are not things, but people who are being uneasily forced into the category of “thing.”