Anxiety of a Freeman
Frederick Douglass’s radical—and prophetic—understanding of workplace power.
“I was kept in a perpetual whirl of excitement, I could think of nothing scarcely, but my life… I almost forgot about my liberty.”
—Frederick Douglass
As was often the case for those living under chattel slavery, Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey, the man later to be known as Frederick Douglass, was taken from his mother before his first birthday. He spent his early years on the plantation with his grandma. Since he only saw his mother on rare occasions, it might have been assumed that they lived states away from one another. In fact, she lived just over 12 miles away, on a different plantation.
When Douglass was about eight, his master sent him to Baltimore, to the home of Sophia and Hugh Auld, where he first learned how to read. Through his studies, he came, as he’d later recount, to “faithfully [rely] upon the power of truth, love, and justice.”
Fueled by these three moral virtues, Douglass summoned the power to challenge, both materially and intellectually, the structures of work, control, and enslavement. His story, an epic of American history, reminds us there is no cause as worthy as freedom.
Even today, many people around the word are striving, as Douglass, to escape slavery, while the rest of us find ourselves on the sliding scale between freedom and bondage. As the pandemic still rages on, millions of people are reconsidering their lives, and the role work should play therein.
As part of a phenomenon termed the “Great Resignation,” workers all over the U.S. (and world) are not taking jobs, leaving companies short-staffed in practically every major industry. A recent report found that more than 50 percent of U.S. hospitality workers wouldn’t return to their old jobs for any reason. And why would they? Americans have come to work an average of 8.8 hours per day, with many, especially blue collar workers, working 12 hours days unbroken by weekends. This is a practice that was going out of style in 1926!
The trend is limited not only to poor service workers, but also middle management and other “successful professionals.” This has come as a surprise to practically everyone. The political right sees the phenomenon as proof that society really is weighed down by lazy welfare queens and kings. Many on the political left see it as proof of ill pay, and a degraded lower class increasingly unwilling to submit. This analysis has merit. But it’s somewhat belied by the fact that the “Great Resignation” has affected high wage earners as well.
The actual problem is one of alienation. According to Marxist political scientist Asher Horowitz, alienation is “a surrender of control through separation from an essential attribute of the self, and, more specifically, separation of an actor or agent from the conditions of meaningful agency.” In the workplace, alienation drives workers to give up community, family, love—the things that make life worth living—for the robotic efficiency demanded by capital.
In Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Douglass, no Marxist himself, describes the social conditions by which people are kept in bondage. In recounting the distinct horrors of chattel slavery, Douglass displays deep—and ever-relevant—appreciation for the dynamics that keep us working under duress. These same dynamics helped sustain slaveholding America, and they’re best understood through the eyes of the era’s most prolific and insightful writer.
Far-removed from the grueling plantations of the rural south, Frederick Douglass was relatively lucky: In Baltimore, he could learn to read and write, if surreptitiously, and the diversity of lives moving forth in his midst exposed him to alternative possibilities from a young age. Eventually though, despite the initial (and later rescinded) encouragement of Sophia Auld, Hugh banned him from further learning. He believed that teaching slaves was not only unnecessary, but a cause of anguish.
On the last front at least, Auld would have a point. Douglass found himself regretting his own existence, and he fell into a deep depression. Young and bright, Douglass was stuck in a system that he knew hated him, and would provide few, if any, opportunities for him to come into his own. His status as a slave was absolute.
Around this time, Douglass began to learn of the abolitionist movement, and considered the prospect of escaping to the North. One day while helping on the docks, Douglass met Irish sailors who took pity on his situation. Given their own history of terrors, many Irish in America were sympathetic to the plight of enslaved people, and the workers egged him to run away, helping him to fortify his own resolve to seek freedom.
After being hired out to a slave master outside of Baltimore, he began to teach other slaves under the guise of “Sunday School” gatherings. He saw education as a step towards freedom, arguing that learning would erase the “mental darkness” that allowed chattel slavery to persist. “I have found,” he would later write, “that to make a contented slave, it is necessary to make a thoughtless one. It is necessary to darken his moral and mental vision, and, as far as possible, to annihilate the power of reason. He must be able to detect no inconsistencies in slavery.”
Robbed of the right to education, and by extension, important avenues of communication, enslaved peoples could not properly express their intelligence in the eyes of the everyday white Americans, who saw them as inferior. It is in the context of such “created” logics that perverse cultural narratives can fester.
Without such logics, these narratives, whether organized around slavery or contemporary work culture, cannot last. In slavery, the logic of slave inferiority only holds in the absence of a more comprehensive reason. Both white and Black Americans were robbed of that capacity through the white supremacist regime.
Today, nothing matches up to the sinister project to justify slavery. But similar dynamics darken our own vision and keep us distracted, both at work and at play. Consider the engine that drives today’s “hustle culture.” A woman I once dated put it to me thus: “I work to afford the nicer things in life that I deserve after working so hard.” We work to consume—a logic which only makes sense on the basis of elaborate mental gymnastics. Beyond the need for shelter, food and other necessities, the culture encourages people to spend more so they work more. It’s part of a phenomenon the economist Thorstein Veblen termed “conspicuous consumption”—the idea that people spend money in the pursuit of social status. Alienated from other human values, the idea goes, it becomes necessary to assert one’s status with the only available value remaining: money.
In Douglass’s day as now, the time we get off from work is contextualized by work itself. People are not machines, and without breaks, they may get agitated and revolt. Some slave owners understood this, and many enslaved people in the U.S. had one actual stretch of holidays, a six-day period between Christmas and New Year’s. During this time, slaves could return home and, theoretically, spend their time how they chose.
Douglass was skeptical:
“The holidays are part and parcel of the gross fraud,” he wrote. “They do not give the slaves this time because they would not like to have their work during its continuance, but because they know it would be unsafe to deprive them of it…. Their object seems to be to disgust their slaves with freedom, by plunging them into the lowest depths of dissipation.”
According to Douglass, on holidays, slaves would overindulge on drink and food. While many would take the holiday time to, for example, work on their tools, many more spent it hedonistically. The latter approach was preferred by the masters, who would sometimes, with betting games, encourage slaves to get drunk. The goal, as Douglass saw it, was to get slaves so drunk that they would start to hate it; it was to “disgust the slave with freedom by allowing him to only see the abuse of it.”
The modern equivalent might be the club-goer who spends their weekend binge-drinking such that, by the time Monday comes, the hangovers and the exhausted bank account make work a welcome reprieve from the vices. Not only does overindulgence create the need to work—many enslaved peoples would save all year for the holidays, according to Douglass, and those who failed to amass the means to drink through Christmas were considered lazy—but it is in part over-consumption itself that drives people back to work. “We staggered,” wrote Douglass, “up from our filth of our wallowing, took a deep breath, and marched to the field—feeling, upon the whole, rather glad to go from what our master had deceived us into belief was freedom, back to the arms of slavery.”
The Covid-19 lockdown has closed not just workplaces but even places of leisure and fun. And people are waking up to the inadequacy of the weekend to assuage their anxieties. Without the stress of going into work, many realize how little they cared to overindulge in the first place. I know personally that the cycle of weekend parties has often functioned to keep me busy, as by Monday I have done little to improve my situation, and in fact now need to work to make up the money I’ve spent. There is something deeply cruel about conditioning people to hate freedom. And yet, even today, our designated leisure time often alienates us from a true sense of freedom by offering a false one in its stead.
Douglass’s “Sunday School” lessons took place on the plantation of William Freeland, who Douglass regarded as a kinder man than his counterparts. Here, Douglass found in his fellow enslaved people a family—bound through education, work, and a developing plan for escape.
They were caught. And Douglass, seen as the primary culprit, was sent back to Hugh and Sophia Auld, who hired him out to a local shipbuilder. Here, Douglass, who learned to caulk, worked among free Black carpenters. As a tradesman, he was entitled to monetary compensation, which he passed on to Auld, who would sometimes, perhaps sensing Douglass’s resentment, pay him a tiny percentage back. (“The fact that he gave me any part of my wages was proof, to my mind, that he believed me entitled to the whole of them.”)
A skilled caulker, Douglass managed to hire out his time for further compensation still, and though he was required to pay Auld room and board, he was now more in charge of his own life than ever before. He set up his own contracts and found his own employment—duties typically undertaken by the master. As Douglass would later write, his master “received all of the benefits of slaveholding without its evils; while I endured all of the evils of a slave, and suffered all the… anxiety of a freeman.”
These anxieties of the freeman are what we have today. While Douglass was theoretically free to spend his time as he chose, the need to earn enough to pay off Auld kept him busy. It was, he acknowledged, an improvement, but it was a “hard bargain” too. Though the regime allowed him to save money, the new predicament was not all that favorable to his freedom. Before, when caulking work was not available, his time would have been free. Now as Douglass put it, “rain or shine, work, or no work, at the end of each week the money must be forthcoming, or I give up my privilege.” Douglass earned about $7 to $9 dollars per week. $6 went to his master.
Elements of this system would be familiar to those today who contract themselves to work menial jobs for menial wages to afford disastrous rents. Many scrounge to save more money to afford a retirement or to move to a better life. But in general, U.S. workers earn less, work more, and have higher expenses today than any time since the 1980’s.
Dwindling opportunity has kept people tied to these menial conditions, with minimal chance for further financial liberty. Taking a new job or even just going to an interview can come at the cost of the job you have now, and billions of people, from the U.S. to the Ukraine, live paycheck to paycheck, days away from homelessness. Caught in this ruthless cycle, many do not have the luxury to save, or may even be too distracted to find something to save for. This is what Douglass means when he says that “I was kept in a perpetual whirl of excitement, I could think of nothing scarcely, but my life; and in thinking of my life, I almost forgot my liberty.”
As is the case for many destitute workers today, Douglass found that the need to feed yourself tomorrow overrides the need for freedom in general. One day, Douglass was late paying his master and was thereafter forbidden to contract his extra time. Once again, he gave his wages, in full, to his master. Yet having saved enough (and with the financial assistance of the freeborn black woman Anna Murray), Douglass was ready to make his second attempt at freedom. With both the money to escape, and the time to plan an escape, Douglass was ready to find true emancipation.
For many, the coronavirus lockdowns likewise stopped, or at least substantially slowed, the circling wheel of work. Freed from the daily necessity to go into work every weekday, millions are doing something that resembles what Douglass once did: With the time to think of their liberty, and for some, the saved income to render it possible, workers are also looking to emancipate themselves from destitution.
On September 3rd, 1838 Douglass reached New York as a freedman. He and Murray, who quickly married, set out for New Bedford to spend the rest of their lives in freedom. His skills as a caulker would be useful there. Fredrick Bailey became Fredrick Johnson and then Fredrick Douglass. Freed from slavery, his name change—to Douglass—reflects a lessening sense of alienation, a growing sense of who he was and what his life could mean. With the coronavirus upending our lives, it’s important to learn from Douglass, to gain a fuller sense of self, and understand that freedom does not simply “exist”—it is a never-ending fight. ▩