Featured Excerpt: A Matter of Complexion by Tess Chakkalakal

On October 7, 1880, The Raleigh Signal, a Republican newspaper published by the Republican State Committee of North Carolina, introduced Chesnutt to the public. Hailing Chesnutt’s “rare accomplishments” as “a thorough English scholar” and his ability to speak French and German fluently, the editors also called readers’ attention to his mastery “without assistance” of “the Pittman [sic] system of phonography.” These credentials, according to the paper’s editors, qualified Chesnutt to report “verbatim et literatum”—word for word and letter for letter—on Frederick Douglass’s speech delivered on October 1. Douglass’s 1880 speech in support of James A. Garfield’s presidential campaign was part of the second annual Industrial Exhibition, organized by a group of North Carolina’s most prominent Black businessmen and held at the state capital’s Metropolitan Hall. Chesnutt’s skills in shorthand had become so well known in the state that he was invited by the organizers to share the podium with the great orator.

Chesnutt would have traveled to Raleigh from Fayetteville by train on the Cape Fear and Yadkin Valley Railway. It was an important trip. This would have been the first time Chesnutt could apply and get paid for the shorthand and literary skills he had been practicing for months. He had already published a couple of short sketches in the school’s newspaper and delivered several speeches for the school’s literary society. Reporting on Douglass’s 1880 speech marked Chesnutt’s entry into the public sphere as a literary man. We don’t know how much Chesnutt was paid for reporting Douglass’s speech or if he was paid at all. Perhaps seeing his name and biography in print, coupled with the name “Fred. Douglass,” was sufficient remuneration for his labor. Douglass’s speech, like so many the former slave delivered in his lifetime, is a work of literary genius. Entitled “Why Should the South Be Solidly Democratic?” Douglass’s speech opened with a quote from, in his words, the “god-like” Daniel Webster:

The right to canvass the policy of public men and public measures, is a homebred right, a fireside privilege; that it belongs to private life as a right, but it belongs to public life as a duty. Aiming to exercise it calmly and temperately, except when the right itself is questioned, then, said he, I will step to the verge of my right and hurl defiance to any power that would move me from my place. Living, I shall assert it; dying, I shall assert it; and, if I leave no other heritage to my children, it shall be a manly defence of free principles.

Like Webster, speaking publicly was Douglass’s way of exercising the “free principles” he championed throughout his life. Printed on the second page of the four-page newspaper, Douglass’s speech took up three and a half of its six columns. Chesnutt reported the speech in its entirety, including the moments when the audience broke into “[Applause]” and “[Laughter].” The purpose of the speech was to provide a resounding endorsement of Garfield for president. Douglass claimed that Garfield was “a good man . . . because he is like me . . . a self-made man.” Midway through the speech, written almost entirely in standard English, Douglass quoted from “a colored brother of mine.” In quoting from this “colored brother,” Douglass switched to Black dialect. Chesnutt reported Douglass’s words this way:

“Well,” said the preacher, “I should like to preach the Gospel to de people here, but I cannot consent to preach on dem terms. Why,” said he, “do you know dat one word on dat subject would throw a dampness and coldness over de whole congregation?”

Well known for his antislavery speeches and powerfully written autobiographies, Douglass was not known for his use of Black dialect. He almost never employed it in his writings, and there are few, if any, examples of it in his published speeches. Even in his only published work of literary fiction, The Heroic Slave, an 1853 novella that dramatized the life of Madison Washington, a slave who led a successful rebellion on a slave ship in 1841, Douglass presented his hero speaking in a highly literate, even poetic, form of English. But in Chesnutt’s report, Douglass can be heard speaking in Black dialect. In doing so, the audience (and readers) of the speech got a better sense of Douglass’s literary range and sense of humor. Here was a man who can quote from Webster and an unnamed colored preacher in the same breath, giving both men equal status on the podium.

In reporting on Douglass’s speech, Chesnutt absorbed more than just his words. He also absorbed Douglass’s literary style, a style that integrated both Black and white voices that spoke to both Black and white audiences. It was a lesson he would not forget. Recalling in vivid detail the experience a couple of years later in one of his speeches to the literary society entitled “Self-Made Men,” Chesnutt described how Douglass “held the audience spell-bound for several hours. He had lost none of his old-time power, and the audience were alternately moved to laughter by his wit, or tears by his pathos. My heart swelled with pride and happiness as I saw the veteran abolitionist stand before an audience, half of former slave-holders, in a State where he once would have been hunted by bloodhounds or sold on the auction block.” As the nation’s preeminent self-made man and Chesnutt’s personal role model, Douglass was nothing short of an inspiration for Chesnutt. Chesnutt’s 1882 speech would serve as a first take of his only book-length work of nonfiction. Published less than a decade later, Chesnutt would write the first full-length biography of the former slave, orator, and political figure that would set off a revival of Douglass’s work in the twentieth century. Though other biographies of Douglass would surpass Chesnutt’s in length and popularity, his was the only one written by someone who had seen, heard, and transcribed Douglass’s speech as it was being spoken.