do you really think that two selected quotes represent the totality of a person's thinking, and how they lived their complete lives? provocative writing is a rhetorical device to bring attention to a grave issue. it's like cursing. it says "i'm serious here!".
through experience douglass realized violence doesn't work, something many of us have to learn for ourselves as we grow up. he ultimately realized that to achieve abolition, he needed to outreason the slavers, not outgun them, which is what he's principally known for--his reasoned positions on (anti-)slavery.
I read enough about Frederick Dougles, most of it written by himself. Enough to know that yours "espoused exactly the type of cross-racial and cross-ideological dialogue i'm bringing up here" does not describe his stance at all.
He was not merely writing provocatively. He was not provocative in that quote at all. He was trying to radicalize listeners. His distaste toward slaveholders and slavery is clear in his writings, that was his main thing.
> through experience douglass realized violence doesn't work, something many of us have to learn for ourselves as we grow up. he ultimately realized that to achieve abolition, he needed to outreason the slavers, not outgun them
What are you talking about here. He had no issue with Harpers raid
or John Browns previous actions. Instead he had respect toward the man. The civil war followed right after the raid - there was not much time to change opinion such fundamentally.
Also, he wanted black men to fight in civil war, he believed it will give them justification for civil rights and confidence.
Frederic Doughles knew violence works, that was his lifetime experience. Slavery was existing purely because of violence and was kept by violence. That is something Dougles wrote about, talked about repeatedly.
And he did not convinced or outreasoned slaveholders either. They lost the war, they were not convinced. They had too much money in slavery for any convincing to be possible. Plus it feels good to be dominant.
He did however pushed and negotiated with Lincoln. However, he was not pacifist in any shape and form. He was critical of radical abolitionists pacifists (and those were not "cross ideology dialog" kind of people either)
you're entitled to your opinions, but it's really hard to believe your scholarship on the man when you've misspelled his name like 15 different ways. i'm willing to have my mind changed on who douglass was because i know i'm not an expert on his life, but your points haven't provided a coherent, convincing argument, and especially do not provide a coherent and convincing counterargument to mine. it doesn't even attempt to address my line of reasoning at all, but rather simply throws out more disconnected and unsubstantiated assertions.
my basic argument was that douglass tried violence, found it didn't achieve his aims, and decided to use his intelligence and empathy instead, and achieved (some of) his aims by winning over those on the margin, not trying to necessarily win over the extremely prejudiced. this happened over a lifetime (some 80ish years), and who someone is is a totality of those years, not some arbitrary subset of them.
Basically, you know nothing about him and are willing to make up stuff based on own imagination.
> my basic argument was that douglass tried violence, found it didn't achieve his aims, and decided to use his intelligence and empathy instead, and achieved
This is categorically false. You made that up, because you want it to be true (for mysterious reasons).
I write on mobile, I misspell. But, at least I took some interest in that man. And I did not made up whole life philosophy of man I don't know anything about living in social environment I know even less about.
through experience douglass realized violence doesn't work, something many of us have to learn for ourselves as we grow up. he ultimately realized that to achieve abolition, he needed to outreason the slavers, not outgun them, which is what he's principally known for--his reasoned positions on (anti-)slavery.