The next time you have the chance to watch a river ebb, flow, and course towards its destination with gentle persistence, try to see it through the eyes of Frederick Douglass, the great 19th century abolitionist, orator, and philosopher.
Douglass grew up on the eastern shore of Maryland, and, after escaping slavery, eventually made it to New Bedford. He spent his life around water, and it clearly inspired him. His speeches often used water imagery to push audiences to understand that the forces that shape nations, like the force of water, can be simultaneously constructive and destructive.
Nowhere did he refer to water more powerfully than in his July 5, 1852, speech, "What to the Slave is the 4th of July?". In its opening lines, he paints a portrait of the young American nation as a river:
Great streams are not easily turned from channels, worn deep in the course of ages. They may sometimes rise in quiet and stately majesty, and inundate the land, refreshing and fertilizing the earth with their mysterious properties. They may also rise in wrath and fury, and bear away, on their angry waves, the accumulated wealth of years of toil and hardship. They, however, gradually flow back to the same old channel, and flow on as serenely as ever. But, while the river may not be turned aside, it may dry up, and leave nothing behind but the withered branch, and the unsightly rock, to howl in the abyss-‐sweeping wind, the sad tale of departed glory. As with rivers so with nations.
This speech is commonly cited as one of Douglass’s greatest. It was delivered in Rochester, NY to a mostly abolitionist audience. But Douglass knew he was speaking beyond the room. By the 1850’s our predominantly agrarian nation had started to become concerned about deforestation, overgrazing, and deteriorating fishing conditions (Willis, 2011).
Just 12 years after Douglass made this powerful call for social reform, George Perkins Marsh published his seminal work Man and Nature: or, Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action which sounded the alarm about watershed protection that echoes through the work of organizations like the Massachusetts Rivers Alliance today. So, Douglass’s eloquent metaphor, that draws a parallel between river stewardship and the safekeeping of a nation, would have resonated with Americans in the 1850s. Certainly, the speech and its accompanying pamphlet made a strong impression, acting as a rallying cry for the growing abolitionist movement.
Douglass understood that the forces of nature can motivate and inspire people. In his eyes, a river became a prophetic allegory for the future of an unsteady society. It’s just one of many important lessons we can learn from Frederick Douglass; spend time with a river, watch it, listen to it, and perhaps it will help you better understand how to improve your own world.
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