Road to Africa: Frederick Douglass's Rome.

Frederick Douglass visited Rome in 1887 and described his sojourn in the concluding section of his 1892 Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, an expanded version of his 1881 memoir of the same name. Typically, nineteenth-century American travelers to Rome were drawn to the art and history of the city, and even to aspects of Roman Catholicism, while at the same time they recoiled from what they perceived to be the decadence, agedness, and duplicity of Protestant culture's traditionally seductive anti-republican enemy. [1] Much of what Douglass has to say about Rome in Life and Times suggests his familiarity with other travel writings of the period, and his desire to present himself, in part, as the archetypal conflicted American traveler.

Though he suffers an initial disappointment when arriving in newer areas of Rome, which remind him of "Paris, London, or New York," by the next day Rome has become "Rome": "The Eternal City, seated on its throne of seven hills, fully gave us all it had promised, banished every feeling of disappointment, and filled our minds with ever-increasing wonder and amazement" (Life and Times 572). He praises Rome's art and architecture, which he says reveal an aesthetics and history lacking in the United States, and he seems envious of the ways in which the rituals and practices of Roman Catholicism bring "a great comfort to these people" (577). But even as he confesses his attraction to the city's spiritual grandeur, he voices skepticism and concern about the possibly mendacious, despotic, and aristocratic character of the Roman Catholic Church. Like Nathaniel Hawthorne, who was also attracted to aspects of Roman Catholic art and religion, Douglass worries over the sheer worldliness of the Church as an economic and i mperial institution. Declaring that "about every fifth man met with ... is at work in some way to maintain [the Church's] power, ascendency, and glory," he wryly notes that "religion seems to be in Rome the chief business by which men live," and he condemns the "fanaticism ... encouraged by a church so worldly-wise as that of Rome" (575). The doubleness of his response, critique and fascination, is nicely captured in his remarks on St Peter's. Commenting on "the wealth and grandeur within," Douglass points out that "the Church of Rome today receives gifts from all the Christian world, our own republican country included." Yet despite his portrayal of the Church as a monetary power, Douglass finds himself succumbing to the atmosphere of "ethereal glory" at St. Peter's, and he concludes his remarks on a note of begrudging admiration: "St. Peter's, by its vastness, wealth, splendor, and architectural perfections, acts upon us like some great and overpowering natural wonder. It awes us into silent, speechless adm iration" (576). Rome is both unnatural and natural, subject to critique and yet somehow beyond critique. It offers a kind of solace ultimately unavailable in Protestant/republican America.

Although Douglass's conflicted responses to Rome can make him seem very much the conventional nineteenth-century American traveler, I will be focusing here on some of the less conventional aspects of his presentation of Rome in Life and Times and other, more private writings of the period: the way in which he uses Rome to address what he regards as the conjoined issues of race and progress in the United States, and the way in which he conceives of Rome in relation to Africa. But first it would be useful to provide some background on his travels.

From October 1886 to May 1887 Douglass toured England, France, Italy, Egypt, and Greece with his second wife, nee Helen Pitts, a white woman whom he'd married two years earlier, in 1884, at the age of 66, less than two years after the death of his first wife, Anna. A graduate of Mt. Holyoke College, Helen worked as Douglass's secretary when he was Recorder of Deeds in Washington in the early 1880s, and their marriage was greeted with considerable controversy: Douglass was attacked by blacks and whites (including Helen's family) for marrying someone outside of his "reace." In response to these criticisms, Douglass aggressively challenged essentialist notions of racial difference, asserting, for example, in an interview printed in the 26 January 1884 Washington Post: "I am not an African, as may be seen from my features and hair, and it is equally easy to discern that I am not a Caucasian" (Frederick Douglass Papers 5: 146). Consistent with his statements on the matter since the 1840s, he argued for the importance of transcending race, of thinking about the oneness of humanity, declaring in the same interview (and sounding a bit like Melville's Ishmael on Queegueg's religious denomination): "You may say that Frederick Douglass considers himself a member of the one race which exists" (Papers 5: 147). [2]

Throughout his career, Douglass's inclusive views led him to reject black separatist solutions to the racial problems plaguing the United States, fearing that emigration movements would undermine his efforts to champion African Americans' rights to citizenship in the United States. As he remarked in the January 1859 Douglass' Monthly: "Now, and always, we expect to insist upon it that we are Americans; that America is our native land; that this is our home; that we are American citizens; that it is our highest wisdom thus to recognize ourselves; and that it is the duty of the American people so to recognize us" ("Twelfth" 2). Consistent with his desires to bring about black elevation in the United States, he attacked black racial chauvinism, or what he scornfully referred to as "race pride," as a "positive evil," warning in an 1889 speech to an African American audience that racial chauvinism replicated the thinking of white racists and thus gave "the enemy a stick to break our own heads" (Papers 5:411-12). As a mulatto, he also regarded racial chauvinism as false to social and biological realities. In the same speech, "The Nation's Problem," he thus challenged those who would chide him and other African Americans for a lack of "race pride": "When a colored man is charged with a want of race pride, he may well ask, What race? For a large percentage of the colored race are related in some degree to more than one race" (Papers 5:413).

But even as Douglass urged blacks to abandon race pride and fight for their rights in the U.S., he remained acutely aware that most whites thought in terms of racial binaries and hierarchies, and that such thinking had hurtful daily consequences for African Americans. In a letter of 16 July 1886 to his friend W. H. Thomas, he succinctly noted that "the Negro is few, the white man is many. The Negro is weak, the white man is strong" (Life and Writings 4: 443). Though his public rhetoric often remained optimistic about blacks' prospects in the U.S., the fact of the matter is that, with the failure of Reconstruction and the rise of Jim Crow laws and anti-miscegenation statutes, Douglass began to wonder just how much better off nominally free blacks really were. He despairingly wrote Francis J. Grimke on 24 April 1886: "Though no longer bought and sold in the market we are still a proscribed, oppressed and maltreated race at nearly all points." Given this social reality, Douglass confided to Grimke that there wa s a continued need for race leaders (even as he disavowed notions of race): "It seems to me that the colored man has now almost as much need of a faithful advocate as in the time of slavery" (Life and Writings 4: 442).

Central to Douglass's project as a race leader during the 1880s and early 1890s, Gregory Stephens argues, was an effort to display his interracial marriage as a mediatory symbol that spoke to the possibilities of overcoming racial obsessions and hatreds (see ch. 2). Presenting his marriage and mixed-race status as positive examples for the nation, Douglass championed the value of a racial mixing that ultimately could contribute to the nation's progress and harmony by making a virtue of the nation's racial diversity. Concerned that white racists increasingly sought to demonize black men as desirous of "unnatural" sexual and marital relations with white women, he extolled what he termed America's "Composite Nationality," its mixture of "white" and "black" blood, and presented himself (and his marriage) as the very embodiment of such mixture. [3] In this way he boldly sought to confront those who, for whatever reason, continued to put stock in racial essentialisms. As part of his effort to undermine such essent ialisms, he cagily begins the section added to the 1892 Life and Times by listing the various questions he was regularly asked about the interconnected issues of his racial status and marriage:

In what proportion does the blood of the various races mingle in my veins, especially how much white blood and how much black blood entered in my composition? ... Whether I considered myself more African than Caucasian, or the reverse? Whether I derived my intelligence from my father, or from my mother, from my white, or from my black blood? Whether persons of mixed blood are as strong and healthy as persons of either of the races whose blood they inherit? ... Why did I marry a person of my father's complexion instead of marrying one of my mother's complexion? How is the race problem to be solved in this country? (513)

The large implication of this rhetorical opening is that Americans will be on the path to addressing their race problems only when they come to realize the intellectual and moral bankruptcy of such questions.

But even as he celebrated the possibilities (and reality) of biraciality and multiraciality, Douglass sought to present his politics of racial mixing to his black readers as anything but a program that would encourage them to succumb or surrender to whiteness. Like the African American writer William Wells Brown, who in his 1881 My Southern Home urged blacks to increase their "contact with educated and enterprising whites" (294) because "amalgamation is the great civilizer of the races of men" (293), Douglass argued that blacks' commitment to racial mixing should proceed not from a sense of racial inferiority but rather from a prideful conviction of racial equality.

It follows, then, that one of Douglass's principal motives for touring Europe was to cast himself, the black traveler, in the role of the civilized and elite traveler of the period. Richard Brodhead has argued that during the Gilded Age European tourism became one of the gentry class's "chief means to establish its place in the world" by promoting "the value of Culture" ("Introduction" xiv; see also School ch. 3). In deciding to undertake his own grand tour, Douglass as representative black leader hoped to make his and, by extension, African Americans' claims to the world of culture, even as he remained acutely aware that struggles for literacy and economic survival remained the pressing issues for the majority of blacks in the deep South. In less grandiose ways, Douglass's tour was also no doubt motivated by a desire to escape the controversy over his marriage, and by the fact that earlier in the year President Grover Cleveland had asked him to resign from his job as Recorder of Deeds.

Additional motives for the tour became clearer to Douglass only after he arrived in England, for it was at that time that he decided to add Rome and Egypt to his itinerary. [4] The evidence suggests that Douglass initially intended to use his visit to Egypt as a kind of fact-finding expedition that would help him to argue, along with Martin Delany and many other nineteenth-century black leaders, that Western civilization had important sources in Africa, and thus that those of African descent had legitimate claims to what Douglass in a letter to his son Lewis Douglass referred to as "the moral support of Ancient Greatness" (qtd. in McFeely 332). As he somewhat vaguely writes in Life and Times, "I had... an ethnological purpose in the pursuit of which I hope[d} to turn my visit to some account in combating American prejudice against the darker colored races of mankind, and at the same time to raise colored people somewhat in their own estimation and thus stimulate them to higher endeavors" (579). Rather than p resenting all roads leading to Rome, Douglass, in an effort both to develop black pride and to contest the ideological sources of whites' antiblack racism, would show that all roads led to Africa. But such was his commitment to ideals of progress and racial mixing that he resisted what could be termed an Afrocentric celebration of origins, and in Life and Times he presents instead a more progressive narrative of all roads leading both to and from Africa. As we shall see, it is ultimately in Rome that Douglass finds what he most values and believes will be most useful in making his antiracist arguments in the United States: a conjunction of mixed blood peoples (the Romans) and the rise of Western civilization.

Douglass and his wife began their tour in England in late September of 1886, stopping first at Liverpool and then making their way to London, where they met Anna and Ellen Richardson, the British sisters who had helped to purchase Douglass from slavery in 1846 for $711, and Julia Griffiths Crofts, the now-widowed white woman who had been Douglass's editor (and possible paramour) during the early 1850s. [5] In October the Douglasses traveled to Paris, where they remained for eleven weeks, touring the city with, among others, Theodore Tilton, who had left the United States in 1883 after his scandalous conflict with Henry Ward Beecher, and Theodore Stanton, the son of Elizabeth Cady Stanton. During their stay Douglass and his wife visited a number of people and landmarks that spoke to Douglass's interest in slavery and race: Haitian students from the French colonies whose intelligence and sophistication, Douglass wrote to a friend, testified to "the possibilities of the colored race" (Life and Writings 4: 446); a statue honoring Alphonse Marie Louis de Lamartine; and Gustave Dor e's statue of the mixed-race writer Alexandre Dumas. According to Stanton, who published an account of his Parisian tours with the Douglasses in the journal Open Court, when Douglass viewed the statue of Lamartine, he dwelt "on the fact that the poet-President signed in 1848 the decrees that freed all the slaves of the French colonies, and his eyes were attracted by the resemblance of Lamartine's face to that of Lincoln"; and when he viewed the statue of Dumas he was unmoved, for he "remembered how this son of a negress had never spoken a word or written a line in defense of his mother's race" (151). Douglass's responses suggest that, despite his commitment to racial unity, he continued to conceive of himself as a race leader who had a mission to defend "his mother's race." In fact, while in Paris he wrote to friends that he intended to put his travels to use in helping blacks in the United States: "I shall probably make a few speeches in vindication of the cause and character of the colored race in America, in which I hope to do justice to their progress and make known some of the difficulties with which as a people they have had to contend" (Life and Writings 4: 446; on Douglass in Paris, see Quarles 305-08).

Although Paris clearly stimulated Douglass's thinking on racial matters and was the locale of his longest stay, in Life and Times, his most public account of his travels, he devotes relatively little attention to Paris, focusing instead on Rome and Egypt. He sets up the significance of his journey from Paris to Rome in terms of issues of race and civilization, referring to "the country lying between Paris and Rome" as "the cradle in which the civilization of Western Europe and our own country was rocked and developed" (562), and describing the necessity of traveling even farther east to study its birth. In making this journey, he states, the traveler moves on a continuum from nations exhibiting relative whiteness to nations exhibiting relative blackness, the implication being that there is no essential purity of races (particularly of whiteness"). In a passage that is crucial to an understanding of Douglass's conception of race in human history, he writes about the journey from Paris to Rome as a journey tow ard "blackness": "As the traveler moves eastward and southward between those two great cities, he will observe an increase of black hair, black eyes, full lips, and dark complexions. He will observe a southern and eastern style of dress, gay colors, startling jewelry, and an outdoor free-and-easy movement of the people" (562). He presents these physical characteristics and signs of racial gradation as consistent with his "ethnological" project of using his eastward journey to develop arguments about the indebtedness of relatively white Western Europe to relatively black Northern Africa, and in this way argue for human equality and unity. For example, he notes that, like blacks in Egypt (and the American South), workers in France and Italy congregate together at night and carry their supplies on their heads. This provides evidence, he says, that refutes notions of "inferiority peculiar to the Negro" (562), showing that, "even if originated by the Negro," various cultural practices have "been well copied by som e of the best types of the Caucasian. In any case, it may be welcomed as a proof of a common brotherhood" (563).

Douglass of course had long been thinking about race and cultural origins, and in one of his best known antebellum lectures, "The Claims of the Negro Ethnologically Considered," a graduation speech delivered in 1854 before the Philozetian and Phi Delta literary societies of Western Reserve College in Hudson, Ohio, he had sought to counter the racist, polygenist arguments of the leading exponents of the so-called "American School" of ethnology--Josiah Nott, Samuel Morton, George Gliddon, and others--who had made avowedly scientific claims about the racial and cultural inferiority, separate evolution, and absolute difference of black peoples in relation to whites. Intent on demonstrating that Egypt's contributions to Western civilization had everything to do with the white blood of its inhabitants, Samuel Morton, for example, in his influential Crania Egjptiaca (1844), asserted that the "Valley of the Nile, both in Egypt and Nubia, was originally peopled by a branch of the Caucasian race" (qtd. in Nott and Gli ddon 214). In "Claims," Douglass attacked Morton for attempting "to prove that the ancient Egyptians were totally distinct from the negroes, and to deny all relationship between," and he argued instead for "a near relationship between the present enslaved and degraded negroes, and the ancient highly civilized and wonderfully endowed Egyptians" (Papers 2: 508,517). Convinced that the scientific racialism of the American School's ethnologists was being put to the service of legitimating racial hierarchies in the United States, Douglass proclaimed that "the whole argument in defense of slavery, becomes utterly worthless the moment the African is proved to be equally a man with the Anglo-Saxon" (Papers 2: 506). [6]

In Life and Times, Douglass to some extent is still fighting the battle against scientific racialism, for the good reason that such racialist thinking continued to hold considerable sway in U.S. culture. He remains concerned that "scientific" assertions of black inferiority serve as crucial underpinnings to "the steady march of the slave power toward national supremacy since the agonies of the war" (554), and he includes a discussion of his 1854 criticisms of Morton, Nott, and Gliddon in both the 1881 and 1892 versions of his autobiography. But the emphasis in Douglass's 1892 autobiography is ultimately less on locating and celebrating the black sources of Western civilization than on exploring the multiracial origins and development of the West. Given his commitment to African Americans' rights to U.S. citizenship, which he saw as best brought about by a collapsing of racial categories and hierarchies, and given the symbolic place of his marriage in this social and political program, it is thus not surprisi ng that in his 1892 Life and Times he seeks to emphasize the mixed-raced identities of the European and, by extension, the manifestly white and black American peoples, presenting mixture rather than purity as the crucial determinants of civilization and progress.

In this regard it is significant that, when Douglass sailed to Europe on the aptly named City of Rome, he spent a full day reading Ralph Waldo Emerson's English Traits (1850). (According to his "Diary, 1886-1894," Douglass was able to devote himself to Emerson on 20 September 1886 because his wife was confined to their cabin with seasickness. [7]) In the chapter in English Traits titled "Race," Emerson challenged the central tenets of the Scottish physician Robert Knox's 1850 book The Races of Man: A Fragment, which attempted to prove, in Emerson's words, "that races are imperishable" (44). Refuting Knox, Emerson maintains that the idea of a pure or unchanging race is a fiction, for the progress of Western civilization, he declares, "eats away the old [racial] traits" (48). Especially gratifying to Douglass would have been Emerson's remarks on racial gradation and mixture. Emerson writes: "Though we flatter the self-love of men and nations by the legend of pure races, all our experience is of the gradation a nd resolution of races, and strange resemblances meet us everywhere" (49-50). Even the English, he says, have a "composite character [thati betrays a mixed origin" (50). Significantly, in contemplating English racial types, Emerson notes that "the Roman has implanted his dark complexion" (54). It is precisely such intermixture, such "composite character," Emerson concludes, that contributed to England's emergence as one of the world's great civilizations and powers. In his diary entry on Emerson, Douglass remarks, I ... have been glad to find my own views of the civilization of England supported by one so thoughtful and able as the Sage of Concord" (20 Sep. 1886).

Emerson's discussion of the darkness of the Romans, and the overall mixed racial character of Europe, no doubt influenced Douglass's own account, approximately forty years later, of Rome's racial dynamics. For it is in Europe's Rome, as much as in Africa's Egypt, that Douglass takes note of racial mixture and blackness. Douglass made an initial two-week visit to Rome, arriving on 19 January 1887 and soon after meeting up with the small black expatriate community that found Rome a congenial political and aesthetic refuge from a racist United States. This group included the sculptor Edmonia Lewis, who had been residing in Rome for the past twenty years, and Sarah Remond, an abolitionist who was the sister of Douglass's close friend Charles Remond, the abolitionist lecturer. In the enthusiastic spirit of these Rome-enamored expatriates, Douglass in Life and Times focuses much of his attention on describing his fascination with the relics of ancient Rome and the practices of the contemporary Roman Catholic Churc h. But he also talks about racial and cultural difference. Contemplating the Arch of Titus, he laments the fate of the Jews in losing their "beloved Jerusalem," and he suggests that his ability to sympathize with the Jews has much to do with the fact that as an African American he has suffered similar indignities based on racial prejudice: "None who have never suffered a like scorn can adequately feel for their humiliation" (573). He then moves from a lament for the Jews' sufferings to a discussion of the holiness and bravery of St. Paul and St. Peter, and this discussion culminates in a playfully arch and subversive image of worshipers paying their respects to the "black" statue of St. Peter at St. Peter's: "I had some curiosity in seeing devout people going up to the black statue of St. Peter--I was glad to find him black, I have no prejudice against his color--and kissing the old fellow's big toe, one side of which has been nearly worn away by these devout and tender salutes of which it has been the cold s ubject" (577). [8]

The joke here of course is that the bronze of the statue has blackened to such an extent that Douglass can present a picture of St. Peter and his worshipers that inverts conventional images of white supremacy. In the context of the rise of public lynchings of blacks during the American 1880s, there may even be an oblique phallic joke in the image of whites kissing the Saint's extended black toe. But more is going on in the passage than just a comic (and bawdy) racial inversion. Consistent with his conception of the Continent as becoming blacker as the traveler moves east, the image of a black St. Peter that Douglass presents in Life and Times speaks to his effort to "blacken" traditional accounts of European and Christian history by questioning assumptions of whiteness. When he worked up the account in the late 1880s or early 1890s for Life and Times, Douglass was clearly mounting a pointed and deliberate challenge by choosing to raise such questions through his image of a black St. Peter, for the fact is th at his initial diary entry on the statue makes no mention of St. Peter's "blackness." Instead, he matter of factly describes the "men and women... crossing themselves, and some kissing the toe of St. Peter, which toe has already been nearly kissed away" (24 June 1887).

Douglass's reconception of St. Peter as "black" can therefore be taken as central to his effort to interrogate and revise key ideological sources of whites' "race pride." With his emphasis on Roman blackness, Douglass would seem to have set his sights on the racist historicism of Thomas Jefferson, whose influential discussion of slavery in his 1787 Notes on the State of Virginia has at its center a discussion of Roman "whiteness." Attempting to cast a positive light on slavery in the emergent United States, Jefferson insisted that the condition of the Romans' slaves "was much more deplorable than that of the blacks on the continent of America," in large part because the Romans' laws governing slavery were significantly harsher than those of American slave owners. And yet, Jefferson concedes, after denigrating the poetry of Phillis Wheatley, the fact is that in Rome, as opposed to the United States, the "slaves were often the rarest of artists" (267). According to Jefferson, the obvious reason for this dispar ity is racial: "Epictetus, Terence, and Phaedrus, were slaves. But they were of the race of whites. It is not their condition then, but nature, which has produced the distinction" (268). Convinced, as he puts it, "that the blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind," he can thus explain why the Romans, unlike Americans, could emancipate their slaves with greater frequency: Emancipation in ancient Rome would not raise what was for Jefferson the highly troubling specter of racial mixing. As Jefferson explains, "Among the Romans emancipation required but one effort. The slave, when made free, might mix with, without staining the blood of his master" (270).

Jefferson's revulsed rejection of the very possibility of mixture was of course at odds with Douglass's social goals of the period, as it was at odds as well with Emerson's (and Douglass's) views of racial gradation. Jefferson's views also conflict with the historical truth of the matter. The classical scholar Frank M. Snowden, Jr., in his book Blacks in Antiquity. dismisses notions of racial separatism and chauvinism perpetuated by Jefferson and others, arguing that the Romans did in fact enslave, liberate, and mix with African peoples: "Roman accounts of race mixture between Ethiopians and Mediterranean whites reveal no repugnance at the idea of racial crossings between whites and non-whites" (192). There was no (or less) repugnance because the kinds of hierarchical racial categories that guided the thinking of Jefferson and other Enlightenment writers had not yet been invented; for this reason, then, according to Snowden, Roman society "had no prohibition against miscegenation" (195) [2] In his romance of miscegenation, The Marble Faun (1860). Hawthorne implicitly works against Jefferson's notion of Roman purity by telling his own story of racial mixture in describing the descendent of what he refers to as the "race of Monte Beni" (231) as marked by "constant intermixtures" (234). Though Hawthorne emphasizes the allegorical mixing of animal and human, the allegory is informed by traditional white fears of miscegenation (see, for instance, the linking of animality and race in Edgar Allan Poe's "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" [1841]). Miriam, like Donatello, is also referred to as a person of "mixed race" (430), as she is rumored to have both black and Jewish blood. In Hawthorne's (as opposed to Jefferson's) Rome, so in Douglass's Rome: There is an emphasis on mixture, though in Douglass the representation of mixture has different ideological sources and is put to very different political uses. [10]

That said, there are important similarities between Hawthorne's and Douglass's notion of the conjunction of Jewish and black blood in those bodies that Jefferson preferred to imagine as racially "pure." It is thus worth noting that some evangelicals, Native American and otherwise, regarded the Native Americans as descendants of the lost tribes of Israel, and accordingly conceived of both the Native Americans and the Jews, whom Douglass presents quite sympathetically in Life and Times, as people of color. [11] In his best known speech, "An Indian's Looking-Glass for the White Man" (1833), the Pequot writer William Apess works with that notion to present Christ and his disciples as black. Apess writes:

Did you ever hear or read of Christ teaching his disciples that they ought to despise one because his skin was different from theirs? Jesus Christ being a Jew, and those of his Apostles certainly were not whites--and did not he who completed the plan of salvation complete it for the whites as well as for the Jews, and others. And were not the whites the most degraded people on the earth at that time? . . . And did not St. Paul labor more abundantly for building up a Christian nation among you than any of the Apostles? And you know as well as I that you are not indebted to a principle beneath a white skin for your religious services but to a colored one. (158)

Apess thus concludes his speech with a wry rhetorical question: "Now, if the Lord Jesus Christ, who is counted by all to be a Jew--and it is well known that the Jews are a colored people, especially those living in the East, where Christ was born--and if he should appear among us, would he not be shut out of doors by many, very quickly?" (160). In asking this question, Apess destabilizes notions of blackness and Christianity (as would Douglass in his attack on proslavery Christians in the Appendix to his 1845 Narrative), terming the inconsistencies and hypocrisies of white "Christian" racists as "ten times blacker than any skin that you will find in the universe" (157).

Because St. Paul has traditionally been admired as the Saint who best articulated Christ's transracial view of the oneness of humanity, it is significant that Douglass in Life and Times describes Paul's brave walking of the Appian Way to meet his fate. But it is with his description of St. Peter's blackness that Douglass, in the tradition of Apess (and Hawthorne) does his most subversive and ironic questioning of racial purity and superiority. He concludes his account of the Roman Catholic worshipers of the "black" St. Peter by remarking, "It is doubtless a great comfort to these people, after all, to have kissed the great toe of the black image of the Apostle Peter" (577). Having reinforced the image of a black St. Peter, he then underscores, in an anticipation of the pragmatic, ethnographic mode of William James's Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), the psychological and spiritual similarities between whites' religious practices in Rome and blacks' religious practices in the United States: "I felt, in looking upon these religious shows in Rome, as the late Benjamin Wade said he felt at a Negro camp meeting, where there was much howling, shouting, jumping: 'This is nothing to me, but it surely must be something to them'" (578). This sort of cultural relativistic presentation, linking that which has been viewed as traditionally white with that which has been viewed as traditionally black, while retaining a skeptical distance that means to collapse the distance between white and black, comes to inform Douglass's subsequent remarks on his travels to Egypt.

As his account of Rome suggests, Douglass regarded racial mixing as both a social desideratum and a fact of human history, a fact that could best be studied by moving even farther east. One reason that Douglass insisted upon such a fact is that he wanted to instruct his readers on the crucial place of "blackness" in that mix, thereby challenging the central tenets of the ethnologists' white supremacist AngloSaxonism. In Life and Times he remarks that what he hoped to gain by subsequently journeying from Rome to Egypt in February 1887 was evidence to support his "ethnological" vision: "I had a theory for which I wanted the support of facts in the range of my own knowledge. But more of this in another place" (579). Douglass never does give us a major statement on ethnology in some other place, but we can speculate that he planned to revisit the main arguments of his 1854 "The Claims of the Negro Ethnologically Understood" by collecting the empirical facts that would support his thesis, as elaborated in "Claims ," that "Greece and Rome--and through them Europe and America-have received their civilization from the ancient Egyptians," and that the Egyptians "were, undoubtedly, just about as dark in complexion as many in this country who are considered genuine negroes" (Papers 2: 508). In fact, while in Paris Douglass wrote a letter to friends suggesting that, because of the intensifying antiblack racism during the 1880s, he believed it was particularly important to continue to fight ethnological battles, for as he remarks in that letter:

I have long been interested in Ethnology--especially of the North American races. I have wanted the evidence of greatness under a colored skin to meet and beat back the charge of natural, original and permanent inferiority of the colored races of men. Could I have seen forty years ago what I have now seen I should have been much better fortified to meet the Notts and Gliddons of America in their arguments against the Negro as a part of the great African race. Knowledge of this subject comes to me late, but I hope not too late to be of some service, for the battle at this point is not yet fought out and victory is not yet won. (Life and Writings 4:446)

What is somewhat surprising about this letter is that Douglass wrote it before visiting Egypt; he asserts the centrality of "the great African race" to Western culture on the evidence of his prior reading, his viewing of several Haitian students in Paris, and perhaps most importantly, especially when considered in relation to his responsiveness to Rome, his perception of the blackening of Europe as he travels east from England.

Consistent with his notion of racial continuum and gradation, Douglass, by the time he makes his way to Egypt, believes that he has entered a realm of greater, but not "pure," blackness. Shortly after arriving in Cairo, he writes in a diary entry of 18 February 1887: "I do not know of what color and features the ancient Egyptians were, but the great mass of the people I have yet seen would in America be classed with Negroes. This would not be a scientific description but an American description." In a letter of 20 February 1887 to his son Lewis, Douglass makes a similarly jaundiced point about the unscientific, culturally inflected nature of racial categories in the United States, remarking that the Egyptians "are very much like the mulatto, and would be taken for such in the United States" (qtd. in McFeely 332). Douglass's thinking on Egypt and race was in all likelihood influenced by David Walker, who in his famous 1829 Appeal ... to the Coloured Citizens of the World proclaimed that "the Egyptians, were A fricans or coloured people, such as we are--some of them yellow and others dark--a mixture of Ethiopians and the natives of Egypt--about the same as you see the coloured people of the present day" (8). Like Douglass, but even more explicitly, Walker asserted a connection between blacks and the ancient Egyptians for the ideological purpose of contesting the racist ideology of Thomas Jefferson. In this regard it should be recalled that as a mulatto Douglass earlier in his career had personally linked himself to Egypt, remarking in the third chapter of his 1855 autobiography My Bondage and My Freedom that his mother's features resembled those of an Egyptian head depicted in James Cowles Prichard's The Natural History of Man (1845), a text that had argued for connections between Egyptians and blacks. (Douglass offers similar comments on Prichard and his mother in the opening chapter of the 1881 and 1892 editions of Life and Times.) From this perspective, and in light of his visiting Egypt approximately thirty yea rs after having asserted this familial connection, Douglass can be regarded as having reached a kind of spiritual homeland in a nation that, though literally in Africa, is figured as a border zone between Western Europe and the southern reaches of even "blacker" Africa.

And yet the fact is that, while in Egypt, Douglass can seem rather condescending to the "blacks" or mulattos that he encounters there. In his diary he describes how he "saw various forms of squalor, disease, and deformity-all manner of importunate beggary. It was truly pitiful to see a people thus groveling by filth and utter wretchedness" (19 Feb. 1887). As someone who had championed the rights of women since the 1840s, he is also concerned about the situation of Egyptian women. Less than a month before visiting Egypt, he noted in his diary the "very cheerful, happy--and successful" situation in Rome of the black artist Edmonia Lewis (26 Jan. 1887). By way of contrast, Egyptian women, he states, are "kept in ignorance and degraded, having no existence except that of ministering to the pride and lusts of the men who own them as slaves are owned" (19 Feb. 1887).

In Life and Times, Douglass adopts a similarly critical perspective on Egypt. Watching a "small army of Arabs" working with apparent pleasure on a barge, he notes their happiness at their labors and compares them to blacks, remarking, in passages that make him sound a bit like Melville's Amasa Delano in "Benito Cereno," that the "Negro works best and hardest when it is no longer work, but becomes play with joyous singing" (580). He depicts the laboring Arabs as animal-like: "Lank in body, slender in limb, full of spirit, they reminded one of blooded horses" (581). Rather than celebrating Egypt, he concludes by underscoring the country's lack of progress: "Egypt may have invented the plow, but it has not improved upon the invention" (585). Ultimately, though his intention in visiting Egypt, as stated in letters and diary entries of 1887, was to adduce the kind of evidence that would combat white racists' denigrations of blacks' place in Western history, by the time he wrote up the account for his memoir he se ems uneasy about what he regarded as an embarrassing lack of evidence of "progress" in this Northern African nation. In this respect, Douglass displayed some of the attendant Western biases of nineteenth-century U.S. elites, white and black, who came into contact with Arabs and Islam and failed to discern marks of civilization. His road to Africa thus ultimately leads him back to Rome, where, from his perspective as Christian, reformer, and former U.S. government official, fuller progress and a subtler racial mixing are on display. [12]

What Douglass does experience in Egypt is not some chauvinistic insight into the greatness of Africa but stirrings of a nascent religiosity. [13] Climbing the Pyramids at the age of sixty-nine with the help of two Arab servants, he describes in Life and Times how he looks down from the summit and feels a sense of spirituality and wonder; he confesses to experiencing "thoughts and feelings never thought and felt before" (586). And he experiences once again a cultural relativistic, or perhaps more accurately, pragmatist view of the ways in which religion speaks to suprarational human needs: "The religion and church of Egypt, though denounced as a fraud and their author branded throughout Christendom as an imposter, are not less believed in and followed in Egypt than the Church and Christianity are believed in and followed at Rome. ... If Rome has its unwashed monks, Cairo has its howling and dancing dervishes, and both seem equally deaf to the dictates of reason" (586-87). Despite such cultural-relativistic in sights, however, upon his return to Rome, where he decides to remain for another two weeks, he evinces a great deal of respect for Roman Catholicism, recording in his diary that he "witnessed the Easter ceremonies within St. Peter's abounding in excellent music" (15 Apr. 1887) and commenting as well on his exhilarating tour of the Vatican museums (20 Apr. 1887). Significantly, in describing his return to Rome in Life and Times, he evokes a sense of the progressive movement of history and race from east to west, as he talks of passing in "sight of Crete, looking from the deck of our steamer perhaps as it did when Paul saw it on the voyage to Rome eighteen hundred years ago" (587). Linking himself to Paul, celebrated by Apess and other Native American evangelicals as a person of color with a color-blind commitment to spreading the Gospel, he asserts his ties to the rise of Christianity and progress in the West, and reaffirms his identity as an antiracist leader and as a person of mixed blood.

Douglass's letters and diary entries of 1886 and 1887, then, suggest that he initially conceived of Rome as a stopping point on the road to Africa in his eastward journey from lighter-skinned to darker-skinned peoples and nations. But by the time he wrote Life and Times, Rome comes to seem to Douglass the more rhetorically useful locale; he wants to place himself (and American blacks) more on the westward road to the United States than on the eastward road to Africa. One reason that Douglass wanted to demonstrate a greater allegiance to Europe than to Africa was that he sought to challenge the notion that he and other blacks had some "natural" connection to black nationhood; such a challenge was consistent with his career-long resistance to colonization and emigration programs that would transport African Americans to what he termed "the pestilential shores of Africa" (Papers 2: 437). He was also concerned that the development of a chauvinistic "race pride" among African Americans would further contribute to the (self-) segregation practices that kept blacks in the anomalous position of being what he termed a "nation, in the midst of a nation" (Papers 2: 427). And of course through his representation of his marriage and travels, he wanted to promote a racial mixing that would teach the large truth that Douglass took from Acts 17:26, "that God has made of one blood all nations of men to dwell on all the face of the earth" (Papers 5: 413).

There was also a specifically political reason for his desire to dissociate African Americans from Africa. In the early 1890s, during his two-year stint as minister and consul general to Haiti, Douglass was criticized by many white politicians and journalists for having deliberately sabotaged U.S. efforts to obtain naval and trading privileges with Haiti. These critics believed that, because Douglass was a black man, he must have been working secretly to forward the interests of a black nation. He resigned from the position in the summer of 1891, around the same time he wrote his account in Life and Times of his visit to Rome. A celebration of Africa at the expense of Rome would have given additional quarter to racists' arguments about Douglass's larger allegiance to a transnational ideal of black nationhood. And so he presents himself in his autobiography as a patriot of sorts, who sought to gain from his travels that which would contribute to progress and social justice in the United States.

Reading Douglass's account of his travels to Rome prompts us to rethink consensus notions of Rome's place in the nineteenth-century American imagination. Attending to the politics of race in his account allows us to see more clearly the unstated racial politics of popular travel texts, such as James Jackson Jarves's Italian Sights and Papal Principles: Seen through American Spectacles (1856) and Charles Eliot Norton's Notes of Travel and Study in Italy (1859; rpt. 1887), which in subtle ways worked to advance the very connections among U.S. republicanism, Anglo-Saxonism, and white privilege that informed the ethnological accounts of the American School and ultimately the racist politics of the post-Reconstruction period. [14] Unlike most white American travelers to Rome, Douglass paid heed to racial mixture, and extolled not the triumph of Anglo-Saxonism but the miscegenated origins of Western civilization. But even with these differences, there are important similarities between Douglass's and other U.S. vis itors' conflicted attraction to Rome as a refuge from the struggles and anxieties of Protestant/republican America. Worn down by his diplomatic misadventures and the continuing struggle for black rights in the U.S., Douglass, in his brief description in Life and Times of the additional two weeks he spent in Rome after returning there from Egypt, seems to be yearning for yet another return to Rome. "The longer one stays" in Rome, he writes, "the longer one wants to stay," and he remarks that while in Rome for those two weeks he felt a great sense of humility in contemplating "the vanity of all things" (588). One of the most moving aspects of Douglass's account of Rome is just how conventional that account becomes by the very end.

Robert S. Levine is Professor of English and Director of Graduate Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is the author of Conspiracy and Romance (1989) and Martin Delany, Frederick Douglass, and the Politics of Representative Identity (1997), and the editor of The Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville (1998) and a Bedford Cultural Edition of William Wells Brown's Clotel (2000).

Notes

(1.) For excellent accounts of nineteenth-century Americans' conflicted responses to Rome, see Vance, and Franchot. Also useful are Davis, Baker, Wright, and Levine, Conspiracy.

(2.) In Moby-Dick, Ishmael proclaims that Queequeg belongs to "'the great and everlasting First Congregation of this whole worshiping world; we all belong to that'" (83).

(3.) For an early instance of Douglass's compelling use of the concept of "Composite Nationality," see "Our Composite Nationality: An Address Delivered in Boston, Massachusetts, on 7 December 1869," which attacks white racists' responses to Chinese immigrants (Papers 4: 257). On Douglass's notion of "A Composite American Nationality," see Martin 197-224. For an excellent discussion of whites' concerns about miscegenation during this period, see Hartman 184-90.

(4.) In a letter of 1 September 1887, Douglass remarked to Francis J. Grimke that "Egypt and Greece were not in our calculations when we left home--and Rome was definitely not so" (Life and Writings 4: 448).

(5.) On Douglass in England, see McFeely 324-28; on Douglass and Julia Griffiths Crofts, see esp. 162-86, 326.

(6.) For a fuller discussion of Douglass's "Claims," see Levine, Martin Delany 9-12. On Morton and the "American School" of anthropology, see Gossett ch. 4, Martin ch. 9, and Nelson chs. 3, 5. As Martin points out, Morton eventually modified his views on Egypt, though he continued to argue "that ancient Egypt's greatness derived from the Caucasian admixture" (226).

(7.) My thanks to the librarians in the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress for allowing me to work with the manuscript of Douglass's diary, which is also available on Reel #1 of the Library's microfilmed collection of The Papers of Frederick Douglass.

(8.) On Douglass and Rome, see Quarles 309-11 and McFeely 328-29. Douglass was not alone in remarking on the darkness of the Romans. In Italian Hours, Henry James regularly refers to the "dusky" Italians. On race and "ethnography" in James and other travel writers of the period, see Blair 15-59.

(9.) Thompson similarly argues that in Rome the "structures of society carried no inherent prejudice against blacks qua blacks," and he refers to "the constant process of inbreeding which regularly placed progeny and descendants of Aethiopes in the somatic categories--'swarthy' and 'white'" (162).

(10.) On race in The Marble Faun, see Carton 112-14.

(11.) On the Puritan origins of the evangelical impulse to conceive of the Indians as the lost tribe of Israel, see Cassuto 58.

(12.) Martin criticizes Douglass's turn against Egypt and Africa (207-10). For a more sympathetic and equally nuanced account of Douglass's ultimate dissatisfaction with Egypt, see Moses 80-81, 130. (Wilson also develops a useful critique of Bemal's Egyptocentrism; see esp. 48-51.) On the importance of notions of progress to Douglass's Life and Times, see Warren.

(13.) My reading of Douglass's religious stirrings departs from Warren, who sees Douglass as intent on demonstrating that "the religious spirit is alien to the world of progress" (267). Douglass seems to me to be suggesting that the world of progress gives rise to religious desires, which Rome more than Egypt perhaps better helps to satisfy.

(14.) On Anglo-Saxonism and aesthetic appreciation, particularly with reference to Charles Eliot Norton, see Lears 243-47.

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