Lecture on Trip to Europe (1887)

AUTHOR: Douglass, Frederick
PUBLICATION: “Lecture on Trip to Europe.” 1887. Frederick Douglass Papers. Library of Congress.
https://www.loc.gov/item/mss1187900454/

The text refers to the trip Douglass took to Europe between 1886-1887 with his second wife, Helen Pitts. Some of the contents of this text appear in the revised edition of Douglass’s third autobiography, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1892 [1881]).

KEYWORDS: animals, environment, food, land, slavery

Douglass reflects on his third trip to Europe, dwelling especially on the journey between Paris and Rome and on his stay in Egypt. The account does not discuss food but evokes various aspects of Douglass’s ethical theorizations about human-animal relations. Douglass empathizes with the physical toil of animals of burden and compares the lot of the camels he sees in Egypt with that of enslaved African Americans. The text also reiterates his hatred of animal fighting and his valorization of frugality and humility in a broader sense.

In Douglass’s description of peasant routine in the French and Italian countryside his ideal of frugality coincides, implicitly, with a veg*n diet: “One of the pleasantest sights to be seen as you pass along are groups of these people by the roadside, taking their frugal noonday meal of hard bread and sour wine, and apparently as cheerful and happy with their humble fare as are those who are arrayed in silks and satins, purple and fine linen, and fare sumptuously every day” (3). That their rudimentary diet is also free of meat, dairy, and other animal products speaks to their modesty and absence of greed, a characteristic Douglass and other anti-slavery writers routinely identify as belonging to the American slave-holding elite. Three decades after Emancipation, Douglass upholds the same ethical framework. Importantly, Douglass equates the moral ideal to aesthetic beauty so a scene of virtuous frugality is to him a pleasant sight.

While in Arles (in the South of France) and in Rome, Douglass visits the cities’ amphitheater and comments on the staged animal fights that were historically held in these venues. This is an occasion for Douglass to critique both the inter-species destruction and the gratuitous violence engendered by blood sports:

We were taken through it [the amphitheater at Arles] and shown the various apartments where the lions were kept, and their way out of their dens to the arena where they were lashed to fury for their fierce and bloody contests with men. Looking upon this old structure, with its memory of the terrible strifes for which it was built, and the amusement it once strangely afforded to thousands of men and women, one cannot help feeling thankful that we live in a more enlightened age (9).

Douglass’s historicization recalls how intrinsic peace is to civilizational progress, including peaceful relations between humans and other animals. Douglass links lion fighting to other forms of gambling, which he generally holds as immoral:  “There is, however, enough of the wild beast still left in our modern human life to remind us of our kinship with the people who built this ampitheater, and who found pleasure in the brute encounters of men and beasts in its arena” (9).

During his visit to Egypt, Douglass pays particular attention to and empathizes with burden-bearing animals, specifically camels. He describes at length how:

I have large sympathy with all burden-bearers, whether they be men or beasts, and having read of the gentle submission of the camel to hardships and abuse, how he will kneel to receive his heavy burden and groan to have it made lighter, I was glad right there in the edge of Egypt, to have an illustration of these qualities of the animal. I saw him kneel and the heavy load of sand put on his back; I saw him try to rise under it and heard his sad moan. I had much the same feeling which I at first had in seeing a gang of slaves chained together and shipped for a foreign market. Here, too, we caught sight of what we often see in pictures,--a long line of camels attended by three or four Arabs, slowly moving over the desert. This spectacle, more than the language or the costumes of the people, gave me a vivid impression of eastern life, as it was in the days of Abraham and Moses (28-29).

Douglass illustrates his impression of fellow-feeling with the camel by interpreting the camel’s non-verbal expressions through familiar emotions, such as sadness. Through the simile with “a gang of slaves,” Douglass signals his understanding that the camel’s circumstance is familiar to hi, through personal experience. Beyond the simile, Douglass parallels enslaved African Americans and the camels he sees in Egypt through a typological structure. To him, the “spectacle” he witnesses evokes the biblical-historical period of the Israelites’ enslavement in Egypt, which in Abolitionist writings often registers as the biblical type of U.S. chattel slavery.

Despite the camels’ heavy burden, Douglass does not depict their treatment as violent (unlike his view of the treatment of animals of burden in Haiti). In fact, he implicitly describes what he sees of Egyptian farming as an achievement of his own agricultural ideal. He notes a key difference in the management of grazing animals between what he observes and what is familiar to him: “Another feature peculiar to Egypt is the mode of grazing. The cattle, donkeys, horses and camels are not allowed to roam over the fields as with us, but are tethered to stakes driven down in the ground, eating all before them and leaving the land behind them as though it had been mowed with the sickle or scythe” (31). Douglass translates this practical ideal into an aesthetic ideal: “They [the camels] present a pleasant picture standing in rows like soldiers with their heads towards the tall vegetation and seemingly as orderly as civilized people at their dining tables” (31).