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Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass by Frederick Douglass (1845)

I have found that, to make a contented slave, it is necessary to make a thoughtless one. It is necessary to darken his moral and mental vision, and, as far as possible, to annihilate the power of reason. He must be able to detect no inconsistencies in slavery; he must be made to feel that slavery is right; and he can be brought to that only when he ceases to be a man.
(Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, chapter X)

Brief bio

Frederick Douglass was born Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey to Harriet Bailey, a slave woman, and an unknown white father, probably in February 1818. He speculated that his father was the plantation master, but he never had any proof.

Fred Bailey, as everyone called him, was about seven years old when his mother died, and soon after that he was given to Lucretia Auld, who sent him to serve her brother-in-law, Hugh Auld in Baltimore and his wife, Sophia, who was the first to teach him to start to read and write, until her husband forbade her.

After seven years of relative good treatment as a domestic slave in Baltimore, Bailey was sent to a plantation to work in the fields and subjected to brutal treatment. He made good comrades among the other male slaves and helped organise a group escape of about 6 slaves in April 1836, but the conspiracy was discovered and Bailey was severely punished.

Two years later, in September 1838, aged 20, he finally managed to escape to the free North. In 1837, Bailey had met and fallen in love with Anna Murray, a free black woman in Baltimore about five years his senior. She encouraged his aspirations to be free, lent him money and helped his escape. The escape was quite elaborate, requiring Bailey to take a train north, then a steam ferry across the Susquehanna River, and then resume the train journey, to arrive at Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, an anti-slavery stronghold.

To do this he required a sailor’s uniform provided to him by Murray, who also gave him part of her savings to cover his travel costs and he needed to carry identification and protection papers certifying that he was free, which he had obtained from a free black seaman. Full details of the thrilling escape are given in the Wikipedia article.

Three points about this:

Anna’s help was absolutely central to Bailey’s escape.
Bailey gives no details whatsoever of the escape in this book: in this narrative he says that even hints about how he did it would close the escape route for any who wanted to follow him.
It reads like one of the accounts of Allied airman escaping Nazi-occupied France, what with the need for a disguise and false papers. They are two very similar genres.

Bailey moved on from Philadelphia to New York where he was married to Anna Murray then, to be safe, they moved further north, to New Bedford, Massachusetts. Here he was welcomed by a network of abolitionists who helped freed slaves. He wanted to change his name to establish a new identity and one of these white supporters suggested the name Douglass, the name of a character in Walter Scott’s novel The Lady of the Lake, which the supporter happened to be reading at the time (explained in chapter XI).

After the newly named Frederick Douglass made a speech at an anti-slavery meeting in Nantucket he was hired by the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society to lecture about his life as a slave. He was so eloquent that auditors doubted such an articulate man could ever have been a slave and that was the spur for him to write this autobiography, the Narrative, which became an international bestseller.

The publicity the Narrative brought made him made Douglass fear he might be tracked down and recaptured by his previous owner, so he fled to England. Here he became a free man when a group of supporters purchased his liberty for $700. In spring 1847 Douglass returned to America and launched his own newspaper. He published a second autobiography, My Bondage and My Freedom, in 1855.

Following the outbreak of the civil war in April 1861, Douglass lobbied President Lincoln to allow black men to enlist as soldiers in the Union cause and lobbied for the emancipation of slaves to become a Union war aim and so his joy when Lincoln finally makes the Emancipation Proclamation on 1 January 1863 is often quoted by historians. After the war he campaigned for the swift passage of the Fifteenth Amendment granting suffrage to freed slaves. It was finally ratified in 1870.

Douglass rose to hold a series of official positions, serving the US government as a Federal Marshall in the District of Columbia, as consul to Haiti and chargé d’affaires to the Dominican Republic. These experiences form the basis for his third autobiography, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, published in 1881.

Douglass died in 1895 shortly after delivering a speech about women’s rights.

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass

It’s a short text. In the Oxford University Press edition, it’s 92 pages. But a little like another short book, One Day In The Life of Ivan Denisovich, it manages to convey an entire world of suffering and humiliation in a short span.

The text is packed with examples of the wickedness and evil of slavery which appal and disgust the reader. But what really strikes home is the universal perversion of normal human relationships which slavery brings. He never knew his birthday, no-one told him. He was separated from his mother when he was months old; she was sent off to slave from dawn to dusk at another of his master’s holdings. On a handful of occasions, when her day’s work was done, she walked miles to see him and bed down with him for a few hours but she was always gone in the morning. When he was seven he learned, some time after the fact, that she had died.

He explains how frequent it is that a master impregnates one of his female slaves and goes on to raise the child, his own child, as another slave. On the one hand it is ‘cheaper’ than buying new slaves. But on the other, it leads to terrible perversions of human relations. Think about it: a man makes his own child a slave. If he shows any partiality for the child, his white children or wife and even the other slaves will resent it. And he looks on while overseers whip his own child, or watches his half-brothers whip his own child.

The slave narrative genre and its conventions

The notes in the OUP version I read mention the 1839 book, American Slavery as It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses. This was an anthology of documents assembled by the American abolitionist Theodore Dwight Weld, his wife Angelina Grimké, and her sister Sarah Grimké. They bought thousands of old newspapers from libraries and scoured them for all references to slavery, personal accounts, letters, articles and hundreds of adverts, especially for runaway slaves, written by slavers themselves.

When cut and pasted together the book formed a harrowing testimony to the brutality of the slave regime which completely contradicted the lying speeches of southern politicians and commentators.

But from a literary point of view, the important thing about American Slavery As It Is is how influential it was. Harriet Beecher Stowe used it as the direct inspiration for her novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which itself influenced millions. Charles Dickens’s American Notes quotes whole ads from American Slavery. And also Frederick Douglass quoted extensively from the book in the many speeches he gave.

My point is that the recycling and formatting of descriptions meant that anti-slavery books quickly became a genre with its own conventions and formats. Certain topics were expected. Certain arguments were repeated. As I read through the Narrative I was certainly horrified by Douglass’s experiences of the systematic heartlessness, cruelty and brutality of the American slave system. But I also began to notice that the narrative is artfully arranged to press its readers’ buttons.

Consider his audience. It was the educated, bien-pensant, North American nineteenth-century middle-classes, the same high-minded New England abolitionists who attended his lectures. What were their values? They believed in family, in home, in chastity and fidelity. They believed in religion, the ten commandments, we should love our neighbour as ourselves. They believed in the sanctity of the Sabbath, that men should use chaste and dignified language and refrain from swearing. They had a sentimental post-romantic ideology of fine feelings and romantic attachments. They disapproved of alcohol and many advocated complete abstention.

As I read Douglass’s Narrative it almost felt like he had a checklist of these Victorian values in front of him and went out of his way to show how slavery, slave owners and their overseers were the exact opposite of everything the Victorians held precious, and embodied the diabolical anti-type of every single Victorian value.

Chastity

Many male slave owners had sex with their female slaves. Female slaves were unable to maintain their chastity and there was no-one to protect them. All those fair damsels being rescued from dragons in sentimental Victorian art and literature were mocked by the reality of the systematic raping of millions of helpless black women.

Family values

Rape

Male slave owners completely inverted the idea of family values by siring multiple mulatto children with numerous slave women, obviously out of wedlock. Douglass himself thought his father was probably the white owner of the plantation he was born on. It is doubtful if his mother gave anything like what we mean by ‘consent’ to him raping her. Douglass must have gone through his life knowing he was the result of white master rape.

Destroying families

Not only that, but slave owners thought nothing of breaking up families, dividing husband and wife or parents from children, at the drop of a hat, with no warning, and forever. After Colonel Lloyd hears criticism of himself from a slave who didn’t even realise Lloyd was his master (Lloyd had some 1,000 slaves), he acts decisively and cruelly.

The poor man was then informed by his overseer that, for having found fault with his master, he was now to be sold to a Georgia trader. He was immediately chained and handcuffed; and thus, without a moment’s warning, he was snatched away, and forever sundered, from his family and friends, by a hand more unrelenting than death.

Douglass being separated from his mother while still a baby was no accident; it was an intrinsic part of a system which went out of its way to destroy all natural family feeling.

My mother and I were separated when I was but an infant—before I knew her as my mother. It is a common custom, in the part of Maryland from which I ran away, to part children from their mothers at a very early age. Frequently, before the child has reached its twelfth month, its mother is taken from it, and hired out on some farm a considerable distance off, and the child is placed under the care of an old woman, too old for field labour. For what this separation is done, I do not know, unless it be to hinder the development of the child’s affection toward its mother, and to blunt and destroy the natural affection of the mother for the child. This is the inevitable result.

Anti-fathers

The fathers of these half-breed slave children were happy to watch them be degraded, worked to death, punished and whipped to shreds. Pretty much the exact opposite of what the ideal, caring and loving Victorian paterfamilias ought to be. A diabolical inversion.

Truth telling and lies

Colonel Lloyd had met the slave about an errand on a road, asked him who he belonged to, was told ‘Colonel Lloyd’ and when he asked what kind of owner Lloyd was, the slave (not realising he was talking to the man himself) replied that he wasn’t treated well. Tearing him away from his family was the slave’s punishment.

OK, upsetting story: but, as is his way, Douglass then goes on to make a much wider sociological point, which is that it was this kind of event which taught all slaves never to tell the truth. Again, for the Victorians this was a much more important issue than it is to us today. Douglass was addressing the Victorian value which goes something like ‘a gentleman always tells the truth’. All Victorian mummies told their little boys and girls to always tell the truth. Well here, Douglass shows his reader, is a vast system which indoctrinates millions of slaves into never telling the truth, into hesitating to reply to any enquiry, of being afraid to tell the truth to anyone, in any situation, in case they are a spy for their owner trying to catch them out (which does, Douglass assures us, frequently happen).

Slavery was not only based on multiple lies about human nature but it created a culture of systematic lying. For God-fearing Victorian evangelists this was horrifying for who is the Father of Lies in the Bible? The Devil. Slavery does the Devil’s work by turning its wretched subjects into sinners.

Chivalry towards the fairer sex

As we all know Victorian ladies fainted at the sight of a grand piano’s legs and Victoria chaps were aroused by an exposed ankle. Slave culture drove a coach and horses through these fancy pretensions with slave women regularly stripped naked and degraded.

I have often been awakened at the dawn of day by the most heart-rending shrieks of an own aunt of mine, whom he used to tie up to a joist, and whip upon her naked back till she was literally covered with blood. No words, no tears, no prayers, from his gory victim, seemed to move his iron heart from its bloody purpose. The louder she screamed, the harder he whipped; and where the blood ran fastest, there he whipped longest. He would whip her to make her scream, and whip her to make her hush; and not until overcome by fatigue, would he cease to swing the blood-clotted cowskin.

Male slave owners could have sex with any slave they wanted to. Apart from anything else the system institutionalised rape on an industrial scale. He tells the story of his Aunt Hester, a good looking woman who he now realises his master was raping. When his master catches her in the company of a male slave from another property:

Before he commenced whipping Aunt Hester, he took her into the kitchen, and stripped her from neck to waist, leaving her neck, shoulders, and back, entirely naked. He then told her to cross her hands, calling her at the same time a d——d b——h. After crossing her hands, he tied them with a strong rope, and led her to a stool under a large hook in the joist, put in for the purpose. He made her get upon the stool, and tied her hands to the hook. She now stood fair for his infernal purpose. Her arms were stretched up at their full length, so that she stood upon the ends of her toes. He then said to her, ‘Now, you d——d b——h, I’ll learn you how to disobey my orders!’ and after rolling up his sleeves, he commenced to lay on the heavy cowskin, and soon the warm, red blood (amid heart-rending shrieks from her, and horrid oaths from him) came dripping to the floor.

If chivalry means something like respect towards and consideration for ‘the fairer sex’, then slavery was its diabolical antitype, combining systematic rape, stripping naked and degradation, along with the most violent and cruel physical punishment imaginable.

Decency

Not only were the women regularly raped and/or stripped and whipped, but most slaves had very few clothes to cover their bodies with, to maintain what the Victorians thought of as their ‘decency’, and then only of the poorest quality. These often degenerated to rags. Where Douglass grew up, the children weren’t given any underclothes or garments to his their privates, just one long shirt.

The children unable to work in the field had neither shoes, stockings, jackets, nor trousers, given to them; their clothing consisted of two coarse linen shirts per year. When these failed them, they went naked until the next allowance-day. Children from seven to ten years old, of both sexes, almost naked, might be seen at all seasons of the year.

This indecency would have scandalised Douglass’s high-minded, religious readers.

Christian values

Slave owners simply deny that slaves are human and therefore ineligible for the rights and respect preached by Christianity (see below). By direct contradiction, Douglass makes plain at various points in the narrative that he is a practising Christian who believes the series of incidents which led to his eventual freeing were the results of a special Providence. In fact he devotes the final section of the text, the Appendix, to making an unambiguous extended declaration of his profound Christian faith.

As to whether religion had a positive effect on slave owners, the answer is No. In 1832 Douglass was transferred to the ownership of young Master Thomas Auld who turns out to be a mean and cruel owner. In August 1832 his master attends a Methodist camp meeting and is converted to the new religion, and yet it in no way moderates his behaviour. He continues to whip and punish Douglass for numerous infringements of his petty rules. In fact, Douglass states that conversion to more active Christian belief made his master’s behaviour worse:

I indulged a faint hope that his conversion would lead him to emancipate his slaves, and that, if he did not do this, it would, at any rate, make him more kind and humane. I was disappointed in both these respects. It neither made him to be humane to his slaves, nor to emancipate them. If it had any effect on his character, it made him more cruel and hateful in all his ways; for I believe him to have been a much worse man after his conversion than before. Prior to his conversion, he relied upon his own depravity to shield and sustain him in his savage barbarity; but after his conversion, he found religious sanction and support for his slaveholding cruelty.

Douglass routinely watches Auld whip a helpless young slave woman, Henny, and piously quote scripture to justify doing so: ‘“He that knoweth his master’s will, and doeth it not, shall be beaten with many stripes’ (Luke 12:47).

Not really up to managing slaves, Auld loans Douglass out to a Mr Covey, a notorious ‘nigger breaker’, even though he was a professor of religion—a pious soul—a member and a class-leader in the Methodist church. Once again this Mr Covey manages to be super-pious and extremely violent to his slaves. Covey whipped Douglass more than any other master. Later on Douglass is totally explicit on this issue:

I assert most unhesitatingly, that the religion of the south is a mere covering for the most horrid crimes,—a justifier of the most appalling barbarity,—a sanctifier of the most hateful frauds,—and a dark shelter under, which the darkest, foulest, grossest, and most infernal deeds of slaveholders find the strongest protection.

Were I to be again reduced to the chains of slavery, next to that enslavement, I should regard being the slave of a religious master the greatest calamity that could befall me. For of all slaveholders with whom I have ever met, religious slaveholders are the worst. I have ever found them the meanest and basest, the most cruel and cowardly, of all others.

It was my unhappy lot not only to belong to a religious slaveholder, but to live in a community of such religionists. Very near Mr. Freeland lived the Rev. Daniel Weeden, and in the same neighbourhood lived the Rev. Rigby Hopkins. These were members and ministers in the Reformed Methodist Church. Mr. Weeden owned, among others, a woman slave, whose name I have forgotten. This woman’s back, for weeks, was kept literally raw, made so by the lash of this merciless, ‘religious’ wretch.

For pious, religious Northern readers, what could be more horrifying than this hypocrisy and the devilish quoting of scripture to justify cruelty and sadism?

Bad language

The Victorians disapproved of bad language. D—n and b——h are spelled with the central letters omitted so as not to offend the gentle reader. By contrast, the overseers who managed their slaves on the owners behalves are consistently depicted as swearing their heads off and uttering all the worst oaths available.

This ‘profanity’ was far more offensive to Victorian readers than it is to us today. The height of this sin was blasphemy, to take the Lord’s name in vain, to use the name of God or Jesus in angry outbursts instead of contexts of veneration. Profanity had been a serious crime in early modern (Elizabethan and Restoration) times and was still highly frowned on in polite society in the nineteenth century. Whereas:

Mr. Severe [the overseer] was rightly named: he was a cruel man. I have seen him whip a woman, causing the blood to run half an hour at the time; and this, too, in the midst of her crying children, pleading for their mother’s release. He seemed to take pleasure in manifesting his fiendish barbarity. Added to his cruelty, he was a profane swearer. It was enough to chill the blood and stiffen the hair of an ordinary man to hear him talk. Scarce a sentence escaped him but that was commenced or concluded by some horrid oath. The field was the place to witness his cruelty and profanity. His presence made it both the field of blood and of blasphemy.

Mr. Plummer was a miserable drunkard, a profane swearer, and a savage monster. He always went armed with a cowskin and a heavy cudgel. I have known him to cut and slash the women’s heads so horribly, that even master would be enraged at his cruelty, and would threaten to whip him if he did not mind himself.

Drunkenness

Same with alcohol. Overseers are often depicted as the worse for wear, another value whose transgression meant much more to Victorians than to us. Drunkenness was seen as a vice, and one which degraded its practitioner.

In this respect, as so many others, Douglass goes out of his way to show how Southern slaveowner behaviour was the exact antitype of ‘true’ religion and civilised values.

Whipping and blows

So much for Douglass’s enumeration of the way the institution of slavery mocked and inverted traditional Christian and Victorian values.

At a kind of higher level, slavery mocked the very idea of a civilised society. The most obvious way is that, in a civilised society, men show respect and courtesy to each other, whereas slave society was drenched in wanton cruelty and, in particular, the universality of whipping.

It would astonish one, unaccustomed to a slaveholding life, to see with what wonderful ease a slaveholder can find things, of which to make occasion to whip a slave. A mere look, word, or motion,—a mistake, accident, or want of power,—are all matters for which a slave may be whipped at any time. Does a slave look dissatisfied? It is said, he has the devil in him, and it must be whipped out. Does he speak loudly when spoken to by his master? Then he is getting high-minded, and should be taken down a button-hole lower. Does he forget to pull off his hat at the approach of a white person? Then he is wanting in reverence, and should be whipped for it. Does he ever venture to vindicate his conduct, when censured for it? Then he is guilty of impudence,—one of the greatest crimes of which a slave can be guilty. Does he ever venture to suggest a different mode of doing things from that pointed out by his master? He is indeed presumptuous, and getting above himself; and nothing less than a flogging will do for him. Does he, while ploughing, break a plough,—or, while hoeing, break a hoe? It is owing to his carelessness, and for it a slave must always be whipped.

Douglass shows that pretty much all slaves are whipped, some to a hair-raising degree, whipped for half an hour solid till the overseer is exhausted and strips of skin hang off the slaves’ bloody backs.

I have seen Colonel Lloyd make old Barney, a man between fifty and sixty years of age, uncover his bald head, kneel down upon the cold, damp ground, and receive upon his naked and toil-worn shoulders more than thirty lashes at the time. Colonel Lloyd had three sons—Edward, Murray, and Daniel,—and three sons-in-law, Mr. Winder, Mr. Nicholson, and Mr. Lowndes. All of these lived at the Great House Farm, and enjoyed the luxury of whipping the servants when they pleased, from old Barney down to William Wilkes, the coach-driver. I have seen Winder make one of the house-servants stand off from him a suitable distance to be touched with the end of his whip, and at every stroke raise great ridges upon his back.

At the other end of the spectrum, less devastatingly violent but just as demoralising, are the frequent blows and cuffs and beatings which some slave owners handed out to their chattel, sometimes on a constant level, for almost all a slave’s waking hours. He evidences the household of Mrs Hamilton in Baltimore, who sat in the middle of her living room with a bullwhip by her side and:

Scarce an hour passed during the day but was marked by the blood of one of these slaves. The girls seldom passed her without her saying, ‘Move faster, you black gip!’ at the same time giving them a blow with the cowskin over the head or shoulders, often drawing the blood.

Compare and contrast with all those Victorian novels where the weak and fey female politely accepts the visitation of a charming young gentleman and they politely discourse over tea and cakes. The reality of slave society’s continual, constant violence makes a mockery of those scenes.

Injustice and murder

Obviously slavery was a vast system of injustice which gave rise to countless millions of daily instances of injustice. But Douglass is careful to include some instances of what he regards as murder, where a slave overseer simply murders a slave dead. Now entire mid-Victorian novels could rotate around just one murder, the newspapers went mad every time a salacious murder was committed and there were outcries against the heartless perpetrators or such heinous crimes. As long as the victims were white.

Douglass goes out of his way to describe the murders of several slaves, namely when the grave and serious overseer Mr Gore shoots dead Demby, a slave, for running away during a whipping and hiding in a creek. Mr Gore tells him to come out of the creek, says he’ll count to three, counts to three then shoots Demby through the head.

Or Mr Thomas Lanman of St Michael’s who murders two of his slaves, one of them by knocking his brains out with a hatchet.

The individual stories are upsetting, but the point Douglass is making is that both times the overseers got away with it. They were never charged or ‘brought to justice’. Even if the white ‘justice’ system made a few cursory attempts at an investigation it soon fizzled out, the whole thing was hushed up, and the overseers continued on their career of whipping and occasionally killing their slaves.

Slavery was a system which literally got away with murder, thus undermining the fundamental basis of all civilised society, which is the sanctity of human life.

Suicide

Nowadays we think of suicide as the result of mental illness or mental problems to which we must be sympathetic and supportive. But for the Victorians it was first and foremost a terrible sin which automatically condemned its practitioner to hell.

Which is the relevance of Douglass’s admission that it was only when he could read and began to read abolitionist tracts against slavery that the full force of the horrific iniquitous system in which he found himself became clear and he began to have suicidal thoughts. Reading had shown him the hellhole he was in but offered no escape. Anyone who has had suicidal feelings will recognise that mental condition, the feeling that you are trapped, in a box, in a cell, in a hole, with no way out except to do away with yourself.

Thus Douglass’s admission of his own suicidal ideas is an example of the double-sidedness of the narrative: it is a true and accurate first person description of his feelings. But at the same time makes a massive general point about the effect of the system on its victims, creating widespread feelings of hopelessness and despair, so frowned on by Victorians, and which often led to the actual act of suicide, which was an unambiguous sin which condemned its practitioner to hell.

In its way, suicide was more iniquitous and evil than murder, in which the victim, according to Victorian theology, at least stood the chance of going to heaven. Douglass shows that slavery was not just a system of universal violence, rape and sadistic punishment, but also spread the sin of suicidal thoughts and actions.

Are slaves human?

The fundamental crux of the issue was whether slaves were fully human. Southerners said no. They used a wide variety of arguments to support this position, but sooner or later all the arguments boil down to claiming slaves are a difference race, a different species: they were cursed to slavery in the Bible, they enjoy slavery, they were animals so they couldn’t be reasoned with and needed the firm discipline of slavery, they were congenitally unfit for freedom, and so on.

Whereas abolitionists argued that, yes, slaves are human, as human as all other humans, with the full set of human feelings, emotions, perceptions, thoughts and intellect, they are creatures of God like you and me, and so are due the entire panoply of human rights, freedom under the law, equal access to justice and so on.

It is to address the slaver accusation that slaves are somehow not fully human in their a) intellect and b) feelings that Douglass goes out of his way to prove the opposite.

Feelings

This motivation (to prove that slaves are capable of all the human emotions) underlies the passages in the first few chapters about his mother, Harriet Bailey, how they were separated when he was a baby but how she still made long pilgrimages to see her son. These passages are not only heart-breaking in their own right but are making a fundamental point: slaves have feelings, too. They are capable of just the same fine family sentiments as the most dignified of white people.

This is not a trivial issue. A key plank in the defence of slavery was that slaves were incapable of finer feelings and emotions. You could split up their family units as if they were livestock because they were incapable of feelings, you could whip them like you whipped a donkey because they didn’t feel it. Passages like the ones about his mother are at pains to utterly discredit this argument.

Intellect

As to intellect, slavers were able to use the circular argument that their slaves were ignorant, illiterate and stupid and so it was pointless trying to educate them. Douglass singles out the key moment in his escape from slavery as coming when his mistress in Baltimore, Mrs Sophia Auld, naively offered to teach him to read and write. In fact she didn’t get very far before her husband learned what she is doing and delivers a key speech:

‘If you give a nigger an inch, he will take an ell. A nigger should know nothing but to obey his master—to do as he is told to do. Learning would spoil the best nigger in the world. Now,’ said he, ‘if you teach that nigger (speaking of myself) how to read, there would be no keeping him. It would forever unfit him to be a slave. He would at once become unmanageable, and of no value to his master. As to himself, it could do him no good, but a great deal of harm. It would make him discontented and unhappy.’

Hearing this was like a thunderbolt to Douglass’s mind. It lay bare in a flash the key to the white man’s domination over the black. Education. Literacy. Those were the sources of the white man’s power:

These words sank deep into my heart, stirred up sentiments within that lay slumbering, and called into existence an entirely new train of thought. It was a new and special revelation, explaining dark and mysterious things, with which my youthful understanding had struggled, but struggled in vain. I now understood what had been to me a most perplexing difficulty—to wit, the white man’s power to enslave the black man…From that moment, I understood the pathway from slavery to freedom.

And although his mistress obeyed her husband and abruptly stopped teaching him his letters, the next few chapters give a moving account of how Douglass picked it up on the streets, doing favours for white boys and getting them to identify the different letters for him, picking them out in the dirt or on brick walls, slowly learning to spell out the words in adverts and shop signs, painfully teaching himself to read. Also his master’s son, Master Thomas, was attending junior school and so Douglass was able to sneak looks at his schoolbooks and even swipe his old ‘copy books’ and use them to teach himself to write out letters. And once he could read, it opened up the vast treasure house of knowledge, law and power.

So Douglass’s narrative not only describes the author’s slow, painful self-education and the path to empowerment which he undertook – but the narrative itself, its sheer existence, is a massive rebuttal and disproof of a central plank of the slaver argument that blacks are somehow intrinsically incapable of thought and intellect.

This book at a stroke demolished that argument forever. Give a black child the same education as a white one and he or she can go on to become easily the equal of any white person, arguably their superior because they have had to overcome so many obstacles in a white persons’ society.

A treasury of arguments and examples

Douglass’s narrative became such a central text in abolitionist literature not only because it is a vividly written, easily accessible and heart-breaking first-hand testimony to an evil system; but also because it was a cannily assembled series of counter-arguments to all the slavers’ justifications for their system.

It can be plundered for scenes which graphically depict the stomach-churning violence or the subtly corrupting effect of slave-owning on initially ‘good’ people. But it was also a goldmine of anti-slavery arguments which could, and would, be quoted extensively in abolitionist lectures, articles and speeches for decades to come.

P.S.

I had included some photos of slaves taken for Harvard zoologist Louis Agassiz in 1850 for a study in which he tried to prove that black people constituted a different and inferior race to whites. The ownership and purpose of these images is now highly contested, as is Agassiz’s reputation. I had included the photos as visual evidence of the abjection and humiliation to which slaves were subjected. But, on reflection, I think a) I was perpetuating that very objectification and humiliation by including them, and b) the people in the photos have living descendants who have complained to Harvard about the ownership and use of the images, and, to be blunt, how would I like to see photos of my great-great-great grandparents stripped naked and humiliated? So I’ve removed them.

Ubik by Philip K. Dick (1969)

His revulsion became, all at once, a weird nebulous panic. (p.88)

Ubik is set in the same year as Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, 1992, although it is a different 1992 (itself making a point about ramifying realities and fissiparous futures). Instead of androids, this future is plagued by telepaths, telepaths who can read your mind and some which can predict the future.

The telepaths – known collectively as psis – have become such a menace that companies have grown up which offer the services of anti-telepaths, human mutants who also have psionic mind powers, but of a purely negative kind, to counteract them. The businesses are known as anti-psi prudence organisations; the anti-telepaths are known as ‘inertials’.

Types of telepaths include: teeps, kineticists, precogs, resurrectors and animists (p.22).

One of these prudence organisations is Runciter Associates, run by ageing Glen Runciter. His people irritate him by ringing him early one morning to tell him they’ve lost track of ‘the top telepath in the Sol system’, S. Dole Melipone. He is the only known telepath who can generate ‘68.2 blr units of telepathic aura’. Melipone is employed by Ray Hollis, who runs an organisation for psis and is by way of being the book’s baddy.

Runciter immediately flies to Zürich to consult his dead wife, Ella, who is kept in a state of suspended animation – in ‘cold-pac’ – at the Beloved Brethren Moratorium run by Herbert Schoenheit von Vogelsang. Family members who have passed away can be kept in cryogenic storage and you can ‘wake’ them and communicate with their brain patterns via special headphones, the ‘electronic communing equipment’ (p.223).

In the event, Ella’s thoughts are hijacked by a dead person being kept in a casket next to hers, Jory Miller. Because he’s younger, Jory’s cerebronic patterns are stronger than hers. Runciter is outraged and demands his wife be moved to a secure unit.

These half-deads are, the reader reflects, yet another kind of altered consciousness, Dick’s main theme – as are, of course, the florid range of telepaths and inertials we meet throughout the book. Other kinds of minds.

Runciter Associates had sent one of their own telepaths, G.G. Ashwood to the hotel where Melipone was last seen. Now Ashwood turns up at the flat of the chronically impoverished Runciter Associates employee, Joe Chip.

Ashwood has brought a new find, a girl of about 17 who has a spectacular new power. She seems to be able to rearrange the past in order to suit the needs of the present. I.e. if she sees something she or someone else wants to change she has the power, not to travel in person, but to send her mind back into the past to alter the course of events in order to change the present to suit. She proves this by showing Joe the initial evaluation of her which he carried out and which was very unfavourable. In the narrative we just read she had slowly stripped off to get ready for a shower, which swayed Joe towards giving her a more favourable valuation. This – the stripping version – is version two of events. She went back and changed everything that happened from the moment she came into his apartment.

Joe doesn’t believe it. To prove it Pat gets out of her blouse the valuation he wrote for her in the first course of events. It’s his writing, alright. It appears to be true that she can go back in time and alter the course of events. Wow.

Commentary

All this has happens in the first 40 or so pages of this 230-page-long novel. As usual Dick has plunged us not only into a story, but into a densely imagined world of wonders where weird elements are not just everyday but so taken for granted that they’re given typically American nicknames.

The futureness of it all is created and reinforced by a raft of gadgets and gizmos in the brave new world of 1992.

Runciter obviously travels to Switzerland and back super-fast, maybe via rocket. The existence of rockets is confirmed when Runciter takes his team of inertials to Luna (the moon) by the company rocket, Pratfall II.
Runciter’s hovertaxi drops him on the roof of his company building, from where he takes a ‘descent chute’ down to the fifth floor.
People don’t have newspapers, they have ‘pape machines on whose screen they scan through today’s headlines and, if an article takes their fancy, ask the ‘pape machine to print it off so it can be read. (Reading this in 2019 you wonder why Dick didn’t make the logical connection and just have people read the whole article off the screen? Why bother with cumbersome printing? I guess the culture-wide tradition of reading from paper was too all-encompassing for even Dick to see beyond.)
People talk via vidphone (as they also do in Android).
Money has stopped being in dollars and is now counted in poscreds.
For weaponry people carry laser tubes (as they do in Android).

The plot

The main plot concerns a client, Stanton Mick, a billionaire who is developing a new hyperspace drive on the moon. He suspects his operation has been infiltrated by psis from Hollis’s organisation. The fear is that they will carry out industrial espionage, getting into his scientists’ minds, stealing all the secrets, possibly sabotaging the project.

So he sends a secretary, Miss Wirt, to ask Runciter Associates to send up a team of their best inertials to counter the psis.

It all has a broadly comic tone. The inertials Runciter assembles are a strikingly random ill-matched bunch of freaks wearing deliberately kooky outfits – the red triangular glasses, the fashionable elastic bands which push a woman’s breasts together – who even their employer, Runciter, finds it hard to take seriously.

They fly to the moon (in one hour) and are ushered by Stanton Mick’s people into the underground rooms of the lunar base. The bizarre figure of Micks, with waist-length white hair, appears, but they’ve barely begun discussing arrangements before Mick inexplicably floats up to the ceiling and explodes.

Many of the inertials are injured, Runciter fatally. Joe takes charge and carries Runciter’s body with another anti-psi, along with the rest of them they escape in a lift up to the surface, make it to the spaceship, and blast off, leaving Joe wondering: if the entire ‘job’ was a set-up by Hollis, why did he let them get away?

Comedy

The novel is surprisingly funny. Or obviously funny at unexpected moments. One humorous element is Dick’s fondness for improbable-verging-on-grotesque businesses. I noted it in the Van Ness Animal repair shop in Androids and here it surfaces in the Beloved Brethren Moratorium and its unctuous Teutonic owner.

The rundown of the eleven inertials who go to the moon is a parade of grotesques in outlandish costumes, done for broadly comic effect.

There’s another thread of broad comedy running through the text in that, in the future, many basic household functions and implements – such as a door, a shower, a bath – require cash payments up front before functioning. You have to slip a nickel or a dime or twenty cents into the slot before they’ll work. This need dogs Joe Chip wherever he goes because Joe, a shambles of a man, is permanently hard-up, with the result that doors won’t open for him, coffee dispensers won’t serve him, showers don’t operate, and so on, so that he is continually begging everyone around him for spare nickels and dimes, which becomes a kind of catchphrase or repeated failing.

Entropy

The plot so far led me to expect that there would be all kinds of cat and mouse, psi-chasing shenanigans between inertials and psis on the moon base. But this turns out tobe a complete red herring. From this point onwards the novel is about something completely different.

Immediately after the fake Stanton Mick bomb explodes, Runciter’s team all hurry back to the rocket and blast off back for earth.

And begin to notice what turns out to be The Big Theme of the second half of the book. Everything starts ageing and retrogressing. The cigarettes crumble in their hands. Coins seem out of date. The ship’s computer rejects information from the yellow pages when they try and phone the moratorium number.

They fly direct to the Beloved Brethren Moratorium in order to get Runciter’s body into a cold-pac as soon as possible, to preserve whatever is left of his consciousness and there is fuss and comic business with the funereal Herbert Schoenheit von Vogelsang, who insists on playing heavy classical music (Beethoven, Verdi) till they yell at him to turn it off.

But things are retrogressing. Joe stays the night at the moratorium hotel and in the morning is horrified to discover one his fellow inertials, Wendy Wright, turned into a dried-out mummy. She had obviously come to see him in the night but maybe be stricken by some sort of physical degeneration and crawled to the closet where she curled up and atrophied.

Joe flies back to New York where he finds a meeting of the inertials being led by Al Hammond. They have all noticed that their cigarettes are always too old to smoke. They get their money out and lay it on the table only to discover that Runciter’s head has replaced Washington on all the coins and notes. One of the inertials has a box of matches they bought weeks ago which carries an advertisement featuring Runciter’s face and telling them he is selling a product from a corporate HQ in Des Moines.

Joe takes Al from the meeting to his office where the remains of Wendy are in a plastic bag. They confer feverishly about the situation then decide to pick a city at random. Baltimore. They fly to Baltimore and visit a store at random. The woman in front of them at the checkout complains that everything she’s bought from the store is either dying or dead. Al and Joe check out the packs of cigarettes; all of them crumble in their fingers. Something is ageing the world. Something that aged Wendy to death.

They pick a carton totally at random from a huge pile of cigarette cartons and, when they open it, there’s a message from Runciter inside, telling them the situation is critical, he must get in touch with them, apologising about Wendy. What the hell is going on? There seem to be two forces, one in which everything is ageing, another in which Runciter is taking over the world, or revealing aspects of it (money, vidphone, products).

Joe takes a punt and buys a brand new tape recorder from the store. They fly back to New York. By the time they hand the tape recorder over to Runciter Associates’ chief technician the recorder has morphed into an old tape-driven version, at least 40 years old. Al looks at the instruction booklet and it claims the machine was ‘Made by Runciter of Zürich’ which has a North American office in Des Moines, Iowa. It’s as if lots of bits of Runciterness are leaking into this world. How? Why?

They take a lift back to the meeting room where they left the others, but on the way Al has visions of the lift itself reverting to a 1910s metal frame elevator complete with elevator guy. He is phasing back and forth between the present and a degenerated past. As they walk the corridor towards the meeting room Al fades. He asks to go into the men’s room where they find a graffito:

JUMP IN THE URINAL AND STAND ON YOUR HEAD
I’M THE ONE THAT’S ALIVE. YOU’RE ALL DEAD

The lights go out. Joe hears Al’s voice fading. He’s going the way of Wendy and begs Joe to leave. There is a terrifying page which takes us inside Al’s head to experience the sense of the entire present world turning to a barren desert of rocks and ice.

The conference room is empty. The other inertials have split. The big TV screen broadcasts a news announcement of the death of Runciter and a big funeral to be held at the Simple Shepherd Mortuary in his home town of des Moines. This cuts to a message for a product named Ubik, followed by a message from Runciter himself, saying that he knew he was going to be assassinated on the moon, thanks to some company preconfigs. He knew this deterioration would set in (though he doesn’t explain why) and says he posted an aerosol of Ubik which Joe can use to spray around him and stave off the decay.

Joe, the reader notices, is taking all this very calmly. Dick’s characters generally do. When they have nervous breakdowns it’s not because of the weird stuff that happens in the stories. Anyway, Joe ponders: the graffiti in the men’s room implied that Runciter is alive and that somehow all the other inertials are dead. Maybe the bomb on the moon killed all of them save Runciter and he somehow managed to get them all into cold-pacs. Maybe this is what being half-dead feels like, like the world carries on but rots and regresses until eventually it’s just the bleak desert which Al saw.

But that theory is contradicted by this TV newscast which, along with the text of the matchbox ads, appears to show that Runciter genuinely is dead. Only answer is to get to des Moines for this supposed funeral.

Joe takes a hovertaxi back to his apartment building. Here there is an extended passage where Joe discovers that every single element in his apartment has regressed – the fridge, phone, TV, everything have ceased to be their shiny plastic 1992 editions and gone back to the 50s, 40s and 30s.

When he exits the apartment (held up, as usual by the front door demanding its nickel) he is scared of taking the lift in case the same thing happens to him as happened to Al, so he walks down the stairs. By the time he gets to the front door it has an old fashioned electric buzzer. There’s a package in his post cubby hole but it doesn’t contain the Ubik spray Runciter promised, but Ubik Liver and Kidney Balm, some old-fashioned snake oil.

The substance designed to reverse the regressive change process has itself regressed. (p.145)

His car has reverted back into a petrol and combustion engine car. He’s never driven one before. A key ring is in his pocket with the ignition key in it so he starts it up and hesitantly drives towards the nearest airport.

By the time Joe gets to the airfield it is lined with old hangars and all the planes have propellers. In the time it takes to be directed towards some flyers who might be prepared to take him to Des Moines these have degenerated further to biplanes. the quaintly dressed pilots a) look at his outlandish (futuristic) clothes b) reject his unknown (to them) money and c) agree to fly him in exchange for his 1939 LaSalle motor. But when Joe takes them to see it it has regressed further to a black 1920 Model-A Ford (p.149).

The pilot isn’t interested in the car but notices the bottle of Ubik on the passenger seat. It has regressed since Joe left it to an apparently rare ointment – Elixir of Ubik – in a vintage bottle. Looking at it closely Joe sees the label has changed and there’s another message from Runciter:

Don’t do it Joe. There’s another way.
Keep trying. You’ll find it. Lots of luck.

The pilot says he’ll fly Joe to Des Moines in exchange. Weird though all this regressing has been, it has in a sense been easy enough to grasp – the world is moving backwards in time relative to one privileged character who remains the same and observes it rationally.

Next day he arrives at Des Moines airfield more or less in one piece, struggles (as always; it is his signature schtick) to find a nickel to use in the payphone, rings the Simple Shepherd Mortuary to be told that the service for Runciter has started, to be followed by a lying in state.

Joe finds all the other inertials who had been to the moon and were involved in the blast attending the funeral. They all crowd round him and it’s immediately obvious that they too have experienced the regression. They all see the same ‘reality’ as him, namely – from a newspaper he saw – that it is 13 September 1939 i.e. the Second World War has just broken out.

They confer and agree that they need to keep together. But one of them, Edie, had returned to her hotel in town feeling ‘tired’. they jump into the two available cars to get to the hotel and help her. On the way Joe is pulled over by a motorbike cop who writes out a citation. When he reads it, Joe sees it is in Runciter’s handwriting, warning him that Pat is… and then stops. At the bottom is an ad for a druggist, Archer’s Drug Store.

Joe enters the nearest shop and asks where the druggist is. The owner points across the road. Joe realises the building is pulsing in and out of time. For moments he can see it as an automated shop from 1992. Then it reverts to an era even before 1939. In one of its old moments he enters and asks the shop assistant for a jar of Ubik. On the label is yet another message from Runciter, warning that Pat is lying, Pat the time changer may be behind all of this.

Joe goes onto the hotel foyer and confronts Pat with the part of the message on the traffic violation at which moment his world explodes. It is dark, darkness which slowly resolves to grey streaks, and he can hear voices concerned for him. Basically he is dying and disintegrating just like Wendy and Al did. Pat accompanies him as he slowly, agonisingly makes his way up the stairs to the room he’s been allotted, taunting him all the way. Joe realises she is really evil. She was sent by Hollis to infiltrate Runciter Associates and kill them all, but this is a horrible way to do it.

The chapter describing this is really horrible, with an acute description of what feels like a heart attack only much worse – the sheer agony of trying to lift his feet and move one step further is nightmarish to read – and made ten times worse by Pat’s cold, heartless, taunting of him at, literally, every effortful gasping step of the way.

But when he finally, just about makes it into the room, and collapses to the floor, prepared to shrivel into a bag of dusty bones… Runciter is there and sprays him with wonder-working Ubik, at which he is almost immediately restored to normal life and function!

Runciter explains his view of the situation. Ashwood, Melipone, Mick and Hollis have been conspiring for months, maybe longer to lure them to Luna and blow them up. Now they are using Pat to transport them back in time. Why stop at 1939? Because that’s as far back as Pat’s powers extend.

Joe doesn’t believe him. In a complex dialogue Joe forces Runciter to admit that all the inertials were killed in the bomb explosion. They were quickly stored in cold-pacs. Pat herself was mortally wounded and is in a cold-pac. Runciter admits that he is sitting in the lobby of the Beloved Brethren Moratorium while Joe is in a cold-pac. Reluctantly, Runciter admits that the sense of atrophy and decline, things ageing and falling to pieces – they’re all common features of what all ‘half-lives’ experience, a mournful sense of decay.

And the regression in time? Initially Runciter tells him that is the work of Pat’s half-life mind taking them as far back as she can go. But, Joe asks, who is sometimes killing them, sometimes making it worse? Joe doesn’t believe it’s Hollis and his gang. It’s too arbitrary, too malicious for that. An almost childish delight in breaking and fixing, like a kids pulling wings off a fly. He nags Runciter into admitting that he, Runciter, doesn’t know what’s going on. He’s left all these useful messages and yet… he can’t actually save or improve the situation.

Runciter breaks off contact and the text cuts to him sitting in the lobby taking off the apparatus which lets you talk to the half-lives. And back to Joe in the fake 1939. There’s a knock at the door and one of the gang of inertias, Don Denny is there with an old-time doctor. Joe tells the doc he doesn’t need his help, but the doc inspects him anyway, while Joe tells Denny what he’s learned and what Runciter told him.

Denny tells him they’re all going to die. Even Pat. He just came from Pat expiring on the stairs. She seemed surprised. Yes, says Joe, she thinks she’s doing this, but she isn’t. She’s in the cold-pacs like all of them. Joe persuades Denny to use up what’s left of the Ubik spray, might do him some good. Denny sprays himself and when the nimbus of aerosol disappears, it isn’t Denny at all. there stands some gawky, misshapen teenage kids. He tells them his name is Jory, Jory Miller.

He is the gawky crude teenager who was in the cold-pac next to Runciter’s wife who invaded her thought patterns near the start of the book. Now he’s doing it to all of them.

There now follows an elaborate game as Jory gets rid of the doctor and explains that everything, everything he sees about him, was created by he, Jory. He eats the other half-lives, he consumes them, he has eaten all Joe’s colleagues. Joe attacks Jory but Jory sinks his teeth into his hand and tells him he is invulnerable. Joe turns and tries to escape out the hotel room, down the stairs, hails a cab in the street. Asks the cab to cruise around town and then out of town.

Joe knows that creating this world and keeping it stable costs Jory a lot of effort. He wants to make it hard. Cruising round they come across a pretty young woman. Joe kerb crawls her and says he’d like to take her to dinner. He is beginning to feel tired again, and cold, signs that the Ubik is wearing off. The young lady is kind and courteous and compassionate whenhe begins to fade and look rough. And then she announces that she is Ella Runciter, Ralph’s wife. She has been fighting a long war against Jory ever since he arrived in the moratorium.

She gives him a certificate for a lifetime supply of Ubik which he can get at any of two pharmacies in town. She says she is soon to be reborn (reborn? there’s a whole new angle) and wants him, Joe, to take over as Ralph’s sleeping partner, the person he comes to consult. They stop the cab. She gets out and bids adieu.

Hugely relieved, Joe gets the cab to drive to the first pharmacist. But almost as soon as he’s inside he realises the pharmacist is a version of Jory, who quietly gloats that he has ‘reverted’ all the Ubik in the store back to its 1930s version, pure snake oil, useless for healing. He hands him a jar of the useless stuff. Joe bends all his heart and soul and spirit on trying to force the thing to regenerate back to 1992, to be the proper Ubik, bending every nerve to make it so.

He fails. He gives up. He walks out the store. He is now feeling weak again. Oh no he’s going to have to go through the appalling weakness and cold he experienced back in the hotel when Pat was taunting him. He lies down on the bench at a bus shelter.

And a pretty woman bends over him and offers him a can of up to date, effective Ubik. She sprays it on him and she comes back to life. She is a representative of the manufacturer. She gives him a plausible sounding explanation of how it is a biochemical agent which retards the inevitable fading effects of being in a cold-pac on half life. ‘Hey, you want to go to dinner?’ he asks her. ‘Next time,’ she promises and fades away.

Ubik

Throughout the book every chapter has started with a spoof little advert text selling Ubik as a wonder product, a brand of beer or coffee, a type of brassiere which pushes up and shapes those boobs, Ubik hair conditioner, Ubik sleeping pills.

On one level these read to me like the kind of satirical spoof ads you get in late 1960s comedy movies, Woody Allen films and suchlike, the knockabout spirit of the original M*A*S*H movie (1970), taking the mickey out of grotesque American consumer culture.

But quite obviously, on another level, Ubik is portrayed as some kind of magic force all the way through the novel. The entirely biochemical explanation the young lady gives at the end is not quite enough to explain the imaginative force it has had in the text. So it comes as no surprise when the epigraph to the short final chapter reads.

I am Ubik. Before the universe was, I am. I made the suns. I made the worlds. I created the lives and the places they inhabit; I move them here, I put them there. They go as I say, they do as I tell them. I am the word and my name is never spoken, the name which no one knows. I am called Ubik, but that is not my name. I am. I shall always be. (p.223)

So is Ubik just a chemical compound created by Ella Runciter within the world of the cold-pacs (and it’s pretty hard to see how that would be physically possible seeing as their bodies are completely static)? Or is it meant to be some shape-shifting force which stands – within the half-life world – for God?

To be honest, by this stage of the novel, on the penultimate page, I was too exhausted by the continually shifting realities of the previous 221 pages to care. That kind of point blank interpretation seems to me to be dead and stultifying.

What makes the novel live is the extraordinary and apparently endless succession of surprises it pulls on you. It is the narrative dynamic which appeals and works. Stopping to think about the logic of the plot or the symbolism for very long tends, in my experience, to make the whole house of cards collapse.

Futures and pasts

Both Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and Ubik are set in 1992, a giddy 24 years from when they were written. Dick predicted that by then we’d have hovercars, colonies on the moon and Mars, lasertubes, androids and telepaths.

In the real world 1992 was notable for the UK General Election which was won by John Major who went on to govern Britain for five years and is most remembered for setting up a traffic cones hotline.

Thus the difference between the dazzling techno-worlds of science fiction – and between Philip K. Dick’s deliriously proliferating alternative worlds – and the big grey underpants of reality.

Philip K. Dick reviews

The Man in the High Castle (1962) (1962) In an alternative future America lost the Second World War and has been partitioned between Japan and Nazi Germany. The narrative follows a motley crew of characters including a dealer in antique Americana, a German spy who warns a Japanese official about a looming surprise German attack, and a woman determined to track down the reclusive author of a hit book which describes an alternative future in which America won the Second World War
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) In 1992 androids are almost indistinguishable from humans except by trained bounty hunters like Rick Deckard who is paid to track down and ‘retire’ escaped andys
Ubik (1969) In 1992 the world is threatened by mutants with psionic powers who are combated by ‘inertials’ but the novel focuses on the weird alternative world experienced by a group of inertials after a catastrophe on the moon
Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said (1974)

Other science fiction reviews

1888 Looking Backward 2000-1887 by Edward Bellamy – Julian West wakes up in the year 2000 to discover a peaceful revolution has ushered in a society of state planning, equality and contentment
1890 News from Nowhere by William Morris – waking from a long sleep, William Guest is shown round a London transformed into villages of contented craftsmen

1895 The Time Machine by H.G. Wells – the unnamed inventor and time traveller tells his dinner party guests the story of his adventure among the Eloi and the Morlocks in the year 802,701
1896 The Island of Doctor Moreau by H.G. Wells – Edward Prendick is stranded on a remote island where he discovers the ‘owner’, Dr Gustave Moreau, is experimentally creating human-animal hybrids
1897 The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells – an embittered young scientist, Griffin, makes himself invisible, starting with comic capers in a Sussex village, and ending with demented murders
1898 The War of the Worlds – the Martians invade earth
1899 When The Sleeper Wakes/The Sleeper Wakes by H.G. Wells – Graham awakes in the year 2100 to find himself at the centre of a revolution to overthrow the repressive society of the future
1899 A Story of the Days To Come by H.G. Wells – set in the same future London as The Sleeper Wakes, Denton and Elizabeth defy her wealthy family in order to marry, fall into poverty, and experience life as serfs in the Underground city run by the sinister Labour Corps

1901 The First Men in the Moon by H.G. Wells – Mr Bedford and Mr Cavor use the invention of ‘Cavorite’ to fly to the moon and discover the underground civilisation of the Selenites
1904 The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth by H.G. Wells – scientists invent a compound which makes plants, animals and humans grow to giant size, leading the human giants to rebel against the ‘little people’
1905 With the Night Mail by Rudyard Kipling – it is 2000 and the narrator accompanies a GPO airship across the Atlantic
1906 In the Days of the Comet by H.G. Wells – a comet trails gasses through earth’s atmosphere which bring about ‘the Great Change’, inaugurating an era of wisdom and fairness, as told by narrator Willie Leadford
1908 The War in the Air by H.G. Wells – Bert Smallways, a bicycle-repairman from Kent, gets caught up in the outbreak of the war in the air which brings Western civilisation to an end
1909 The Machine Stops by E.M. Foster – people of the future live in underground cells regulated by ‘the Machine’ until one of them rebels

1912 The Lost World by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle – Professor Challenger leads an expedition to a plateau in the Amazon rainforest where prehistoric animals still exist
1912 As Easy as ABC by Rudyard Kipling – set in 2065 in a world characterised by isolation and privacy, forces from the ABC are sent to suppress an outbreak of ‘crowdism’
1913 The Horror of the Heights by Arthur Conan Doyle – airman Captain Joyce-Armstrong flies higher than anyone before him and discovers the upper atmosphere is inhabited by vast jellyfish-like monsters
1914 The World Set Free by H.G. Wells – A history of the future in which the devastation of an atomic war leads to the creation of a World Government, told via a number of characters who are central to the change
1918 The Land That Time Forgot by Edgar Rice Burroughs – a trilogy of pulp novellas in which all-American heroes battle ape-men and dinosaurs on a lost island in the Antarctic

1921 We by Evgeny Zamyatin – like everyone else in the dystopian future of OneState, D-503 lives life according to the Table of Hours, until I-330 wakens him to the truth
1925 Heart of a Dog by Mikhail Bulgakov – a Moscow scientist transplants the testicles and pituitary gland of a dead tramp into the body of a stray dog, with disastrous consequences
1927 The Maracot Deep by Arthur Conan Doyle – a scientist, engineer and a hero are trying out a new bathysphere when the wire snaps and they hurtle to the bottom of the sea, there to discover…

1930 Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon – mind-boggling ‘history’ of the future of mankind over the next two billion years
1938 Out of the Silent Planet by C.S. Lewis – baddies Devine and Weston kidnap Ransom and take him in their spherical spaceship to Malacandra aka Mars,

1943 Perelandra (Voyage to Venus) by C.S. Lewis – Ransom is sent to Perelandra aka Venus, to prevent a second temptation by the Devil and the fall of the planet’s new young inhabitants
1945 That Hideous Strength: A Modern Fairy-Tale for Grown-ups by C.S. Lewis– Ransom assembles a motley crew to combat the rise of an evil corporation which is seeking to overthrow mankind
1949 Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell – after a nuclear war, inhabitants of ruined London are divided into the sheep-like ‘proles’ and members of the Party who are kept under unremitting surveillance

1950 I, Robot by Isaac Asimov – nine short stories about ‘positronic’ robots, which chart their rise from dumb playmates to controllers of humanity’s destiny
1950 The Martian Chronicles – 13 short stories with 13 linking passages loosely describing mankind’s colonisation of Mars, featuring strange, dreamlike encounters with Martians
1951 Foundation by Isaac Asimov – the first five stories telling the rise of the Foundation created by psychohistorian Hari Seldon to preserve civilisation during the collapse of the Galactic Empire
1951 The Illustrated Man – eighteen short stories which use the future, Mars and Venus as settings for what are essentially earth-bound tales of fantasy and horror
1952 Foundation and Empire by Isaac Asimov – two long stories which continue the future history of the Foundation set up by psychohistorian Hari Seldon as it faces attack by an Imperial general, and then the menace of the mysterious mutant known only as ‘the Mule’
1953 Second Foundation by Isaac Asimov – concluding part of the ‘trilogy’ describing the attempt to preserve civilisation after the collapse of the Galactic Empire
1953 Earthman, Come Home by James Blish – the adventures of New York City, a self-contained space city which wanders the galaxy 2,000 years hence powered by spindizzy technology
1953 Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury – a masterpiece, a terrifying anticipation of a future when books are banned and professional firemen are paid to track down stashes of forbidden books and burn them
1953 Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke – a thrilling tale of the Overlords who arrive from space to supervise mankind’s transition to the next stage in its evolution
1954 The Caves of Steel by Isaac Asimov – set 3,000 years in the future when humans have separated into ‘Spacers’ who have colonised 50 other planets, and the overpopulated earth whose inhabitants live in enclosed cities or ‘caves of steel’, and introducing detective Elijah Baley to solve a murder mystery
1956 The Naked Sun by Isaac Asimov – 3,000 years in the future detective Elijah Baley returns, with his robot sidekick, R. Daneel Olivaw, to solve a murder mystery on the remote planet of Solaria
1956 They Shall Have Stars by James Blish – explains the invention – in the near future – of the anti-death drugs and the spindizzy technology which allow the human race to colonise the galaxy
1959 The Triumph of Time by James Blish – concluding story of Blish’s Okie tetralogy in which Amalfi and his friends are present at the end of the universe

1961 A Fall of Moondust by Arthur C. Clarke – a pleasure tourbus on the moon is sucked down into a sink of quicksand-like moondust, sparking a race against time to rescue the trapped crew and passengers
1962 A Life For The Stars by James Blish – third in the Okie series about cities which can fly through space, focusing on the coming of age of kidnapped earther, young Crispin DeFord, aboard New York
1968 2001: A Space Odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke – panoramic narrative which starts with aliens stimulating evolution among the first ape-men and ends with a spaceman transformed into galactic consciousness

1971 Mutant 59: The Plastic Eater by Kit Pedler and Gerry Davis – a genetically engineered bacterium starts eating the world’s plastic
1973 Rendezvous With Rama by Arthur C. Clarke – in 2031 a 50-kilometre long object of alien origin enters the solar system, so the crew of the spaceship Endeavour are sent to explore it

1981 The Golden Age of Science Fiction edited by Kingsley Amis – 17 classic sci-fi stories from what Amis considers the Golden Era of the genre, namely the 1950s

The War of 1812 by Carl Benn (2006)

‘Free trade and sailors’ rights’ (American rallying cry for the 1812 war)

In June 1812 the United States, under president James Madison, declared war on Great Britain. The war lasted three years and fighting took place along the America-Canada border, around the Great Lakes, off the American coast, and in the Deep South, in the region then called West Florida, now called Louisiana.

Why? Why did America attack Britain in 1812?

I borrowed the Osprey ‘Illustrated History’ of the war of 1812 from my local library, to find out.

Osprey Publishing produce a series titled ‘Essential Histories’. They are short (90 pages) lavishly illustrated texts describing the political and (especially) the military aspects of wars and conflicts, ancient and modern, ranging far and wide from the conflicts of Ancient Israel to Russia’s offensives in Chechnya.

Osprey Publishing Essential Histories

The volume on the war of 1812 is a good example of the format.

Reasons

The reasons American politicians gave for declaring war were that:

Royal Navy ships had been stopping and searching American vessels. They did this to retake fugitives and deserters from RN ships, since Britain was at war with Napoleon’s France. But they often went further and press ganged men who claimed to be citizens of the United States, causing outrage.
The French and British had spent a decade or more imposing a complicated sequence of trade bans and embargos on each other and the Americans, to which the Americans responded with their own. The British ones were policed more effectively because of the strength of the Royal Navy – the 1811 bans on the export of American salted fish hit the Yanks particularly hard.

So the Americans went to war because:

The British trade embargos seriously threatened their trade
Because of the embargos, British America (i.e. Canada) threatened to replace America as a supplier of a number of staples to France and Britain
Seizing the Great Lakes-St Lawrence Waterway system would cripple Canadian trade and greatly boost America

There were other reasons too.

Native Americans Many colonists had fought the War of Independence because they wanted to expand westwards into ‘the Old Northwest’ (Ohio, Michigan, Indiana). But the native Algonkian-speaking Americans of the region weren’t happy about American expansion, and there was evidence that the British were arming and supporting them to repel American incomers. A key moment was when American forces clashed with warriors of a western native confederacy at Tippecanoe in November 1811. War felt inevitable to both sides.

Manifest Destiny Many Americans thought that their nation had God-given destiny to control the entire North American continent. This vision and policy were named Manifest Destiny. Hawkish American expansionists hoped that another war would drive Britain from the North American mainland completely, vastly expanding American territory and economy. They thought that only God himself could set natural bounds to America, from the Gulf of Mexico in the south to the Arctic wastes in the north. Everything in between should be theirs. Hero of the independence struggle Thomas Jefferson, who had himself recently been president (1801-1809), declared that, if there was war, the Americans would capture Quebec in the first year, ready to march on Halifax (on the Canadian coast) in year two, and soon afterwards clear the Brits out of the continent altogether. Hooray.

Mississippi East and West Florida nominally belonged to Spain. President Madison had proclaimed the annexation of West Florida in 1810. But the war party thought that they could use any conflict with Britain to consolidate their control in the region. In the event, the Florida theatre of the war was to be most notable for the successful American defence of New Orleans, although the British did manage to take some other strategic points on the Gulf coast. In 1819, well after the war had ended, America bought both Floridas from Spain.

Re-election President Madison had made mistakes in his negotiations with both France and Britain in the preceding years, prompting criticism even from inside his own party. He had served one term as president and was up for re-election in 1812. Declaring war was a traditional way of rallying support and quelling domestic criticism. In the event, Madison received his party’s nomination and was re-elected in November of 1812.

The war

No-one expected the war to last three years.

And nobody expected the Americans to quite so useless. It is pretty amusing to read about the first few American attacks across the border into what was called ‘Upper Canada’, and how easily they were beaten back or defeated by the Brits.

But the Americans didn’t give up and there followed a complex sequence of battles and skirmishes on land, a few naval engagements on the great lakes, many more at sea on the Atlantic, as well as a separate campaign fought down around New Orleans on the Gulf of Mexico.

There is a long, detailed account on Wikipedia.

War of 1812 Wikipedia article

America’s main military aim was to seize Upper Canada i.e. British territory lining the Great Lakes. They launched eight invasion attempts at different places, yet all but one failed, and that one only secured a small part of south-west Ontario, and this ended up being handed back at the 1815 peace treaty. Hardly driving the British from the continent.

The outcome of 1812 invasion attempts at Detroit, Niagara and Montreal was that:

The United States had lost every engagement of significance and suffered huge losses in prestige, supplies, land and men.

Further American losses followed in two major invasion attempts of 1813. However, the small American navy of Captain Oliver Hazard Perry (9 ships) did win the Battle of Lake Erie on September 10, 1813 against 6 British ships, compelling the British to fall back from Detroit.

American General Harrison launched another invasion of Upper Canada, which culminated in the U.S. victory at the Battle of the Thames on October 5, 1813.

Up to now the British had relied for support on a confederation of native Americans led by the warrior Tecumseh. He was killed in the Battle of the Thames and with his death the confederation collapsed and many native Americans withdrew west into America away from the war zone, or east alongside retreating Canadian citizens. Many Indians had fought hoping that the British would guarantee them a territory of their own in the north-west. This dream was now dead.

The Battle of the Thames, also known as the Battle of Moraviantown, a decisive American victory in the War of 1812 against Great Britain, on October 5, 1813, near present-day Chatham, Ontario, showing the death of native American leader Tecumseh

The Battle of the Thames, also known as the Battle of Moraviantown, a decisive American victory on October 5, 1813, near present-day Chatham, Ontario, showing the death of native American leader, Tecumseh

The war followed the same pattern in 1814. Despite some victories, and fiercely fought battles e.g. at Lundy’s Lane and around the besieged Fort Erie, the Americans failed in their twin objectives of retaking Macinac on the north shore of Lake Huron or breaking out of the mouth of the Niagara River and crossing Lake Ontario into Canada.

The 1814 American Macinac and Niagara campaigns had come to a failed end.

War on sea and land

There were quite a few encounters between Royal Navy and US navy ships, victory generally going to the larger ship or greater number. Both sides encouraged ‘privateers’ i.e. licensed pirates, to board and seize the opponent’s merchant vessels. This causes both sides inconvenience, the seizures sometimes escalating to combat and associated deaths of merchant mariners.

The most important aspect of the war at sea was that the Royal Navy imposed an effective naval blockade, initially on the southern states then, once Napoleon was defeated in 1814, extending it to the entire American seaboard. US import-export trade plummeted from $114 million in 1811 to just $20 million in 1814.

The British also launched amphibious assaults on ports up and down the coast. In August 1814 they landed 4,000 men near Washington. Advancing up the River Potomac, Royal Marines and sailors destroyed a privateer, 17 gunboats, 13 merchant schooners and any dwellings which resisted. At the Battle of Blandenburg 2,600 British regulars whipped 6,000 American militia, sailors and regulars.

On August 24, 1814, after defeating the Americans at the Battle of Bladensburg (‘the greatest disgrace ever dealt to American arms’), a British force led by Major General Robert Ross continued into the young nation’s capital city, Washington D.C., where they burned down the White House, the Capitol, the Treasury and the War Office, plus other military facilities. Another detachment of Brits took the nearby port of Alexandria. Both forces seized vessels, arms and munitions as well as general loot, before falling back to the river, and so back to sea.

The British then tried something similar at Baltimore, the coastal base of America’s much-hated fleet of privateers, but were rebuffed by the strength of American defences.

Criticised for these attacks by the opposition in Parliament, British Prime Minister Lord Liverpool justified the burning as retaliation for:

a) December 1813 when withdrawing American forces turned the people of Niagara out of their houses into the snow then burned the town to the ground, the next day similarly burning Queenston to the ground
b) the American destruction of the Parliament buildings and other public buildings in York, the provincial capital of Upper Canada, early in 1813
c) the Americans started the war

In the south the British launched an amphibious attack on New Orleans but the city was skilfully defended by Major-General Andrew Jackson, winning the reputation which helped him twenty years later become president, 1829-37.

War’s end

Diplomats in Europe had begun trying to end the war as soon as it started. The British had made concessions on the trade embargos before America even declared war.

Both sides had many aims they were reluctant to abandon which delayed things, but negotiations inched to a conclusion on Christmas Eve 1814, in the European city of Ghent.

The most fundamental war aim of America had been to seize ‘upper Canada’, hawks hoping to seize all of Canada. In this respect the war was what my kids call an epic fail. America gained no Canadian land whatsoever. Both sides agreed to set up a commission to finalise the border between America and Canada, a border which has endured to this day.

The retention of British America – whose states came together to form the Dominion of Canada in 1867 – had two large consequences:

It allowed the British Empire access to a wide range of North American goods – wheat, timber, furs – but within Imperial trade arrangements
In 1914, and then in 1939, Canadian soldiers and resources played what this book calls a ‘vital’ role in reinforcing Britain as it entered the two world wars.

Despite having gained nothing that it set out to achieve – the British categorically refused to back down on the contentious issue of press-ganging and the issue only went away because the war with Napoleon had ended – the American president, his party, and their supporters in the press all hailed the war as a Great Victory, with the handful of outright American victories, especially the defence of New Orleans, growing in legend and inaccuracy as the years passed.

The star-spangled banner

35-year-old lawyer and amateur poet Francis Scott Key had witnessed the bombardment of Fort McHenry in Baltimore Harbour by Royal Navy ships during the Battle of Baltimore. He was inspired to write a poem about it – ‘The Defence of Fort M’Henry – on September 14, 1814.

The poem was quickly set to the pre-existing tune of a popular British song of the day, and became known as the Star-Spangled Banner. In 1931 it was recognised as the national anthem of America.

Summary

The Essential Histories lack much subtlety or nuance. There isn’t enough space. They’re only 90 or so pages long, and all of them include several 2- or 3- or 4-page featurettes on quirky aspects of the conflict – this one has a section on the native American Black Hawk’s War, and another section profiling the experiences of the Anglican vicar of York (later to become Toronto), John Strachan, during the town’s siege and occupation by American forces (and it is a fascinating account).

Given that there has to be an introduction, half a dozen pages on the background, and a similar amount on the outcome, and given that the Osprey books are generously illustrated with – wherever possible – contemporary pictures and full-page maps, there isn’t much room left for anything except a bald recital of the facts – in the case of the War of 1812 a steady series of skirmishes and battles – on land, on the Great Lakes, on the Atlantic and around New Orleans – spaced over three fighting seasons, none of which led to a decisive knock-out victory.

It’s a handy introduction, but at some stage I’ll probably want to read a more in-depth account, probably the prize-winning one by the great Alan Taylor.

The Civil War of 1812: American Citizens, British Subjects, Irish Rebels, & Indian Allies on Amazon

Reviews of other books on American history

2 Comments

by Simon on August 13, 2018 • Permalink

Posted in America, History, War

Posted by Simon on August 13, 2018

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2018/08/13/war-of-1812-carl-benn/

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Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass by Frederick Douglass (1845)

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Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass

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A treasury of arguments and examples

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Ubik by Philip K. Dick (1969)

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The War of 1812 by Carl Benn (2006)

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