The gardening of Frederick Douglass

Frederick Douglass is perhaps the most prominent abolitionist in American history. A brilliant writer, orator, and organizer, his words are still cask strength. This man’s work, “What to the slave is the Fourth of July?” is so resonant that excerpts of it transform into 21st-century memes every single year right around this time. And for good reason:

To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy—a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages.

And so it came as a little bit of a shock to me to encounter Douglass in critic Mary Kuhn’s (excellent) book, The Garden Politic, as a grower of pumpkins and peaches and strawberries. A gardener. Kuhn is careful with history, and she doesn’t make too much of Douglass as an agronomist, but the truth of the 19th century was that far more people’s lives were intimately tied to their ability to make plants grow. And so: debates about slavery necessarily encompassed agriculture, and vice versa.

Abolitionists had made the exhaustion of southern soil into an argument against the slave system. Slavers, on the other hand, saw a kind of divinity in a profitable commodity farming system that required enslaved people’s labor. Would God create the possibility of slavery-dependent plantations, if it were not correct in his eyes? (I know—these arguments are repugnant.) This work reminds us that slavery was an abomination, a system of labor, and a way of growing specific plants.

“The antislavery movement was, after all, an agricultural reform movement,” notes Kimberly K. Smith in her book African American Environmental Thought, “it aimed at disassembling the plantation system of controlling nature and labor and promoting a different system of agriculture.”

So, when Douglass wrote in The North Star about growing pumpkins, it was not only a bit of gardening, but also an answer to the southern slaveholders way of growing plants, a comment on the hierarchies of the human world. “Yes! Pumpkins!” Douglass writes. “We raised a nice lot of them this season in our own garden.”

The ground was prepared—seed sown—and the plant cultivated by our own colored hands; and although the soil is American, it took no offense on account of our color—but yielded a generous return for our industry. From this we infer that the earth has no prejudice against color, and that nature is no respecter of persons.¹ It pours its treasures as liberally into the lap of colored industry, as into that of the white husbandman. The earth is a preacher of righteousness; it inculcates justice—love—and mercy; repudiates the factitious distinctions of pride and prejudice—and owns all the sons and daughters of men (without regard to color) as its own dear children.

Kuhn, herself, argues against the idea that familiarity with plants necessarily makes us better people. Were not the southern planters intimately familiar with the growth patterns of cotton and tobacco and flowers? If so, why were they not moved to reconsider the grotesque system they’d built?

Turning to the modern debates about the nature of plant being—part of what anthropologist Natasha Myers called “the plant turn”²—Kuhn says her students are often fascinated by the tantalizing possibilities that plants represent, but then some “worry that lending such agency to plants elevates another species while ignoring systems of violence and inequality within our own.”

And… yes. Scholars give warnings worth heeding. Plants can teach many different kinds of lessons. They don’t simply override the other aspects of our identities and class position, or fill in the blank spots of our lived experiences, or replace the need for justice. They don’t do the thinking for us, whatever we may believe or want to believe about their ways of knowing or forms of intelligence. It’s not that easy.

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But still, you can tell, Kuhn wants to make the plant turn (as do I). Her reading of 19th-century authors allows us “to recognize how fundamentally the political economy of plants structures our systems of power, and how alternative political visions can emerge when we pay serious attention to other forms of life, especially those that resist our comprehension and control.”

And I love that Frederick Douglass, towards the end of his life, devoted more time to gardening at his home in Washington, as Kuhn notes. Ka’mal McClarin, the museum curator for the national park created out of his home, described Douglass’s deep appreciation for the world that grew all around him.

Douglass lifted weights on his front lawn, lounged in the property’s hammocks, rockers, and played croquet with family and friends on its back lawn. Daily he explored and utilized his property’s every inch. With his walking stick in hand he strolled his estate, alone, with family members, or with other guests who sought to spend time with him.

British journalist Catherine Impey on one of her visits to Cedar Hill in 1892 had an opportunity to accompany Douglass on one of his nature walks. As they both wandered through the woods, Douglass and she stopped along the way to rest on a fallen tree. He then turned to her and asked "let us be silent awhile and listen to nature.”

He made visitors go look at this strawberries, pressed flowers into books, and collected botanical specimens. A photo from the time shows his granddaughter playing croquet on the lawn, under the trees, out back of the house. Maybe he was walking around that day, and he stopped to pick up a particular leaf, and he brought it inside and set it gently on a table, just because.