In the course of tracking and trying to pin down the idea of Freedom in the thoughts of the titular writers, it may be easier at first to whittle away at what Freedom is not, and see what kernel remains at the end of the deconstruction.
In Song of Myself, Whitman, in his gentle way, commands us, “You shall no longer take things at second or third hand . . . . nor look through the eyes of the dead . . . . nor feed on the spectres in books[…]” In these lines Whitman is advising us, his readers, to dispatch those would-be arbiters of Truth—that is, writers—from our path to enlightenment, and approach the idea ourselves for ourselves, such that wherever our inquiries lead us, what we get in return is pure and unadulterated by dead words and mute voices. A few lines later, Whitman shows his Transcendentalist colors when he writes, “I pass death with the dying, and birth with the new-washed babe . . . . and am not contained between my hat and boots[…]” Whitman’s notion of Freedom is bound to his idea of the immortality of the soul, that the Human Being as such is unfettered by physical limitations and the artifice of “reality;” for Whitman, to borrow a Kantian term, the “thing-in-itself” of Man—shall we say Man-in-Himself—is an eternal, omnipresent connection with Everything (the Universe, if you like), the truest sense of Freedom there can be.
Emerson, though more “grounded” than Whitman, espouses a strikingly similar philosophy of Freedom. In “The American Scholar”, Emerson declaims: “If there be one lesson more than another, which should pierce [the scholar’s] ear, it is, The world is nothing, the man is all; in yourself is the law of all nature, and you know not yet how a globule of sap ascends; in yourself slumbers the whole of Reason; it is for you to know all, it is for you to dare all.” (Italics mine.)
Like Whitman, Emerson emphasizes the preponderance of Man vis-à-vis the external world; what he seeks he will find within himself, and so long as he remains vigilant in his independence of thought his labor will lead him to pure, original concepts. Emerson’s ideal of Freedom seems to rest upon Man’s individuality as such, and his concomitant reluctance to let whatever popular notions are prevalent at the time to steer his course.
Frederick Douglass’s lack of freedom was twofold in character: he was bound intellectually by sheer ignorance, as slaves were forbidden to read or cultivate their minds in any meaningful way, and bound physically by the institution of slavery, specifically by slaveholders and their agents.
One might easily reduce the question of Freedom as it concerns Douglass to a purely physical character; that if not for his enslavement and concomitant restriction of movement he would be “free.” Such a judgment would be an oversimplification however, for in Chapter XI of Douglass’s Narrative he recounts his feelings about his having to surrender his wages to his master: “When I carried to him my weekly wages, he would, after counting the money, look me in the face with a robber-like fierceness, and ask, "Is this all?" He was satisfied with nothing less than the last cent. He would, however, when I made him six dollars, sometimes give me six cents, to encourage me. It had the opposite effect. I regarded it as a sort of admission of my right to the whole.” (Italics mine.) In this last sentence we see, as was elucidated in class, the source of Douglass’s discontent: the products of his own labor are alienated from and surrendered by him to his “master,” his innate sense of agency castrated and pocketed by another. It is this agency that is restored—no, first gained—upon his escape to New Bedford via New York, where he finally becomes the owner and sole proprietor of his labor.
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