Douglass's Narrative operates within two fields: the United States and the Atlantic. The former demonstrates the degree to which the slave narrative as autobiography can be considered as representative in both form and content as the Franklinian template. Douglass's work incorporates elements of Northern and Southern literary convention, producing an American subjectivity that spans national and racial divides. In the Atlantic context, Douglass's travels and the overseas editions of his work link the issues of slavery and abolition into a transnational network of separate but interlocking agendas. These occupy, to a greater or lesser extent, the terrain of progressive liberal discourse, a terrain that includes the advancement of women's political agency, racial liberalism, British and American nationalism, evangelical mission, and hierarchies of religious affiliation.

Yet the interconnectedness of these agendas also illustrates the complexities of individual and group identity in the context of shifting, increasingly globalized networks of ethnicity, gender or political agency. The Narrative was progressively restructured by Douglass in the period following its initial publication, to the point where it became a key node in this diverse network. Other elements of his textual production during the period 1845–47, the letters to Garrison in particular, continued to build upon the project of self-fashioning initiated in the Narrative, specifically on the American element of that undertaking.

From the outset of his public career, Douglass was confronted with the dilemma of representation in the complex social, cultural and political milieu of the nineteenth-century Atlantic world. His early trip to Ireland, and the changes to the Narrative that he implemented there, signal his first major reconfiguration of the anti-slavery debate. The central fiction of the narrative, the slave subject, is repositioned within an international Atlantic, rather than insular US discourse of western modernity. The Irish Narratives become the expressive locus of Douglass's economic success, social mobility and increasing ideological independence. They also mark his alliance with feminized political spaces of comparable class and moral intention, an alliance that was to continue throughout his career.

In this, Douglass's work was instrumental in consolidating a transnational ethical culture committed to liberal, Anglo-American values and the principles that underpinned them. Conversely, the preface to the new texts becomes the site of a counter-discourse, which posits slavery as the result of colonial process, though the radicalism of that position was soon to be lost with the emergence of Douglass's unequivocal Anglophilia. The Narratives also demonstrate the agency of the slave-subject in mediating images of the United States in an international context, and, indeed, Douglass's power over the economic and ideological success of transatlantic abolitionism.

Ireland, a site on the margins of western discursive practice, was a space of empowerment for Douglass in the early years of his public career. The impact on his writing was such that it necessitates a re-evaluation of the apparent limitations of the slave narrative form. In its Irish incarnations, Douglass's Narrative demonstrates a generic and formal flexibility that attests to his increasing personal status and narrative authority, as well as confirming the recalibration of his socio-political stance. As such, the Irish editions, composed on the margins after an escape from the United States, might be considered an act of literary maroonage, with direct impact on contemporary hegemonic understandings of US subjectivity and the American experiment as a whole.

In addition to the implications for generic understandings of autobiography within the American canon, or the exceptionalism of the African American narrative position, the Irish Narratives have repercussions for the now national space in which they were produced.

The extended version of Frederick Douglass's Life and Times was published in 1892 with chapters additional to those of the earlier editions. These later chapters deal with Douglass's tour of Europe and North Africa, and with his Haitian diplomatic experiences. Their inclusion in the final version of his last autobiography illustrates the importance of Douglass's engagement with the realities of US expansion and the underpinning myths of empire to his construction of nationhood and representative identity. Another autobiographical publication of Douglass's latter years was a text that reworked his early transatlantic experience, entitled ‘Thoughts and Recollections of a Tour in Ireland’. Published in the AME Review in 1886, just before he embarked on the journey that would retrace and extend the path of his earlier travels, this piece is more or less contemporaneous with Douglass's Egyptian writing. It reveals some of the political views that fed into his autobiographical project at the time. It also allows for a comparison between Douglass's political stance on Irish Home Rule, and his views on Haiti, to whose history and current condition Douglass had previously compared Ireland.

For Douglass, the issues of emancipation, racial equality and citizenship were directly and inextricably linked to questions of nationhood and identity. The traditions and tropes in which that identity was encoded were also crucial to his own self-fashioning throughout his career.

The extended version of Frederick Douglass's Life and Times was published in 1892 with chapters additional to those of the earlier editions. These later chapters deal with Douglass's tour of Europe and North Africa, and with his Haitian diplomatic experiences. Their inclusion in the final version of his last autobiography illustrates the importance of Douglass's engagement with the realities of US expansion and the underpinning myths of empire to his construction of nationhood and representative identity. Another autobiographical publication of Douglass's latter years was a text that reworked his early transatlantic experience, entitled ‘Thoughts and Recollections of a Tour in Ireland’. Published in the AME Review in 1886, just before he embarked on the journey that would retrace and extend the path of his earlier travels, this piece is more or less contemporaneous with Douglass's Egyptian writing. It reveals some of the political views that fed into his autobiographical project at the time. It also allows for a comparison between Douglass's political stance on Irish Home Rule, and his views on Haiti, to whose history and current condition Douglass had previously compared Ireland.

For Douglass, the issues of emancipation, racial equality and citizenship were directly and inextricably linked to questions of nationhood and identity. The traditions and tropes in which that identity was encoded were also crucial to his own self-fashioning throughout his career. The contrary, however, was also true: in his role as fugitive, cultural tourist and diplomatic emissary, Douglass was instrumental in mediating transnational sites of US interest, and defining their place in the American cultural imaginary. This was as true of his early overseas experience in Ireland as it was of his later position as agent and representative of state in Haiti.

‘Thoughts and Recollections’ forms part of Douglass's journalistic contribution to American public life, in the early stages of which, Shelley Fishkin Fisher and Carla Peterson contend, he established the ‘we’ behind his Emersonian ‘I’ as a demarcation of those within and outside the abolitionist community. This dynamic of inclusion and exclusion permeates Douglass's writing: well after the formal abolition of slavery at the end of the Civil War, he continued in this binary mode – which was based on élite, civilizationist models of morality – particularly in discussions of international politics.

The overseas editions of Douglass's autobiography repositioned the Narrative as a forum in which transnational power relations and the struggle for agency were mediated. Such repositioning helps illustrate the opportunities provided to Douglass by the slave narrative genre, particularly in terms of its semantic engagement with pro- and anti-slavery discourse, and related negotiation of the domestic divide between North and South in the United States. For the transnational Narrative not only establishes the international impact of anti-slavery activity, it also enables new national readings. It is therefore useful to review the transatlantic Narratives against the literary and political context provided by the United States at mid-century.

The United States at this point reflected the changing circumstances of American self-definition. National identity was being refashioned amidst the competing pulls of North, South and West. None was immune to the problems of slavery. One of the major national debates of the period concerned western expansion, specifically the issue of slavery and its legality in the newly incorporated territories. Although discussions of western expansion in US culture have emphasized the primacy of the frontier experience – civilization's encounter with savagery leading to the metaphysical triumph of freedom within the American cultural imaginary – the frontier territories also involved more earthly considerations of liberty at an historical moment in the United States notable for its ideological divisions. Nebraska and Texas illustrate that locations beyond North and South were increasingly stages upon which the realities as well as the debates around freedom and bondage were played out.

Much of that debate took place in the Northeast, Douglass's home after his escape from Maryland in 1838. New England was also the home of the American Renaissance, and the transcendentalist vision underpinned by romantic ideals of nature and freedom that informed it. F.O. Matthiesson writes that the ‘democratic core of North Eastern transcendentalism believed that an American historian must write in the interests of mankind, in the spirit of the nineteenth-century’. At the heart of that ‘democratic core’ lay an ideal of freedom, an ideal increasingly confronted by the reality of slavery. Douglass's work, which combines personal history with social critique and an impulse towards reform, may be placed within the Renaissance camp. As Andrews argues, ‘in an era charged with revolutionary romanticism … the slave who endeavors to recover his freedom is associating with himself no small part of the romance of the time’.

Patriarchy and Patrimony

Frederick Douglass was one of the most notable visitors to Irish shores during the nineteenth century. He had left the United States in 1845, following the publication of his autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself, in order to avoid recapture and re-enslavement, and generate support for the antislavery cause in Europe. His travels throughout the then United Kingdom in the two years from 1845 to 1847 had a lasting effect on his social and intellectual status. Alan Rice and Martin Crawford describe him arriving in ‘Britain [and Ireland the] … raw material of a great black figure; [and leaving] … in April 1847 the finished independent man, cut from a whole cloth and able to make his own decisions about the strategies and ideologies of the abolitionist movement’.

Douglass's personal and political transformation found correspondence in the shifting form of his literary work, which became enmeshed in those same strategies and ideologies. In Ireland, his autobiography was re-published by the Dublin Quaker printer, Richard Webb, shortly after Douglass's arrival in September 1845, and went to variant and second Irish editions in 1846. Just as Douglass's personal and professional standing were deeply marked by the experience of being outside the United States, the reprinting of the Narrative in Ireland marks the beginning of a stage in Douglass's literary career that has an impact on contemporary readings of his life and work.

The Eagle Stirreth Her Nest', one of C.L. Franklin's best-known sermons, offers a critique of the United States, a nation predicated as much on exploitation and oppression as on liberty and democracy. The eagle of the title is not only the central image of the sermon, but emblem of the American Republic, and metaphor of divine presence and protection. The piece begins as exegesis, listing, then expounding the characteristics shared by the eagle and the divine: strength, speed and vision. It subsequently slips into an apparently unrelated folk narrative of a captive eagle being raised on a poultry farm. His difference from the rest of the birds is soon evident, and the eagle is confined to a cage in order to prevent his escape. As the eagle ages, he begins to outgrow his cage, as he does all subsequent cages built for him, until finally, in pity, he is released by the farmer. The correspondence with the initial biblical tale becomes clear in a final analogy between the eagle's release and a Christian prophecy of freedom and resurrection:

Patriarchy and Patrimony

Frederick Douglass was one of the most notable visitors to Irish shores during the nineteenth century. He had left the United States in 1845, following the publication of his autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself, in order to avoid recapture and re-enslavement, and generate support for the antislavery cause in Europe. His travels throughout the then United Kingdom in the two years from 1845 to 1847 had a lasting effect on his social and intellectual status. Alan Rice and Martin Crawford describe him arriving in ‘Britain [and Ireland the] … raw material of a great black figure; [and leaving] … in April 1847 the finished independent man, cut from a whole cloth and able to make his own decisions about the strategies and ideologies of the abolitionist movement’.

Douglass's personal and political transformation found correspondence in the shifting form of his literary work, which became enmeshed in those same strategies and ideologies. In Ireland, his autobiography was re-published by the Dublin Quaker printer, Richard Webb, shortly after Douglass's arrival in September 1845, and went to variant and second Irish editions in 1846. Just as Douglass's personal and professional standing were deeply marked by the experience of being outside the United States, the reprinting of the Narrative in Ireland marks the beginning of a stage in Douglass's literary career that has an impact on contemporary readings of his life and work. Taken in conjunction with his other literary output at this time – the letters to Garrison from Britain and Ireland, which were subsequently published in the abolitionist newspaper the Liberator – the Irish Narratives mark a transitional phase in Douglass's emergence as a modern subject and his mediation of nineteenth-century models of identity, specifically those that emerged as part of the international ethical culture of abolitionism.

For with the republication of the Narrative in Dublin came several changes in the form of the work, involving the incorporation of various prefacing devices and appendices that distinguish it from the US edition.

From the outset of his public career, Douglass was confronted with the dilemma of representation in the complex social, cultural and political milieu of the nineteenth-century Atlantic world. His early trip to Ireland, and the changes to the Narrative that he implemented there, signal his first major reconfiguration of the anti-slavery debate. The central fiction of the narrative, the slave subject, is repositioned within an international Atlantic, rather than insular US discourse of western modernity. The Irish Narratives become the expressive locus of Douglass's economic success, social mobility and increasing ideological independence. They also mark his alliance with feminized political spaces of comparable class and moral intention, an alliance that was to continue throughout his career.

In this, Douglass's work was instrumental in consolidating a transnational ethical culture committed to liberal, Anglo-American values and the principles that underpinned them. Conversely, the preface to the new texts becomes the site of a counter-discourse, which posits slavery as the result of colonial process, though the radicalism of that position was soon to be lost with the emergence of Douglass's unequivocal Anglophilia. The Narratives also demonstrate the agency of the slave-subject in mediating images of the United States in an international context, and, indeed, Douglass's power over the economic and ideological success of transatlantic abolitionism.

Douglass's early overseas experience indicates the importance of transnational encounters to the formation of black American subjectivity, complicating claims to either US or African American exceptionalism in the mid-nineteenth century. The writing and rhetoric of the British–Irish tour exemplifies the potential for the creation of an enabling myth for the African American subject in spaces where the racial hegemony of the United States could safely be contested.

Equally revealing are the international experiences at the latter part of Douglass's career. In 1886, Douglass toured Europe and North Africa with his second wife, Helen Pitts. He was later appointed as US minister to Haiti from 1889 to 1891, and subsequently engaged as organizer of the Haitian pavilion at the 1893 Columbian World's Fair in Chicago.

The circumstances of these overseas experiences could not be more different from those of the early sojourn. Rather than seeking asylum or advocating resistance, Douglass travelled as a tourist or a representative of state. Additionally, by the end of the nineteenth century, Egypt and Haiti were important spaces in the political and cultural imaginary of western empire and black nationalism. Douglass's views on each country afford a glimpse of his attitudes to important elements in the American and African American cultural imaginary of the period. His writings reveal some of the complexity of the African American relationship with Africa and modernity, particularly as that relationship reflected the rise of the United States as an imperial power.

The overseas editions of Douglass's autobiography repositioned the Narrative as a forum in which transnational power relations and the struggle for agency were mediated. Such repositioning helps illustrate the opportunities provided to Douglass by the slave narrative genre, particularly in terms of its semantic engagement with pro-and anti-slavery discourse, and related negotiation of the domestic divide between North and South in the United States. For the transnational Narrative not only establishes the international impact of anti-slavery activity, it also enables new national readings. It is therefore useful to review the transatlantic Narratives against the literary and political context provided by the United States at mid-century.

The United States at this point reflected the changing circumstances of American self-definition. National identity was being refashioned amidst the competing pulls of North, South and West. None was immune to the problems of slavery. One of the major national debates of the period concerned western expansion, specifically the issue of slavery and its legality in the newly incorporated territories. Although discussions of western expansion in US culture have emphasized the primacy of the frontier experience – civilization's encounter with savagery leading to the metaphysical triumph of freedom within the American cultural imaginary – the frontier territories also involved more earthly considerations of liberty at an historical moment in the United States notable for its ideological divisions. Nebraska and Texas illustrate that locations beyond North and South were increasingly stages upon which the realities as well as the debates around freedom and bondage were played out.

Douglass's writings, his autobiographies in particular, have long been cornerstones of the literary and historiographical scholarship generated around his life and work. Other major sources have included Douglass's private correspondence and editorial writing, with the letters in particular casting light on a range of relationships, public and private, throughout his career. The publication of Series One of the Douglass Papers: Speeches, Debates and Interviews by John Blassingame from 1979 to 1986 greatly expanded the body of material readily available to Douglass scholarship, compiling newspaper and other reports of his speechmaking from a wealth of sources, across a fifty-year period from the earliest days of his career. The papers help to round out the public figure Douglass presented, framing him within contemporary institutional politics in the United States. An important corollary of this is that Blassingame's collection allows for a directional change in Douglass scholarship. With their focus on the very public realm of rhetoric and performance, the three volumes in the collection facilitate critical approaches less concerned with genre, textuality or formal, one-to-one relationships than with the contingencies of group interaction in the public sphere. In short, Blassingame's collection suggests that attention to the nature and form of the performative self and its interaction with wider culture is both possible and necessary.

The first formal study of Douglass's training in public speaking and rhetorical inheritance, Gregory Lampe's Frederick Douglass: Freedom's Voice, 1818–1840, appeared in 1998, initiating a directed debate around the issues of voice and rhetorical structure.

Douglass's Narrative operates within two fields: the United States and the Atlantic. The former demonstrates the degree to which the slave narrative as autobiography can be considered as representative in both form and content as the Franklinian template. Douglass's work incorporates elements of Northern and Southern literary convention, producing an American subjectivity that spans national and racial divides. In the Atlantic context, Douglass's travels and the overseas editions of his work link the issues of slavery and abolition into a transnational network of separate but interlocking agendas. These occupy, to a greater or lesser extent, the terrain of progressive liberal discourse, a terrain that includes the advancement of women's political agency, racial liberalism, British and American nationalism, evangelical mission, and hierarchies of religious affiliation.

Yet the interconnectedness of these agendas also illustrates the complexities of individual and group identity in the context of shifting, increasingly globalized networks of ethnicity, gender or political agency. The Narrative was progressively restructured by Douglass in the period following its initial publication, to the point where it became a key node in this diverse network. Other elements of his textual production during the period 1845–47, the letters to Garrison in particular, continued to build upon the project of self-fashioning initiated in the Narrative, specifically on the American element of that undertaking.

Douglass remained in constant contact with the United States whilst overseas, with bulletins crossing the Atlantic on an almost weekly basis. The letters were updates detailing Douglass's progress, reception and his impression of people and places encountered in the course of his travels. Their status as private correspondence was little more than a literary conceit, however. For the letters were destined not just for Garrison's eyes, but for the pages of the Liberator, a public forum instrumental in binding an imagined community of abolitionists in the United States and beyond.

Douglass's time in Ireland is remarkable for the absence of any appeal across class lines to the peasant population or the urban working class. Particularly notable by its absence, despite the plethora of letters written by Douglass during his visit, is any commentary on the Great Famine of 1845–47, an event exactly contemporaneous with Douglass's time in Britain and Ireland. Given the scale of the disaster and Douglass's ongoing reportage of the people, customs and conditions he encountered overseas, the omission is striking.

The 1789 French political earthquake produced aftershocks long after the 1812 War and Napoleon's later banishment to St. Helena. These included the continent-wide revolt in Latin America against Madrid's authority, triggered by French invasion of Spain in 1808. Washington fully acknowledged the success of this liberation, led by Simon Bolivar and Jose de San Martin, in a presidential statement on December 2, 1823 (subsequently christened the Monroe Doctrine). Emperor Pedro I of Brazil had earlier declared independence from Portugal (1822), itself ruled since 1820 by a liberal constitution.

Moments of democratic-national intensity also flared during the twenties in Naples and Piedmont (1820–1821), Spain (1820–1823), and among Russian military officers imbued with French convictions, the Decembrists of 1825. Countervailing legitimacy – solemnized by the Treaty of Vienna, embodied in the Holy Alliance, powered by oppressive military engines – buried these projects in reaction.

The turbulent character of the 1820s was nowhere more apparent than in the ramshackle, polyglot, multireligious, ethnically diverse Ottoman empire. Its Egyptian and Syrian provinces were jolted by the Napoleonic commotion. French notions of liberty also reinforced impatience with Ottoman overlordship in the empire's European intelligentsia, particularly the Greek component. The eminent Rigas Velestinlis composed a constitution, among other radical documents, suffused with French ideas for a future Hellenic republic. He translated the Rights of Man into Greek. He had hoped before his martyrdom in 1798 by agents of the Sublime Porte to consult with Napoleon.

This book examines US foreign policy from Thomas Jefferson's purchase of Louisiana expanse to the Korean War. That period of one hundred and fifty years corresponded with the rise of US might from fledgling republic to transcontinental giant with overseas reach: empire. By mid-twentieth century, the US gross national product, exports as a percentage of world exports, and nuclear delivery systems dwarfed those of all competitors or other powers, including Great Britain, China, France, Germany, Japan, and the USSR.

This study serves as a companion to my earlier Wars and Peace: The Future Americans Envisioned, 1861–1991. I reviewed in it how a broad range of Americans during security crises conceptualized future world orders. I did so with a conviction that political imagination is not an exclusive property of the policymaking elite: Americans of diverse political stripes have always flavored public discourse with their versions of truth and solutions to problems. Thus I scrutinized the views of nonconformists, civil rights activists, feminists, and scholars. I drew connections between this eclectic crowd and the ideas – plus decisions – of policymakers in Washington. In effect, I sought to reacquaint readers with prominent, often controversial, thinkers whose eloquence, passion, and even wrongheadedness gave texture to the debates of their times.

My analytical concern here is more restricted than in Wars and Peace. The focus is on dissenters within the responsible class, coextensive with members of Congress, high-ranking soldiers, ambassadors, and cabinet officers.