Frederick Douglass and the African American Epistle

Scholars of rhetoric are drawn to the African American epistle, a subgenre of reformist literature that spans more than two centuries, by its structural features and by its impact on public discourse.1 An epistle is a private letter made public, or a moral commentary packaged into a personal missive. Its multilevel audience—the addressees on one tier, the broader readership on another—enables an ad hominem directness more intrinsic to religious than to legal or philosophical writing. Even so, the epistle differs from other sermonic modes like the jeremiad in its appeal to the bonds of friendship rather than to prophetic warning.2 Epistolary writing has played a role in many social and political movements, but it occupies a place of note within African American literature. James Forten’s Letters from a Man of Colour (1813), David Walker’s Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World (1831), James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time (1963), Martin Luther King’s Letter from Birmingham Jail (1963), and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me (2015) are among the specimens that have attracted considerable study. These writers are known for a broad range of deliberative rhetoric, but their epistles achieve a certain resonance that has demanded closer examination.

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