Tom Hanks and Frederick Douglass on the Importance of Contingency

You will find no better explanation of the concept of contingency than in the movie Cast Away. Following his rescue from a small deserted island, in a remote corner of the Pacific Ocean, Tom Hanks, who plays Fed-Ex worker Chuck Noland, explains to his friend how the chance arrival of a piece of plastic on the beach, which he turned into a sail, led to his rescue and return to civilization.

His return brought additional heartbreak, but also the realization that the arrival of each new day brings with it the possibility of a brighter future.

It’s sometimes difficult to see the place of contingency in the trajectory of our own lives. The routines and responsibilities that frame each day often makes it feel as if we are operating on automatic pilot.

The weight of just a few days of Donald Trump’s presidency and the dismantling of institutions, norms, and landmark legislation has left many of us with a visceral sense of foreboding. I know I have felt it.

Such feelings can be helpful in galvanizing one to action, but they can also lead to a sense of helplessness as if the future has already been determined.

Knowing how events in the past turned out can often reinforce the sense that a story’s conclusion was inevitable, but it is always important for the historian to resist this urge and to acknowledge contingency—the possibility that events could have taken a different turn at any point in time.

I sometimes think that we dismiss the importance of contingency when discussing the history of Reconstruction. We often frame it as a period of failure—that it had little chance of success or that it was destined to fail.

Such an approach not only fails to acknowledge the scale of change that did take place during this period, for which there had been no precedent, but even more importantly, it ignores the perspective and humanity of the people who lived through it and who attempted to make sense of their place in the midst of such dramatic and, at times, decisive change.

The life of Frederick Douglass is always instructive in these situations. His life is a perfect case study for appreciating the contingency of the past, beginning with his life as an enslaved boy and ending as one of the most important Americans of the nineteenth century.

All I can say is read David Blight’s wonderful biography of Douglass to learn more about this remarkable life. Douglass witnessed many sails wash up on his shores over the course of his life.

Of all the incredible speeches that Douglass delivered over the course of his life, his address to a group of students, just a few months before his death in 1895 is one of my favorites. On September 3, 1894, Douglass traveled from his home in Washington, D.C. to Manassas, Virginia to help dedicate a new school for African-American children.

The entire speech is well worth reading, but I want to highlight two short excerpts:

No spot on the soil of Virginia could have been more fitly chosen for planting this school, than on this historic battlefield. It has not only the high advantage of forming an instructive contrast and illustrating the compensation possible to mankind, by patiently awaiting the quiet operation of time and events, but suggests the battle to be waged against ignorance and vice. Thirty years ago when Federal and Confederate armies met here in deadly conflict over the question of the perpetual enslavement of the Negro, who would or could have dreamed that in a single generation, such changes would be wrought in the minds of men that a school would be founded here for the mental, moral and industrial education of the children of this same people whose enslavement was sought even with the sword? Who would have imagined that Virginia, after the agony of war, in a time so short, would become so enlightened and so liberal as to be willing and even pleased to welcome here, upon her sacred soil, a school for the children of her former slaves? Thirty years ago neither poet, priest nor prophet could have foretold the vast and wonderful changes which have taken place in the opinions and sentiments of the American people on this subject since the war. The North has changed and the South has changed, and we have all changed, and all changed for the better. Otherwise, we should not be here today engaged in the business of establishing this Institution….

I must not further occupy your time except to answer briefly the inquiry, ‘What of the night?’ You young people have a right to ask me what the future has in store for you and the people with whom you are classed. I have been a watchman on your walls more than fifty years, so long that you think I ought to know what the future will bring to pass and to discern for you the signs of the times. You want to know whether the hour is one of hope or despair. I have no time to answer this solemn inquiry at length or as it deserves, and will content myself with giving you the assurance of my belief. I think the situation is serious but it is not hopeless. On the contrary, there are many encouraging signs in the moral skies. l have seen many dark hours and have yet never despaired of the colored man’s future. There is no time in our history that I would prefer to the present. Go back to the annexation of Texas—the fugitive slave law times and the border war in Kansas. The existence of this Industrial School of Manassas, is a triumphant rebuke to the cry of despair now heard in some quarters. Nor does it stand alone. It is a type of such institutions in nearly all of the Southern States. Schools and colleges for colored youth are multiplying all over the land. Hampton, Tuskegee, Cappahosic, are brilliant examples. The light of education is shedding its beams more brightly and more effectively upon the colored people of the South, than it ever did in the case of any other emancipated people in the world. These efforts cannot fail in the end to bear fruit..

It might be tempting to dismiss Douglass here. After all, isn’t this the nadir of race relations, following years of brutal violence and the promises of Reconstruction all but destroyed? Shouldn’t Douglass be preparing these young students for a life of fear and little hope of progress?

Perhaps if we take a perspective from 10,000 feet above, but in doing so we lose sight of the continued change that took place even after the point that we are supposed to believe that Reconstruction ended and which led inevitably to the era of Jim Crow.

The timing of Douglass’s speech in instructive.

The dedication of the Manassas school took place just a few years following a revolution in Virginia led by a bi-racial political party known as the Readjusters. Without getting into too much detail, the Readjusters were led by a former Confederate general named William Mahone. For four years between 1879 and 1883 the Readjusters transformed the state through control of the governor’s mansion and General Assembly. The largest number of Black teachers worked in public schools and the largest number of Black students attended public schools during this period.

Though it lasted only a few short years, it left it left a legacy of Black education and political activism. It also points to the kind of change that was still possible even in the late nineteenth-century South.

On the other hand, Douglass could not know that, in a few short years following his death, Virginia would ratify a new state constitution that stripped the vast majority of Black citizens that were still on its voting rolls.

Douglass was neither naive about the future nor was he overly pessimistic. His address to the students was both empowering and reflective of his own life’s journey—one filled with twists and turns that could never have been predicted.

It was a life defined by contingency.

I encourage you to spend a few minutes and read Douglass’s speech. It speaks to our common humanity and our own struggles to find our footing and direction in a world that is constantly changing and one that is often filled with dark clouds.

In the meantime, keep an eye out for those sails that wash up on your own shores.