Book Review: Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom by David W. Blight

Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom by David W. Blight published by Simon & Schuster 913 pages (2018) $37.50 Hardcover $14.99 Kindle
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David Blight has written a wonderful biography of Frederick Douglass that is likely to be the standard against which other work on the great human rights advocate is judged for at least a generation. The first new full biography of Douglass since William McFeely’s 1991 book, this is a massive work of prodigious research that is coupled with straightforward writing. The book covers all of the years of Douglass’s life and all aspects of his long career. It also offers an unvarnished account of the Great Man’s private life without descending into the salacious.

I have read one of Douglass’s autobiographies and McFeely’s biography. I have also visited some sites associated with Douglass’s life in Maryland and in New England and New York. While I am hardly a Douglass devotee, I have more familiarity with his life than most readers. Still, I was surprised by some of what Blight brings to light, and persuaded by many of Blights’s conclusions about Douglass’s life.

David Blight is a Yale professor and this book accords with scholarly standards, but it avoids the jargon and exclusivity of some academic history. This is a book for all intelligent readers interested in the Civil War and Reconstruction, African American History, and Abolition Studies. It is also perfect for those of us who like to see how people capable of great deeds on the national stage dealt with the everyday domestic trials that we all encounter.

This is a broad and comprehensive biography of one of the most well-known Americans of the 19th Century. While his contemporaries Grant and Lee led men in battle and Lincoln issued executive orders freeing millions of people, Douglass’s tools were seemingly much meeker. Blight writes:

Douglass was a man of words; spoken and written language was the only major weapon of protest, persuasion, or power that he ever possessed. Throughout I try to demonstrate the origins and growth of this man’s amazing facility to find the words to explain America’s racial condition as well as the human condition. In one way, this book is the biography of a voice.

Blight pays close attention to Douglass’s words and to the impact they had on the American people.

Blight opens his book at the 1876 unveiling of the Freedmen’s Monument in Washington.

Here Douglass would address, according to Blight, the most powerful audience an African American spoke before until Obama was sworn in as president. With President Grant, Supreme Court Justices, Senators and Congressmen sitting in front of him, Douglass presented a Lincoln who was the product of a racially divided society. Blight writes that Douglas told his audience:

“It must be admitted, truth compels me to admit, even here in the presence of the monument we have erected to his memory, Abraham Lincoln was not . . . either our man or our model. In his interests, in his associations, in his habits of thought, and in his prejudices, he was a white man.” Douglass must have caused some squirming in the chairs as he injected race so forthrightly into his rhetorical tribute. Grant might have inwardly flinched. It was as though Douglass had decided to give voice to the kneeling slave on the statue, who would now say thank you as well as speak some bitter truths about a real history, and not merely allow the occasion to be one of proud, national self-congratulation. It was as though Douglass was saying—you gave me this unique platform today, and I will therefore teach these lessons about the jagged and tragic paths by which black people achieved freedom in the agony of war. “He [Lincoln] was preeminently the white man’s president,” Douglass continued in his forceful baritone, “entirely devoted to the welfare of the white man. He was ready and willing at any time during the first years of his administration to deny, postpone, and sacrifice the rights of humanity in the colored people to promote the welfare of the white people of the country.” Douglass employed a stunning level of directness for such a ceremonial occasion. He did not merely turn his moment in the national sun into a reminiscence about a good war and glorious outcomes. Lincoln’s growth to greatness and to the role of Emancipator, he insisted, must first be seen through the disappointments of his first year in office. Douglass would not consider the triumphal memory of 1865 without first pulling his audience through the pain of 1861. (Kindle Locations 304-308).

On this ceremonial occasion Douglass reminded his audience that in 1862 Lincoln proposed to Black ministers that freed slaves should move to another country and in 1863 he refused to retaliate against captured Confederates when Black soldiers were murdered. He famously told whites in his audience that “My white fellow-citizens . . . you are the children of Abraham Lincoln. We are at best only his stepchildren; children by adoption, children by forces of circumstances and necessity.” Yet, Lincoln, he said, was worthy of honor among the freedpeople for liberating them from an oppression infinitely worse than the wrongs that had led the founders of the United States to rise in revolt against the British.

Blight then moves from Douglass at the height of his powers to his humble origins as a baby born into slavery on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. Douglass may have been the product of the sexual abuse of his mother by a white owner or overseer. Hired out by her owner to a number of employers, she rarely was even allowed to see her children. “My poor mother, like many other slave women, had many children, but NO FAMILY!” Douglass wrote later. Douglass only saw her on a handful of occasions.

Douglass would often recall the last time he saw his mother. After a transgression as a little boy, he was denied food by the woman placed in charge of him. His mother came in the night to bring him a little heart-shaped cake. By the time he awakened, she had already walked miles the the farm she had been hired out to work. When he heard later that she was dying, he asked to visit his mother but was refused permission. Blight writes of Douglass’s later retelling of this story:

As a world-famous abolitionist in 1855, Douglass knew well how this story would play on the emotions of his readers; but his words must also be read and interpreted as a child’s screams transported by memory into the anguished heart of a lifelong orphan. “The heartless and ghastly form of slavery rises between mother and child, even at the bed of death,” he offered to his sentimental readers. Then, he simply spoke for himself and millions of other former slaves, dead and living: “It has been a life-long, standing grief to me, that I knew so little of my mother; and that I was so early separated from her. The counsels of her love must have been beneficial to me. The side view of her face is imaged on my memory, and I take few steps in life, without feeling her presence; but the image is mute, and I have no striking words of her’s treasured up.” Douglass could see her only from a blurry side view, her voice muted…

Douglass did not know who his father was. He wrote in 1845; “My father was a white man . . . admitted to be such by all I ever heard speak of my parentage.” Growing up, he recalled, it was “whispered that my master was my father.” Blight writes that the question of who his father was concerned Douglass at many points in his life. While Douglass wrote that under slavery white men fathered children with the Black women they controlled, they were not fathers, still he often inquired of people from the area near where he lived if they knew who his father was.

Still little more than a child, Douglass was sent to serve as a slave to Hugh and Sophia Auld in Baltimore. Blight provides a stunning description of the contrast between the hide-bound slave society of the Eastern Shore and the rollicking modernity of Baltimore. The great Border city had slaves, but was not really a slave city. Free Blacks and throngs of Irish and German immigrants greatly outnumbered enslaved African Americans.

His new masters were at first surprisingly kind to Frederick. They would later become abusive, but they provided him with both literacy and shipbuilding skills. Both would help him survive after he escaped to the North. Literacy would empower his efforts to free all men and women in America.

Here is how Blight writes about Douglass’s first months with the Aulds:

To his astonishment and joy, Sophia Auld—Hugh’s wife—displayed “the kindliest emotions” in her face, and her tender demeanor toward the boy put him in a world he had never known from white people. And he hit it off immediately with “Little Tommy,” of whom “his Freddy,” as “Miss Sophia” put it, was to “take care.” Surrounded by all this dreamlike affection, Frederick remembered his emotions: “I had already fallen in love with the dear boy; and with these little ceremonies I was initiated into my new home, and entered upon my peculiar duties.”6 Compared to all his previous experience it was a home and would remain so for several years; but it would also be a place for learning stern lessons for life, as well as to find and savor the one possession that might save his life.

For nearly his first two years with the Aulds, Sophia treated him “more akin to a mother than a slaveholding mistress.” Indeed, as Douglass pointed out, Sophia Auld had never been a slaveholder before his arrival. She allowed him to feel like a “half-brother” to Tommy. She was pious, attended church regularly, and exuded kindness toward the black boy who was now turning ten or eleven years old. She was Douglass’s humane “law-giver,” he said, and such sweetness made him “more sensitive to good and ill treatment.” Living on carpets, sleeping in a good straw bed, eating good bread, and wearing clean clothes did not hurt either. But the great gift she gave him was literacy. In 1845 Douglass recollected simply that Sophia had of her own accord taught him his ABCs as well as his first lessons in spelling. But by 1855 he remembered it a little differently. By then it was part of his “plan,” and after repeatedly hearing her read aloud from the Bible, he frankly asked her to teach him to read. Either way, Sophia was proud of her pupil, and Frederick was an extraordinarily eager learner. (Kindle Locations 909-912)

Sophia’s instruction in literacy ended when her husband forbade further lessons. He told Sophia that it was illegal to teach a slave to read and that once Frederick was literate, there would be no keeping him. Hugh said that the only way to make the boy into a good slave was by depriving him of an education. Douglass would later say that Hugh’s chastisement of Sophia was the “first decidedly antislavery lecture to which it had been my lot to listen.”

Douglass would later say that Sophia Auld “lacked the depravity indispensable to shutting” her slave away from learning, but that her husband’s pressure ended Sophia’s kindness. She went from lamb-like kindness to tiger-like fierceness in her relations with Frederick. David Blight says that when Douglass’s opportunity for learning was cut off by Sophia, he turned to another source of teachers:

Frederick made friends with several white boys who lived in the same neighborhood. [He] developed a genuine bond with these struggling and hungry immigrant kids. Frederick carried his Webster’s spelling book, and at every chance he would corner the white boys and, while “seated on a curbstone or a cellar door,” solicit from them spelling lessons in return for his “tuition fee”—Sophia Auld’s fresh warm bread. A “single biscuit” would also lead to animated discussions of why Frederick was a slave for life and why the white boys were free. The boys took him into their secret emotional havens and supported their enslaved friend. They told him slavery was unfair and that he would be free one day, especially when he turned twenty-one. Their words encouraged him, Douglass remembered. This convinced him that young boys were natural abolitionists, at least until they reached a certain age when they were no longer “unseared and unperverted” by slavery’s material and moral logic.

…by the time of writing Life and Times in 1881, he thanked four by name: Gustavus Dorgan, Joseph Bailey, Charles Farity, and William Cosdry. Here was Douglass’s first comradeship with young Irishmen, his first trusted experience with humanism beyond race. As white boys condemned the hypocrisy and oppression of their parents toward one of their favorite fellow street urchins, perhaps Douglass found even ultimate experiential inspiration for his later speeches and writings. Whenever Douglass made arguments against slavery from the natural-rights tradition, which he did persistently after 1841, he could reflect upon this experience with the boys of Philpot Street, who often told him that “they believed I had as good a right to be free as they did,” and that “they did not believe God ever made anyone to be a slave.” (Kindle Locations 996-999)

After Frederick was sent back to the Eastern Shore, he cooked up an escape plan and led a small group of confederates on an ill-conceived dash for freedom. Recaptured, Douglass contemplated the punishment that awaited him. Blight writes that Douglass envisioned the probability that he would be sold South by Thomas Auld:

When his tense and indecisive owner finally showed up, to Frederick’s great surprise Auld had decided not to sell his slave, but to send him back to Baltimore with the promise that for good behavior, and learning a trade, Auld would free him on his twenty-fifth birthday. This moment may easily have been the greatest stroke of good luck in Douglass’s life, and he seems to have known it. Auld could have sent him “into the very everglades of Florida,” wrote Douglass of this turning
point, “beyond the remotest hope of emancipation; and his refusal to exercise that power must be set down to his credit.” (Kindle Locations 1585-1587)

Douglass was sparred and Auld would have reason to regret his decision.

Douglass returned to the Baltimore shipyards and learned the trade of a caulker. At six foot one inch, Douglass was a big, tough teenager. He needed his bulk to fend off white workmen who complained that he was taking a white man’s job. One day he was beaten to a pulp by four of the white workmen. Returning to their earlier form, Hugh and Sophia Auld gently nursed him, and Hugh went to the local officials to try to get them to prosecute the white assailants. Because a white man could not be prosecuted on a black man’s testimony, the case went nowhere.

Douglass, says Blight, became a brawler of necessity. He was regularly insulted and harassed by whites. The black man was at the mercy of his master, but even a concerned master could not protect him from the blows of other whites. Douglass later explained that the slaveowning whites and the dockyard owners profited from the competition they engendered between working class white and slaves that set off a race to the bottom over wages. As long as black and white workers were divided, both would be in servitude of the wealthy. Blight writes that:

The slaveholding class exploited the lethal tools of racism to convince the burgeoning immigrant poor, said Douglass, that “slavery is the only power that can prevent the laboring white man from falling to the level of the slave’s poverty and degradation.” (Kindle Locations 1643-1644)

Blight explores the relation that led Frederick to take a wife, Anna, who would help him plot his escape. On September 3, 1838 Anna saw off her man at the train station. Disguised as a free black sailor, with another man’s pass, Douglass made the “most famous” escape in American history. On his train North, he was recognized by a German immigrant, who fortunately had no heart to betray him. On Sept. 4, Douglass arrived at the Hudson ferry terminal in New Jersey and he sailed across the river to Chambers Street in Manhattan. He hoped no one noticed him back then. Today this is a marker commemorating his arrival.

He rejoiced at finally being a freeman, but he also realized that he had no plan beyond his arriving in New York. A black sailor directed to the home of black abolitionist David Ruggles. He stayed there a week, waiting for Anna to follow him. When she arrived, the two were legally married. Ruggles suggested that they move on to New Bedford, Mass. where Frederick could find work as a ship caulker in the shipyards there.

Frederick followed the advice, taking a steamer to Rhode Island and a stagecoach to New Bedford. There he was helped by the Johnsons, a black abolitionist couple. He changed his birth name, Frederick Bailey to the name he is now so well know for to avoid capture by slave catchers. Blight notes that while Douglass’s bravery and intelligence were necessary to his escape, so was the help of his wife and the network of Black abolitionists in the Underground Railroad.

New Bedford was one of the safest places in America for a fugitive slave. The growing city had 300 fugitives scattered throughout its population. Its growing maritime industries needed workers and provided opportunities. Blight says that Douglass:

had been conditioned to consider slavery as the basis of wealth. Not in the whaling port. Working white men and black men alike owned homes and lived with dignity. Douglass seemed genuinely stunned at Yankee enterprise and apparent prosperity. (Kindle Locations 1871-1872)

The large Quaker population of the city enhanced the feeling of safety he enjoyed. The Quakers gave the whaling post a distinctively Abolitionist feel. Black religious life also thrived in the little African Methodist church that Douglass attended. He sometimes spoke from the pulpit to the congregation, gaining his first training in public speaking.

As early as 1840, local abolitionists had noticed the gifts of Frederick Douglass.

Almost immediately after his arrival in New Bedford, Douglass registered to vote. In the words of Blight:

it is remarkable that the most famous black man of the nineteenth century, shortly after escaping from slavery, while living with a new, assumed name, with no other identification and certainly no proof of birth in the United States, and while still “illegal” as a fugitive from Southern justice and the property rights of his owner, could instantly become a voter by paying $1.50 and having his name placed on the tax rolls. (Kindle Locations 1942-1945).

Douglass also became a subscriber to The Liberator, the newspaper of the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison. He began speaking on abolition around this time as well. His earliest public comments were in opposition to colonizationists.

In August, 1841, Preacher Douglass was invited to an abolition convention on Nantucket. When he boarded the ferry to the island, he and the other blacks were segregated from their white colleagues. Douglass spoke at the convention before a thousand people and he spoke from his intimate knowledge of slavery. Garrison wrote that “I shall never forget his first speech at the convention—the extraordinary emotion it excited in my own mind—the powerful impression it created…” Douglass was getting the attention of the leaders of the movement to end slavery.

At the time Douglass was joining the abolitionist movement, its main organization, the American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS), was being torn apart by a new direction in Garrison’s politics. Garrison advocated disunionism, abstention from electoral politics, and women’s rights. None of these had universal acceptance among abolitionists. Garrison’s attacks on established religion alienated many anti-slavery ministers. A large minority of the AASS broke off with the Tappan brothers into a more moderate movement willing to engage in legal challenges to slavery and electoral politics through the Liberty Party and, later, the Republican.

Frederick Douglass became a leading spokesman for the Garrisonian faction. He traveled throughout the North trying to use “moral suasion” to convince his listeners that slavery was immoral. He soon learned that he would be insulted and attacked on his peripatetic speaking tours. He was supposed to engage in principled “non-resistance” to whatever he was subjected to. Garrisonians practiced a radical non-violence.

By the time he was a touring lecturer, he was also the father of three little children. His wife Anna found herself in a pattern that would characterize the rest of her married life. She would stay home, caring for their children and providing a home for her increasingly famous husband, while seeing him less and less.

Only 23 at the start of his touring, and not long removed from slavery, Douglass was accused of merely reading speeches written for him by white men. But other observers saw the originality and intelligence of Douglass’s speeches. The young man was aided in his speaking by a sharp sense of humor that made him as entertaining as he was challenging. Douglass particularly enjoyed skewering the racism of Protestant ministers North and South. Blight describes one such speech:

Douglass often began by reciting the story of the Reverend Isaac Bonney in New Bedford separating blacks from whites for Communion. But one Sunday Bonney blundered. After a baptism in which several white and one black woman had been anointed “in the same water,” the Communion cup was passed. A foolish, abolitionist-leaning deacon saw the black woman step in line between the whites, so he handed her the cup. But when “the precious blood which had been shed for all” reached the next white woman, “she rose in disdain and walked out of the church.” Brimming for the sarcastic kill, the orator did not stop there. “Another young lady fell into a trance,” barked Douglass. “When she awoke, she declared she had been to Heaven; her friends were all anxious to know what and whom she had seen there.” One “good old lady” especially needed to know “if she saw any black folks in Heaven?” Then came the punch line: “Oh! I didn’t go in the kitchen!”28 Douglass paced to another position on the platform awaiting the howling laughter to subside. (Kindle Locations 2340-2345)

By 1842 Douglass was speaking in front of crowds numbering in the thousands. He was frequently paired with the fiery Quaker abolitionist Abby Kelly on his tours. Churches that might welcome him as a speaker, refused their pulpits to her. Train conductors would try to separate them as they went from town to town. Douglass noted that if he was the slave of white woman he would be free to ride with her, but as the equal of Kelly he was an unacceptable companion. Abby Kelly was an early and vocal feminist and Blight thinks it likely that conversations with her led to Douglass’s own developing support for women’s rights.

The abolitionists found a particularly congenial reception in New York’s “Burned Over District” along the Erie Canal. Cities from Albany to Buffalo had been opened to new ideas of equality, socialism, and feminism that made the words of Douglass and Kelly seem familiar. The Erie Canal and the expanding railroad system were the information superhighway of the early 1840s, and this part of New York State was on the main line.

During his 1843 tour, Douglass was scheduled to speak in Buffalo at the same time as the national Colored Convention was to be held there. Douglas attended as a delegate.

Douglass the Garrisonian would experience pushback from many of the other Black delegates. Most did not accept the anti-political and pacifist views espoused by Garrison. They insisted that they had rights under the United States Constitution, and that those blacks who could vote should support the political abolitionism of the Liberty Party.

Henry Garnet, himself an escaped slave from Maryland, called for militant action against slavery and implied that violent resistance to slavery by blacks was justified. Denmark Vesey was the guide star for freedom, he asserted, not William Lloyd Garrison. Nat Turner was the patriotic martyr of Black Americans. Garrison’s pacifism needed to be rejected. Garnet told his listeners bluntly “Let your motto be RESISTANCE! RESISTANCE! RESISTANCE!”

With the audience in tears by the end of Garnet’s speech, Douglass arose to speak. Blight recounts this early conflict between the two black abolitionists:

Douglass, partly from fledgling Garrisonian principle, but also from an emerging pragmatic and situational view of violence, objected: Garnet had called for “too much physical force,” and Douglass preferred “moral means a little longer.” To advocate “insurrection,” Douglass held, would be irresponsible and result in disaster. Garnet rose to reply and urged slaves to tell their masters they wanted their liberty; if denied, “we shall take it.” Just who “we” meant was unclear. Just how this was to be done was even less clear.

Douglass won the day on the use of violence. By the 1850s, he would come to largely support the views Garnet espoused.

When Douglass went on his speaking tours, he was willing to risk his life to speak in hostile territory such as in pro-slavery southern Indiana. For example, during one small outside meeting in Pendleton, Indiana, a mob attacked the 130 abolitionists and they broke Douglass’s hand and knocked him semi-unconscious. Douglass spoke again the next night from the same outdoor platform.

In 1845, Douglass’s Narrative was published and he became the most famous black man in America. In revealing his identity to the world, Douglass opened himself up to recapture as a fugitive slave. Not only would his old master be able to track him down, but supporters of slavery who wanted to silence the abolitionist could use the fugitive slave laws to take him prisoner.

That summer, armed with his new book, Douglass set off on a speaking tour of Ireland and Britain. Crossing over, he was subjected to Jim Crow segregation, but was cheered that the Hutchinson family singers who accompanied him came below decks to cheer him. “We had anti-slavery singing and pro-slavery grumbling” he wrote later. When the abolitionists held a mini-camp meeting onboard, a slave-owning Georgian shouted, “I wish I had him in Savannah! We would use him up!” Some of the men rushed Douglass to try to throw him overboard, but an Irishman and the ship’s captain blocked them. Douglass’s bad treatment was widely broadcast in the Irish and British newspapers and Douglass believed that it swelled interest in his mission.

Douglass arrived in Liverpool and promptly took the ferry to Ireland. Douglass wrote that his arrival in Ireland was the first time he had encountered no “manifestations of prejudice” against him based on race. He was allowed to stay where he wished and travel on transport without discrimination. In Ireland he “was not treated as a color, but as a man,” he wrote.

He was introduced to Dan O’Connell, the “Great Liberator” of the Irish. When he heard O’Connell speak, Douglass wrote home saying that he had never experienced such a captivating speech. He wrote that the address was “skillfully delivered, powerful in its logic, majestic in its rhetoric, biting in its sarcasm, melting in its pathos, and burning in its rebukes.”

Not all was work for Douglass. He spent a month in Cork relaxing, for the most part, in that fair city. Here, he gave a series of lectures and became the darling of the locals. Here, also, he had some freedom from the overweening attempts by the Garrisonians to control his message.

Douglass increasingly clashed with the Garrison faction in Ireland and Britain. One of them implied that he was more interested in making money from the sale of his book than in furthering Garrison’s strategies. Douglass himself wanted his speeches to concentrate on the enslavement of blacks and not on the disputes among white abolitionists.

A resentful Douglass wrote that “I can say with propriety save me from my friends and I will take care of my enemies!” and “If you wish to drive me from the Antislavery Society, put me under overseer ship and the work is done.” Still he continued on with his Irish tour, speaking in Limerick and spending nearly a month in Belfast.

Douglass denied that there was any equivalence between American slavery and the terrible situation of the indigenous Irish. He said that while the Irish might be discriminated against, “slavery was not what took away any one right or property in man: it took man himself…from himself.” The Irishman was poor, he told audiences, but he was not a slave.

Douglass did not know it, but his tour of Ireland came as the potato blight was beginning to destroy the livelihood and the lives of the indigenous Irish. Over the next four years a million Irish would die of the effects of malnutrition and a quarter of the population would become refugees from starvation. The deaths and dislocations were as much a product of British exploitation of Ireland’s resources as they were of biological disaster. Douglass, who often expressed affection for the Irish poor, did not hesitate to blame them for the suffering that they were enduring.

After he left Ireland, he had time to reflect I what he had seen. He wrote, says Blight, that:

Too many self-styled “philanthropists,” maintained Douglass, “care no more about Irishmen . . . than they care about the whipped, gagged, and thumb-screwed slave. They would as willingly sell on the auction block an Irishman, if it were popular to do so, as an African.”

He could see commonalities among the oppressed, but as with his later discussions of Native Americans, he also differentiated their plight from that of enslaved blacks.

“I have spent some of the happiest moments of my life since landing in this country,” Douglass wrote at the end of his time in Ireland. “I seem to have undergone a transformation. I live a new life. Instead of the bright blue sky of America, I am covered with the soft grey fog of the Emerald Isle. I breathe, and lo! The chattel becomes a man. I have . . . no creed to uphold, no government to defend; and as a nation, I belong to none . . . The land of my birth welcomes me to her shores only as a slave.” Ireland, even in poverty, was far better than the United States. In Ireland he might be argued with, but he was not assaulted.

When Douglass next went to Scotland, he became embroiled in religious conflicts. Churches there had accepted donations from slaveholders, setting off splintering within sects. But not all was storm and trouble. Like many 19th Century Americans, he was a devotee of Robert Burns and he indulged his fandom by visiting sites associated with the poet.

In England philanthropists raised money to finally buy Douglass’s freedom from Auld. His English friends arranged for his freedom to be purchased for 150 Pounds Sterling. Predictably, purists criticized him for paying money to a slaveowner, little considering the danger his public role placed him in.

When he returned to the United States a free man, Douglass was still part of a discriminated against race. Blight tells us the story of trip the black abolitionist made through Pennsylvania where he was denied food for two days by taverns that refused to serve blacks.

An increasingly national figure, Fredrick Douglass was able to raise money for his dream project, the publication of a Black abolitionist newspaper. This would place him in direct competition with his mentor Henry Lloyd Garrison. As the North Star took shape, Garrison vowed to meet the challenge from his young protege with firmness. The first issue of the North Star in December 1847 heralded a new direction for abolition and a growing break with Garrison.

Newspaper editing and writing shaped the next two decades of Douglass’s life. As anyone who has ever had to write on deadline, the need for constant output forces the writer to struggle daily with the issues at hand. There is no waiting for inspiration, the paper must come out on schedule. According to Blight:

The paper became, as he later recalled, the “motive power” of his life. Douglass tested his ideas and began to grasp the landscape of politics through the lens of the North Star. “It was the best school possible for me,” he wrote. “It obliged me to think and read, it taught me to express my thoughts clearly.” He had to produce the words that were both burden and liberation. (Kindle Locations 3874-3877)

Blight describes the attempt by New York’s notorious Democratic Party link to gangland Isaiah Rynders, to disrupt a speech by Douglass in Manhattan. I was left doubting Blight’s mastery of the gangs of New York when he identified the Plug Uglies as an Irish gang. They were, in fact, a Know Nothing gang.

I also think Blight stumbles in describing the relationship between Douglass and a woman who played a large role in the abolitionist’s early career. Julia Griffiths was an Englishwoman who devoted several years of her life to fostering Douglass’s development. Her relationship with Douglass was a matter of scandal generated by the anti-abolitionist press.

Blight does not demonstrate that Douglass had a sexual relationship with Julia, yet he writes: “It was as though Douglass had a conjugal and a companionate mate, and they were not the same person.” Perhaps what he means is that Douglass had a best friend, and she was a woman.

If Blight wants to claim that Julia was Douglass’s lover, he should do so. If not, then a close relationship between a man and a woman is properly called a friendship.

Apart from Julia Griffiths, Blight gives a revealing account of the personal life of Frederick Douglass. He does not shield Douglass’s failings as a husband, including a years-long sexual relationship with a German emigre radical. He also describes the problems of being the children of America’s most famous Black man. Douglass’s relations with his neighbors in Rochester and Washington are explored, his housing situations from a rented room to a grand home all make it into Blight’s book.

This is not a meditation on Frederick Douglass, it a full-blown biography that spends as much time on Douglass the man as it does on Douglass the Leader.

In the 1850s, the Rochester-based Douglass increasingly worked with Upstate New York abolitionist Gerrit Smith. Blight writes that by 1851, “Douglass openly embraced Smith’s version of an antislavery interpretation of the Constitution, of voting, and political activism.” The passage of the Fugitive Slave Act pressed Douglass to reject Garrison’s limited range of acts of resistance. “Douglass had long since headed out for his own new territory; the rigid doctrines of disunionism, nonvoting, and moral suasion no longer sufficed in the political climate of the 1850s.” (Kindle Locations 4216-4217).

The Garrisonians reacted with increasingly personal attacks on Douglass and Julia Giffiths. They claimed that Douglass had be bought by the wealthy Smith and that his ambition to depose Garrison as the leader of the abolition movement had led him astray.

As Douglass adopted the anti-Garrisonian position that the Constitution did not support slavery, he found himself an outcast among his old comrades. Blight writes that:

by mid-1851 he came under attack by the Garrisonians for his disloyalty to their principles. “There is roguery somewhere!” cried Garrison in an outburst at the May 1851 annual meeting of the AASS in Syracuse. He laid the charge on Douglass, who, in response to a resolution declaring that the society would endorse no newspaper that did not support a proslavery conception of the Constitution, announced his “firm conviction” that the national charter should be “wielded in behalf of emancipation.” He had conducted “careful study,” Douglass told all his old colleagues, and from now on he planned to advance the antislavery interpretation of the Constitution in his paper. In an uproar the convention promptly voted to exclude the North Star from the list of favored journals. (Kindle Locations 4264-4268)

Douglass knew that the war against him would focus on his motives for his defection from Garrison’s orthodoxy. The most common charge was that Smith’s money had won his allegiance.

The 1855 publication of My Bondage and My Freedom marked Douglass’s arrival as a writer. The book is still read as a mature writer. Four times as long as Douglass’s first narrative, it is still read as a classic of American literature. When it was published, it sold an astounding 5,000 copies in just two days.

As Douglass became more and more influential, he moved further and further away from Garrison’s pacifism. Bloody Kansas pointed the way to the future as slavery’s partisans took up the gun against their opponents. John Brown showed a way to resistance that held out greater hope than the “moral suasion” of Garrison. Brown’s decision to live among African Americans in Gerrit Smith’s free settlement near Lake Placid, New York, solidified his position in Douglass’s pantheon of anti-slavery heroes. Douglass thought that only violence held the hope of ending slavery, and Brown was one of the few white men willing to wield this terrible tool.

When Brown developed his plan to capture Harper’s Ferry, Douglass saw it as a dangerous and likely disastrous adventure. He was convinced the Brown had no plan to hasten a slave revolt after he struck his first blow and he concluded that Brown had lost all objectivity.

The failure of John Brown’s raid was followed by an order to arrest Douglass while he was in Philadelphia to deliver a speech. Douglass rushed to his Rochester home while his son removed incriminating materials from his desk. Virginia’s governor sent a message to President Buchanan request Federal aid in apprehending “the person of Frederick Douglass, a negro man . . . charged with murder, robbery, and inciting servile insurrection.” Douglass fled to Ontario.

From Canada Douglass helped to craft the Abolitionist image of John Brown. Not a madman, but a martyr for liberty.

The polarizing effect of Brown’s brief raid outlived the old man’s life.

The start of the Civil War was the moment of greatest peril for abolition. The movement risked being subsumed into Lincoln’s presidency, and Lincoln was no abolitionist. During the first year of the war, Douglass spent as much time calling out the Union’s limited war aims which did not include emancipation and might foster his bete noir, colonization. Yet the war also led to a change in the way Douglass thought about the United States.

Douglass’s 1852 speech “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” is a justly famous jeremiad directed at the hypocritical celebration of liberty in the land of slavery. Blight uses Douglass’s less well-known 1862 Fourth of July Speech to show a change in Douglass’s understanding of the country that had enslaved him. Blight writes:

Early on the morning of July 4, Douglass took the Elmira and Canandaigua Railroad from Rochester southeast approximately sixty miles to a tiny town called Himrods Corners, New York. Arriving at the sleepy village located between Keuka and Seneca Lakes, some eight miles south of Penn Yan, Douglass stepped off the cars and “found no one to receive” him. So he simply started walking until he encountered someone who could take him to his hosts. Soon this little settlement of “two taverns, one church, six neat little cottages, one store,” and a “pile of sawed wood” began to transform for celebration. By late morning, Douglass saw the Star-Spangled Banner flying from many a liberty pole, and before long, by rail and in farm wagons, a throng estimated at two thousand arrived and assembled in “a grove of noble pines, under a bright blue sky.” They had not gathered, said their orator, “for fun and frolic, not for mirth or senseless parade,” but to listen to Douglass consider “the perilous condition of the country.” Under a canopy of trees, to a throng of western New York and Finger Lakes region farmers and townspeople, many of whom had sons, brothers, or fathers in the army in Virginia, Douglass delivered a carefully prepared address he called “The Slaveholder’s Rebellion.”

Most of his arguments had been well rehearsed in editorials and speeches that spring and summer. With reports of the shocking bloodshed all around the eastern perimeter of Richmond, and the retreat of McClellan’s army to the James River in defeat just trickling in, Douglass acknowledged a “midnight blackness” intruding on their beautiful day. The country was undergoing a “social earthquake,” the national “house” was “on fire.” Douglass addressed big subjects: the origin of the war, its “tap root, and its sap, its trunk and its branches,” all born of slavery; the Confederacy’s quest to forge in revolution an eternal slaveholders’ republic; a history of the litany of compromises with slavery over time; the many perversions of the Declaration of Independence in the service of satisfying the demands of the Slave Power; the inevitability of the war; and McClellan’s alleged disastrous incompetence as well as the duplicity within the Lincoln administration. The war had now reached such scale of bloodshed that it was no longer about constitutional authority, but about which side had the will to fight to win.

In this sobering critique of the Union war effort, one new and important element emerged. In the shade of a beautiful grove, the floor of the natural arena strewn with pine needles, Douglass’s deep baritone called out an honest abolitionist’s patriotism. Contrary to his magnificent jeremiad for the Fourth of July in 1852, where the orator rang down a hailstorm separating himself and “your fathers,” “your” Declaration of Independence, and “your” Fourth of July, this time at Himrods Corners, ten years later and in the midst of a war that now showed vivid signs of becoming a struggle against slavery, Douglass suddenly altered the pronouns: “The claims of our fathers upon our memory, admiration and gratitude are founded in the fact that they wisely, and bravely, and successfully met the crisis of their day.” This time he took ownership in the special day and gave it new meaning. “If the men of this generation would deserve well of posterity, they must like their fathers, discharge the duties and responsibilities of their age.” It was now his age, his duty, and especially his country. They had gathered this time, said the black Jeremiah in softer tones, to draw a new meaning “around the birth of our national independence.” Douglass linked past to present as he instructed the throng sitting on wagons and leaning on trees. “We are only continuing the tremendous struggle, which your fathers and my fathers began eighty six years ago”. Douglass had never before called the American founders his “fathers.” For him, a second American revolution was under way—more bloody, but perhaps more enduring and important than the first. He claimed his place among the founders of the second republic. (Kindle Location 7166)

David Blight devotes a large section of this book to Douglass during the Civil War. Of course, the effort to pressure Lincoln into making Emancipation a war aim is central, as is the recruitment and treatment of black troops. Blight also explores the question of why Douglass, who willingly sent his sons into the army, did not join the army himself.

The author also discusses Douglass’s changing views on Abraham Lincoln. When Lincoln spoke to black ministers and asked them to support colonization of blacks abroad, Douglass wrote:

“The tone of frankness and benevolence which he assumes in his speech to the colored committee is too thin a mask not to be seen through. The genuine spark of humanity is missing in it. . . . It expresses merely the desire to get rid of them [blacks] and reminds one of the politeness with which a man might try to bow out of his house some troublesome creditor or the witness of some old guilt.”

Douglass in Reconstruction is given equal weight to Douglass the Abolitionist. Douglass’s family life also emerges most fully after the war. His children, now grown to adulthood, see the greatness a black man can achieve, but are repeatedly stifled by a discriminatory society and personal problems. Frederick Douglass uses the opportunity created by the end of slavery to reunite with friends and relatives that he had not seen since his own escape. His expanding family drained his resources and led to a life of non-stop work even as he aged.

There was his involvement with the Freedmen’s Bank. Knowing nothing of banking, he assumed the leadership of the troubled financial institution shortly before it failed. Douglass may not have been involved in any fraud, but his incompetent presence may have persuaded poor African Americans to stick with the bank after it was on the road to ruin.

There is also Douglass’s easy acceptance of the prejudices of his day. Blight writes:

he almost never recited his litany of reasons for the franchise without trotting out his drunken Irishman joke, especially among New England Yankees. He could easily garner laughter and applause, as he did in Boston on January 26, with “If we know enough to be hung, we know enough to vote. If the negro knows enough to pay taxes . . . he knows enough to vote. . . . If he knows enough to shoulder a musket and fight for the flag . . . he knows enough to vote. If he knows as much when he is sober as an Irishman knows when drunk, he knows enough to vote.” He was eager to counter the Uncle Tom image of the quiescent black man, the “perfect lamb” exuding Christian piety but not standing up, demanding and fighting, while exploiting the “picture of the Irishman, drunk and good humored.” Moreover, he asserted African Americans’ claims to “a state of civilization” by contrasting them with “the Indians,” who may “die out.” “The Indian, to be sure,” said Douglass, “is a stout man; he is proud and dignified; he is too stiff to bend, and breaks. He sees the plowshare of civilization casting up the bones of his venerated fathers, and he retires from the lakes to the mountains. . . . He will not even imitate your wearing apparel, but clings to his blanket, lives in hollow trees, and finally, dies.” To these brutal racial images, Douglass compared “the negro,” who “likes to be in the midst of civilization,” in the “city . . . where he can hear the finest music, and where he can see all that is going on in the world.” (Kindle Locations 8861-8863)

Reconstruction would start inauspiciously for Douglass. As white terrorists murdered African Americans trying to assert the most basic rights, Douglass led a delegation of Black leaders in a meeting with the accidental president Andy Johnson. After blaming blacks for the civil war and insisting that they held working class whites in contempt, Johnson said he was considering a new scheme of black colonization. Douglass’s responses to the blabbering president were loaded with sardonic humor.

Johnson’s secretary told the New York World that “The President no more expected that darkey delegation yesterday, than he did the cholera.” The secretary said that after Douglass and Company left the White House, Johnson said “Those d__d sons of b__s thought they had me in a trap. I know that d__d Douglass; he’s just like any nigg@r, & he would sooner cut a white man’s throat than not.”

Unlike Lincoln, there was no room for growth in Johnson’s mind and no empathy for blacks in his heart. Blacks would continue to suffer under the racist regime of Andrew Johnson.

The meeting with Johnson did help settle Douglass on one area of his own life. He had considered leaving politics and policy at the end of the Civil War. As abolition societies were folding their tents throughout the North, he thought he might try his hand at another line of work. When he realized that Johnson was the successor to Lincoln in legal title only, he knew that the next decade of his life would not be so different from the last.

For example, when Douglass travels to Europe, he makes sure to spend his time in the Vatican and other centers of Catholic religious art. He devoted space in his journal to denouncing the Catholics as idol worshipers because the churches are filled with paintings and sculptures depicting scenes from the Bible at the same time that he writes about the sublime nature of these works of art! The Sistene Chapel is a place where he is almost carried away by the genius of the place and at the same time he has a Puritan’s revulsion at seeing the face of God! Douglass the man could recognize the beauty he saw in the churches but he could not escape the prejudices he received from his Calvinist and Evangelical allies.

While Catholics in America were under attack during the 1850s and 1860s, their situation was not at all as desperate as the indigenous peoples of this land. Douglass never endorses the mistreatment of the Native Americans but he does share some of the same prejudices about them with most white Republicans. Blight writes about this terrible blind spot:

Douglass’s defense of the patriotism and assimilation of blacks to American culture contrasted with, again, the alleged retreat and decline of Indians.

Douglass delivered a lengthy comparative, racialized rant about Native Americans. Blacks had achieved the “character of a civilized man,” and Indians had not. The Indian, said Douglass by one invidious distinction after another, is “too stiff to bend” and “looks upon your cities . . . your steamboats, and your canals and railways and electric wires, and he regards them with aversion.” The Indian “retreats,” said Douglass, while the black man “rejoices” in modernity. Brutally ignoring so much history, Douglass claimed that against his people “there is a prejudice; against the Indian none.” He complained that Indians faced only “romantic reverence,” while blacks were “despised.” It is astounding that Douglass would use race this way just as American Indians were fighting, and losing, so many western battles over their lands, and especially as the federal government, in alliance with Christian and philanthropic reformers, launched the reservation system, as well as the long effort to detribalize Native peoples. The prolonged effort of Bureau of Indian Affairs agents to achieve the forced deculturalization—“to destroy the Indian and save the man”—of Native Americans on a vast scale was a history very different from the one Douglass used to assert the cause of black rights. The marketplace for racism was diverse and terrifying in Reconstruction America. Even its most visible and eloquent homegrown opponent could fall to its seductions in his fierce quest to be accepted by American “civilization.”

Since Douglass was sometimes the only non-white speaker at many Republican gatherings during Reconstruction, his reproduction of prejudice allowed his white auditors to feel comfortable in their own bigotry.

As Andrew Johnson’s control over Reconstruction slipped, Douglass grew hopeful that a fuller equality could be achieved. He was encouraged by the drafting of the 14th Amendment establishing a color-blind citizenship, although he opposed some of the language of the Amendment because it did not grant a color-blind right to vote.

The introduction of the 15th Amendment in 1869 would place the ballot in the black man’s hand, but it was silent on the right of women to vote. Should Douglass have supported it?

Frederick Douglass had long been the leading African American voice for the rights of women. His record of advocacy for women was two decades long. He knew the leadership of the women’s movement. He lived near some of them in his Rochester home. The women he was closest to professionally and romantically were all early feminists. His nature and life experiences would indicate a desire to include women in the protections of the 15th Amendment.

Yet, when Douglass learned that the Amendment would not include women, that a gender-neutral voting clause would be a poison pill that could kill off black male suffrage, he accepted the compromise of his values. Like most successful but principled leaders of a cause, he had to sell some of his values to achieve an immediate end. And he did.

As her Black allies fell away, Elizabeth Cady Stanton deployed racist language in defense of women’s rights. The women she was defending were from the white middle classes. Blight writes:

By denying American women the vote, politicians, Stanton contended, degraded their own “mothers, wives and daughters . . . below unwashed and unlettered ditch-diggers, boot-blacks, hostlers, butchers and barbers.” But she did not stop there with her invidious class and racial-ethnic slurs. She asked her readers to imagine “Patrick and Sambo and Hans and Yung Tung who do not know the difference between a monarchy and a republic, who never read the Declaration of Independence . . . making laws” for refined, educated Anglo-Saxon women reformers. Douglass too had used his “drunken Patrick” jokes to argue for black suffrage. But Stanton and Anthony had crossed some lines. Many in the women’s rights movement were also disgusted when Stanton and Anthony denounced the Republicans and allied with white-supremacist Democrats in 1868. They did so by welcoming the support of wealthy racist merchant George Francis Train, who funded the new journal Revolution, Stanton’s ideological mouthpiece. (Kindle Locations 9521-9523)

Stanton said that Black women would be better off as slaves than living in a Republic in which black men could vote and black women could not. She said “It is better to be the slave of an educated white man, than a degraded, ignorant black one.” She sounded like a Southern Democrat when she warned that enfranchised black men would inflict horrible outrages on white women as well.

Douglass had to cope with the deep racism underlying the thinking of all Americans, even his erstwhile allies.

David Blight was one of the progenitors of the modern study of Civil War Memory, the way the was and the society that fought it were recalled. Douglass was his predecessor, in many ways. A year after the armies disbanded, “The Lost Cause” was emerging as an interpretation of the war and Southern white defeat. Douglass saw the danger early on to the whitewashing of historical memory. Blight says that Douglass:

realized the power of the “Lost Cause” as both a historical argument and a racial ideology. The Lost Cause was in these early years essentially an explanation of defeat and a set of beliefs in search of a history—ex-Confederates’ contentions that they had never been defeated on battlefields but by the Northern leviathan of industrial might; that they had never fought for slavery but for state sovereignty and homeland; that the South’s racially ordered civilization had been tragically crushed by Yankee invasion; and that “just” causes can lose militarily but with time regain the moral and political high ground. Douglass vehemently resisted the rapid emergence in national political circles of these ideas. He was appalled at the national veneration of Robert E. Lee when he died in 1870. Disgusted at what he called the “bombastic laudation” and the “nauseating flatteries” of the “rebel chief,” Douglass attacked the Lost Cause as a betrayal of the verdicts of the war. “It would seem,” he wrote in a biting editorial, “that the soldier who kills the most men in battle, even in a bad cause, is the greatest Christian, and entitled to the highest place in heaven.” By early 1871, after so much romance about Lee’s death and the sentiment that he had “died of a broken heart,” Douglass expressed a precise verdict: “He was a traitor and can be made nothing else.” (Kindle Locations 10296-10299)

Blight’s Douglass is a man for whom history mattered. He believed that the way the war was remembered would help shape the place Blacks assumed in post-emancipation society. He would spend three decades fighting a rear-guard action against the advance of Lost Cause and Reconciliationist narratives of the Civil War Era. He would offer an Emancipationist narrative as an alternative vision of the conflict.

Douglass began seeing the Republican Reconstruction consensus slipping away during the election of 1872. The defection of the Liberal Republicans signaled that issues other than “The South,” “The Negro” were growing in importance to many Northern Republicans.

According to Frederick Douglass, the renegade Liberals wanted “the clasping of hands across the bloody chasm, the great love feast of reconciliation cooked by Mr. Greeley, on which occasion our southern brethren are indirectly promised the first seats at the common table.” The “southern brethren” being white and not black.

Douglass went too far, however, in simply dismissing charges of corruption against the Grant administration and calls for civil service reform. A country immersed in a conflict over race for more than two decades could not be expected to maintain its centrality forever. White voters had other issues that they wanted addressed that could not be subsumed under the title “Reconstruction.”

Blight explores Douglass’s involvement in Grant’s confusing attempts to annex what is now the Dominican Republic. Santo Domingo had been riven by civil wars and coups. Grant saw an opening to semi-legally take control of the country and Douglass was deeply involved in the sordid negotiations. The jury is out on Grant’s true intentions, but others involved clearly saw the misery in the DR as a main chance to pile up wealth.

Even if you believe that Grant saw Santo Domingo as a refuge for blacks facing Ku Kluxing, Douglass’s involvement in a harebrained colonization scheme does not show him in a good light.

Blight writes that Senator Charles Sumner took a different view of the Santo Domingo adventure:

Sumner rejected all humanitarian explanations for annexation anywhere in the Caribbean. He saw the effort as the ultimate destruction of a black nation, a fate that would also extend to Haiti. Sumner opposed annexation as blatant American imperialism and an abandonment of the domestic struggle to enforce Reconstruction racial policies in the South. (Kindle Locations 10420-10422).

Blight describes Douglass as a post-14th Amendment expansionist. He seems to have believed that the United States could now incorporate places like Santo Domingo and Cuba into the American nation without damaging the lives and cultures of the people of color living in those countries!

William Lloyd Garrison thought that Douglass got involved in the dubious Santo Domingo venture for reasons of personal aggrandizement. How could any honest man think that a black republic could be brought into a United States still so riven with racism? Douglass’s claims that after the passage of the 14th and 15th Amendments the U.S. had become the world leader in the protection of human rights has to sound at best naive, at worst a distortion designed to sell imperialism packaged as racial inclusion.

Blight says that Douglass hoped to export this new American liberty to the Caribbean. Of course, the history of subsequent American relations with the region would reveal that liberty was not to be the main interest of Douglass’s countrymen in the region.

Of course, if Douglass’s vision of the incorporation of Santo Domingo was fulfilled and it became a state, that would have meant blacks in Congress and black voters that presidential candidates had to win over. However, it is hard to imagine the Dominicans given any real control over their own destinies.

And perhaps Douglass did not really want the Dominicans to control their own futures. Like many American imperialists he seemed to see white American culture as superior to that of the Latino society that he found in Santo Domingo. In an essay, he even mused on the benefits of sending Protestant missionaries the Dominicans to win them away from Catholicism. He may have thought that remaking the Dominicans into English-speaking New England Evangelicals would be in everyone’s best interest. Of such dreams are genocides made.

As Reconstruction drew to a close, Douglass was left without a journalistic voice. His newspaper The New National Era went under. Douglass personally lost $10,000 on the newspaper, and the relic of the no longer publishing paper was constantly being sued for unpaid debts.

Douglass was at the same time more needed as a national voice. The Democrats in 1874 had abandoned mere revanchism as their platform. They ran more broadly against government centralization and corruption. Blight writes of Dougalss’s response:

Democrats had never shied away from using federal military power when the object was returning fugitive slaves, or handing over John Brown to be executed. He wondered why if the “American people could stand centralization for slavery,” they could not also “stand centralization for liberty.” As for the charges that the new Civil Rights Act pending in the Senate (eventually passed in honor of Charles Sumner) might advance “social equality” between whites and blacks, Douglass exploited the reality of racial mixture: “What is social equality? They had a great deal of it where I came from. A great deal of the social, but no equality.” Two races arrived in North America America in the early seventeenth century, said Douglass, one on the Mayflower at Plymouth, and the other on a “Dutch galliot . . . at Jamestown.” At that time there were no “intermediate races,” but now, two and a half centuries later, because of slavery and long-practiced “social inequality there had come a million and a half of intermediates.” His roaring Yankee audiences loved the joke. (Kindle Locations 10760-10762).

In 1875, Douglass gave the most controversial speech he delivered during Reconstruction. It was a 5th of July Speech. In it he wondered; if war between Northern and Southern whites had resulted in the freedom of the slaves, what would peace and reconciliation of the whites bring for black men and women? The road to reconciliation, Blight writes, was “paved only for white people.”

Douglass worried that African Americans were too divided to successfully resist the erosion of their rights that would follow whites reaching out to one another in friendship. They lack a cadre of national leaders and after his own paper had closed they lacked a national press. Rank and file blacks had imbibed a sense of inferiority and were likely to defer to the will of the whites who were their masters in all but legal title.

Douglass also attacked the white-run philanthropies that had been set up to aid and educated the freedmen, wondering if they brought more benefits to their white officers than to their black students, patients, and aid recipients.

The speech was reprinted and commented on in newspapers around the country. Democrats were gleeful at Douglass’s rebuke to the white “friends” of the freedmen. Many Republicans were hurt by his reproach. Douglass wrote that his message was misunderstood. He was not calling for blacks to abandon the Republicans. He wrote that his speech was “an appeal to the American people to substitute the simple rule of justice for the rule of invidious charity in their treatment of the negro—to give him his rights rather than alms.”

Douglass famously worried that “If war among the whites brought peace and liberty to the blacks, what will peace among the whites bring?” He understood that reconciliation meant reconciliation among white people, to the possible exclusion of blacks from the body politic. The road forward was to be one reserved for whites only.

The Gilded Age was the era of the restoration of white supremacy in the South.

As the nightmare of “Redemption” set in, Douglass began speaking more and more of Black self-reliance. He told white audiences, “If you see a negro wanting to purchase land, let him alone; let him purchase it. If you see him on the way to school, let him go; don’t say he shall not go into the same school with other people. . . . If you see him on his way to the workshop, let him alone; let him work; don’t say you will not work with him.”

Blight writes that this emphasis in his later speeches is sometimes twisted by modern conservatives into advocacy by Douglass for governmental non-intervention on behalf of African Americans. Blight writes:

“let alone” meant rule of law and social peace. It meant stop killing the freedmen and denying them access to civic life, make the revolution of emancipation real, enforce it by law, protect it in the courts, teach it in schools, keep the ballot box safe and free to defend that revolution, and reimagine government itself as the source and shield for a brave new economic world. “Let alone” and “fair play” demanded that whites open their minds and let blacks find their own place in equality before the law, announced in the Fourteenth Amendment. Douglass chose unfortunate passive words for a plan of social and political action. He knew this was a somewhat utopian vision. But he was in for the long haul, and he often prefaced any talk of his “let alone” theory with the sobering admission that slavery “did not die honestly.” It had died in all-out war, from necessity, not from enlightenment and morality alone. It had been crushed in blood, not merely legislated out of existence. Its ideology and habits, its racial assumptions, lived on in virulent forms. When those were crushed too, then, said Douglass to friend and foe, “you shall have peace.” (Kindle Locations 10941-10943).

Douglass began delivering a speech, “The Self-Made Man,” at venues around the country. Blight says that he appears to have carried it with him when he traveled in case he needed a ready speech. Douglass’s self-made black man assumed that racial barriers were removed and reparation was made for slavery. Douglass said in his speech that the “nearest approach to justice to the negro for the past, is to do him justice in the present. Throw open to him the doors of the schools, the factories, the workshops, and all mechanical industries.” While he highlighted the achievements of a handful of blacks, he recognized that their success did not signal an end to racial disadvantage in America.

A thorough believer in the advance of capitalism, Douglass saw a large role for the Federal government in protecting the civil rights of blacks, insuring the education of the children of slaves, and countering efforts at voter suppression.

In 1876 Douglass was able to address the Republican National Convention. He joked to his audience that it was the first time he had been able to look the Republican Party in the face. After acknowledging the party’s role in emancipation, Douglass said that the lack of government protection and aid had done irreparable harm to freedpeople. With an air of reproach he told them; “You turned us loose to the sky, to the storm . . . and, worst of all, you turned us loose to the wrath of our infuriated masters.” The slaves had not been given the land of their rebel masters, nor had they received adequate support to start a new life. They had not been protected from the violence of the returning Confederates intent on keeping blacks subservient to whites. He demanded that the party at least defend the limited gains blacks had made during Reconstruction.

The election of Rutherford B. Hayes signaled the retreat from Reconstruction, but it also brought an honor to Douglass. Hayes named him the marshal for the District of Columbia. This was the first time in American history that a black man assumed an office requiring senate approval.

A marshal, Douglass visited his old slave quarters on the Eastern Shore. Blight writes:

He later called this homecoming “strange enough in itself,” but that he was about to meet his former master was “still more strange.” A messenger brought word that Auld had agreed to see him at the home of the old man’s daughter and son-in-law, Louisa and William H. Bruff. The gawking entourage followed him to the corner of Cherry Street and Locust Lane, where, as Dickson Preston, our best chronicler of Douglass’s returns to the Eastern Shore, wrote, “It was the first time that a black man had ever entered a white home in St. Michaels by the front door, as an honored guest.”22 Auld was sick, bedridden, his hands “palsied,” as Douglass described him. The two men met for about twenty minutes in an emotional, humane encounter of past and present. Douglass thought he was witnessing Auld on his deathbed, although the former slaveowner would not die for two and a half more years. As autobiographer, Douglass re-created this drama with a customary vividness and irony. He entitled the chapter “Time Makes All Things Even”; he did not say time cures all ills, nor had he “begged” for Auld’s “forgiveness,” as the Baltimore Sun’s reporter claimed. But he may have revealed a deep yearning to heal his own soul, to find a purging of his scarred memory, to forgive in a way that helped him to finally declare publicly his survival and triumph. In much of Christian tradition—in which Douglass had learned to think and write—the forgiver often forgives for his own sake, not to excuse the oppressor. He forgives to strengthen his own heart, to work through grief, pain, loss, and hatred. Douglass had striven long and far and come to see that some self-understanding may rest at the end of the precept “Forgive, and ye shall be forgiven.” Blight, David W.. Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom (Kindle Locations 11492-11494). Simon & Schuster. Kindle Edition.

In 1879, Douglass opposed the growing Exoduster movement of blacks out of the South and toward Kansas and other places on the Great Plains. He seemed to view the flight of blacks as an admission that the struggle for equality in the former-Confederacy was over and defeat inevitable. Some of those heading west asked him if he was willing to live in the South now that White Supremacy had been reestablished.

After Douglass’s wife died, the country’s most prominent black man took a new wife. The fact that he chose a white woman became a national sensation. Democrats were disgusted by a race-mixing marriage. Of course, many of his Southern white critics had engaged in race-mixing themselves. Douglass told a reporter that he did not act in love because of his race, but because of his heart.

Some African Americans worried that Douglass’s choice would be seen as a rejection by Douglass of black women as mates. His new wife Helen faced ostracism from her family and social disgrace. Everyone seemed to have an opinion about this marriage.

Helen had known Douglass for two decades before they married. She was a lifelong supporter of racial equality and women’s rights. During the Civil War, she taught freedpeople at a contraband camp in Virginia. Whatever others might have thought, Blight sees the marriage as a love match that offered comfort to each partner.

Douglass would need Helen’s support in the final years of his life. The last chapters of the book include the deaths of close family members and the upsurge in lynchings in the South. Douglass mourned both developments, but fought against the lynchings, enlisting in Ida B. Wells’s anti-lynching campaign. Douglass in decline was still a powerful moral force among old Radicals. He also protested the exclusion of African American life from the Great Columbian Exposition in Chicago, and he gave a stage to the rising generation of black voices like poet Paul Dunbar.

When Douglass died of a heart attack at the age of 77 he was still fighting to preserve the legacy of the abolitionists, the victories of the Civil War, and the integrity of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments.

Douglass in death was still viewed through the telescope of race. The New York Times attributed his “superior intelligence to his “white blood.” An Upstate New York newspaper praised him as “almost white.” That was apparently the greatest thing that could be said of a black man. The New Orleans Picayune described Douglass as a “half-breed.” A Northern newspaper in an otherwise laudatory obituary, criticized his “unnatural” marriage to a white woman.

W.E.B. DuBois, a young intellectual at the time, told an audience that Douglass was a man of his race, but that he also “stood outside mere race lines . . . upon the broad basis of humanity.” Of how many other men born in the slave states during the early 19th Century could the same be said?

David Blight concludes his biography:

Freedom in its infinite meanings remains humanity’s most universal aspiration. Douglass’s life, and especially his words, may forever serve as our watch-warnings in our unending search for the beautiful, needful thing.