Frederick Douglass
Prophet of Freedom
David W. Blight
Having read it
★★★☆☆
Five out of five for its subject but this book felt lost in its own academic efficacy (and its publisher’s editorial abilities, or lack thereof?!) and unfortunately, aside from some interesting and intriguing moments about Frederick Douglass’s life and its many tribulations and a few successes, the author seemingly forgets, or is just unable, to write a compelling narrative that hooks the reader. It may well have been worked on for a long time, but for what it is worth, an alternative editor would have helped and one that was keen and able to seriously chop this academic tome to half its size and thus make it a more effective and enjoyable read. I didn’t read it all the way through, although I did manage the first half of it before concluding that as much as the subject is interesting I can’t read every word, so skipped and scanned but made it to the last page. Well, the last page before the acknowledgments, many pages of footnotes and the index!
A good passage
He tells us that he gave his host [Nathan Johnson, who helped create the growing black community in New Bedford, Massachusettes] the privilege of choosing his new last name, but that he dearly wanted to retain Frederick. ‘I must hold on to that to preserve a sense of my identity,’ wrote Douglass in 1845. Johnson had just been reading Sir Walter Scott’s Lady of the Lake, the classic and popular romantic Scottish poem of 1810. From the Highland clan named Douglas, Johnson suggested a new name. Frederick liked the name’s sound and strength as a word, and he quickly accepted, adding an s for distinction.2 Thus began the long process of the most famous self-creation of an African American identity in American history.
A second good passage
Such conviviality and mutual support was quite real. But what ultimately made Douglass pull back on the public platform was the frequent analogy between black American slaves and the alleged ‘white slaves’ of the British wage system, a claim made inside and outside Chartism. As a man of words, Douglass faced many tensions and contradictions on this issue. He could claim over and over, as he had back in Ireland, that his mission was ‘purely an antislavery one,’ but write frequently how he was learning to ‘enter into the wrongs of others’ as the only ‘true foundation for his antislavery faith.’ In a speech in Bristol in late August 1846, Douglass seemed to acknowledge ‘political slavery in England’ and gave a nod to the virtual slavery of men in the British army and navy. He proclaimed his hatred for all forms of tyranny and oppression, but then stated firmly that ‘there was no similarity between slavery, as existing in the United States, and any institution in this country, than there was between lightness and darkness.’ A week later in Bridgewater, England, Douglass felt challenged by the analogy again. After reciting his litany of the evils of American slavery wreaked upon both body and mind, he concluded unequivocally, ‘Were there any such in this country? There was not one! The humblest man in the realm could resist the proudest aristocrat, backed up by the shield of the slave.’ Douglass thus parted ways with those the British law! Not so the slave.’ Douglass thus parted ways with those Chartists who still clung to slogans such as ‘Death to aristocrats’ and even with the moral-suasionist crusaders for workers’ rights who knew something about just how much the labouring poor in England could ultimately resist the aristocrats whose boots crushed their necks.37
A third good passage
Douglass was the prose poet of America’s and perhaps of a universal body politic; he searched for the human soul, envisioned through slavery and freedom in all their meanings. There had been no other voice quite like Douglass’s; he inspired adoration and rivalry, love and loathing. His work his words still wear well. What shall we make of ‘our Douglass’ in our own time? The problem of the twenty-first century is still some agonisingly enduring combination of legacies bleeding forward from slavery and colour lines. 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 things.