Frederick Douglass (2018) by David W. Blight

 Audiobook Review

Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom (2018)

by David W. Blight

   Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom by David W. Blight is another pick from the 100 Best Books of the 21st Century by the New York Time (#86).  I'm also looking for non-fiction titles to round out my fiction heavy reading list, and the Times list has plenty of non fiction titles.  Even within the non fiction world, "great man" biographies aren't my favorite, but Frederick Douglass strikes me as a worthy candidate, since he is the first African-American, chronologically speaking, who would merit this treatment under any "great man" type theory of history. This is as compared to the "ordinary man"/annales school of history which focuses on normal folks, in which case there are many possible candidates for the honor.

   I knew nothing about Douglass beyond the bare biographical details of his life: Born a slave in Western Maryland, he learned to read and write at a young age and then fled slavery to the north as a young man, where he became known as a strong and urgent voice for the end of slavery. As the book reveals, he spent most of his life on lecture tours although in the post Civil War era he assumed several government positions, including being the US Marshall for Washington DC and as an envoy to Haiti- the only sinecure for African-American diplomats in the world at the time.  The Audiobook runs 36 hours, and it is easy to imagine the exact same story as a work of fiction- any individual who charts a career path as an "orator" as Douglass did- in an era before amplification of the human voice- is bound to have a flair for the dramatic in his personal and professional life.  

  For most of his life- and certainly the early pre-Civil War part, Douglass worked closely with white abolitionists, who were both his sponsors and his audience. These relationships were often fraught with issues of financial dependency, and it's hard to not to see Douglass' desire to emancipate both African-American slaves AND himself from white partners as a double theme of the book through the end of the civil war.  Beyond his work as an advocate, Douglass was one of the first (the first?) African-Americans to travel the world (American and Europe anyway) and his biography also does justice to those impressions.  For example, there are at least a dozen descriptions of Douglass encountering racial segregation on trains and boats- including the detail that when he was appointed as the American envoy to Haiti he had to find a new ship to take because the captain of the first ship refused to transport blacks and whites together. 

   After the Civil War, Douglass' legacy is a mixed bag: He was there when the Freedman's Bank- a post Civil War financial institution designed to help newly freed slaves obtain financial independence- collapsed, taking the savings of many of its (black) patrons.  He also advocated for the annexation of Haiti and other Caribbean and Central American polities and generally served as an apologist/advocate for American colonization. Finally, after his long suffering wife died, Douglass married a white lady. which, again, was close to being a unique circumstance at the time.

  His family doesn't come off particularly well. Douglass felt a strong obligation to support his children and their children, but none them amounted to anything, and a few were out and out failures.