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Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom

Frederick Douglass was a remarkable man who managed to escape slavery in Baltimore, Maryland as a young man. Despite the odds stacked against him, he was fortunate enough to have been taught to read by his slave owner’s mistress. This education would prove to be invaluable, as Douglass went on to become one of the most important literary figures of his time.

His very existence was a testament to the fact that slave owners were wrong: he carried himself with dignity and great intelligence and used his voice to bear witness to the brutality of slavery. William Lloyd Garrison was one of the people who mentored Douglass in his early years. With Garrison’s guidance, Douglass began to speak out against slavery, using his own story to condemn the practice.

By the time the Civil War broke out, Douglass had become the most famous and widely traveled orator in the nation. His unique and eloquent voice, both written and spoken, made him a fierce critic of the United States, while also positioning him as a radical patriot. After the war, Douglass sometimes found himself at odds with younger African Americans over political issues.

However, he never abandoned his commitment to the Republican party or the cause of black civil and political rights. In this biography, David Blight has uncovered new information about Douglass’s life that few other historians have consulted. He has also discovered previously unknown issues in Douglass’s newspapers, shedding new light on this remarkable man’s life and legacy.

Frederick Douglass

WINNER OF THE– Bancroft, Parkman, Los Angeles Times, Lincoln, Plutarch, and Christopher Awards. NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR- The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe, The Chicago Tribune, The San Francisco Chronicle, and Time

Frederick Douglass- was the most important African American of the nineteenth century and one of the most significant writers and orators in American history. Douglass was born a slave and escaped at the age of twenty. He was fortunate to have learned to read as a boy, and he would develop this skill forbidden to slaves to become one of the great writers of his era. In addition to becoming the most celebrated orator of the abolition movement.

Over his lifetime he wrote three versions of his autobiography, all of which are stellar classics of the slave narrative and of American memoir. This former slave met with Lincoln in the White House and rejoiced in the victory of emancipation. He saw the promise of Reconstruction dashed by the resistance of former slaveholders and their allies, and he fought this betrayal as ferociously as he had fought slavery itself.

As a lecturer, he likely reached more listeners than any American of his century, and he lived with a modern dilemma of fame like few others of his era. Based in part on papers never seen by previous biographers, Blight’s magnificent biography is sure to be the standard life of Douglass for many years.

About The Author

David W. Blight is Sterling professor of History at Yale University and Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale. He is the editor of annotated editions of two of Frederick Douglass’s autobiographies, The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass and My Bondage and My Freedom. He is also the author of A Slave No More: Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom, Including Their Own Narratives of Emancipation and the prize-winning Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory, among other works.

Praise for Frederick Douglass

“A stunning achievement. Blight captures an icon in full humanity. From riveting drama in slavery and the Civil War, Douglass rises into clairvoyant genius on the blinkered centrality of race in our struggle for freedom.

-Taylor Branch, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of America in the King Years 1954-63

“David Blight’s incandescent Frederick Douglass is a monumental achievement of biographical empathy, historical context, and grim comprehensiveness, a much-awaited masterpiece of a life that emblematized slavery as the problem of the nineteenth century, as was race that of DU Bois’s twentieth, and the legacy of both the problem of our twenty-first century.”

-David Levering Lewis, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of W.E.B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868-1919