He wrote, spoke, and traveled prodigiously, was appointed marshal of the District of Columbia by President Rutherford Hayes (“the first time,” Blight points out, “in American history that an African American was nominated for a position that required Senate approval”), dealt with his growing and sometimes contentious family, and lived to see what Blight calls “the great experiment in racial democracy” of Reconstruction darken into the age of Jim Crow lynchings, and constantly shifted and adapted under the growing weight of his own celebrity, both in the international world of letters and activism and also in the more close-knit and compromised world of Washington politics. The outlines of the Frederick Douglass story are well-known in large part through the superb readability of those autobiographies: born a slave in Maryland in 1818, he was taught how to read by the kindly wife of a slaveholder, escaped at the age of 20 to New Bedford, Massachusetts, and quickly became a leading advocate in the Northeast's growing abolitionist movement. It's been nearly 30 years since William McFeely's epic biography of Frederick Douglass, and as historian David Blight notes with depressing accuracy in his magisterial new book Frederick Douglass, Prophet of Freedom (beautifully produced by Simon & Schuster), “The problem of the twenty-first century is still some agonizingly enduring combination of the legacies bleeding from slavery and color lines.” Relevance is a wobbly leg on which to rest the weight of a biography, particularly a 900-page doorstop, and Blight, a Yale University professor, winner of the Bancroft Prize, and editor of annotated editions of Douglass's first two autobiographies, wisely here crafts a monument to the man his his own time rather than in the lens of our own.

David w blight frederick douglass