Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom by David W. Blight, Simon and Schuster paperbacks 2018
We are once again delighted to present a book review by Kendal resident Hope Cooke. It follows:
First, let it be said that Frederick Douglass was the most stunning man to ever bestride the planet. In maturity he stood a broad shouldered six foot one, had blade-like cheekbones, Apollonian features including cupid bow lips and a resolute chin. His leonine gaze on the cover of this volume, showing depths of sensibility as well as outward presence, command. So too the pictures that follow, even to his old age. (Which was not so old by today’s standards...)
I would feel more ashamed for this callow lead about one of the most august men in modern history were it not for the fact that Douglass himself, the most photographed American of his age, deliberately used the new art of Daguerreotype to his own self-fashioning ends, famously fixing his eyes on the viewer, frowning slightly so as not to abet the image of “the happy slave.”
Douglass was 22 or thereabouts in 1839 when Louis Daguerre’s invention arrived at the onset of his career. The budding activist-orator was not alone in employing the tool for political promotional ends. In Britain, Queen Victoria consciously used her likeness to chart the progress of the age named after her. In America, Walt Whitman, almost Douglass’ equal for the press he received, dressed down as a ‘Bowery Boy’ to emblemize himself as ‘the common man’ while Douglass took care to pose dressed in impeccable gear to show Black civility. For his part, Matthew Brady, the great U.S daguerriste, used the new process to seal the image of the United States into a mythic whole after the schismatic Civil War. So big was photography that a Brady daguerreotype (now on our five-dollar bill) propelled a relatively unknown Lincoln to the Presidency, along with a speech that the candidate made at New York’s Cooper Union.
How Douglass, a boy born to slavery in a backwater of the Chesapeake in Eastern Maryland rose to near mythic status in our country’s life is the question the biographer of this Pulitzer Prize winning tome explores. Douglass, whose childhood name was Frederick August Washington Bailey, asks himself this same question in his three autobiographies. (His adopted name itself was part of the myth: ‘Douglass’ plucked from a hero in a novel by the wildly popular Walter Scott.) The ‘thereabouts’ casually thrown into the previous paragraph provides a key. Douglass’ angry malaise at not knowing the basic fact of his birthdate is an echo of a deeper uncertainty—his lack of certitude of his paternity—whispered locally to be his owner, a middling farmer named Thomas Auld. The paternal absence the more felt as Douglass only met his mother Harriet Bailey a few times. She worked at a plantation some miles away and died when he was six. Poignantly, he recalls never seeing her by daylight on these hurried visits after her daylong labor in the fields.
Douglass’ quest to forge himself in his own fire as he had no givens was what kept me reading this lengthy book which weighed more than two pounds on my postal scale. It is of course, as its host of luminary historians testify upfront, a portrait of the era as well as the man, a study of abolitionism, the Civil War, Reconstruction and the women’s suffrage movement and much more. (I was perhaps most interested in one of Douglass’ smaller achievements near the end of his career when he was the guiding light behind the Haitian Pavilion at the Columbian Exposition of 1899 in Chicago having served as U.S envoy to that country, the Haitian representation being the one official Black presence in the ‘White City” an otherwise famously white Euro-American show, apart from a sensational maiden lecture to Americans on Hinduism by Swami Vivekananda.) Other blacks and browns from around the world were exhibited as Midway curiosities carrying on in their “savage native ways”. Even so, while it is massively Informative and thought provoking, the book still is a heft, Lockdown upper-body gymnastics.
It is a necessary heft, however, its knowledge crucial for our time. While Professor Blight does not overtly use ‘presentism’, steering the reader to see historical issues through a contemporary lens, horribly, the crises affecting Blacks now were on the boil then even after Emancipation. Violence, voter suppression, the whole litany, particularly, but not limited to, the South. What was special about Douglass was his universalization of his own quest to become a ‘man’ though I have read that orphans in general tend to share the impulse, albeit without his prowess and resolve to realize its larger gains.
Douglass saw his self- forging as emblematic of larger Black empowerment. It was not simply their freedom he wanted but their full participation in America, their belonging; “America, he said “will not allow her children to love her’—a tragic inversion of loss. As well as making Black lives better, Douglass worked to make America better. Among other things--he helped turn Lincoln, for years a racist, away from the mainly white American colonization effort to expatriate Blacks to other countries.
Language and literacy were Douglass’ path to liberty. First taught his letters by a sister-in-law of his owner/putative father, Sophie Auld, in the Baltimore household where he had been sent to serve, he went on to teach himself after Sophie’s husband stopped his education for being detrimental to white supremacy, the necessary condition for slavery. (A lot of Northern states did not allow it either.) As a young teen he already was giving 40 Black youngsters impromptu reading lessons.
In Massachusetts, where he escaped with the help of a Baltimore free Black woman Anna Murray, whom he married when she too came north, at age 23 he gave his first oration at an abolitionist meeting in Boston, his voice sonorous, his cadence dictated by the King James Bible. (His quotations make this book a pleasure in our benighted aural age.)
At age 27 he published his first book, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, A Slave, Written by Himself, a much reprinted (and translated) bestseller in the U.S and Europe, his success so great he was forced to flee abroad for two years in case his owner/putative father sought his recapture, the forced return of former slaves from the free states being a lucrative business.
In Europe he was an instant star on the lecture circuit, women swooning at his voice, abolitionist circles purchasing his freedom and linking their causes. (He later he became an advisor in the Irish Home Rule Movement.) In 1877 when he was 60 (or ‘thereabouts’) he went to visit his former owner/putative father on his death bed. Earlier, on the 10th anniversary of his escape, Douglass had ‘forgiven’ Auld who had sold him to a brutal ‘slave breaker’ when he was 16. In a scathing letter closing with the delicious benediction that ‘he has no malice personally’ (for the five years of daily beatings and servitude) ‘and would welcome him as a guest...to set an example of “how mankind ought to treat each other.” As before in their spasmodic encounters, no mention was made of their relationship at this final meeting. Douglass did, however, pose his UR? surrogate enquiry that masked his inadmissible cri-de-coeur, asking once again when he had been born…Douglass’ last years were happy, albeit pained by some of his children’s and grandchildren’s early deaths and their sometimes ‘shiftless’ behavior. (The latter the reason he became such a [slightly ruthless] advocate of Self Reliance…)
After his wife Anna’s death, he married Helen Pitts, a white abolitionist half his age, causing considerable scandal to which he memorably replied, “first I married someone who looked like my mother; later I married someone who looked like my father.” Their house, Cedar Hill (visitable and well worth seeing) lies on a hill in Anacostia overlooking the Anacostia River, the dome of the Capitol visible in the far horizon.
The great orator lived to see a Victrola in his old age, fitting closure for a piece beginning with the invention of another technology that allowed self-perpetuation. He was mesmerized by the machine and the possibility of recording thoughts for posterity. He did not record but his words and concerns live on nonetheless. “Douglass was not gone,” Blight writes, “he was merely dead.” Douglass had been prophetically concerned about the struggle over the memory of the Civil War, and believed the success of the Reconstruction depended on who controlled the story. In the newspaper that he ran, he “attacked the Lost Cause as a betrayal of the verdicts of war.”
For him, the South, “having slaughtered a quarter of a million brave loyal men, wounded and disabled a quarter million more, made a full million widows and orphans” deserved no quarter, particularly as they had the gall to demand that they be restored to power. “He hated reconciliations, political gestures”, Blight continues—in Douglass’ words, “the hand- clasping across the bloody chasm business.”
Today in the post -election resistance to Biden’s win by 70 or more percent of the opposition, it looks as if the past and present Lost Causes are merging with toxic vengeance. Meanwhile, although the President-elect talks of cooperation across the aisle, there are fundamental differences that are hard to bridge. One concern—obviously new since Douglass’ time but building on his worry about controlling the narrative (and the agenda) versus building a possibly unattainable consensus, really got to me and made me worry (more) about America’s immediate post-election future. Should Biden supporters try to reconcile with Red Staters who don’t think like ‘us’--‘healing’, or to push progressive narration and agenda to the max? Particularly vis-a-vis the climate crisis (on which Democrats also do not necessarily agree.) And if so, how? In the balance is the end of the world… (at least as we know it --the modest caveat always put in fine print after that unthinkable remark.). If we are unable to impose mask wearing, what is our plan for compliance in this existential matter? Especially when the push for ‘growth’ to enable jobs and a ’rebound’ will be so powerful following the Pandemic?
FIVE STARS