The Lives of Frederick Douglass by Robert S. Levine (review)

Robert S. Levine demonstrates insight, originality, and a commanding knowledge of both primary and secondary sources in this painstaking and fruitful study of the numerous autobiographies of Frederick Douglass. As Levine and others have indicated, Douglass enjoys, largely due to his own brilliant self-promotion, the status of “the country’s great and most representative black leader through his three major autobiographies” (9). The first of these, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself (1845), has become required reading in many college courses because of its compactness, ready availability, and elegant directness of style. An additional reason for its popularity may be that in terms of content and literary qualities it contributes so naturally to the main currents of nineteenth-century American writing, with its themes of self-reliance, egalitarianism, and implicit transcendentalism. E. D. Hirsh Jr. lists Douglass in his Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know (1987).

Immediately following publication of the Narrative, Douglass feared for his life, as some enemies accused him of being an impostor, and others threatened to abduct him and return him to slavery. With the assistance of friends, he embarked on a speaking tour of the British Isles, carrying with him copies of the Narrative, which he successfully marketed to defray his expenses. The first American edition, frequently used in colleges today, was published in May 1845, with a preface by his sponsor, William Lloyd Garrison. Shortly after arriving in Ireland, Douglass began work on the first Dublin edition, published in September 1845, with changes that Levine describes as “small but striking, focusing on the title page, illustration, epigraph, prefaces, and appendixes” (87). Levine describes the changes to the text of the Narrative as minor in a lecture that is currently available on YouTube, but there, as in the present volume, he notes that the framing of the Dublin edition in terms of its appendices and a new preface, written by Douglass, indicates Douglass’s increasing independence during his first British tour.

Levine reexamines Douglass’s changing representations of himself in My Bondage and My Freedom (1855) and in The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, which appeared in 1881 and 1892 editions. He challenges Douglass’s various interpretations of his early life that were published in later years, for example, his memory of having broken with the Garrisonian abolitionists because of their alleged refusal to allow him his own voice. According to Levine, the relationship, though paternalistic, was for some time satisfactory to both Douglass and the Garrisonians, although he observes a developing testiness on both parts as early as the autumn of 1845. Levine attributes some of this to Douglass’s irritation with the friendly but condescending and officious James N. Buffum, who had charge of financial affairs during his British tour.

Levine notes that the Narrative, which is regarded as canonical today, was once commonly dismissed as a mere bagatelle, in comparison with the more extended autobiographies. Levine collaborated on the 2012 scholarly edition of The Life and Times, edited by John R. McKivigan, the longtime editor of the Frederick Douglass Papers, and is coeditor with McKivigan and John Stauffer of the critical edition of Douglass’s fictionalization of Madison Washington’s slave rebellion aboard the brig Creole, entitled The Heroic Slave (2015). Noting Douglass’s allusions to the Creole revolt in his speeches and writing, Levine writes that “those accounts, which had an autobiographical component, had a major impact on his depiction of himself as a black revolutionary in Bondage and Freedom” (25–26).

Although Levine mentions his subject’s occasional clashes with other black leaders, he does not belabor the point that Douglass’s egocentrism was a factor in his rivalries with them, or the fact that Douglass barely mentions his interactions with other black leaders and intellectuals in his autobiographies. Levine discusses Douglass’s clash with Henry Highland Garnet at the National Convention of Colored Citizens in Buffalo in 1843, [End Page...