Frederick Douglass: Race and the Rebirth of American Liberalism (review)

This meticulous, postrevisionist interpretation of Frederick Douglass—the preeminent abolitionist, orator, diplomat, and federal government appointee—is, broadly speaking, concerned with examining and analyzing the "principles and problems of liberalism" and, specifically, with aforesaid principles and problems in reference to African Americans in the United States of America (1). Situating the Lockean idea of natural rights at the heart of Douglass' political philosophy, Myers deftly opposes the purported "radical impulse" of members of the African-American, educated elite who are intent upon "displacing" the liberal mainstream" of American and African-American political thought (3). Hence, he attempts to rebut the works of scholars such as Blight, Moses, Martin, Harding, and Mills—historians and philosophers who reduce the gargantuan Douglass to human proportions by investigating and scrutinizing his tensions, inconsistencies, and contradictions.¹ Myers excels in illuminating the continuities that he believes were Douglass' "first principles of political life and of the American Republic" (13). His is truly an imbricated interdisciplinary work; the author ignores the boundaries separating cultural history, autobiography, biography, intellectual history, and political history, as well as academic philosophy and political theory. In most instances, Myers succeeds brilliantly in his endeavors.

Nevertheless, this thesis-driven gem is not perfect. As Myers himself and his critics have pointed out, Douglass was not a systematic thinker. As a consequence, Myers' application of academic philosophy and political theory to attribute a natural-rights liberalism to him ignores the fallibility at the heart of Douglass' effectiveness as an agitator who confronted ideas and issues only in a pragmatic fashion. Douglass did not subject ideas to close scrutiny over long periods of time. Myers' examination of Douglass' speeches after the Civil War, which called for an anti-Madisonian "abolition of the independent chief executive and of major elements of the constitutional checks and balances," exemplifies the problems with his book (131). Instead of criticizing Douglass, who resided for an extended period of his relatively long life in the "Burnt Over District" of upstate New York, a hot bed of utopianism and millennial perfectionism, Myers argues that Douglass' "trust in simple, majoritarian democracy was not based on millennial or utopian faith. To the contrary, it was based on his deliberate, realist assessments of the protections and advantages inherent in the majoritarian principle and of the imperfections of the Madisonian model" (131–134). Notwithstanding this reservation, this book exhibits a mastery of numerous and varied primary and secondary sources in many disciplines and subfields. It is worthy of close attention.