The Nineteenth-Century World of Frederick Douglass

Frederick Douglass was among the most well-known figures in the nineteenth-century Euro-American world. His own writings—three autobiographies, a number of newspapers, voluminous lectures, editorials, and correspondence— as well as his thousands of miles of international travel as a lecturer against slavery and for racial equality and women’s rights, lectures he delivered right up until the last day of his life in 1895, made him without doubt the most well-known African American personage in the nineteenth century. In addition, as the subtitle of John Stauffer, Zoe Trodd, and Celeste-Marie Bernier’s recent book of photographs of Douglass states, he was the nineteenth century’s most-photographed American, surpassing even Abraham Lincoln. The body of photographs served as a visual representation of his political writings against racism, as well as the result of his own fascination with the new technology and photographers’ fascination with his visage.¹

Although Douglass’s fame remained high through the end of his life, the racist practices of the historical profession in the first half of the twentieth century dimmed his legacy outside of the black community and the relatively small number of whites who continued to turn to his life as an example against racism. In the 1950s, Philip Foner’s recovery of a large selection of Douglass’s written work in the four-volume The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass began to move Douglass back to the center of historical accounts of the anti-slavery movement at least, but only slowly.² In the 1960s, the recovery of the extent of political activism by the radical abolitionists was largely a segregated one, in which historians examined white and black activists separately, assigning intellectual heft to middle-class whites of the movement and largely ignoring the central role of free-born blacks and fugitives from slavery in shaping the rejection of colonization, the radicalism of immediatism, and calls for racial and economic equality that were rooted both in their lived experience as well as their political and theological beliefs.

In this literature, blacks were objects of reform, rather than shapers of political movements, with the exception of Benjamin Quarles’s Black Abolitionists (1969). Not coincidentally, Quarles’s 1948 dissertation had been on Frederick Douglass, forming the basis of his 1968 Douglass biography. Quarles’s work opened a path to what became by the 1980s two bodies of work on abolitionists, one on black activists and one on whites. The sole black abolitionist who most often appeared in accounts of white abolitionists was Douglass. But his central presence alongside white abolitionists in anti-slavery work was slight when compared to the attention given to William Lloyd Garrison and others.³

Still, changes in the historical profession did bring Douglass to the attention of academic historians: his 1845 Narrative was one of the few that was accorded legitimacy before the work of John Blassingame and others in reclaiming black writings as an unparalleled source of information on slavery.⁴ Waldo Martin’s The Mind of Frederick Douglass (1986) provided foundational work on his intellectual range, while William S. McFeely’s Frederick Douglass (1991) was the most complete biography to date. Douglass’s first narrative also became part of the literary canon of the nineteenth century, assigned to students and required reading for scholars; and Douglass himself became considered one of the most important literary figures of the time, his writings an important counterpoint to Harriet Beecher Stowe, and his leadership and public feuding with William Lloyd Garrison portrayed as the central example of the possibilities and fault lines in the radical abolitionists’ struggle not only to end slavery but bring about racial equality as well. Indeed, Douglass’s towering example and the accessibility of his public writings have overshadowed other black abolitionists of the time. Although white antebellum...