“It must be admitted, truth compels me to admit, even here in the presence of the monument we have erected to his memory, Abraham Lincoln was not. Blight writes that Douglas told his audience: With President Grant, Supreme Court Justices, Senators and Congressmen sitting in front of him, Douglass presented a Lincoln who was the product of a racially divided society. Here Douglass would address, according to Blight, the most powerful audience an African American spoke before until Obama was sworn in as president.

While his contemporaries Grant and Lee led men in battle and Lincoln issued executive orders freeing millions of people, Douglass’s tools were seemingly much meeker. This is a broad and comprehensive biography of one of the most well-known Americans of the 19th Century. It is also perfect for those of us who like to see how people capable of great deeds on the national stage dealt with the everyday domestic trials that we all encounter.

This is a book for all intelligent readers interested in the Civil War and Reconstruction, African American History, and Abolition Studies. Still, I was surprised by some of what Blight brings to light, and persuaded by many of Blights’s conclusions about Douglass’s life.ĭavid Blight is a Yale professor and this book accords with scholarly standards, but it avoids the jargon and exclusivity of some academic history. While I am hardly a Douglass devotee, I have more familiarity with his life than most readers. I have also visited some sites associated with Douglass’s life in Maryland and in New England and New York.

I have read one of Douglass’s autobiographies and McFeely’s biography. It also offers an unvarnished account of the Great Man’s private life without descending into the salacious. The book covers all of the years of Douglass’s life and all aspects of his long career. The first new full biography of Douglass since William McFeely’s 1991 book, this is a massive work of prodigious research that is coupled with straightforward writing. David Blight has written a wonderful biography of Frederick Douglass that is likely to be the standard against which other work on the great human rights advocate is judged for at least a generation.

Frederick douglass book by david blight