Title: Frederick Douglass
Author: William S. McFeely
Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company
Date: 1991
Rating: three stars out of five (two stars for the presentation, four stars for the research)

What this book is / is not
Frederick Douglass is a full-length biography of the greatest American anti-slavery leader and reformer of the 19th century. It is the most recent biography to be written on Douglass. It is not, however, a terribly exciting book or a well-written one, for that matter—despite the author’s excellent research.

Main thesis
Frederick Douglass was an extraordinary man, and one of the greatest of all Americans. He was proud, quick to anger, generous, and a true fighter.  He was born sometime in the 1820s (or before; Douglass was never sure) as Frederick Bailey in eastern Maryland on the Chesapeake. Young Frederick was sent from master to master, and barely knew his mother. His most fortuitous time was spent in the Auld household in Baltimore, where he was almost a brother to young master Thomas and was taught the Bible by Sophia Auld.

When Douglass escaped to freedom—and married another escapee, Anna—he at first became a preacher.  But soon Douglass found a different calling: fighting the very thing he had escaped from. His destiny was not to spread the gospel, but to fight for freedom for all Negroes. But Douglass recognized early on that getting rid of slavery would be only the beginning. There were invisible chains in the “free” North and that discrimination against black men and women was palpable and constant.

When Douglass published his The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass in 1845, people couldn’t believe that a black man could be so “articulate.” Many charged that his first mentor, the famed abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison or someone else had written it. In Narrative, Douglass wrote strictly about himself, and gave very scant details about his original family or anything else. Douglass would publish two subsequent versions of his autobiography. (He has been charged with inaccuracy in all three versions, a charge which unfortunately is true, but it doesn’t detract overall from any of the three works.)

Douglass proved to be one of the great speakers of the age, having taught himself to speak well by using a copy of The Columbia Orator (a collection of great speeches and soliloquies from plays) while he was still a slave. People literally flocked to hear him speak, and sometimes would even interrupt other speakers with calls that Douglass take the stage.

Before the war, Douglass would continually fight with other abolitionists to assert his independence, even over associating with whom he wanted to. Long after the war, and after Anna had died, he married a white woman, feminist Helen Pitts, which scandalized both whites and blacks, though long-time friend and compatriot Elizabeth Cady Stanton approved. The prejudice in the north against blacks was sometimes subtle, sometimes open. Douglass always felt it, but either ignored it or defied it, in his relationships with white women (as traveling, business or anti-slavery companions) and white men. He was often expected not to be able to handle finances—even when he handled the finances of The North Star (his newspaper) poorly and really did need some help.

Douglass slowly broke with his “father” mentor Garrison when he became convinced that political action was necessary to end slavery; he joined with Gerrit Smith and the Liberty Party, an obscure third party which really had no chance at much of anything. He even got tangled with John Brown before Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry in 1859, but disapproved of Brown’s methods. Douglass would eventually abandon the Liberty Party for the new Republican Party, and remain with it for the rest of his life. After the war, he was disappointed that he was not offered much of a place at the political table, but became a strong supporter of President Grant, the only post-war president who truly cared for the rights of freed blacks (and took strong measures to ensure those rights).

Douglass would eventually land a post as ambassador to Haiti, a post that made him extremely proud. He would return to battle once more late in life at the behest of Ida B. Wells over lynching of blacks in the South. He died in 1893.

Jaw-Droppers
The prejudice of some of the fellow abolitionists is amazing. Some of them really were condescending, and to them Douglass was more like a novelty, or a tool, than a compatriot. But the sentiment wasn’t that widespread.

There were often tensions within anti-slavery circles, as sometimes other causes fought for equal prominence, such as worker’s rights. But as long as Douglass was on the scene, slavery and black equality was the foremost—even the only—issue.  

Also, just learning things about Douglass that I hadn’t known, such as some of the details of his post-war career, and his 1840s campaign in Great Britain to get the Free Church of Scotland to return all donations from Southern churches, because the money came from slavery.

Doe the author succeed?
Unfortunately, no; at least not for me. The reasons have to do with the author’s style and presentation. See below.

Criticism
The good thing about McFeely’s biography is that the author does not always accept at face value what Douglass wrote. McFeely investigates the surrounding circumstances to determine whether Douglass’ version of events matches—or seems to match—events or the motivations that Douglass assigns to various people in his life, especially Thomas Auld. It is this alertness that prevents McFeely’s work from slipping into fawning hagiography, despite his obvious admiration for his subject.

For example, he challenges Douglass’ loose facts in his curious “open letter” to Thomas Auld published in The North Star in 1850. In it he seemed to hold Auld responsible for all the evils of slavery—but wound up saying that were Auld under his roof, he would shelter him and keep him safe. McFeely corrects Douglass on facts that do not fit the paper record.

But I was extremely annoyed at McFeely’s tendency to subjectively decide what Douglass was thinking and feeling rather than using the actual paper record then speculating on possibilities. Instead of giving us a portrait of who Douglass was according to Douglass himself and his contemporaries, with all of the enigmatic possibilities and pitfalls that go along with biography of men long-since dead, McFeely wrote as if he knew exactly what Douglass himself was thinking and feeling—even if Douglass himself didn’t even know!

For example, Douglass was a powerful speaker, and not just with his voice. He had a presence that commanded the room. In a very flowery, even haughty way, McFeely examines whether this led to his having female groupies of a more sexual nature, but curiously remarks that the proper gentleman that he fashioned himself out to be just didn’t do things like that—without even speculating that Douglass wouldn’t cheat on his wife. This speculation is just one of the many frustrating things about this book. True, there is a dearth of details on Douglass’ first wife, but why not speculate that he remained faithful, in the absence of evidence otherwise?

And one thing that I hated – and I do mean truly, utterly disliked – about McFeely’s work is that he doesn’t let Douglass speak enough for himself. Douglass’ speeches, newspaper columns and autobiographies are not excerpted at any length, and the impressions we get of the subject come more from his contemporaries and from the historian’s interpretation than from Douglass himself. For example, Douglass’ July 5, 1852, speech is arguably his greatest. “The Meaning for the Fourth of July for the Negro” certainly ranks among the most powerful of all the speeches against slavery, and should stand with MLK’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail or Lincoln’s second inaugural address as among the greatest in the land.

McFeely barely builds to the speech—even springing it on the reader in the middle of a discussion of his relationship with the English white lady Judith Griffiths—and spends a total of one page on it. He excerpts only a small portion of speech before analyzing it. For such an important talk, you’d think that McFeely would have given much more attention than that.

It almost seems as if the author is more concerned with having his say on Douglass than letting the reader let us hear Douglass speak for himself.  McFeely’s earlier work, Grant: A Biography, which won a Pulitzer Prize (undeserved in my opinion), is in a similar vein because McFeely misses Grant entirely, leaving the reader with a terrible and grossly incorrect impression of Grant. In that work, Grant is left unable to speak for himself either.  

Finally, my ultimate criticism: I don’t feel like I got to know Douglass through this book. It’s almost as if I got to know this book about Douglass.

Main takeaway lessons
If there were ever a second Mount Rushmore created, Frederick Douglass would have to be on it.  

But just as modern-day civil rights leaders and white liberals would do well to heed the actual words of Martin Luther King Jr., they would equally do well to listen to Frederick Douglass before continuing to push for things like race-based quotas, affirmative action, reparations and race-based “solutions.” From Douglass’s 1865 speech, “What the Black Man Wants”:


Do I recommend this book?
Half-heartedly, but only for the most serious students of Douglass.  Otherwise, I’d recommend his autobiographies: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845), My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), and The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1892). This generation needs a much better biography of Douglass, one that’s easy to read, and lets Douglass’ prolific written and spoken words flow.

It’s truly sad that there are seemingly a couple of new books out every year about the Kennedys, Lincoln, the founding fathers, etc., but only on full-length biography of one of America’s greatest sons in the last 40 or so years.