Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom

Frederick Douglas: Prophet of Freedom (October 2018) is a nonfiction biography of the life of the famed abolitionist, published in 2018 by the American author and historian David W. Blight. Among other awards, it won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for History. The book also made the Best Books list for 2018 by the Boston Globe, the Chicago Tribune, the San Francisco Chronicle, the New York Times Book Review, the Wall Street Journal, and Time magazine. The book is categorized as U.S. Abolition of Slavery History and Black & African American History. (All page references in this study guide refer to the 2018 Kindle edition of the book.)

Blight is a professor of history at Yale University who spent much of his life researching Douglass, slavery in America, and the Civil War. He has written other books dealing with this material, including Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (2001) and American Oracle: The Civil War in the Civil Rights Era (2011). Blight also edited an edition of Douglass’s first autobiography. Drawing on Douglass’s newspaper articles, autobiographies, and personal correspondence, the author follows the abolitionist’s life chronologically from his birth in February 1818 to his death in 1895.

As Blight sifts through the facts of Douglass’s life, he shapes his narrative around several key themes that the orator wrestles with as he defines and redefines himself. These include the quest for identity, the power of words, biblical influences, conflicting ideologies, and Douglass’s problematic relationships with women. 

Plot Summary

Frederick Douglass enters life as a slave in the winter of 1818. He scarcely knows his mother since she works at a plantation 12 miles away. The baby is left in the care of his grandmother instead. It is rumored that Frederick’s father is the master of the plantation or one of his White relatives. When the boy is six, he is sent to the larger Wye Plantation, which his owner also manages. There, he meets his half brothers and sisters, who are strangers to him. His mother dies soon after this point, leaving the young boy isolated and orphaned despite his siblings. At Wye, Frederick witnesses the worst abuses of the slave system. Its atrocities will haunt and outrage him for the rest of his life.

By a stroke of good luck, the young boy is sent to live with his master’s relatives in Baltimore. Soon afterward, he learns to read and write. His exposure to life in a big city broadens his horizons and increases his ambition to control his own life. At the age of 20, Douglass escapes to the north. He marries, starts a family, and eventually settles in Rochester, New York, where he becomes an influential speaker for the abolitionist movement led by William Lloyd Garrison. Douglass soon breaks into print with an autobiography and as publisher of his own newspaper.

When the Civil War begins, Douglass works ceaselessly as a recruiter, lecturer, and writer for the Union cause. After the war, he aligns himself with the Republican Party and is given government positions that help defray the expenses of an extended family that has come to depend on him for their livelihood.

Through his personal charisma as a speaker and his great articulacy as a writer, Douglass becomes the voice of the civil rights movement for the rest of the century. He is on his way to give a speech when he is stricken with a fatal heart attack in 1895. Blight says of him, “There had been no other voice quite like Douglass’s; he inspired adoration and rivalry, love and loathing. His work and his words still wear well” (764).