American Founder Frederick Douglass

A book review of Yale Historian David W. Blight’s masterful new biography of Frederick Douglass

If the animating spirit of the American experiment is to secure the blessings of liberty for the individual and for posterity then the preeminent founding father of America’s creed and country is Frederick Douglass. Few other people in the national history have advocated so beautifully, or so harrowingly, for human freedom and liberty as has the Sage of Cedar Hill. That his visage does not grace the stony permanence of Mount Rushmore alongside his junior counterparts of Washington, Jefferson, Roosevelt and Lincoln is a testament to the poverty of our country’s historical awareness and its enduring racial inequality. Until this error is remedied David W. Blight’s new biography — a book as weighty in its nearly 1,000 pages as Mount Rushmore’s ageless granite — must suffice as witness to the great man’s life.

Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom stands as the curious reader’s first stop in Douglass’s biographical corpus. Too often volumes from this school produce more of a symbol than a human in full. What emerges from Blight’s deep immersion into the life and times of his subject, however, is a well-written and honest account of the man more so than the myth. Here you’ll find not only the famous…