Critical Essays on Frederick Douglass. - book reviews

African American Review, Fall, 1994 by John Sekora

Although the English building on my campus is not at all prepossessing, it is served by businesses with grandiloquent names: Master Key, Master Lock, Master Chem, Master Towel, Master Door, Master Glass, Master Brick, Master Casting, and Master Temp. Maintenance for the building--it lacks sufficient stature to be a Hall--is contracted to Master Craftsmen, repairs to Master Builders and Master Plumbers. With a Master-Card, of course, one has available equally lofty services: Master Assist, Master Purchase, Master Travel, Master Rental, Master Legal, and Master Medical. This is the shortest of short lists, yet it makes the point. As word and concept, master has a long and complex history, much of it interwoven with the history of slavery. The least one can say about it at the moment is that Americans are ambivalent about power relations under slavery. They might cheer the underdog in a sports event, but slavery is a different matter altogether.

Such an attitude is the more understandable when one realizes that the black figure most closely associated with slavery and writing about slavery is Booker T. Washington. Up from Slavery has never been out of print, nor has Washington's imprint upon American life. In the late 1970s I did an unsystematic search for towns, schools, and the like named for Washington. I stopped when the list went over 700; meanwhile, I found about fifty namings for Frederick Douglass, thirty for W. E. B. Du Bois, and ten for Malcolm X. Washington's eclipse of Douglass is a prominent feature of the politics of literary history in the 1890s. The expanded edition of the Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1st ed., 1881) appeared in 1892 and did not do well, selling only 399 copies in two years. Douglass's health was failing, and his death came in February 1895. Washington's Cotton Exposition address followed in seven months and gave him a national platform. Up from Slavery completed the apotheosis in 1901. The final stage came with Washington's recreation of Douglass in his own image in a biography of 1907--a book Washington cajoled and coerced publishers for the exclusive right to do, against Du Bois's superior, competitive claim. For three generations thereafter he would hold the mantle of destiny. Douglass's works all remained out of print until the watershed of 1960, when Benjamin Quarles published his edition of the Narrative for the Harvard University Press.

Americans want to mythologize those of their leaders like Washington and Lincoln who endured extraordinary struggles for as long as a decade, some historians have said. Indeed, Arthur Schlessinger calls FDR the greatest of Americans because he bore the weight of struggle and decision for more than a decade. The books under review here acknowledge that Douglass endured incessant struggle for five continuous decades, and intermittent strife for three more thereafter. He was without doubt the major black figure during the last generation of slavery, during the Civil War, and during the whole of Reconstruction. Many, including several essayists here, have tried to capture his representative quality as the foremost black figure of the nineteenth century.

The six books are nicely complementary. Appearing in the same season that a biographical opera on Douglass would open in New York City and a biographical documentary would be announced by PBS, they signal in effect a return to the regard Frederick Douglass possessed in the 1880s. William S. McFeely has written the first full biography in more than a generation; some have called it the first ever. Douglass has always attracted significant biographers--Chesnutt, Washington, Shirley Graham, Quarles, Philip Foner, Arna Bontemps, and Nathan I. Huggins--and excellent though more limited studies of the life have come in the last decade from Dickson J. Preston (whom McFeely praises highly) and Waldo E. Martin. The William L. Andrews collection amounts to a small library of the most important critical essays, with special emphasis upon the historicist. Eric Sundquist, in contrast, gathers essays from as many historians as critics, all from the very recent past. David Dudley tells a particular and impressive story of Douglass's influence, from the Narrative of 1845 through the Autobiography of Malcolm X. And two volumes of the opening series of The Frederick Douglass Papers provide meticulously annotated speeches and interviews from 1864 until the end of Douglass's life.

In an age of elephantine biographies, one is surprised to wish one longer. Yet this is emphatically the case with McFeely, who does so much so well that one can only wish he would do more. His earlier biographical subjects were two generals of the Civil War: O. O. Howard (for whom Howard University is named) and Ulysses S. Grant. He is good with precisely those aspects of Douglass's life that others skirt or squelch: the significance of Betsy Bailey, the two Auld couples, and Douglass's black friends in Maryland; the attractions of Wye House; his convoluted relations with Garrison, Lincoln, and especially Anna Murray Douglass; the disappointment presented by some of his five children; and the chagrin of his last years. McFeely is unusually successful as a stylist, weaving analytic issues seamlessly into his narrative flow. Although he does not attempt a literary biography, he does the spadework for such critical work by producing the full complexity of those periods during which Douglass wrote his great books as well as his journalism.