In November of 1864, Frederick Douglass returned to Baltimore for the first time since his daring escape from enslavement in that city twenty-six years earlier. As the Confederacy staggered toward its final collapse, the state of Maryland voted narrowly to abolish slavery that month, prompting Douglass's triumphant return. Cheered by his newly-freed old friends and neighbors and reunited with an older sister, Douglass treated an interracial audience to a sample of his renowned oratory, thrilling them with emotional remembrances of his youth while urging both black and white to put the past behind them and embrace a revolutionary new era as fellow countrymen. Standing at the pulpit at Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church, where as a slave he first learned to interpret scripture, Douglass now turned the tables and catechized Baltimoreans on the right of “self-ownership” and “the absurdity of ‘property in man’” (447). Douglass would return again to Baltimore a few years later after the adoption of the Fifteenth Amendment to celebrate with his hometown, exalting before a mostly black audience of six thousand: “We have a future!” “Everything is possible to us!” (526).

The life of Frederick Douglass contained many such awe-inspiring moments, captured memorably by David Blight in his engrossing and comprehensive new biography, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom. Douglass's iconic life intersected with some of the most pivotal events of his time, and his total immersion in the struggle against slavery and racism makes it a challenge to separate the private man from the public figure. It is harder still since Douglass told his own life story repeatedly and made his personal story represent the larger national drama over the meaning of slavery and freedom. But that is precisely what Blight endeavors to do. Blight's ambitious undertaking is to provide a full and revealing portrayal of the private Douglass, probing his personal relationships, and searching for revealing glimpses into his self-understanding.

That Douglass believed himself to be an American prophet, in the literal sense, is a major theme that Blight uses to unite the public figure with his private, inner self. Especially in his early abolitionist days, while deeply immersed in Garrisonian religiosity, Douglass drew upon the Old Testament to condemn Americans for tolerating the sin of slavery and to prophesize their national doom. He had a unique ability to deliver judgment upon the guilty, employing rhetorical strategies with thundering eloquence that shamed northern audiences for their complicity with evil, and relied effectively upon their fear of God. Blight implies that Douglass felt himself divinely chosen to deliver this message. It is understandable that he would imagine a greater hand at work in his incredible life journey. As a slave, he had been the property of another man with no agency to direct his own life; he was insulted, scorned, and treated as an inferior. As a fugitive and free man, he found himself internationally celebrated by famous abolitionists, adored by women, and regarded by all as a force to be reckoned with and feared by slaveholders. Douglass could have lost his way quite easily, but a deeply-rooted spiritual conviction that his life served a higher purpose kept him relentlessly at work fulfilling his mission.

Douglass certainly knew how to command biblical rhetoric. Understanding him as a self-identified prophet, however, only takes us so far. Among the many relationships illuminated in this book, Douglass's relationships with the militant John Brown and the pacifist William Lloyd Garrison are instructive. Even more than Douglass, John Brown inhabited the role of biblical prophet, blindly following a divine inner voice until it led him inexorably to martyrdom. Douglass was not religiously fanatical enough to join with Brown when asked, nor was he able to remain within the cultish Garrisonian circle with its demands for strict doctrinal adherence to Garrison's principles of non-resistance. Douglass had a down-to-earth pragmatism and a hard-won streak of independence that made him unlikely to blindly obey any voice, even a divine one, other than the voice of reason. It is not insignificant that Douglass broke away from Garrison and other extremists over their rejection of the U.S. Constitution. In the secular founding documents, Douglass found an effective and practical weapon—the foundations for a national community that he believed was intended to include all citizens, regardless of race or gender, and protect the natural rights of all equally. Garrison and John Brown put “God's law” above the Constitution and worried more about the purity of their own consciences, while Douglass wanted to hold Americans to their founding principles and make constitutional promises (as he saw them) real. His strategy focused more on this world than the next.

While Blight's thesis about Douglass's spiritual self-understanding provides important insight into the man, he misses the opportunity to explore Douglass's emotional relationship to his identity as an American. In his famous 1852 “Fourth of July Address” (which he insisted on delivering on July 5), Douglass rejected the holiday as “yours, not mine” and condemned the “hypocrisy of the nation” whose Constitution was a “glorious liberty document” whose intended bounties were denied to him and his people. As a kind of illegitimate national son, Douglass kept holding up American ideals to condemn American actions right up until he found himself sitting in the White House, strategizing the final defeat of slavery as a “friend” and advisor of President Lincoln. By that moment, the United States had become his nation and the Republican Party its vehicle of redemption. Douglass, as Blight shows, embraced Lincoln the Emancipator and then fought to keep the abolitionist memory of the war alive during and after Reconstruction, even as the promises of equal citizenship came under renewed assault. While Blight prefers to frame this as a fight over “memory,” it was also a fight to preserve a nationalist vision of a new and inclusive democratic republic that he helped to found. In my view, Blight could have balanced his emphasis on religious prophecy with more analysis of the nationalism that Douglass embraced once the doomed Slave Republic fell, captured especially in his visionary 1867 “Composite Nation” speech, which only receives brief mention while most of his other major speeches and texts are given extended exegesis.

Blight's newly-discovered source material fills in many details about Douglas's later life. The author hoped to make this “the fullest account ever written of the last third of Douglass's complex and epic life” (xvii). The Douglass of this period has sometimes disappointed his admirers, then and now, for becoming too comfortable with the Republican Party and too uncritical of the individualist ethos or the political corruption of the Gilded Age (although Douglass has found new admirers among today's conservatives for this same reason). Douglass sought and accepted a string of patronage appointments, such as Marshal of Washington, DC, that were prestigious and lucrative and made him less oppositional to the Republican administrations. Moreover, he began to reshape his life story in speeches such as “Self-Made Men” to fit the national “up-by-the-bootstraps” ideology of the day. Trumpeting the Protestant work ethic to black audiences, Douglass even espoused a free-market “let alone” principle toward the South well before President Hayes used that mantra to justify the end of Reconstruction—though Douglass certainly did not mean the government should not intervene to protect the fundamental rights of its citizens (563–64). Blight views Douglass's final autobiography as an attempt to recast himself as the ultimate self-made American:

Blight's analysis of the “transformed” postwar Douglass is nuanced, insightful, and convincing. But it shows him constructing himself as a nationalist icon and having left his prophesies of its destruction behind. “Douglass believed that the United States had undergone apocalyptic regeneration in the Civil War,” Blight writes, “so too, as the autobiographer kept trying to demonstrate, had he” (620).

Where Prophet of Freedom succeeds most splendidly is in its richly-detailed account of Douglass's domestic life. Bolstered by evidence discovered in the Douglass family scrapbooks, a source that had been tucked away from scholars in a private collection, Blight discovers a good deal to illuminate the private Douglass and his most intimate companions. Anna Murray Douglass is the riddle of the sphynx Blight tries hardest to solve. Though they were married for four decades and had five children together, Douglass barely mentions her in his autobiographies. A free black woman who aided his escape in 1838, she was the sole remaining link to his years of enslavement in Baltimore, where they probably met at Fell's Point Church. Strangely, she never learned to read or write, and left virtually nothing behind to record her perspective. She remained devoted to her husband, despite his long absences and the unwelcome houseguests he sometimes brought, raising their five children. As Blight depicts her, she seems to have been the steadying force in a household with plenty of sibling rivalries and domestic drama which nevertheless provided Douglass a much-needed sanctuary from the lecture circuit. Blight manages to establish Anna's critical importance to Douglass, materially and emotionally, by describing her through the accounts of others, including some harsh assessments of her by rivals for her husband's affections that prompt Blight to rise to her defense. When she died in 1882, Douglass was devastated and suffered a near emotional breakdown that suggests the depth of their elusive bond.

Douglass formed strong bonds with other women too. He wrote movingly in autobiographies of Sophia Auld, his white mistress in Baltimore who for two years showered him with affection and taught him to read before suddenly withdrawing her love and forbidding his further education. Much later, Douglass defiantly traveled with white abolitionist women, frequented women's rights conventions, and formed what Blight calls “close friendships” with two white women who moved into his home at different times. Englishwoman Julia Griffiths, seven years his senior, sparked controversy when she moved into his home in 1850s to undertake vital editing and administrative tasks for his newspaper. Douglass ignored the gossip, Blight suggests, out of necessity if for no other reason, since the paper would not have survived without her. German radical Ottilie Assing spent several summers living with the Douglasses and became hopelessly infatuated with Douglass over a twenty-year period, which he did little to discourage. Whatever the true nature of their friendship (she burned his letters), the relationship ended badly after Douglass announced his marriage to Helen Pitts two years after Anna's death. Douglass spent his last fourteen years happily married to Helen Pitts Douglass. It was perhaps the highest-profile—and most controversial—interracial marriage of the time.

An indispensable resource, Prophet of Freedom humanizes Frederick Douglass without dispelling the magic of his remarkable life. Blight delivers a mountain of evidence with riveting anecdotes and thought-provoking analysis that takes care not to overinterpret or speculate too much. Despite all of his additional evidence, however, Blight never lets us forget how much remains hidden about Douglass. Musing over the many silences, his book raises as many questions as it answers. This reader is left wondering about Douglass's obsession with his early life in Baltimore, where his intellectual awakening took place, and what made him return to it so often in his mind. Did he miss the fellowship of the black religious community where Blight tells us he first “found religion” and learned “the power of words”? (53, 55). Did the brief period of familial embrace in the Auld household spark a vision of a world where he could be accepted by whites as equals? Or did he just need to keep reminding himself of the distance he had traveled from oppressed obscurity to national icon? This absorbing biography tells a lot, but leaves plenty to ponder about one of the most extraordinary American lives.