Univ. of Georgia history professor McFeely follows up his Pulitzer
Prize-winning Grant (1981) with a more psychologically daunting and
intriguing subject: Frederick Douglass (1818-1895), the fiery black
orator and editor of the abolitionist newspaper North Star. Much of
this biography covers ground explored by previous chroniclers:
Douglass's birth to a Maryland slave and an unknown white father;
escape to freedom; close association with - and subsequent break
from - William Lloyd Garrison and the American Anti-Slavery
Society; fireless recruitment of black soldiers in the Civil War;
and postwar service in government posts that did not measure up to
his talents. Douglass's three autobiographies - despite starkly
compelling insights into his lot as slave and triumph as freeman -
contain puzzling gaps and inconsistencies about his private life
that McFeely tries to address. The abolitionist, McFeely contends,
turned former master Thomas Auld from a morally ambiguous figure
into an antebellum caricature. Dissatisfied with his first
marriage, a 45-year misalliance with an illiterate ex-slave,
Douglass scandalized associates by pursuing close friendships with
two white women and by later marrying a third. However, given
Douglass's stony reticence, McFeely often has to resort to
conjecture about his subject's interior life in these instances. On
surer, more documented ground with public affairs, he offers
searching moral scrutiny about Douglass's post-Civil War period,
when he championed women's suffrage, initially ignored the
Republican party's retreat from Reconstruction and civil rights,
and finally unleashed a magnificent denunciation of lynching and
pseudoscientific race supremacy theories. Try as he might, McFeely
can't tear off the veil covering the private Douglass. Yet the
public agitator - brilliant, fiercely proud, anticlerical, nobody's
Uncle Tom-comes fully and vibrantly to life. (Kirkus Reviews)
Former slave, orator, journalist, autobiographer; revolutionary on
behalf of a just America, Frederick Douglass was a towering figure,
at once consummately charismatic and flawed. His Narrative of the
Life of Frederick Douglass (1845) galvanized the antislavery
movement and is one of the truly seminal works of African-American
literature. In this masterful and compelling biography, William S.
McFeely captures the many sides of Douglass his boyhood on the
Chesapeake; his self-education; his rebellion and rising
expectations; his marriage, affairs, and intense friendships; his
bitter defeat and transcendent courage and recreates the high drama
of a turbulent era."
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