As a slave, he suffered at the hands of a vicious “nigger breaker” to whom he was rented. Throughout his life, however, Douglass repeatedly fell victim to the brutalizations and insults commonly experienced by African Americans of his time. “I cannot have any love for this country … or for its Constitution.” “I have no patriotism,” Douglass thundered in 1847. Hayes nominated him to be the marshal of the District of Columbia. He was the first black person appointed to an office requiring senatorial confirmation in 1877, President Rutherford B. The most celebrated black man of his era, Douglass became the most photographed American of any race in the 19th century. He also wrote three exceptional memoirs, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845), My Bondage and My Freedom(1855), and Life and Times of Frederick Douglass(1881). He published many arresting columns in magazines and newspapers, including several that he started. He wrote analyses of court opinions that deservedly appear in constitutional-law casebooks. To him, your celebration is a sham … your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery … There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour.” For this biography, the first major work on Douglass in nearly 25 years, Blight drew on new information held in a private collection that few other historians have consulted and recently discovered issues of Douglass's newspapers.What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? … a day that reveals to him … the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim.

Blight tells the fascinating story of Douglass’s entire life, from a plantation in Maryland, to his escape and education, his two marriages and complex extended family. Douglass was not only an astonishing man of words, but a thinker steeped in Biblical story and theology. His very existence gave the lie to slave owners: with dignity and great intelligence he bore witness to the brutality of slavery. As a young man, Douglass was fortunate to have been taught to read by his slave owner mistress, and he would go on to become one of the major literary figures of his time.

This lecture is based on David Blight's Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of the most important African American of the nineteenth century: Frederick Douglass, the escaped slave who became the greatest orator of his day and one of the leading abolitionists and writers of the era.

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