From: theleasthappyfella@gmail.com   
      
   INTRODUCTION   
   Behold, I have put my words in your mouth . . .   
      
   to pluck up and to break down,   
      
   to destroy and to overthrow,   
      
   to build and to plant.   
      
   —JEREMIAH 1:9–10   
      
   In his speech at the dedication of the National Museum of African American   
   History and Culture in Washington, DC, September 24, 2016, President Barack   
   Obama delivered what he termed a “clear-eyed view” of a tragic and   
   triumphant history of black    
   Americans in the United States. He spoke of a history that is central to the   
   larger American story, one that is both contradictory and extraordinary. He   
   likened the African American experience to the infinite depths of Shakespeare   
   and Scripture. The “   
   embrace of truth as best we can know it,” said the president, is “where   
   real patriotism lies.” Naming some of the major pivots of the country’s   
   past, Obama wrapped his central theme in a remarkable sentence about the Civil   
   War era: “We’ve    
   buttoned up our Union blues to join the fight for our freedom, we’ve railed   
   against injustice for decade upon decade, a lifetime of struggle and progress   
   and enlightenment that we see etched in Frederick Douglass’s mighty leonine   
   gaze.”1   
      
   How Americans react to Douglass’s gaze, indeed how we gaze back at his   
   visage, and more important, how we read him, appropriate him, or engage his   
   legacies, informs how we use our past to determine who we are. Douglass’s   
   life and writing emerge from    
   nearly the full scope of the nineteenth century, representative of the best   
   and the worst in the American spirit. Douglass constantly probed the ironies   
   of America’s contradictions over slavery and race; few Americans used   
   Shakespeare and the Bible to    
   comprehend his story and that of his people as much as Douglass; and there may   
   be no better example of an American radical patriot than the slave who became   
   a lyrical prophet of freedom, natural rights, and human equality. Obama   
   channeled Douglass in his    
   dedication speech; knowingly or not, so do many people today.   
      
   Born Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey, a slave, in Talbot County,   
   Maryland, in February 1818, the future Frederick Douglass was the son of   
   Harriet Bailey, one of five daughters of Betsy Bailey, and with some   
   likelihood his mother’s white owner. He    
   saw his mother for the last time in 1825, though he hardly knew her. She died   
   the following year. Douglass lived twenty years as a slave and nearly nine   
   years as a fugitive slave subject to recapture. From the 1840s to his death in   
   1895 he attained    
   international fame as an abolitionist, editor, orator of almost unparalleled   
   stature, and the author of three autobiographies that are classics of the   
   genre. As a public man he began his abolitionist career two decades before   
   America would divide and    
   fight a civil war over slavery that he openly welcomed. Douglass was born in a   
   backwater of the slave society of the South just as steamboats appeared in   
   bays and on American rivers, and before the telegraph, the railroad, and the   
   rotary press changed    
   human mobility and consciousness. He died after the emergence of electric   
   lights, the telephone, and the invention of the phonograph. The renowned   
   orator and traveler loved and used most of these elements of modernity and   
   technology.   
      
   Douglass was the most photographed American of the nineteenth century,   
   explained in this book and especially by the intrepid research of three other   
   scholars I rely upon.2 Although it can never really be measured, he may also   
   have been, along with Mark    
   Twain, the most widely traveled American public figure of his century. By the   
   1890s, in sheer miles and countless numbers of speeches, he had few rivals as   
   a lecturer in the golden age of oratory. It is likely that more Americans   
   heard Douglass speak    
   than any other public figure of his times. Indeed, to see or hear Douglass   
   became a kind of wonder of the American world. He struggled as well, with the   
   pleasures and perils of fame as much as anyone else in his century, with the   
   possible exceptions of    
   General Ulysses S. Grant or P. T. Barnum. Douglass’s dilemma with fame was a   
   matter of decades, not merely of moments, and fraught with racism.   
      
   The orator and writer lived to see and interpret black emancipation, to work   
   actively for women’s rights long before they were achieved, to realize the   
   civil rights triumphs and tragedies of Reconstruction, and to witness and   
   contribute to America’s    
   economic and international expansion in the Gilded Age. He lived to the age of   
   lynching and Jim Crow laws, when America collapsed into retreat from the very   
   victories and revolutions in race relations he had helped to win. He played a   
   pivotal role in    
   America’s Second Founding out of the apocalypse of the Civil War, and he   
   very much wished to see himself as a founder and a defender of the Second   
   American Republic.   
      
      
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