Autobiographies: Narrative of the Life; My Bondage and My Freedom; Life and Times.

The Library of America series, created with the support of the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Ford Foundation, is "dedicated to preserving the works of America's greatest writers in handsome enduring volumes, featuring authoritative texts." In this volume, Henry Louis Gates has assembled the three major versions of Frederick Douglass's autobiography, and provided seventy-eight pages of excellent explanatory material, including a chronology, a note on the texts, end notes, and an index. In a short bibliographic preface to the "Notes" section, beginning on page 1083, Professor Gates conscientiously acknowledges his debts to the primary research of William L. Andrews, John R. Blassingame, David W. Blight, William S. McFeely, and Dickson J. Preston. He also duly mentions the pioneering contributions of Benjamin Quarles and Philip S. Foner, whose works remain essential reading after almost half a century. Waldo Martin's excellent The Mind of Frederick Douglass is unfortunately not referenced.

Professor Gates has unquestionably made good use of the fine body of Douglass scholarship that has emerged in recent years. Commendably, he acknowledges his sources, because an editor has a responsibility to reveal not only what she or he knows but how she or he has come to know it. Gates's impressive chronology is the result of incremental gains achieved over the past several decades by teams of researchers. The process whereby his notes were compiled can be explained to and employed by students, who may wish to replicate the biographical methods of Douglass scholars in their own research. The volume would have more usefulness as a teaching text if greater effort had been made to inform students first as to the sources of the editor's knowledge, and then to inform them as to the path whereby the editor discovered these sources. Scholars have a responsibility not only to present students with the facts, but to record the processes whereby they themselves have arrived at the facts.

Frederick Douglass's emergence as the superstar of the abolitionist movement coincided with the publication of the first version of his autobiography in 1845. He was the first African American to achieve the status of "public intellectual," and his career strikingly illustrates the ironies embedded in that term. A skeptic may suspect that Douglass's career is based on much the same sort of showmanship that one observes in a Phineas T. Barnum or an Abraham Lincoln. Students of Douglass are not certain that they know the man. He is an exceedingly malleable symbol, having been invoked as the patron saint of figures as diverse as Booker T. Washington, Marcus Garvey, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Stanley Crouch. He is the incarnate symbol of race pride, although Douglass claimed to find race pride "ridiculous." We must be puzzled by contradictions in the Douglass hagiography that are seldom acknowledged and even less frequently confronted.

Schoolboys still recall with enthusiasm Douglass's stirring words at the West India emancipation celebration in 1857: "Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.... Negroes will be hunted at the North, and held and flogged at the South so long as they submit to those devilish outrages." This is the fiery orator whose words are conjured up by itinerant actors for the edification of our children in annual black history month pageants, in church basements and high schools across America. We have all heard the grunted assents and emphatic amens from the slick-haired deacons and ladies in floral print dresses.

Yes, these are splendid words, but they come from the same Douglass who had earlier opposed the publication of Henry Highland Garnet's celebrated "Address to the Slaves," delivered at the Convention of Colored Citizens at Buffalo, New York, in 1843. This address, a portion of which was widely reprinted in black studies anthologies during the late 1960s, called on the slaves to "Let your motto be Resistance! Resistance! Resistance! and remember that you are three millions." According to the minutes, the convention was at first "literally infused with tears," and Garnet concluded "amidst great applause." But Frederick Douglass then arose and turned his inimitable skills to expressing his non-concurrence with Garnet. Douglass maintained that publication of the address would lead to an insurrection, and that "he wanted emancipation in a better way, as he expected to have it."

Douglass's hatred of slavery is beyond question, so why his opposition to Garnet's address? Douglass was still at the beginning of his public career, and very much under the influence of William Lloyd Garrison. We do not have many speeches by Douglass from the year 1843, but if we did, one suspects they would not reveal much disagreement with Garnet in principle. My suspicion is that Douglass wanted to assert himself at the convention, and to make certain no one would forget his presence there. Throughout his life Douglass frequently took issue with other speakers, even when they articulated positions with which he was basically in agreement. He was good at semantic distortions, placing words in the mouths of others and then skillfully destroying arguments that his opponents had never made, bullying them into submission with a stentorian power, a talent for mimicry, and a personality as grandly unaccommodating as that of a stag in rut.

Douglass's objection to Alexander Crummell's address at Storer College in 1885 offers another case in point, although it is not mentioned in The Life and Times. Crummell had called on the graduating seniors at Storer to put recollections of slavery behind them and adopt a group advancement philosophy that anticipated the economic doctrines of Marcus Garvey. Douglass distorted Crummell's remarks and called for a constant recollection of the moral wrongs of slavery. These evils were, of course, undeniable, but one suspects that Douglass was really more interested in hearing himself talk than in allowing another speaker to suggest a program for racial advancement under the hostile conditions of counter-Reconstruction. The fact that you can silence someone does not mean that you have convinced them. Douglass's oratory was like the awful rush of ocean waters, to use one of his famous metaphors, but the forcefulness with which he expressed his opinions did not guarantee that he always got things right.

It is a fault of the Library of America series, for which Professor Gates obviously is not to blame, that the volumes minimize scholarly apparatus. The Library of America volumes suffer from the weakness of not having extended introductions of the sort that David Blight provides in his edition of the 1845 Narrative. In the Library of America, not only are introductions lacking, but notes are distractingly placed at each volume's end, and indexes are far too sketchy, often consisting only of proper names followed by frustrating strings of unidentified page numbers.

Unassisted by introductions, readers may overlook the disturbing inconsistencies in Douglass's narratives that are frequently remarked by his biographers. The chronology, which is unequivocally excellent, must, nonetheless, by its very nature, simplify matters; it does not adequately distinguish between speculation and fact. For example, one notes its treatment of the identity of Douglass's father - a problem that abounds in speculation, although it has been thoroughly researched by prior scholars. The present edition overshoots the mark with its statement that Aaron Anthony was "rumored among slaves" to be the father of Frederick Douglass. This oversimplifies matters greatly, and might give students a false impression both as to what is actually known about Douglass's paternity and as to what exactly the nature of the rumors concerning it was. We do not know what was "rumored among slaves," nor do we know whether it was Anthony or some other "master" who was said to be Douglass's father. Even the assumption that Douglass's father was a white man, as Benjamin Quarles notes, is "inferential from such inconclusive evidence as a contrast of the 'deep black' complexion of the mother with the brown hue of her son" (2n3).

William McFeely, who in his Frederick Douglass (1991), provides the most complete biography of Douglass to date, is admittedly bemused by the "unidentical" quality of Douglass's three autobiographical renditions of his childhood. McFeely observes that in his Narrative of 1845 Douglass states as a matter of fact that his "father was a white man." Douglass does not say that there were rumors of his father having been his master, what he says is that "the opinion was also whispered that my master was my father." It is one thing to repeat a rumor, another to repeat an opinion that was no more than an expression of the slave community's sardonic world-view. Even so, that was in the Narrative of 1845. As McFeely observes, in My Bondage and My Freedom, Douglass says, "My father was a white man or nearly white. It was sometimes whispered that my master was my father." In The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, Douglass says, "Of my father I know nothing."

With the passage of years, we observe Douglass's shift from an assertion that his father was a white man, possibly his master, to the speculation that his father was perhaps white or nearly white, to the admission that he knows nothing concerning the race of his father. Historian William McFeely precedes me in making these observations, and no one has solved the question of whom Douglass referred to when he repeated the whisper that his father was his master. McFeely finds that Douglass referred to several persons as his master, including Aaron Anthony, Thomas Auld, and Edward Lloyd. McFeely demonstrates that any of these masters might conceivably have been Douglass's father.

Some scholars have been perplexed by the tale of Douglass's youthful fight with Covey, the slave breaker. Not that one questions its veracity. Douglass had great physical courage, as he repeatedly demonstrated in clashes with pro-slavery mobs on the anti-slavery lecture circuit. The Covey story admits of more than one interpretation, however, as Douglass concedes. Clever undergraduates may wonder whether Douglass really did experience the very worst of slavery under Covey, who allowed a sixteen-year-old with important white family connections to defy him. It is the very fruitfulness of the Covey story as personal mythology that makes it practically useless as a source of any conclusive information on the youth of Frederick Douglass.

On the day that Rebel troops began their shelling of Fort Sumter, Frederick Douglass editorialized in his newspaper, "They have shot off the legs of all trimmers and compromisers." The rebellion, in fact, did more to shoot the legs off Frederick Douglass. Over the preceding dozen years, Douglass had hoisted himself into the position of principal black spokesman. No black leader enjoyed such unrivaled status before nor has one since. Yet with the coming of the Civil War - which Douglasss sat out, just as Thomas Jefferson sat out the Revolutionary War - Douglass lost his rhetorical platform. With slavery dead, he was unable to construct a public role that spoke adequately to the problems of Reconstruction. He contradicted himself endlessly, calling one day for a color-blind society, but asserting racial pride on the next; denouncing Alexander Dumas, inaccurately, for ignoring his racial obligations, then denouncing the African-American press for being obsessed with racial claims; chiding Alexander Crummell for cautioning against the constant recollection of slavery, then accusing African Americans of excessively pleading their special grievances.

In my view, the enduring popularity of Frederick Douglass derives far more from the brilliance of his anti-slavery career than from the clarity of his post-bellum vision. It also reflects the genius with which he created the Frederick Douglass industry, which, like certain other nineteenth-century oligopolies, now chugs along on its own steam, having outlived the man who produced it. I have a portrait of Douglass on my wall in classic sepia tones. He is about sixty years old in this portrait, stunningly handsome with his grizzled mane and beard, his eyes piercing, yet large, warm, and sensitive. Douglass possesses a face with which most African Americans are happy to be identified. His ideas are more problematic.

Reviewed by Wilson J. Moses Pennyslvania State University