Life and Legacy of Frederick Douglass at the National Constitution Center

When you write biography, you have made a choice to look at a period of time through the life of a particular person. As you get into that person's life, you make more choices about emphases. The longer the life, the further the figure's influence, the decisions that you have to make in order to shape a narrative and, ultimately, an argument about that person's life and times multiply exponentially. I always think of people as living in three and even four dimensions, but writers can only render lives in one or two -- that being the line of the sentence on the page. The more elements of a person's life that you choose to include, the more difficult the task becomes. 

Thus, I focused on Douglass and women, and even that path has detours and branches yet to be explored. Other historians will choose particular periods of their subject's life, such as Douglass's time in Ireland and England or the ways that his autobiographies were shaped or his formative years. Still others will narrow down the choice by placing their subject in tandem with another. A few years ago, Douglass and Abraham Lincoln was a popular pairing.

David Blight (one of the most generous scholars you could meet) has been working on one of those long, multi-dimensional biographies of Douglass and Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom will be out this October to much well-deserved acclaim. (Pre-order now!) Much like Big Picture histories, these full-life biographies are also necessary in pulling together articles and focused studies of Douglass to synthesize and survey his life in light of new ideas about him and about the world around him. The last full-length biography of him by William McFeely (which had many problems on its own in its own time, but that's another story) did not have the benefit of much of the scholarship on black abolition or women's and gender history or racial formation that has emerged in the past (oh, dear god, has it really been) nearly thirty years. Indeed, Blight's own work on memory and the Civil War, in which Douglass was a significant figure, informed quite a bit of the historiography in the meantime, which itself has developed beyond Race and Reunion. Blight also has access to so many more documents that add depth and dimension to his reading. It should be a tour de force.

Perhaps the biggest shame here is that there are not more Douglass biographies like this. I think of Helen Douglass, Frederick's second wife, and her efforts to preserve Cedar Hill as the black and interracial Mount Vernon. Her vision, like Douglass's life, still acts as a counterpoint to the one up the Potomac in the ideal of American freedom. We writers and readers still fight that battle when Founding Father biographies flood the market but big Douglass biographies worthy of Barnes & Noble placement are decades between. 

Link to podcast

But, I get away from the point of this post. The National Constitution Center's podcast, The Constitution Daily, has an interview with David Blight and Noelle Trent, focusing on Douglass's evolving interpretations of the Constitution.

Trent has an incredible job, with the website describing her as "director of interpretation, collections and education at the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, Tennessee. Trent earned her doctorate in American history at Howard University, where she also served as a lecturer for 4 years. Her dissertation, 'Frederick Douglass and the Making of American Exceptionalism,' is currently being expanded into a book." Hers should be an interesting study, because Douglass had a conflicted relationship with nationalism, especially in his later decades.

One thing today's audiences easily forget as they look back to someone whom they want to be a hero is that he was trying to figure it all out as he went along. Many ideas about race, nation, and political solutions that we take for granted as being immutable were still in flux. He was trying to find footing on shifting ground and shift it in another direction.

That, too, is another exciting element of writing biography: attempting to see the past as if it were the present and the uncertain future.