FOREWORD

The canonization of Frederick Douglass is a relatively new phenomenon. Most Americans today under the age of thirty read Douglass in high school or college and they are familiar with his life story and contributions to American culture. By contrast, most white Americans over the age of fifty—including Ivy League graduates—barely know who Douglass is. They have not read him and often confuse his name with Stephen Douglas, the Illinois senator best remembered for his debates with Abraham Lincoln.

This ignorance among older Americans is striking given Douglass’s popularity in the nineteenth century. Following the extraordinary success of his best-selling autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845), he became the most famous black man in the United States, and by the Civil War he was probably the most famous black man in the Western world. He was the first black man to hold a federal appointment that required Senate approval, and he was the nation’s first black minister (or ambassador) to Haiti. For most of his adult life he was a household name in the United States and the British Isles, considered one of the nation’s preeminent orators and writers, even by those who disagreed with him. And yet for most of the twentieth century his autobiographies were out of print, and few Americans knew who he was or what he had accomplished.

This silencing of Douglass in the twentieth century paralleled the collective amnesia regarding slavery as the fundamental cause of the Civil War. During the sectional and secession crises, no one questioned the centrality of slavery as the wedge that was forcing the nation apart. Every seceding state justified its actions by saying it sought to defend and perpetuate slavery. Mississippi’s Declaration of Secession was representative: “Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery—the greatest material interest in the world.”1 But twenty-five years later, as white Southerners created a new order of black unfreedom, the centrality of slavery in American culture was erased from American memory. Jefferson Davis exemplified this historical revisionism. A leading champion of slavery and its expansion, his proslavery writings greatly contributed to secession and the creation of the Confederacy. But in 1881 he published an influential history of the Civil War, in which he declared that “to whatever extent the question of slavery may have served as an occasion, it was far from being the cause of the conflict.”2 By keeping blacks unfree until the Civil Rights era of the 1960s, Southerners in effect won the war. And for over a century they controlled how the story of the Civil War got told. Even today, according to Harris interactive polling, a majority of Americans, including two-thirds of white respondents in the former Confederate States, believe that “states rights” rather than slavery was the central cause of the war.3

The recent canonization of Douglass thus reflects a larger cultural shift in how Americans remember and understand their past. Thirty years ago, most U.S. history surveys—indeed most books on American history—rarely mentioned blacks, even if they discussed slavery. And most American literature courses focused solely on white authors. The debate over the “canon”—what to include and what to leave out in humanities curricula—became an important battleground in the “culture wars” that reached a boiling point in the 1990s. Both sides understood the implications. Newt Gingrich framed the culture war in terms of another civil war: “the left at its core understands in a way Grant understood after Shiloh that this is a civil war, that only one side will prevail, and the other side will be relegated to history,” he said in a 1988 speech. He then sketched out the terms of the fight: “This war has to be fought with the scale and duration and savagery that is only true of civil wars.” Gingrich recognized what George Orwell said in 1949 about the power of history: “who controls the past controls the future,” and “who controls the present controls the past.”4

You might call John McKivigan and Heather Kaufman the Grant and Sherman of our cultural civil war. Through their scholarship, especially their work at The Frederick Douglass Papers, they have ensured that Douglass is widely read and will remain a vital force in American culture. They understand his significance: as they point out in their preface, Douglass “stood for what was best in American ideals”—equality before the law for all persons, education, and self-help—and he sought to realize these ideals. Indeed, it’s not too much to suggest that if every American were required to read Frederick Douglass, the United States would become a much different—and my view better—place to live.

The current regard for Douglass’s insights and wisdom is, of course, not without historical precedent. Lincoln met with Douglass three times at the White House and had immense respect for him. After their first meeting in 1863 he referred to Douglass as “one of the most meritorious men, if not the most meritorious man, in the United States.”5 And at their third meeting, following the Second Inaugural, Lincoln called out to Douglass amid a crowd of whites: “Here comes my friend.” He took Douglass by the hand and said, “I am glad to see you. I saw you in the crowd today, listening to my inaugural address.” He asked Douglass how he liked it, adding, “there is no man in the country whose opinion I value more than yours.”6

Lincoln is not the only president who valued Douglass’s opinion. Douglass met with and advised Presidents Johnson, Grant, Hayes, Garfield, Cleveland, and Harrison. More recently President Obama acknowledged Douglass’s influence: “The hard, cold facts remind me that it was…men like Frederick Douglass…who recognized [that] power would concede nothing without a fight.”7

Douglass’s words continue to serve as inspiration. Indeed they can inspire us, as readers and citizens, to bind up the nation’s wounds, complete the unfinished work, and finally fulfill the ideals of freedom and equality of opportunity for all Americans. Collecting Douglass’s most powerful and penetrating words, as McKivigan and Kaufman have done, is thus not only an important contribution to history and literature but to the nation.

This book brilliantly highlights the power of Douglass’s words. Having exhaustively mined his writings, McKivigan and Kaufman have extracted a mother lode of gold nuggets and organized them topically. The result is truly stunning. While most books of quotations are meant to be sampled, In the Words of Frederick Douglass is so well organized, the quotations so penetrating in their critique of nineteenth-century America and yet so resonant with our own time, that you cannot help but get swept up in the beauty of the prose and the narrative threads that McKivigan and Kaufman have woven, and find yourself immersed, reading it as a book rather than an anthology. It will inspire you to read or reread Douglass’s autobiographies, speeches, essays, and letters.

JOHN STAUFFER

Notes