Frederick Douglass: America's Prophet by D. H. Dilbeck

Abstract

Reviewed by: Frederick Douglass: America's Prophet by D. H. Dilbeck Robert S. Levine Frederick Douglass: America's Prophet. D. H. Dilbeck. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018. ISBN 978-1-4696-3618-4. 208 pp., cloth, $28.00. With the 2018 publication of D. H. Dilbeck's Frederick Douglass: America's Prophet and David W. Blight's Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom, the two hundredth anniversary year of Douglass's birth has taken on a prophetic cast. For Dilbeck, Douglass is best understood as a Christian writer and activist who "cherished the words of the prophet Isaiah and the gospel of Jesus Christ" (3). Dilbeck develops his argument by emphasizing the importance of Christianity to Douglass's autobiographies and speeches. As a result, there is much here that is familiar for those who know Douglass's writings. Rather than considering the autobiographies as artfully crafted works that may not always represent how Douglass felt at the moment of the events he describes, Dilbeck notes the many scenes in which Douglass mentions or emphasizes his Christian perspective. Because Douglass claimed such in a later autobiographical account, Dilbeck says the young Douglass wanted to learn how to read so he could read the Bible story of Job on his own. In one of the oddest moments in the book, Dilbeck includes a full-page illustration from the 1881 Life and Times of Frederick Douglass of the docile child Douglass, with hands behind his back, standing before the seated Sophia Auld who is reading from a book that appears not to be the Bible. That illustration, which Douglass loathed and cut from all subsequent printings, along with statements such as "A bright child like Frederick could see only so many vicious beatings and murders before asking the hardest questions," give the early chapters the feel of a young adult–market biography (18). Douglass's famous apostrophe to the sailboats on the Chesapeake Bay is presented as "a psalm of lament" that Douglass literally composed and uttered on the spot, rather than wrote years later (37). It is good to be reminded that Douglass became a licensed AME preacher, and Dilbeck is especially good in explaining what was at stake for Douglass when he became involved with the controversies concerning the Free Church of Scotland and the Evangelical Alliance. But Dilbeck's discussion of Christianity remains just a bit vague throughout, even as he consistently portrays [End Page 192] Douglass as a black leader who spoke in a prophetic Christian voice about the evils of slavery, racism, and other social ills. There are contradictions in Dilbeck's analysis of Douglass's Christianity, perhaps because of its vagueness. Dilbeck asserts that during the 1850s "Douglass anticipated slavery's immanent [sic] death because he believed God was just, merciful, powerful, and actively at work in human affairs" (94). But he later states that "Douglass resisted a too-easy view of God's providential rule in the world because he thought it did not deal honestly with the problem of evil" (143). He follows up on that remark by referring to "Douglass's deepest assumptions about God's providential presence in history" (151). Despite the concession about the problem of evil, Dilbeck argues that Douglass's prophetic Christianity led him to believe that God will make sure that good triumphs over evil. Accordingly, Dilbeck for the most part presents Douglass not as a pragmatic worker in the real world, and not as a performer, but as someone whom many readers might regard as naively committed to hope. In his introduction, Dilbeck claims that "Douglass never wavered in hope," and the word hope often takes the place of analysis (8, Dilbeck's emphasis). We see this especially in the book's third section, "The Hopeful Prophet: 1853–1895." True, Douglass regularly invoked hope, but was he as hopeful as Dilbeck describes, or was hope part of his rhetorical and pragmatic strategy? We're told that during this long period, Douglass "held fast to a distinctly Christian hope," a phrasing that begs the question of whether Dilbeck believes that hope is distinctively Christian (94, Dilbeck's emphasis). Dilbeck states that "during the four long years of...