The Lives of Frederick Douglass by Robert S. Levine

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Lives of Frederick Douglass by Robert S. Levine Kelly Mezurek The Lives of Frederick Douglass. By Robert S. Levine. ( Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 2016. Pp. x, 373. $29.95, ISBN 978-0-674-05581-0.) In The Lives of Frederick Douglass, Robert S. Levine seeks to provide new insights on Frederick Douglass the writer and social reformer. Levine argues that historians and literary critics have paid a disproportionate amount of attention to Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845), consequently obscuring Douglass's life as a free person and his "larger autographical project" (p. 4). By analyzing Douglass's collective writings and speeches, Levine presents Douglass as an autobiographer who had a keen awareness of the historical moment and his place within it, using revision and rhetorical strategies to craft an identity for himself out of his "complex racial, familial, and political identities" (p. 294). The biography is divided into five chapters corresponding to periods in Douglass's life as a writer. Levine begins with his analysis of Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, calling it "The Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society Narrative" (p. 31). He claims that the work has been inaccurately promoted as a black narrative uninfluenced by white sponsors, when it was actually a collaborative project in which Douglass negotiated his position within a mutually respectful and cooperative effort with William Lloyd Garrison. This was a short-lived partnership, though, and in the second chapter Levine traces Douglass's public speeches, writings, and revisions of Narrative to demonstrate Douglass's growing autonomy as a social reformer and over his own life story. Levine uses his close readings of The Heroic Slave (1853), Douglass's fictional account of the enslaved Madison Washington who led the 1841 Creole slave rebellion, and of My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), Douglass's second autobiography, to argue that The Heroic Slave was "one of the lives of Frederick Douglass" (p. 123). Through these two publications and his other writings in the early 1850s, Douglass grappled with how to characterize black lives in an overwhelmingly racist society. The radicalized Douglass also reevaluated his position on how to oppose slavery and incite change—including the use of violent methods—and made his break with Garrison. Levine then explores Douglass's relationship with Abraham Lincoln and admiration of John Brown. He concludes that Douglass's account of his friendship with Lincoln included in his third autobiography, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, Written by Himself (1881), is a rhetorical exercise in mythmaking. Even though he continued to hold John Brown in higher regard than the former president, Douglass downplayed his political support for other candidates and his criticisms of the president and exaggerated their friendship to help secure his place within the Republican Party. Douglass also recrafted his complicated relationship with his former master, Thomas Auld. Levine denies that there was any love between the two men, and that Douglass's 1877 meeting with the dying Auld should not be understood as one of reunion and reconciliation. Instead, Douglass used Auld, and his later meetings with Auld's daughter Amanda, as another rhetorical tool that he revised in the same way that he reworked other events in his autobiographies [End Page 684] in order to facilitate his ever-evolving identities within the historical context of the time. Levine's work contributes to discussions about how Douglass regarded his place within nineteenth-century America as a black man and about Douglass's revised notions of what he wanted others to remember about his accomplishments. Levine's use of sources, both primary and secondary, is thorough, and he offers compelling arguments. He places his analysis—although unevenly—within the context of other Douglass scholars, but he does not shy away from pointing out the differences that he has with these historians and literary critics, or their shortcomings. Overall, though, this is a well-written book about an important nineteenth-century American that demonstrates that there is still more to learn about Frederick Douglass. Kelly Mezurek Walsh University Copyright © 2017 The Southern Historical Association