Frederick Douglass: Speeches & Writings (LOA #358)

Library of America presents the biggest, most comprehensive trade edition of Frederick Douglass's writings ever publishedEdited by Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer David W. Blight, this Library of America edition is the largest single-volume selection of Frederick Douglass's writings ever published, presenting the full texts of thirty-four speeches and sixty-seven pieces of journalism. (A companion Library of America volume, Frederick Douglass: Autobiographies, gathers his three memoirs.) With startling immediacy, these writings chart the evolution of Douglass's thinking about slavery and the U.
S. Constitution; his eventual break with William Lloyd Garrison and many other abolitionists on the crucial issue of disunion; the course of his complicated relationship with Abraham Lincoln; and his deep engagement with the cause of women's suffrage. Here are such powerful works as "What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?, " Douglass's incandescent jeremiad skewering the hypocrisy of the slaveholding republic; "The Claims of the Negro Ethnologically Considered, " a full-throated refutation of nineteenthcentury racial pseudoscience; "Is it Right and Wise to Kill a Kidnapper?, " an urgent call for forceful opposition to the Fugitive Slave Act; "How to End the War, " in which Douglass advocates, just days after the fall of Fort Sumter, for the raising of Black troops and the military destruction of slavery; "There Was a Right Side in the Late War, " Douglass's no-holds-barred  attack on the "Lost Cause" mythology of the Confederacy; and "Lessons of the Hour, " an impassioned denunciation of lynching and disenfranchisement in the emerging Jim Crow South. As a special feature the volume also presents Douglass's only foray into fiction, the 1853 novella "The Heroic Slave, " about Madison Washington, leader of the real-life insurrection on board the domestic slave-trading ship Creole in 1841 that resulted in the liberation of more than a hundred enslaved people.
Editorial features include detailed notes identifying Douglass's many scriptural and cultural references, a newly revised chronology of his life and career, and an index.