Frederick Douglass

Frederick Douglass: Speeches & Writings (LOA #358)

Library of America presents the biggest, most comprehensive trade edition of Frederick Douglass's writings ever published, selected by his Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer


Frederick Douglass was one of the greatest orators and essayists in American history. For five decades, from the antebellum period through the Civil War and Reconstruction and into the Gilded Age, he used his voice and wielded his pen in the cause of emancipation, equal rights, and human dignity. Inspired by the Hebrew prophets, Douglass developed a unique oratorical and literary style that combined scriptural cadences with savage irony, moral urgency, and keen insight.

Assembled by David W. Blight, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom, this volume, a companion to Library of America's edition of Douglass's Autobiographies, gathers all of Douglass's most essential speechs and journalism, timeless works that are still speak powerfully to us today. Here are:


- "What to the Slave is the 4th 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 white supremacist ideology
- "Resistance to Blood-Houndism," an urgent call for forceful opposition to the Fugitive Slave Act
- "Capt. John Brown Not Insane," with its praise for the "self-forgetful heroism" of the abolitionist martyr
- "How to End the War," published in 1861, which called for the raising of Black troops and the destruction of slavery.
- Freedmen's Memorial Oration in 1876, a brilliantly perceptive assessment of Lincoln's role in emancipation
- "There Was a Right Side in the Late War" in which Douglass attacked the "Lost Cause" mythology of the Confederacy
- and "The Lessons of the Hour," with its denunciation of the lynching and disenfranchisement in the emerging Jim Crow South.

As a special feature the volume also includes Douglass's only foray into fiction, the 1853 novella The Heroic Slave, about a shipboard insurrection. Editorial featues include detailed notes, a newly revised chronology of Douglass's extraordinary life and career, and an index.