A very good copy of this important work. Published two years’ prior to Douglass’s death, it is the first biography of him by an African American author. James M. Gregory (1849-1915) was a friend and supporter of Douglass and a professor of Latin at Howard University. By focusing on Douglass’s public persona, Gregory simultaneously places Douglass in the mainstream of American history and in the African American revolutionary movements.
Gregory begins the work thus: “Among the great men America has produced whose achievements will be narrated to posterity and remembered, is Frederick Douglass. His name is so identified with the anti-slavery movement that no account of this eventful period of our national existence will be complete in which the historian neglects to tell of the remarkable career of this eminent man, and to assign him that place which the services he has rendered his race and mankind deserve.”
John Ernest, in his study, Douglass in His Own Time, writes: “a thoughtful assessment of Douglass as an orator and pioneering public intellectual. Gregory places Douglass within a gallery of great American and British orators (including William Johnson Fox of England and Patrick Henry, Henry Clay, and Daniel Webster of the United States), public figures…, and iconic statesmen, including Benjamin Franklin and Presidents James A. Garfield and Ulysses S. Grant. When Gregory takes the reader to Douglass’s house, we encounter a similar but different gallery of great men: Toussaint L’Ouverture, leader of the Haitian Revolution; Joseph Cinqué, leader of the revolt on board the Amistad in 1839; John Brown, the white abolitionist who led a raid at Harper’s Ferry in 1859 in hopes of initiating a large-scale slave revolt; President Abraham Lincoln; and Florvil Hyppolite [the then-president of Haiti].”
The book is introduced by W.S. Scarborough, a professor of classics who had been born into slavery. He compares Douglass to Themistocles, Pericles, and Demosthenes. Per the subtitle, it includes selections from Douglass’s speeches and lectures.
Ernest, J., Douglass in His Own Time (Iowa, 2014), p.158.
