Book Review

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Book Review | The Journal of American History, 86.1 | The History Cooperative

Frederick Douglass: Freedom's Voice, 1818-1845. By Gregory P. Lampe. (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1998. xvi, 350 pp. Cloth, $45.00, isbn 0-87013-485-X. Paper, $22.95, isbn 0-87013-480-9.)

Frederick Douglass notes in My Bondage and My Freedom (1855) that, prior to his first speech as an abolitionist in 1841, he had no preparation for what was frequently characterized in the nineteenth century as his "miraculous" rise to eminence as an orator under the tutelage of William Lloyd Garrison. That has been taken as the conventional wisdom by Douglass's biographers ever since, even though many acknowledge that he was deeply influenced by a copy of Caleb Bingham's The Columbian Orator (1797) that he purchased for fifty cents at the age of twelve and studied assiduously. Gregory P. Lampe's rhetorical biography of Douglass thickens our understanding of that event by contextualizing it within the abolitionist's early life as a slave and fugitive between 1818 and 1845. He develops the case for two significant claims: First, Douglass had developed a complex rhetorical consciousness well before he was "discovered" by the white abolitionist community in 1841. Second, between 1841 and 1845, Douglass enacted a wholly independent rhetorical persona that included far more than repeating the narrative of his slave experience or reciting the dicta of Garrisonian abolitionism. . . .

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