![]() ![]() What’s curious is that this was a completely Southern choice, a tribute to the culture he was escaping. Escaping to freedom in 1838, at the age of twenty, and needing a new name-in part as a declaration of a reinvented self, in part for the practical necessity of eluding the slave-catchers-he chose to become Frederick Douglass, in honor of a character in a Walter Scott poem. Blight shows in his extraordinary new biography, “ Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom” (Simon & Schuster), was almost certainly white, as Douglass knew early on, and there is something almost cruelly parodic in the grand name the child slave was given: Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey. Frederick Douglass, who has been called the greatest American of the nineteenth century, grew up as a slave named Frederick Bailey, and the story of how he named himself in freedom shows how complicated his life, and his world, always was. ![]()
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