Frederick Douglass was published by George W. Jacobs & Company in 1907 as part of their “American Crisis Biographies” series. Washington’s choice of subject was deliberate: Douglass was the towering figure of nineteenth-century Black American life, and any biography of him was inevitably a statement about leadership, strategy, and the meaning of the Black experience in America.
Washington’s Douglass is a man of action rather than ideology — a self-made figure who rose from slavery through determination and practical intelligence. The emphasis falls on Douglass’s personal qualities rather than his political positions, and the more radical aspects of Douglass’s career (his break with Garrison, his advocacy of violent resistance, his relentless insistence on full political equality) are acknowledged but not foregrounded. The biography is, in effect, a claim of inheritance: Washington positions himself as Douglass’s successor by reshaping Douglass into a proto-Washingtonian figure.
The book is competent as biography — Washington had access to people who knew Douglass personally — but its interest is primarily as an exercise in political genealogy. How a leader tells the story of his predecessors reveals his understanding of his own role, and Washington’s Douglass tells us more about 1907 than about 1845.
Collecting Frederick Douglass
First edition (George W. Jacobs & Co., Philadelphia, 1907): Cloth binding.
Market values:
- First edition, near fine: $200–$500
- Very good: $80–$200
- Good: $30–$80