That voice took shape and sharpened over time, but it would return again and again to the banks of the Tuckahoe River on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, where Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey was born in 1818. Twenty years a slave, then almost nine years a fugitive; as Douglass himself described it in his autobiographies (having adopted his new surname from a Sir Walter Scott poem), the first decades of his life were both thrilling and terrifying. Until his abolitionist allies helped to purchase his freedom in 1846, everything he did felt provisional; he lived with the incessant fear of someone who could be plunged back into captivity at any moment.

Image David W. Blight Credit... Huntington Library, San Marino, California

He didn’t bear that awful burden alone, though. What Douglass didn’t emphasize in his memoirs but Blight rightly does is the steadfast presence of Anna Murray, a free woman Douglass met in Baltimore, while he was still a slave; she aided in his escape, and soon became his wife.

Anna had five children with Douglass, managing the household and mending shoes for money until her husband was able to support the family. She never learned how to read or write; Douglass barely mentioned her in his autobiographies (either taking her for granted or else paying heed to the customary discretion of the era). Blight has to rely instead on the recorded observations of others, including the jaundiced — and, he makes clear, unreliable — sniping of Ottilie Assing, a German radical who befriended Douglass and would stay in the family home for months at a time.

Blight handles all of this as delicately as he can. Assing, whose hyperbole could be as extreme as her politics, described herself in the most inflated terms as Douglass’s true companion. Despite her “grandiosity,” Blight thinks it probable that Assing and Douglass were lovers, even if her devotion wasn’t fully reciprocated. (After Anna’s death in 1882, Douglass married a white activist named Helen Pitts.)

While keeping his eye trained on personal intrigues, Blight still has plenty of room to delve into Douglass’s public and political life. The chapters recounting the run up to the Civil War proceed with the inexorability of fate. Blight describes how Douglass moved away from the moral suasion he promoted in his early years on the abolitionist lecture circuit toward his full-throated calls for war. Slavery was too monstrous for what Douglass decried as the “whines of compromise.” Once the fighting started, President Lincoln, initially prone to “hesitating, doubting, shrinking,” had to destroy the old system once and for all; without that, Douglass warned, the Civil War would be “little better than a gigantic enterprise for shedding human blood.”