Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln: A Relationship in Language, Politics, and Memory

The Frank L. Klement Lectures: Alternative Views of the Sectional Conflict

by David W. Blight

David W. Blight is Class of 1959 Professor of History and Black Studies at Amherst College. Since receiving his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin in 1985, he has written Frederick Douglass’s Civil War: Keeping Faith in Jubilee (1989) and Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (2001). Blight has also edited or co-edited five books, including When This Cruel War Is Over: The Civil War Letters of Charles Harvey Brewster (1992); Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave (1993), and W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1997). Blight has also written many articles on abolitionism, American historical memory, and African American intellectual and cultural history.

24 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 2001

About the author

David William Blight is the Sterling Professor of History, of African American Studies, and of American Studies and Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University. Previously, Blight was a professor of History at Amherst College, where he taught for 13 years. He has won several awards, including the Bancroft Prize and Frederick Douglass Prize for Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory, and the Pulitzer Prize and Lincoln Prize for Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom. In 2021, he was elected to the American Philosophical Society.

Reviews

[Carrington Hill · Rating 5 out of 5]

Honest, informative, enlightening, surprising, and beautiful.

Short and sweet - This account of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln’s relationship captures something truly special.

Complex and unbelievably interesting, their relationship was both calculated and sincere, frustrating yet necessary. Their relationship is one worth studying. Each represented a different world, yet their paths collided at a time of immense national volatility. They are forever engraved in history.