To commemorate the bicentennial of the birth of Frederick Douglass, a man many  regard as one of the greatest Americans in our history, the Gilder Lehrman Institute of  American History has gathered here short essays by leading scholars focused on selected  documents written by Douglass. He has been of central importance to the Gilder Lehrman  Collection since Richard Gilder and Lewis Lehrman established the archive in 1991. Over  the years that followed, they built one of the finest collections of American historical documents  ever assembled, and then decided to dedicate it to the service of K–12 education,  and the edification of the larger literate public, by making it the centerpiece of the Gilder Lehrman Institute when it was founded in 1994. Among the treasures are more than fifty  Douglass manuscripts and artifacts along with other African American materials ranging  from the years of the American Revolution, the antebellum period, and the Civil War,  to the Tuskegee Airmen in World War II and the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s.  

Each of the documents in this volume is introduced by a historian who offers insight  into its context and significance. The historians are a distinguished group. They include  prize-winning authors, among them such past winners of the Frederick Douglass Book  Prize as David Blight for Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory and  Manisha Sinha for The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition, and winners of the Lincoln  Prize, including James Oakes (twice) for The Radical and the Republican: Frederick Douglass,  Abraham Lincoln, and the Triumph of Antislavery Politics (2008) and Freedom National:  The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861–1865 (2013), David Blight again for  Race and Reunion, and most recently Edward Ayers for The Thin Light of Freedom: The  Civil War and Emancipation in the Heart of America.

Among the other contributors are writers who bring a variety of historical and contemporary  perspectives to bear on Douglass: Leigh Fought, an editor of Frederick Douglass’s  Correspondence and author of Women in the World of Frederick Douglass; Randall Kennedy  of Harvard Law School, constitutional law expert and wide-ranging commentator on race  in America; Noelle Trent, director of interpretation, collections, and education at the  National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis; Steve Mintz at the University of Texas, a  historian specializing in the history of families, children, and youth; Lucas Morel, professor  of politics at Washington and Lee, a specialist in Lincoln and black American politics;  David Reynolds, English professor at the City University of New York, author of books on  John Brown and Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin; and Quandra Prettyman, a poet and scholar  who has been teaching African American literature at Barnard College since the 1970s.  At the center of them all are the late James Horton of George Washington University and  his beloved spouse Lois Horton, professor emerita of history at George Mason University,  who together wrote such books as Slavery and Public History: The Tough Stuff of American  Memory and Slavery and the Making of America, among many others. In recognition of  Jim Horton’s innumerable contributions over many years as scholar, teacher, mentor, and  public historian, and his role as a key advisor to the Gilder Lehrman Institute since its  inception, this volume is dedicated to his memory.  

While many of these essays were recently commissioned, others—including Jim Horton’s—were written as “keepsakes” for the Frederick Douglass Book Prize ceremonies,  which have been held annually since 1999. Indeed, the Frederick Douglass Book  Prize, which awards $25,000 to the author of the best book on any aspect of slavery and  abolition, was one of the first projects launched by the Gilder Lehrman Institute in its  early years, in partnership with our sister institution, the Gilder Lehrman Center for the  Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University. The first and still the largest  book prize to focus exclusively on the field of slavery studies, over the past nineteen years  the Frederick Douglass Prize has recognized an honor roll of great historians.

Frederick Douglass and the history he represents are a major part of the programming  and resources that the Gilder Lehrman Institute offers to the tens of thousands of  teachers and millions of students in its educational network. The Institute has curated  exhibitions on Douglass at the New-York Historical Society and the Morgan Library, as  well as digitally on its website, which is visited by millions of users each year. In 2004 the  Institute created a traveling exhibition on the life and achievement of Frederick Douglass  that has been circulating across the United States ever since, having visited more than 145  sites—most of them schools—in thirty-nine states (as of January 2018). Meanwhile the  Institute has printed four different classroom posters about Frederick Douglass; a total of  16,000 copies have been distributed through our network, free, to thousands of schools in  all fifty states. In short, Frederick Douglass is never far from the center of the American  story as presented by the Gilder Lehrman Institute.  

For anyone who takes an interest in American history, in Douglass’s life, or simply  in great stories, the documents reproduced in this book are bound to touch a responsive  chord. Who could fail to be moved by the emotions emanating from Douglass’s 1859  letter explaining that he fled the United States to England lest he “be implicated with  John Brown” and perhaps put to death; or in the wake of America’s bloodiest war ever, his  speech at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in 1871; or his reminiscences about Lincoln  in 1880, honoring him as “one of the noblest wisest and best men I ever knew.” One feels  the sorrow of two grieving souls in communion with each other, as he writes Mary Todd  Lincoln in August 1865 to console her and thank her for the gift of her late husband’s  walking cane. And the rising dismay and anger he felt, perhaps even a premonition of the  century to come, when in 1888 he noted “the clamour raised for the disfranchisement  of the colored voters of the South.” Perhaps the most moving and evocative of them all  is Douglass’s letter to his former owner Hugh Auld, twenty-one years after he had fled  to freedom in the North, in which he delicately explores their shared history and assures  Auld that he is not bitter—“I love you, but hate Slavery.” When in the history of humanity  has an escaped slave ever written to his former master in such terms?  

As Frederick Douglass begins his third century in American memory, we hope this  book will help future generations understand and value his unique contributions to our  country’s history, and the possibilities his spirit represents for our future.  

James G. Basker  President,
The Gilder Lehrman Institute  
Richard Gilder Professor of Literary History, Barnard College