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Outstanding leader of the Negro people in the century and one of the most brilliant minds of his time, Frederick Douglass spoke and wrote on all the major issues confronting the American people during his lifetime. "The Pre-Civil War Decade," second of five volumes of his collected works, brings together for the first time his writings and speeches during this important and turbulent period. In addition to his editor, Dr. Philip S. Foner has written a full-length, authoritative biography of Douglass.
Douglass' crusade against slavery, the strategy and tactics of the Abolitionist movement, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the life and death of John Brown, the founding of the Republican Party and the elections of 1852 and 1860 are among the subjects Douglass analyzed so incisively during this period.
About the author
Frederick Douglass was an American social reformer, abolitionist, orator, writer, and statesman who lived from February 1817 or 1818 to February 20, 1895. After escaping slavery in Maryland, he rose to prominence as a national leader of the abolitionist movement in Massachusetts and New York, where he was known for his oratory and incisive antislavery writings. As a result, abolitionists at the time saw him as a living counterexample to enslavers' claims that enslaved persons had the intellectual aptitude to act as independent American citizens. Northerners at the time couldn't believe such a superb orator had been enslaved. Douglass released his initial biography as a reaction to his incredulity. Douglass produced a total of three autobiographies, one of which, The Story of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845), got a bestseller and was influential in promoting the ideal of abolition, as was his second book, My Bondage and My Freedom (1855). Following the Civil War, Douglass was an outspoken advocate for the rights of freed slaves, and he published his final autobiography, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass.
