With Douglass, then, we have everything and its opposite-the slave wielding a sword of vengeance against the South who adopted the South’s mythology for his own the militant prophet of the truth that no compromise with slavery was possible who became a central pillar of pragmatic politics in the postwar era. No one was ever a more critical reader of the Constitution, or, in the end, a more compelling advocate of its virtues.

This insistence on seeing past the evils of the Enlightenment in search of the light that was still left there made him one of the most radical readers of the American nineteenth century. The name he chose inscribed him within a cultural tradition that he had been forced to inherit and chose to remake. Douglass’s new name was as much a rejection of his slave name as was Malcolm X’s rejection of his birth name, Little-but in this case the chosen name denoted not an absence but a presence. The South, as Mark Twain protested at length, had long been hostage to a cult of Walter Scott’s neo-medievalism, one of the opiates of Southern “gallantry” that justified the concentration-camp culture as a leisurely and gracious one, a myth so durable that it shaped the most successful American movie ever made, “ Gone with the Wind.” But the choice is also a reminder that the wind in Romanticism, and in Walter Scott, could blow both ways, toward liberal nationalism and self-renewal as well as toward feudal nostalgia and hierarchy. What’s curious is that this was a completely Southern choice, a tribute to the culture he was escaping.

Escaping to freedom in 1838, at the age of twenty, and needing a new name-in part as a declaration of a reinvented self, in part for the practical necessity of eluding the slave-catchers-he chose to become Frederick Douglass, in honor of a character in a Walter Scott poem. Blight shows in his extraordinary new biography, “ Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom” (Simon & Schuster), was almost certainly white, as Douglass knew early on, and there is something almost cruelly parodic in the grand name the child slave was given: Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey.

Frederick Douglass, who has been called the greatest American of the nineteenth century, grew up as a slave named Frederick Bailey, and the story of how he named himself in freedom shows how complicated his life, and his world, always was.

Blight frederick douglass