Frederick Douglass' status as the greatest African American abolitionist and orator of the nineteenth century seems unshakable. He was certainly the most accomplished master of self-projection. Appropriating with stunning genius the Euro-American myth of the self-made man, he guaranteed that the story of his struggle would be canonized, not only within an African American tradition, but within the traditions of the mainstream. He manipulated the rhetoric of Anglo-Saxon manhood as skillfully as did any of his white contemporaries, including such master manipulators as Abraham Lincoln, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Phineas T. Barnum. I mention Douglass along with these wily exemplars of American showmanship, not because I want to drag out embarrassing cliches about making heroes more human, but in order to address the truly monumental nature of Douglass' accomplishments. Douglass, like Lincoln, Emerson, and Barnum, was abundantly endowed with the spiderish craft and foxlike cunning that are often marks of self-made men.

Douglass, like his bluff contemporary Walt Whitman, made his living by the art of self-celebration, a skill that has always figured in the strategies of American literary figures. He sang his song of himself through four main versions of his autobiography, creating himself as a mythic figure and racial icon. The result is that even scholars and historians who may be relatively unfamiliar with other black American personalities of the nineteenth century are acquainted with the major events of Douglass' life, or at least with his version of them.