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Frederick Douglass: Freedom 's Voice, i818-45. By Gregory P Lampe. (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, x998. Pp. xiii, 350. $45.oo, cloth; $22.95, paper.)
Frederick Douglass: Freedom's Voice, 1818-45 represents an interesting and valuable contribution to understanding the career of this important historical figure. Gregory P. Lampe reexamines prevalent notions about Douglass's early years as abolitionist orator, specifically, that Douglass had enjoyed little training as a public speaker before becoming a full-time abolitionist activist in the early IBq.os and that during the first years of his career he displayed little if any independence from the white abolitionists who sponsored him. Lampe shows that Douglass was better prepared for an oratorical career and a more autonomous figure in his early years as full-time abolitionist than previous biographers have acknowledged.
Lampe comes to these conclusions by emphasizing those elements in Douglass's background that helped prepare him for a career as a public speaker and by probing to an unprecedented extent newspaper accounts and other sources that document Douglass's activities between I839 and 1845 (the years during which he came into prominence). In fact, the author is quite critical of other Douglass scholars, such as John W. Blassingame, Benjamin Quarles, Raymond Gerald Fulkerson, and William S. McFeely, accusing them of committing numerous "errors and omissions when documenting Douglass's oratorical activities...