Frederick Douglass died in splendid isolation, at the top of a lonely hill in Southeast Washington. It juts up precipitously among flat blocks of middle-class rowhouses, as steep and incongruous as a pyramid in the desert. At its summit stands his last home, Cedar Hill, a white-columned antebellum mansion. A sudden heart attack struck him down in its front hall on a winter evening in 1895.
Like many of the other places that played a role in the famous abolitionist's eventful life, this one feels freighted with symbolic meaning. From one side of the house, he could look out toward the hills of Maryland, the state where he was born into slavery. The other side commanded a fine view of the Capitol and the Mall, emblems of the high federal office he attained much later. And all around spread a neighborhood of ordinary Americans, white and black — near at hand and distant, both at once.
David Blight's extraordinary new biography, “Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom,” captures the complexities of the man who lived and died at Cedar Hill: a figure both eminent and solitary who gazed across vastly different American landscapes.
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