The Libraries of Great Men: Frederick Douglass

“Don’t follow your mentors; follow your mentors’ mentors.”

By Jeremy Anderberg

Frederick Douglass was born into slavery. Before him, many white men didn’t think it was possible for a black man to have any intellectual rigor; for a black man to be able to think for himself in an intelligent way. When Douglass was around 20, he escaped his shackles and began life anew as a free man. From that point on, he gave his full attentions to educating himself, which he believed was a necessary component of all individual achievements and the ability to create real change in the world. It was a truth he understood from his own personal, hard-fought struggle: up from slavery, he rose to become one the foremost leaders in America in the abolitionist and women’s rights movements, as well as one of the most celebrated orators and writers of his era.

None of that would have been possible without his personal library.

Douglass was taught to read around the age of 12 by Sophia Auld, the wife of one of his masters. Mrs. Auld did this in spite of a Maryland law that prohibited teaching reading skills to slaves. Mr. Hugh Auld strongly disapproved, believing that if a slave learned to read, he would become dissatisfied with his condition and would begin to desire freedom. Even a slave owner, or perhaps especially a slave owner, understood that knowledge equaled power and will. Eventually, Mrs. Auld gave in to her husband’s admonitions and resigned herself to the idea that slavery and education were incompatible. Her tutoring came to an abrupt end one day when she snatched away a newspaper Douglass was trying to read.

Undaunted, Douglass continued to hone his reading skills on his own, in secret. He read anything he could get his hands on — newspapers, political pamphlets, novels, textbooks. He even credits one particular collection, The Columbian Orator, with clarifying and defining his views on freedom and human rights.

Douglass wished to rise in the world, and he fervently believed the path of self-reliance was the only way up. It was not luck or circumstances that determined man’s success, he argued, but how hard and how consistently he worked. Nothing valuable could ever be gotten for nothing or from waiting around for others to make things happen for you. “The man who will get up will be helped up; and the man who will not get up will be allowed to stay down,” he preached. He understood that no one else could shovel knowledge into his brain; it was up to him to pry it out of as many books as he could. Whatever knowledge he secured to himself, could never be taken away by another.

Ultimately, then, for Frederick Douglass reading meant freedom.

His ability to read a text, to synthesize that information, and then let it change his thoughts and compel him to action directly led to his fight against slavery, both as an individual man seeking his own freedom, and later as a statesman, fighting for the rights of his fellow man. A single man’s desire to read and attain knowledge changed the landscape of America forever.

Throughout his life, Douglass’s library would grow, and it now serves as a great insight into his thoughts and beliefs. In reading through the list, you get an idea of how incredibly wide-read Douglass was. We see everything from classic Christian pieces, to abolitionist texts, to popular novels of the time, to history and science textbooks, and even seemingly random works on subjects like the dental arts and knitting(!).

If you don’t recognize the name of an author you see below, I encourage you to do some Googling (like I did!) in order to find out more about these works that are contained to this day in Douglass’s library. This list is a fascinating trove of knowledge that played a crucial part in the history of this nation.

You can view his library by visiting Cedar Hill in Washington, D.C., which was Douglass’s home for the final 20 years of his life, and was turned over to the National Park Service in 1962. This list below features about 85 books of the thousands listed in his library’s register.

Before you dig in, I’ll leave you with a quote from Douglass’s incredibly inspiring “Self-Made Men” speech, that attests to the value he put in reading. To read, and simply forget, is to have never read at all. Let the reading you do change you for the better, and let it compel you to action to make the world a better place. If you do so, you’ll make ol’d Douglass proud.

“We have all met a class of men, very remarkable for their activity, and who yet make but little headway in life; men who, in their noisy and impulsive pursuit of knowledge, never get beyond the outer bark of an idea, from a lack of patience and perseverance to dig to the core; men who begin everything and complete nothing; who see, but do not perceive; who read, but forget what they read, and are as if they had not read; who travel but go nowhere in particular, and have nothing of value to impart when they return.”

A Selection of Books from Frederick Douglass’s Personal Library

Title	Author
Cosmos: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe	Alexander von Humboldt
The Count of Monte Cristo	Alexandre Dumas
The Three Musketeers	Alexandre Dumas
Poems	Alfred Lord Tennyson
A Thousand and One Nights
Henrietta Temple: A Love Story	Benjamin Disraeli
Bleak House	Charles Dickens
Cricket on the Hearth	Charles Dickens
‘Three Score Years and Ten’ Life-Long Memories of Fort Snelling, Minnesota, and Other Parts of the West	Charlotte Van Cleve
Orations	Cicero
Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa	David Livingstone
Hesiod and Theognis	(Davies translation)
The Steam Engine Explained & Illustrated	Dionysius Lardner
History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire	Edward Gibbon
Journal of a Residence on a Georgian 1863 Plantation	Frances Anne Kemble
A Journey Through Texas	Frederick Law Olmsted
Mary Stuart: A Tragedy	Friedrich Schiller
An Egyptian Princess	Georg Ebers
Memorial Address on the Life of Abraham Lincoln	George Bancroft
Romola	George Eliot
The Journal of George Fox	George Fox
An Overland Journey Round the World	George Simpson
Works of Harriet Beecher Stowe	Harriet Beecher Stowe
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl	Harriet Jacobs
Complete Works of Henry Fielding	Henry Fielding
History of Civilization in England	Henry Thomas Buckle
Notes from Plymouth Pulpit	Henry Ward Beecher
History of the Rise and Fall of the Slave Power in America	Henry Wilson
The Study of History in American Colleges and Universities	Herbert Adams
The Iliad	Homer
The Odyssey	Homer
The American Conflict	Horace Greeley
Natural History of Enthusiasm	Isaac Taylor
Music and Some Highly Musical People	James Trotter
Napoleon: His Army and His Generals	Jean Charles Dominique De Lacretelle
The Confessions	Jean-Jacques Rousseau
The Sorrows of Young Werther	Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The Farm and the Fireside; Or the Romance of Agriculture.	John Blake
Works of John Greenleaf Whittier	John Greenleaf Whittier
Poetical Works of John Keats	John Keats
The Rise of the Dutch Republic	John Lothrop Motley
The Life of Rev. John Wesley	John Whitehead
Journal of John Woolman	John Woolman
The Science of Government	Joseph Alden
Reminiscences of Levi Coffin	Levi Coffin
Don Juan	Lord George Byron
Works of Lord Byron	Lord George Byron
Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth	Lucy Aikin
The Essence of Christianity	Ludwig Feuerbach
Meditations	Marcus Aurelius
A Popular Treatise on the Teeth: Containing a History of the Dental Art	Mayo Smith
Plain Truths About Stock Speculation: How to Avoid Losses in Wall Street	Moses Smith
The Scarlet Letter	Nathaniel Hawthorne
The Vicar of Wakefield	Oliver Goldsmith
The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table	Oliver Wendell Holmes
Pushing to the Front, Or Success Under Difficulties	Orisen Swett Marden
The Life and Letters of Washington Irving	Pierre Irving
Pictorial Guide to Chicago	Rand McNally
The Farmer’s Boy: A Rural Poem	Robert Bloomfield
Poems and Songs	Robert Burns
The Life of William Wilberforce	Robert Isaac Wilberforce
Knitting Work: A Web of Many Textures	Ruth Partington
Complete Works of Sir Walter Scott	Sir Walter Scott
Narrative of Sojourner Truth	Sojourner Truth
Twelve Years A Slave	Solomon Northup
History of Woman Suffrage	Susan B. Anthony
History of Frederick the Great	Thomas Carlyle
The African Slave Trade and Its Remedy	Thomas Fowell Buxton
The Modern British Essayists	Thomas Macaulay
Les Miserables	Victor Hugo
The Age of Louis XIV	Voltaire
The Life and Voyages of Columbus	Washington Irving
Brigham’s Destroying Angel	Wild Bill Hickman
Slave Songs of the United States	William Francis Allen
Exlporation of the Valley of the Amazon	William Lewis Herndon
The Words of Garrison	William Lloyd Garrison
History of Pendennis	William Makepeace Thackeray
Roundabout Papers	William Makepeace Thackeray
Autobiography of William Seward	William Seward
The Complete Works of Shakespeare	William Shakespeare
Narrative of William Brown, A Fugitive Slave	William Wells Brown
Selected Poems	William Wordsworth
Constitution of the United States
Encyclopedia Britannica
English Bible