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Paintbrush for Hire: The Travels of James and Emma Cameron, 1840–1900 by Frederick C. Moffatt (review)

how he “both spoke from outside the people to whom his speech was addressed and claimed to speak in their higher name” (p. 376). Finally, Nick Bromell examines how being a free person who had once been a slave created Douglass’s “disposition of democratic citizenship . . . . able to bear the tension of standing between two seemingly contradictory imperatives” and led to actions such as a reconciliatory meeting with his former master, even as he criticized the growing national amnesia about slavery (p. 432). These chapters collectively create a fascinating, complex, and insightful study of Douglass’s political thought. A Political Companion to Frederick Douglass should be read by anyone at the undergraduate level or beyondwho seeks to learn more about Douglass, nineteenth-century African America, or American politics more broadly, although some of the philosophy jargon may be less accessible to some readers. The concept of “politicization of everyday life” is now well accepted by historians, but this text goes beyond merely stating that Douglass’s actions were politicized to explore their varying political meanings. This approach is reinforced by the focus on Douglass’s ideas rather than his direct involvement in electoral politics. That being said, some discussion of how those ideas applied to that involvement might have created an even fuller picture. Additionally, although the introduction refers to Douglass’s expression of political thought through visual representations, this subject is largely unexplored in the essays that follow. It would have been useful to analyze, for instance, the fact that he intentionally appeared stern in photographs to counter the public image of black men as happy buffoons. Furthermore, the fruitful discussions of his slave narratives perhaps call for putting Douglass in conversation with other slave narrators, and only the Hancock Alfaro piece gives much attention to the politics of gender. Finally, the overall posture of the book is somewhat triumphalist, analyzing Douglass’s words and actions without asking if he was ever wrong or shortsighted when, for instance, he refused to support black western migration even though he himself had frequently moved to escape racial oppression. These minor criticisms aside, A Political Companion to Frederick Douglass is invaluable in helping better understand an overlooked side of one of the most prominent African Americans of the nineteenth century.