That we live in a decadent age will seem evident to anyone who has been numbed by the moral horrors that occur on a daily basis, all over this country, and that are reported with a bland reportorial neutrality by all the news media. These horrors—involving open drug-dealing and prostitution, shootings in the schools, fetal abortions, doctor-assisted suicides—evoke hardly more than a shrug. Passivity in the face of such evils is in fact nowadays admired as evidence of “open-mindedness,” “compassion,” and “tolerance” for differing “values” and “behaviors.” In fact, to believe that evil is a reality and to have strong convictions about how to deal with the forms that evil takes in the national life is usually to be dismissed as an absolutist, a crank, and a bigot. Public moralists are a nuisance and we usually do not like to listen to them. I am therefore led to wonder whether, if this were the nineteenth century, we would be capable of recognizing, as evil, something so huge and monstrous as the institution of slavery. Probably not.

In any case, such reflections on the ubiquity of evil and the too human readiness to deny it—even when its grotesque visage is mirrored in the lines of one’s face—occur to me as a result of rereading the autobiography of Frederick Douglass. This tragic and truly extraordinary black American had the bad fortune to be born a slave, near Tuckahoe Creek, Maryland, in 1818. For most Americans in the early years