My Bondage and My Freedom (Penguin Classics) Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Introduction

  Acknowledgements

  LIFE AS A SLAVE.

  CHAPTER I. - The Author’s Childhood.

  CHAPTER II. - The Author Removed from His First Home.

  CHAPTER III. - The Author’s Parentage.

  CHAPTER IV. - A General Survey of the Slave Plantation.

  CHAPTER V. - Gradual Initiation Into the Mysteries of Slavery

  CHAPTER VI. - Treatment of Slaves on Lloyd’s Plantation.

  CHAPTER VII. - Life in the Great House.

  CHAPTER VIII. - A Chapter of Horrors.

  CHAPTER IX. - Personal Treatment of the Author.

  CHAPTER X. - Life in Baltimore.

  CHAPTER XI. - “A Change Came O’er the Spirit of My Dream.”

  CHAPTER XII. - Religious Nature Awakened.

  CHAPTER XIII. - The Vicissitudes of Slave Life.

  CHAPTER XIV. - Experience in St. Michael’s.

  CHAPTER XV. - Covey, the Negro Breaker.

  CHAPTER XVI. - Another Pressure of the Tyrant’s Vice.

  CHAPTER XVII. - The Last Flogging.

  CHAPTER XVIII. - New Relations and Duties.

  CHAPTER XIX. - The Run-away Plot.

  CHAPTER XX. - Apprenticeship Life.

  CHAPTER XXI. - My Escape from Slavery.

  LIFE AS A FREEMAN.

  CHAPTER XXII. - Liberty Attained.

  CHAPTER XXIII. - Introduced to the Abolitionists.

  CHAPTER XXIV. - Twenty-one Months in Great Britain.

  CHAPTER XXV. - Various Incidents.

  APPENDIX, - CONTAINING EXTRACTS FROM SPEECHES, ETC.

  Reception Speech

  Letter to His Old Master.

  The Nature of Slavery.

  Inhumanity of Slavery.

  What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?

  The Internal Slave Trade.

  The Slavery Party.

  The Anti-Slavery Movement.

  Explanatory Notes

  MY BONDAGE AND MY FREEDOM

  FREDERICK DOUGLASS was born Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey in 1818 in Tuckahoe, Maryland. He was the son of Harriet Bailey, a slave owned by Captain Aaron Anthony, who was widely rumored to be his father, though no proof exists. Douglass changed his surname to conceal his identity after escaping slavery in 1838.

  Douglass spent the first seven years of his life working on the plantation owned by Colonel Edward Lloyd. In 1825 he was sold to Hugh Auld and came to live in Baltimore. Life in the city was a turning point in Douglass’ life: it was there that Auld’s wife Sophia taught him to read. Douglass wrote later that literacy was his “pathway from slavery to freedom.” In 1833, Auld, upset by the attention his wife was paying to his servant, sent Douglass to be trained as a field hand. Douglass made his first unsuccessful attempt to escape two years later. In 1838, Douglass, posing as a freedman sailor, successfully escaped to Philadelphia and then to New York. Immediately following his arrival in New York, on September 15, 1838, he married Anna Murray, a freedwoman he met in Baltimore who paid for part of his passage North. Shortly after the wedding, the couple moved to New Bedford, Massachusetts.

  By 1839 Douglass was an active member of a black abolitionist group in New Bedford, inspired by William Lloyd Garrison’s newspaper The Liberator. He was soon hired to give lectures for the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, and between 1841 and 1844 Douglass toured several states giving speeches on abolitionism. During that time his wife gave birth to their four children: Rosetta, Lewis, Frederick Jr., and Charles Remond.

  In 1844 Douglass began to write his autobiography, and in the spring of 1845, the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, was published, becoming an instant best-seller. Douglass later published revisions and extensions of his classic work entitled My Bondage and My Freedom (1855) and Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881, 1892). Immediately after the publication of Narrative of the Life, Douglass went on a speaking tour in Great Britain. In 1846, Douglass was legally emancipated when Ellen and Anna Richardson of Newcastle, England purchased his freedom for seven hundred dollars.

  Douglass returned to the United States in 1847 and began his long career in journalism by owning, editing, and publishing, in succession, the North Star, Frederick Douglass’ Weekly, Frederick Douglass’ Paper, Douglass’ Monthly, and the New National Era. In later years Douglass held several appointed positions in the United States Government, but he is still best known as the foremost African-American advocate against slavery and segregation of his time. He died in Washington, D.C. on February 20, 1895, and after lying in state in the nation’s capitol, Douglass was buried in the Mount Hope Cemetery in Rochester, New York.

  JOHN DAVID SMITH is Graduate Alumni Distinguished Professor of History at North Carolina State University. His other publications include An Old Creed for the New South (1985); The Dictionary of Afro-American Slavery (1988); Ulrich Bonnell Phillips (1990); Anti-Black Thought, 1863-1925 (11 vols., 1993); Black Voices from Reconstruction (1996); Slavery, Race, and American History (1999); Black Judas (2000); When Did Southern Segregation Begin? (2002); and Black Soldiers in Blue (2002).

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  First published in the United States of America

  by Miller, Orton & Mulligan 1855

  This edition with an introduction and notes

  by John David Smith published in Penguin Books 2003

  Introduction and notes copyright © John David Smith, 2003

  All rights reserved

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Douglass, Frederick, 1817?-1895.

  My bondage and my freedom / by Frederick Douglass ; edited with an introduction and notes

  by John David Smith.

  p. cm.—(Penguin classics)

  Includes bibliographical references.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-15716-9

  1. Douglass, Frederick, 1817?-1895. 2 African American abolitionists—Biography.

  3. Abolitionists—United States—Biography. 4. Antislavery movements—United States—History—

  19th century. 5. Fugitive slaves—Maryland—Biography. 6. Slaves—Maryland—Social conditions—

  19th century. 7. Plantation life—Maryland—History—19th century. I. Smith, John David,

  1949- II. Title. III. Series.

  E449.D738 2003

  973.8’092—dc21

  [B] 2002028992

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  for

  DORIS W. SMITH

  (1922-2002)—

  BELOVED MOTHER AND

  CHAMPION OF THE DOWNTRODDEN

  Introduction

&
nbsp; AN AMERICAN BOOK, FOR AMERICANS, IN THE FULLEST SENSE OF THE IDEA

  Writing in 1948, the African American historian Benjamin Quarles summarized the life of the celebrated runaway slave and black abolitionist Frederick Douglass (1817?-1895) with characteristic precision. “Douglass’ fame,” Quarles explained, “rests largely upon his impassioned outbursts of rhetoric by which he gave vent to an uncompromising hostility to the slave system.” Quarles also noted that in 1855 Douglass published his second autobiography, My Bondage and My Freedom. “This book, which included an account of his trip abroad, was nearly four times as long as the Narrative. Like the latter, it sold well and served as an excellent publicity promoter for its author.”1

  Like Quarles, most students of history and literature immediately identify Douglass with his monumental Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself (Boston, 1845). “More than autobiography,” Nathan Irvin Huggins argued, “the Narrative, like Douglass’s oratory, was abolitionist polemic, contradicting the premises of the proslavery argument on every page.”2 According to David W. Blight, “Douglass’s Narrative is a song of abolitionism, an argument with America’s conscience, an appeal by the risen slave testifying to his own sufferings and making witness to the crimes of a guilty land.”3 William L. Andrews, the leading authority on Douglass’s autobiographies, characterizes Douglass’s Narrative as “[t]he epitome of the antebellum fugitive slave narrative . . . recognized today as a classic narrative of ascent from South to North in the African American literary canon, and a lasting contribution to the portrait of the romantic individualist in nineteenth-century American literature.” Andrews considers “Douglass’s style of self-presentation, through which he re-created the slave as an evolving self bound for mental as well as physical freedom,” the quality “that has made his autobiography so memorable.”4

  This 125-page text, published by the American Anti-Slavery Society, and reprinted many times and analyzed, contextual ized, and deconstructed, has become a classic in African American studies and American autobiography. Its forthrightness, elegance, and power in unveiling slavery’s brutalities and in charting Douglass’s Horatio Alger-like triumph over evil has helped establish Douglass’s reputation as the nineteenth century’s foremost black agitator, intellectual, political leader, orator, and reformer. In his Narrative Douglass emerged as the archetypal heroic slave fugitive, the Romantic individualist who fled bondage in 1838 and made a place for himself in freedom. This text, written by Douglass, not a ghostwriter (as the subtitle, Written by Himself, was designed to make clear), ranks as the most artistically crafted and widely read of all the American slave narratives.

  In it Douglass confronted the proslavery argument head on and exposed slavery for what it was—a cruel, exploitative, and barbaric system of racial control. The “peculiar institution,” he said, corrupted everyone and everything it touched, including families, religion, and the southern economy. The Narrative chronicled how Douglass extricated himself from servitude and how he entered the white world of the antebellum North. Douglass’s Narrative offered a window on the world of oppression, cunning, and survival in which bondmen and -women lived and labored, as well as on the religious and ideological world of abolitionism from which the text emerged in the 1840s. Douglass argued powerfully that slaves suffered emotionally and physically from their enslavement and that they wanted to be free. One finishes Douglass’s tightly written Narrative convinced not only that he had escaped from slavery, but that the former slave was finding his life’s work as an impassioned black orator, journalist, and abolitionist, and that his life was on course. Douglass’s Narrative communicated a certain Victorian sense of order and completeness, suggesting that its author had transcended the hellish life of the slave and optimistically was moving forward as a freeman.

  While Douglass’s first autobiography has been all but canonized, his two later and more thorough autobiographies, My Bondage and My Freedom (New York, 1855) and Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, Written by Himself (Hart-ford, Conn., 1881; revised 1892), have largely been ignored, relegated mainly to obscure scholarly editions and to footnotes. C. Peter Ripley has noted correctly that the three texts are important independently and collectively, having appeared “at distinct periods of Douglass’s life for different reasons.”5 Over time Douglass changed and corrected details of his life, partly based on facts, but also as the result of his emerging sense of “self.” With the notable exception of Andrews,6 most writers adhere closely to Stephen Butterfield’s assessment of Douglass’s relatively obscure 1855 and 1881 texts. In 1974 Butterfield wrote:The two later editions include most of the material from the early Narrative, with some rewriting, plus the experiences and development that occurred after 1845. Both the Narrative and My Bondage and My Freedom were written as contributions to the antislavery struggle, the latter gaining in urgency and mili tance with the approach of the Civil War. The Life and Times, while still very much involved in the defense of Negro civil rights following the period of Reconstruction, takes on a more reflective tone. The writer is reviewing and commenting on the past, rather than waging the struggles of the present; his audience is posterity; he must speak to a whole new generation of Americans, to whom the Civil War was only a childhood memory.7

  Because Butterfield and others have undervalued the amount of “rewriting” and the importance of Douglass’s post-1845 “experiences and development,” few general readers know Douglass’s My Bondage and My Freedom and Life and Times.

  Fewer still recognize the 1850s and 1880s contexts in which Douglass lived and the importance of his later texts in documenting Douglass’s ongoing critique of American racism and in crafting his carefully constructed self-image. Over the decade since his Narrative appeared, Douglass had changed, and so too had his historical memory of his life and its meaning. “The autobiographical Douglass,” Waldo E. Martin, Jr., explains, is “the central thread in the protean tapestry of the heroic and symbolic Douglass,” and it remains “an indispensable clue to the inner Douglass.”8 Andrews notes that “Douglass’s writing was devoted primarily to the creation of a heroic image of himself that would inspire in African Americans the belief that color need not be a permanent bar to their achievement of the American dream, while reminding whites of their obligation as Americans to support free and equal access to that dream for Americans of all races.”9 In 1855, more so than in 1845, Douglass realized that his life’s story had the power to influence social and political change for black and white Americans.

  Douglass’s autobiographies continue to fascinate modern readers and to spark debate across disciplinary lines. Peter F. Walker, for example, has observed that Douglass’s texts were designed to promote an antislavery argument, not to reveal his “inner self.” Douglass was concerned with protecting his already established reputation, and his autobiographies present “a carefully painted portrait that Douglass intended to fix as part of the public record.” Walker argues that as a result of Douglass’s reticence about his personal feelings and private life, modern authors can easily use Douglass to promote their own pet theories and social agendas.10 This is an accurate observation.

  One writer asserts that Douglass anticipated the philosophical theories of Antonio Gramsci and Paulo Freire.11 Others describe him as a bourgeois Victorian individualist, a smoldering figure of sexuality, “a paradigm of human understanding and empowerment,” a gifted actor, a Christlike shaman, “the ideal American,” a blues artist, even an African American reincarnation of Shakespeare’s Henry V.12 Literary historians have noted that Douglass incorporated elements of the Romantic movement, travel literature, and the popular “sentimental novel” into his second autobiography.13 Andrews insists that My Bondage and My Freedom should be considered part of the American literary renaissance of the 1850s, alongside the works of Emerson and Thoreau.14 Others assert that My Bondage and My Freedom, with its emphasis on a man’s rise from deprivation to prominence, is a deeply American book.15 Do
uglass has been compared to Booker T. Washington and Benjamin Franklin as an example of the archetypal American folk hero, the self-made man.16

  The Penguin Classics edition of Douglass’s My Bondage and My Freedom is designed to provide a fuller sense of Douglass through his second and, compared to his Narrative, more obscure autobiography, especially in light of much recent scholarship devoted to him. My Bondage and My Freedom remains Douglass’s least-known text. According to Dickson J. Preston, scholars usually began with his Narrative “and then, if more information on Douglass is wanted, . . . skip over to Life and Times, which covers his career from start to finish.”17 The reappearance of the text helps us appreciate anew the literary, cultural, and political power of Douglass’s work.

  Readers of Douglass’s Narrative and his My Bondage and My Freedom will discover that they are dramatically different texts. Douglass’s My Bondage and My Freedom is far more analytical, complex, and critical, according to William S. McFeely, a “richer, deeper, and far more ambiguous” work than his Narrative.18 John Sekora has gone so far as to assert that the two texts belong to different genres. Douglass’s Narrative “is the first comprehensive, personal history of American slavery. Autobiography would come a decade later, in My Bondage and My Freedom.”19 “The chief difference between the first and second autobiographies,” writes Marion Wilson Starling, “is to be found in the amplification, in the second, of all expository passages in the first, where Douglass seemed to feel that the reader’s understanding of the basic machinery of the institution of slavery might be in need of help.”20

  Ripley’s concise analysis best summarizes the differences between the two texts. In his opinion,