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    My Bondage and My Freedom: The Givens Collection
    My Bondage and My Freedom: The Givens Collection
    My Bondage and My Freedom: The Givens Collection
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    My Bondage and My Freedom: The Givens Collection

    By Frederick Douglass and John S. Wright

    4.5/5

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    About this ebook

    My Bondage and My Freedom is the second of three published autobiographies from one of the most brilliant and eloquent abolitionists and human rights activists in American history. The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave was published ten years before in 1845, while The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass was published twenty-five years later.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherWashington Square Press
    Release dateJun 15, 2010
    ISBN9781451604245
    My Bondage and My Freedom: The Givens Collection
    Author

    Frederick Douglass

    Frederick Douglass was born into slavery in Maryland in 1818. He was separated from his mother as a baby and lived with his grandmother up to the age of eight, when he was sent to live as a house servant, a field hand and then a ship caulker. He escaped to New York in 1838 and seven years later published Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an autobiography of his life as a slave, which became an instant bestseller. Douglass rose to fame as a powerful orator and spent the rest of his life campaigning for equality. He became a national leader of the abolitionist movement, a consultant to Abraham Lincoln in the civil rights movement and a passionate supporter of the women’s rights movement. He died in 1895.

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    • 5/5
      This is a great book, by a great American. Skeptics looking at that statement might think, well sure you think that reading his own account. Except I've found autobiographies unintentionally revealing in fascinating ways. Within the last year I read autobiographies and memoirs by Ghandi, Dian Fossey and Booker T. Washington. The first book lessened my admiration and liking, the second made me absolutely hate the women right because of her own words, and the last left me ambivalent. And in the case of others, I've become disillusioned afterwards reading other accounts of their lives. Neither is the case with Frederick Douglass--after reading this--and even, hell especially, after reading further about him, I have a new hero. I couldn't help but admire him given so much related here--particularly how, after his experience of being treated with dignity and respect in Britain, he decided to come back to America to fight to end slavery. And reading beyond this book, I learned he was a staunch supporter not just of civil rights for African Americans, but equal rights for women as well. Hardly a popular cause or common attitude back then.And simply in terms of content, this book was riveting. The 1855 introduction by James M'Cune Smith did give me momentary pause. It read, like so much 19th century literature I've encountered, as tedious, overly religious and stuffy. Once you reach Douglass' own account however, that's no longer the case. Yes, there is a formal tone that is characteristic of the age, but there wasn't one line of this entire book that wasn't fascinating; he's a master storyteller. After purchasing this book, I learned this is actually the second of three autobiographies written by Douglass. The first, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, published in 1845, is the most famous and arguably of the most influential and historically important. Yet an introduction by Brent Hayes Edwards in the edition I read makes the case for the second biography as the better, more strongly written book. Which makes sense--after all, in the decade since that first biography Douglass had spent years as editor of The North Star, which would have honed his thinking and writing.I also have read that this middle book includes the most expansive account of his time in slavery. And that account is full of insights, not simply into slavery, but how power over others corrupts victim and perpetrator alike. And I've never read a more moving account of the liberating power of literacy. I wish young people could read this early in their schooling, and read of how young Frederick heard his master talk of how reading makes a man unfit for slavery--and understand the importance of reading for setting a mind alight. The appendix contains other items of interest--the gem I think is Douglass' "Letter to his Old Master." Truly, this is a wonderful read.
    • 5/5
      This is one of the greatest autobiographies I've ever read. It blends a story of triumph over adversity, a retelling of a man's education, and an almost-Tocquevillean analysis of a society and how its economic foundation, slavery, seeps into every aspect of that society from religion to family even to the calendar. This should be required reading

    Book preview

    My Bondage and My Freedom - Frederick Douglass

    MY BONDAGE

    AND

    MY FREEDOM

    MY BONDAGE

    AND

    MY FREEDOM

    Part I._Life as a Slave.  Part II._Life as a Freeman.

    BY

    FREDERICK DOUGLASS

    WITH

    AN INTRODUCTION

    BY PROFESSOR JOHN S. WRIGHT

    By a principle essential to christianity, a PERSON is eternally differenced from a THING; so that the idea of a HUMAN BEING necessarily excludes the idea of PROPERTY IN THAT BEING.

    -COLERIDGE-

    NEW YORK AND AUBURN:

    MILLER, ORTON & MULLIGAN.

    New York: 25 Park Row.-Auburn: 107 Genesee-st.

    1855.

    WASHINGTON SQUARE PRESS

    New York  London  Toronto  Sydney  Singapore

    Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year

    ONE THOUSAND EIGHT HUNDRED AND FIFTY-FIVE,

    BY FREDERICK DOUGLASS,

    In the Clerk’s Office of the District Court of the Northern District

    of New York.

    AUBURN:

    MILLER, ORTON & MULLIGAN,

    STEREOTYPERE AND PRINTERS.

    Washington Square Press

    1230 Avenue of the Americas

    New York, NY 10020

    Introduction copyright © 2003 by Simon & Schuster, Inc.

    All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

    For information address Washington Square Press, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

    www.SimonandSchuster.com

    ISBN 0-7434-6059-6

    eISBN: 978-1-451-60424-5

    First Washington Square Press trade paperback edition May 2003

    10  9  8  7  6  5  4   3  2  1

    WASHINGTON SQUARE PRESS and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

    For information regarding special discounts for bulk purchases, please contact Simon & Schuster Special Sales at 1-800-456-6798 or business@simonandschuster.com

    Manufactured in the United States of America

    TO

    Honorable Gerrit Smith,

    AS A SLIGHT TOKEN OF

    ESTEEM FOR HIS CHARACTER,

    ADMIRATION FOR HIS GENIUS AND BENEVOLENCE,

    AFFECTION FOR HIS PERSON, AND

    GRATITUDE FOR HIS FRIENDSHIP,

    AS A

    SMALL BUT MOST SINCERE ACKNOWLEDGMENT

    OF HIS PRE-EMINENT SERVICES IN BEHALF OF THE RIGHTS AND

    LIBERTIES OF AN

    AFFLICTED, DESPISED, AND DEEPLY OUTRAGED PEOPLE,

    BY RANKING SLAVERY WITH PIRACY AND MURDER,

    AND BY

    DENYING IT EITHER A LEGAL OR CONSTITUTIONAL EXISTENCE,

    THIS VOLUME IS RESPECTFULLY DEDICATED,

    BY HIS FAITHFUL AND FIRMLY ATTACHED FRIEND,

    Frederick Douglass

    ROCHESTER, N.Y.

    INTRODUCTION

    My Bondage and My Freedom is the second of Frederick Douglass’s three written accounts of his life, appearing a decade after the earlier Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave was published in 1845, and a quarter century before The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass appeared in 1881. Douglass’s first version of his life is generally acknowledged to be the most immediate, intense, and optimistic of the three; the third version the most magisterial, detached, and reportorial. Released the same year as such classics of American Romanticism and Transcendentalism as Henry Thoreau’s Walden and Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, My Bondage and My Freedom is Frederick Douglass’s most accomplished rendering of his life on both literary and philosophical terms. It is also his most acutely romanticist and transcendental autobiography, though we are only beginning to understand, a century and a half later, just why this is so.

    In 1837, a year before he fled to freedom and adopted a new surname from the rebel lord of a Walter Scott verse romance, the slave Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey was in the midst of two years’ training as a hired-out caulker in a Baltimore shipyard. There he sharpened his apprentice skills on vessels surreptitiously destined for the unstemmed transatlantic trade in human cargo that had been outlawed thirty years earlier.¹ As a caulker, he earned six to nine dollars a week, turning most of it over to his slavemaster, Hugh Auld. Douglas was allowed to do so according to a work release agreement he had penitently consented to the previous year, after being briefly jailed over forging passes for himself and five other slaves in an abortive escape attempt. Holding firm to his secret resolve to gain his freedom, he and five young free black men formed a secret afterhours debating club, the East Baltimore Mental Improvement Society. In the evenings, when Master Auld thought he was asleep, Frederick taught clandestine reading and writing classes. He and his coconspirators studied and argued incessantly over topics ranging from the legal status of Maryland slaves and freemen to biblical interpretation and classical theology.²

    In August of that same year, Ralph Waldo Emerson, the Harvard-trained former Unitarian preacher who had renounced his pastorate to become an independent American Scholar, delivered the Phi Beta Kappa oration at his alma mater. The speech provided both an eloquent apologia for his chosen new vocation and was what Oliver Wendell Holmes proclaimed to be the nation’s intellectual Declaration of Independence. The malady of mind and spirit to which Emerson addressed this call for cultural revolution was a commonplace then to young Anglo American intellectuals of his class and educational attainments. But Emerson had given it a fabulistic transcendental spin: in the beginning, the fable went, the gods had divided unitary Man into fragmentary men so that, "in the divided or social state, … the members have suffered amputation from the trunk, and strut about so many walking monsters—a good finger, a neck, a stomach, an elbow, but never a man. Man is thus metamorphosed into a thing, into many things."³ The diagnosis and remedy for this dismembering reduction of whole being to thing was, however, at hand. As the delegated intellect of society, Emerson declared, the scholar "in the right state … is Man Thinking. In the degenerate state, when the victim of society, he tends to become a mere thinker, or still worse, the parrot of other men’s thinking. To defy such a fate, to reclaim his manhood, he must embrace the true dignity of his ministry by schooling himself triply in Nature, in the Mind of the Past—books, that is—and in Action. Action was especially important, Emerson insisted, since without it, the scholar is not yet a man: without it thought can never ripen into truth…. Inaction is cowardice, but there can be no scholar without the heroic mind."⁴

    As would mark so many Emerson orations and essays over the coming years, this one revealed a pronounced double-consciousness and voice, an alternation in the speaking I between two quite different first-person identities: one the voice of self-conscious private feeling or personal witness, aware of its separateness and limitations, humbly greeting the Harvard audience; the other, unself-consciously exemplary or representative, with an impersonal oracular tone and unapologetically transcendental vision for the ages.⁵ Both I’s would be crucial to the new romanticist forms of life writing in mid-nineteenth-century America. But it was the latter voice, speaking axiomatically and metaphorically, that would help give the most distinctive shape to the autobiographical impulses of the Reflective or Philosophical Age Emerson believed to be at hand:

    The world—this shadow of the soul, or other me—lies wide around. Its attractions are the keys which unlock my thoughts and make me acquainted with myself. I run eagerly into this resounding tumult. I grasp the hands of those next to me, and take my place in the ring to suffer and to work, taught by an instinct that so shall the dumb abyss be vocal with speech. I pierce its order; I dissipate its fear; I dispose of it within the circuit of my expanding life. So much only of life as I know by experience, so much of the wilderness have I vanquished and planted, or so far have I extended my being, my dominion.⁶

    A self so questing and imperial should not be insulated from suffering or work, Emerson affirmed. Nor should it be subjected to the sneers of more practical men, he thought; for drudgery, calamity, exasperation, want, are instructors in eloquence and wisdom. The true scholar grudges every opportunity of action past by as a loss of power, so that action is the raw material out of which the intellect moulds her splendid products. Accordingly, not out of those on whom systems of education have exhausted their culture, comes the helpful giant to destroy the old or build the new, but out of unhandselled savage nature.⁷

    Emerson spoke more prophetically and more ironically than he knew; for Hugh Auld’s recalcitrant property would become that helpful giant incarnate. Perhaps no American scholar of the age would embody more precisely, or with more social force, the Knower, Doer, Sayer Emerson imagined than the shipyard American slave who, as a successful fugitive from slave law, would rename himself Frederick Douglass. Twice in the course of a decade, in the 1845 Narrative and again in My Bondage and My Freedom, Douglass rang his own autobiographical changes on themes Emerson and his disciples enunciated while they worked transcendentalism into a defining movement in American literary and cultural history. But as fervently self-reliant and individualist as most transcendentalists were, they were as slow correspondingly to take collective action; and it would be through active abolitionism, not transcendentalism, that Douglass took his place in the ring to suffer and to work. Inaction over slavery drove a wedge between the private I and the public oracle in Emerson’s double consciousness, so that in his journal entries Emerson bemoaned himself that he had not confronted this deplorable question, which seems to want nothing so much as a few assured voices, and then tried to recover himself in hours of sanity by saying God must govern his own world, and know his way out of this pit without my desertion of my post, which has none to guard it but me (Emerson, Journals, VIII, August 1, 1852). In his early lecture, The Transcendentalist (1842), Emerson had identified himself with idealism, in opposition to materialism: the Materialist insists on facts, on history, on the force of circumstances and the animal wants of man; the idealist on the power of Thought and Will, on inspiration, on miracle, on individual culture.⁸ Rather than desert his Transcendentalist post, Emerson would therefore conclude, in his journal dialogue between shadow self and soul, I have quite other slaves to free than those negroes, to wit, imprisoned spirits, imprisoned thoughts, far back in the brain of man.

    For Frederick Douglass, materialist fact and idealist inspiration became inseparably fused in the existential reality of slavery, so that Douglass ultimately offered a more assured voice on the deplorable question than Emerson ever could. Douglass had written his 1845 Narrative to remove all doubts that the prodigy of eloquence he so manifestly was had once indeed been a slave. A small volume of 125 pages priced at fifty cents, the Narrative sold out a five-thousand-copy first printing in four months. Four more printings of two thousand each within a year, and approximately thirty thousand copies were distributed in the United States and Great Britain by 1850.⁹ Translated into Dutch, French, German, and Swedish, the volume garnered Douglass international celebrity beyond that of any other African American of the era, or for that matter, any Transcendentalist. Douglass’s unspeakably affecting tale was praised by Margaret Fuller for its torrid energy, saccharine fullness, powers of observation, and manly heart.¹⁰ It was lauded in William Lloyd Garrison’s Liberator as a worthy American counterpart to the plain style and realism of John Bunyan and Daniel Defoe. Set apart from nearly all other slave narratives by its vivid exhibition of the force and working of the native love of freedom in the individual mind,¹¹ the Narrative’s intense self-consciousness fueled itself throughout—not just in the famous confrontation scene with the negro breaker Covey—on the high drama of showing its readers how a man was made a slave and then, in reverse, how a slave was made a man.

    Over the span of ten whirlwind years, however, the circuit of Frederick Douglass’s expanding life invalidated nearly all the controlling autobiographical strategies he had employed in his 1845 account, so that My Bondage and My Freedom represents not just a revision but a metamorphosis of the logic, rhetoric, style, and aesthetic conceptions that had ordered his earlier images of his life. Between 1845 and 1855 Douglass had become an expatriate transatlantic traveler and cosmopolite, an apostate from the reigning evangelical ideology of Garrisonian abolitionism, and a proselytizing convert to its more secular, Liberty Party organizational rival. He became as well the author of a pioneering novella, The Heroic Slave, which heightened his awareness of how embroidering fictions could be woven into romantic biography. Radicalized by the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law beyond his already radical rejection of slavery’s moral and legal foundations, Douglass began contemplating insurrectionary as well as constitutional forms of defiance, which he carefully honed in a steady stream of platform oratory and journalistic enterprise.

    Moreover, beginning with his extended speaking tour of Ireland, Scotland, and England from 1845 to 1847, he immersed himself in expansive reading that included Shakespeare, Coleridge, Scott, Byron, Carlyle, Robert Burns, Tennyson, Longfellow, Whittier, Robert Browning, William Cullen Bryant, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Edmund Burke, Thackeray, Dickens, Victor Hugo, and Alexandre Dumas.¹² Though little explored as yet by today’s scholarship, the impact of nearly all of these influences can be discerned in Douglass’s second book. Moreover, though recent commentary has acknowledged My Bondage and My Freedom’s greater analytical power and political realism over the 1845 Narrative, the later book’s rising canonical status in our own age can be appreciated even more in terms of its sophisticated appropriation of transcendentalist philosophy and theology and its rhetorical use of political abolitionism’s natural law legal interpretation. Douglass enhanced these ideological advances with storytelling and atmospheric devices he adapted from gothic romance, and with the tools of introspection he gleaned from the new, self-consciously autobiographical modes of literary and confessional memoir.

    In the original preface to My Bondage and My Freedom, the distinction Douglass himself makes by pronouncing his second book my autobiography rather than another narrative signals the new conceptual framework. In the preface to the 1845 text, William Lloyd Garrison had called the earlier work a narrative repeatedly, emphasizing its primary design as a structure of episodes, incidents, events. Wendell Phillips, in his prefatory letter, termed it a story, memoir, recollections—associating it likewise with an older tradition of life writing focused more on the times in which the life is lived and on the significant others in the memoirist’s world. Douglass’s new designation for the book marks the modern autobiographer’s shift of consciousness from being in the world to becoming, from primary concern with the physicality of a specific environment in history and culture to the more subjective and privately symbolic. As his own biographer, Douglass was not wholly free yet of the eighteenth century’s deference to biography and history as presiding genres, nor of that less individualistic age’s need to offer an apologia for centering on the solitary self. He feels he must offer special reasons for writing my own biography and must do so in such a manner as not to incur the imputation of weakness, vanity, or egotism. Neither of his reasons betrays a private motive: the first, he tells us, is not to illustrate any heroic achievement of a man, but to vindicate a just and beneficent principle, in its application to the whole human family. The second is that not only is slavery on trial, but unfortunately, the enslaved people are also on trial—so low in the scale of humanity, it has been alleged, and so utterly stupid, that they are unconscious of their wrongs, and do not apprehend their rights.

    But unlike a memoirist, who characteristically accepts the lesser ambition of relating only significant moments of his or her life, Douglass proposes instead to render a full account of his experience as slave and as freeman; and he seeks more than a merely historicized personal chronicle. Where the 1845 Narrative had succeeded by intuitively alternating onrushing picaresque episodes with essayistic digressions, the new, more consciously crafted auto-biography would have, first, an animating metaphysical core—the just and beneficent principle enunciated in the title page epigraph extracted from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Aids to Reflection and The Friend—and second, a dialectical design, traceable as well to Coleridge, which would unfold in an organic narrative pattern of dramatized and richly allusive enigma, aphorism, and extended metaphor. That twentieth-century American scholars have been so slow to explore Coleridge’s manifest impact on Douglass’s mind and art—not to mention the more covert influences of other literary intellectuals—marks our own disoriented sense of transcendentalism’s variant strains and deployments, and our continuing inclination to separate nineteenth-century Romanticism from its full political and psychological contexts, as well as from its black disciples.

    Ten years after writing the Narrative, Frederick Douglass was perhaps even more aware of the necessity and power of truth in the struggle against slavery—more aware as well that truth was more than the merely material—and he sought to achieve that higher truth through the strategies of Romantic art he admired in the works of Walter Scott’s verse and prose romances, in Byron’s quasi-autobiographical poetic pilgrimages and meditations, and in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s prose reflections on the entire nineteenth-century mindscape. Coleridge had established an overarching influence on American Transcendentalism two decades earlier through the ambitious philosophical prose works that were always more central to his life than his poetry. To restive young college-educated American laymen and Unitarian ministers trained in the prevailing sensationalist psychology of John Locke, Coleridge’s speculative and theological meditations, with their countervailing focus on human spirituality and intuition, presented an oasis in an intellectual wasteland. Where Locke’s materialism seemingly divorced humanity from spirituality, Coleridge fused the material with the spiritual in dense but inspirational works like Aids to Reflection and The Friend, which pointed out an alternative way: the stream of German Transcendental Idealism flowing from Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Schelling. Although British editions of some of Coleridge’s works were available in the United States, the American publication of Congregationalist minister James Marsh’s edition of Coleridge’s Aids to Reflection in 1829 (and then The Friend in 1833) almost single-handedly galvanized those New Englanders who began to meet soon thereafter in a Transcendental Club and to call themselves Transcendentalists—as would members such as Emerson, Bronson Alcott, Orestes Brownson, Theodore Parker, Margaret Fuller, and Henry Thoreau.¹³

    Coleridge’s strategy defend’s Transcendental Idealism against skepticism and upholds the primacy of reason or intuitive knowledge over that which is based on observation or reflection alone. The human mind was not the passive blank slate Locke imagined; nor was the world a deterministic machine, as Jonathan Edwards, America’s first systematic philosopher-theologian, had concluded. Believing that the mind has active powers of reason and understanding, Coleridge makes full freedom of the will of reason his own foundational article of belief. He can turn then from metaphysical theology to denominational warfare in daily life and counsel the readers of Aids to Reflection: "Now as the difference of a captive and enslaved Will, and no will at all, such is the difference between the Lutheranism of Calvin and the Calvinism of Jonathan Edwards." That Coleridge wields here the metaphor of slavery to link the metaphysics of free will to the worldly wars over religious freedom points to another of his services to Transcendentalism. For having synthesized a convincing concept of free will, Coleridge provided avowed Transcendentalists—and Frederick Douglass as well—a viable philosophical framework within which to dispute morally the material institution of human slavery itself.

    As such, though none of his life stories makes it explicit, Douglass found in Coleridge’s work a religious and philosophical and aesthetic synthesis as serviceable to him as to any card-carrying Transcendentalist. But he had come to Coleridge through a different route and for different reasons. Most members of the Transcendental Club were college-educated Unitarian ministers or Unitarian lay preachers rebelling against both the Trinitarian doctrines of other Protestant denominations and the corpse-cold Lockean rationalism of their own. Douglass by contrast, though a licensed lay preacher himself, remained faithful instead to his African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, and was troubled much less by Trinitarian controversies and the orthodox Christian concept of supernatural miracles—which Emerson had notoriously characterized as a theological Monster—than by orthodox scriptural interpretations of the Old Testament curse of Ham and by the metaphysical underpinnings of the prevailing Lockean sanctification of individual property rights over the more enlightened and revolutionary Rights of Man. The Coleridgean epigraph Douglass placed on the title page of My Bondage and My Freedom—By a principle essential to Christianity, a PERSON is eternally differenced from a THING; so that the idea of a HUMAN BEING, necessarily excludes the idea of PROPERTY IN THAT BEING—suggests that Douglass was drawn to Coleridge’s writings first and foremost by their religious and political significance and their rejection of conventional ideas about property rights, more than their theories of moral psychology and aesthetics. But whatever his point of entry, their continuing appeal for Douglass, as for many of the Transcendentalists, lay also in Coleridge’s romanticist drive to integrate politics, art, morals, and theology, on the one hand, and to pursue the meaning and prospects of freedom, in all its dimensions, on the other. Though Coleridge’s disillusioned reaction to the French Revolution would eventually lead him in later life to become perhaps the foremost English conservative thinker of the nineteenth century, his youthful communitarian radicalism led him to mount utopian dreams, with Robert Southey, for a proposed egalitarian pantisocracy in Virginia; to share, with William Godwin, the conviction that social evils were traceable to social institutions, especially private property; and to promote, alongside his close friend Thomas Clarkson, the immediate abolition of slavery and the slave trade. Of particular interest, of course, to Douglass, the moral foundation of Coleridge’s antislavery stance, as well as his theories about the social and political significance of private property, centered on the philosophical distinctions between PERSONS and THINGS, and between the nature of reason and understanding that Coleridge elaborated as early as 1795,14 but most fully in his 1809 edition of The Friend, and then later in Aids to Reflection:

    [A]ll morality is grounded in the Reason. Every man is born with the faculty of Reason: and whatever is without it, be the shape what it may, is not a man or PERSON but a THING. Hence the sacred Principle, recognized by all Laws human and divine, the principle indeed which is the ground-work of all law and justice, that a person can never become a thing, nor be treated as such without wrong … [As] the faculty of Reason implies Free-agency, morality (ie. the dictate of Reason) gives to every rational Being the right of acting as a free agent, of finally determining his conduct by his own Will, according to his own conscience: and this right is inalienable except by guilt, which is an act of Self-forfeiture, and the consequences therefore to be considered as the criminal’s own moral election. In respect of their Reason all men are equal. The measure of the Understanding and of all other faculties of man, is different in different persons: but Reason is not susceptible of degree.¹⁵

    We do not yet know at what specific point or by what process Frederick Douglass began integrating Coleridgean theories and motifs into his own public rhetoric and private writings; but in May 1854, the year before he published My Bondage and My Freedom, he delivered an address in New York City, We Are in the Midst of a Moral Revolution, that reveals an already powerful fusion of the English philosopher-poet’s moral and metaphysical themes with the high style and magnetic persona of Douglass’s own platform oratory. He opened his address with the announcement that within a fortnight more than thirty passengers had crossed through the city on the Underground Railroad which he himself had long served as a conductor. Douglass then pounded out a drumroll of carefully weighted rhetorical questions, and proceeded to conduct his audience on an imaginary pilgrimage into the slave-power’s grotesquely inverted underworld of spiritual darkness and danger:

    Is not this anti-slavery movement a grand delusion? Are the sable descendants of Africa now in this country equal members of the human family? Is it your duty, my duty and the duty of us all to labor for their emancipation and enfranchisement? Was the holy apostle really rapt in the hallowed fires of inspiration when he uttered the sublime declaration that of one blood God made all nations of men to dwell upon all the face of the earth, or was he mistaken? Is Liberty a high and holy human right, inherent, indestructible, and inseparable from the constitution and the nature of man, or is it the mere fantasy of dreamers and poets, the unsubstantial and shadowy coinage of a brilliant but disordered and shattered mind? Am I really a man or am I a beast of burden, a suitable article of property, a piece of merchandise? I have sometimes thought myself a man, and have been occasionally regarded and treated as a man; but am I not mistaken? And have I not on this occasion strayed away from the society of my kind, and violated the divine order of things in presuming to stand here in the presence of this evidently intelligent audience, for the purpose of speaking what I think and feel on the subject of American slavery? … Well, sir, we are in the midst of not a physical, but a moral revolution…. We are now involved in moral darkness, and for all the purposes of freedom in one half of this land, night has already taken the place of day; robbery, murder, and rape, the deeds of darkness, stalk abroad in the daytime, while innocence, mercy, and goodness venture forth in the night. To three millions of the people of this country the joyous light of the sun has already become grievous. The fugitive takes up his solitary journey for freedom, not by the light of the rising day, but in the darkness of midnight. The ghost of Denmark’s murdered king did not observe more cautiously the approach of morning than these lonely travelers from the house of American bondage. ¹⁶

    Capping the passage with gothic allusion to Shakespeare’s spectral tragedy of assassination and vengeance, Douglass draws here on specifically Coleridgean formulations of reason, will, understanding, human equality, and the social spectre of humanity reduced to property; and Douglass’s appeal to Coleridge’s conception of liberty carries veiled but unmistakable allusions also to Coleridge’s well-publicized angst over his opium addiction and his looming fears of insanity. But all these are subsumed in the broader design of Douglass’s centering assault on the unnatural horrors of enslavement for the questing human spirit—the drama of anti-imperial consciousness and individuality around which My Bondage and My Freedom revolves.

    It was accordingly more than apropos to Douglass’s reflections on rewriting his life that Aids to Reflection, as Coleridge tells his readers in the preface, was designed for all who, desirous of building up manly character in the light of distinct consciousness, are content to study the principles of moral Architecture on the several grounds of prudence, morality, and religion. Designed most particularly for students intended for the Ministry or the studious Young at the close of their education or on their first entrance into the duties of manhood and the rights of self-government, Aids proceeds to assert that there is one art of which every man should be the master, the art of REFLECTION, and then asks "if you are not a thinking man, to what purpose are you a man at all? In like manner, there is one knowledge, which it is every man’s interest and duty to acquire, namely, SELF-KNOWLEDGE." Aids served in this regard as a complement to Coleridge’s earlier Biographia Literaria (1817). Both works mobilize around the transcendental focus on self-consciousness, which Coleridge roots platonically in the imperatives of the ancient Delphic Oracle, Know Thyself! The eccentric, diffusely auto-biographical Biographia probes what Coleridge calls the mind’s self-experience in the act of thinking, and it presents a concept of the self from the perspective of its creative role in a whirling vortex of intellectual influences and issues. Written during a period of great personal angst when opium did indeed threaten to destroy his mind, and erotic failures his belief in love, it crystallizes Coleridge’s redemptive faith in the powers of imagination above all: that primary and especially secondary imagination (which in a famous passage he rhapsodizes about mythopoetically as a repetition in the finite human mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM) could rescue a life from unimaginably catastrophic conditions. By contrast, Aids to Reflection is only obliquely autobiographical and much more carefully designed. It dramatizes the intention to form the human mind anew after the DIVINE IMAGE, through which Coleridge takes up the ancient Platonist challenge of imitating the Divine. This he does by constructing an ascending Neoplatonic spiral of aphoristic dialogues and spiritual exercises intended to metaphorically return the soul to its heavenly home. Taken together, as Emerson did and as Douglass apparently did as well—but so differently—the two books together served as a kind of vast, eclectic manual on how simultaneously to reimagine and recombine the forces and fragments within the self, how to recognize words and language not as THINGS but as LIVING POWERS, and how to write Auto-biography instead of conventional first-person narrative or memoir.

    As various clues and his fiery address on moral revolution suggest, Douglass’s reflections on Coleridge’s volumes provided crucial guidance while he wrestled with and reimagined his own life during the composition of My Bondage and My Freedom. Douglass exhibits—at those moments in the book when his narrating voice shifts from first-person private to first-person oracular, or from first to third person—a more radical detachment of present from past self than was evident in his 1845 Narrative, a detachment reminiscent of the mind’s self-experience in the act of thinking that had obsessed Coleridge and led him to generate fragments of Auto-biography in a variety of forms, as vehicles for dramatizing the interior transformations of the thinking man’s mind. The greater unity Douglass achieves in his second life writing, which he attempts to explain in his prefatory comments, could have been served perhaps just as fittingly by the apologia Coleridge provided for his own effort: I have used the narration chiefly for the purpose of giving a continuity to the work, in part for the sake of the miscellaneous reflections suggested to me by particular events, but still more as introductory to the statement of my principles in Politics, Religion, and Philosophy, and the application of the rules, deduced from philosophical principles, to poetry and criticism (Biographia Literaria, I).

    Modern editions of My Bondage and My Freedom have grown increasingly sophisticated about a variety of strategies for reading and understanding Douglass’s extraordinary Auto-biography but our views of his aesthetic outlook and compositional principles—his poetics as autobiographer—remain, I am afraid, opaque. Though we have fewer extra-authorial guides to Frederick Douglass’s interior life and Individuality than we might like, we have not listened carefully enough perhaps to those hints he has already explicitly left us. Recent comparative readings of his two antebellum accounts largely concur in admitting that My Bondage and My Freedom adds remarkably little materially to the cast of characters or the compendium of episodes presented in the earlier Narrative. We can clearly see that, with the inevitable additions representing a decade more of lived experience as a free man, the whole of his life is rendered with a greater linguistic and literary sophistication appropriate to Douglass’s more mature psychological and political understanding of his antebellum world and his self. But we should not forget that the LIVING POWER, the philosophical and religious and political and emotional adventure of Frederick Douglass’s transcendental retelling of his life in slavery and in freedom, is contained both above and below the two mirroring narrative surfaces of his books. This Givens Collection edition of My Bondage and My Freedom is offered in the hope that it can provide yet another chance for us as readers to think more closely with a dedicated thinking man about how we might grapple with the complexly interwoven meanings of his life and our own.

    —John S. Wright

    1 Dickson J. Preston , Young Frederick Douglass: The Maryland Years (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), 146-47.

    2 Preston, 148-49.

    3 Donald McQuade , ed., Selected Writings of Emerson (New York: Modern Library, 1981), 46.

    4 Selected Writings of Emerson, 52.

    5 Lawrence Buell , Literary Transcendentalism: Style and Vision in the American Renaissance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1973), 289.

    6 Selected Writings of Emerson, 52.

    7 Selected Writings of Emerson, 53.

    8 Selected Writings of Emerson, 87.

    9 Philip Foner , Introduction to My Bondage and My Freedom (New York: Dover, 1969), vii.; Oxford Companion to African American Literature, 526.

    10 Margaret Fuller , [Review of Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave ], reprinted in William Andrews, ed. Critical Essays on Frederick Douglass (Boston: G. K. Hall & Co., 1991), 21-3.

    11 Ephraim Peabody , Narratives of Fugitive Slaves , in Andrews, 24-7.

    12 Henry Louis Gates , ed., Frederick Douglass: Autobiographies (New York: Library Classics of America, 1994), 1056-57.

    13 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor , in Wesley T. Mott, ed., Biographical Dictionary of Transcendentalism (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1996), 48-50.

    14 Barbara Rooke , ed., The Collected Works if Samuel Taylor Coleridge , v. 4: The Friend (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969), 78 n.11.

    15 Coleridge, The Friend, 189-90.

    16 John Blassingame , ed., The Frederick Douglass Papers:, Series One: Speeches, Debates, and Interviews , Volume 2: 1847-54 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), 480-81.

    CONTENTS

    Editor’s Preface

    Introduction

    Life as a Slave

    I.

    The Author’s Childhood.

    Place of Birth,

    Character of the District,

    Time of Birth—My Grandparents,

    Character of My Grandmother,

    The Log Cabin—Its Charms,

    First Knowledge of Being a Slave,

    Old Master—Griefs and Joys of Childhood,

    Comparative Happiness of the Slave-Boy and His White Brother,

    Chapter II.

    The Author Removed from His First Home.

    The Name Old Master a Terror,

    Home Attractions—Dread of Being Removed from Tuckahoe,

    The Journey to Col. Lloyd’s Plantation,

    Scene on Reaching Old Master’s,

    First Meeting with My Brothers and Sisters,

    Departure of Grandmother—Author’s Grief,

    Chapter III.

    The Author’s Parentage.

    Author’s Father Shrouded in Mystery,

    My Mother—Her Personal Appearance,

    Her Situation—Visits to Her Boy,

    Cruelty of Aunt Katy—Threatened Starvation,

    My Mother’s Interference,

    Her Death,

    Her Love of Knowledge,

    Penalty for Having a White Father,

    Chapter IV.

    A General Survey of the Slave Plantation.

    Slaveholding Cruelty Restrained by Public Opinion,

    Isolation of Lloyd’s Plantation,

    Beyond the Reach of Public Opinion,

    Religion and Politics Alike Excluded,

    Natural and Artificial Charms of the Place,

    The Great House,

    Etiquette among Slaves,

    The Comic Slave-Doctor,

    Praying and Flogging,

    Business of Old Master,

    Sufferings from Hunger,

    Jargon of the Plantation,

    Family of Col. Lloyd—Mas’ Daniel,

    Family of Old Master—Social Position,

    Chapter V.

    Gradual Initiation into the Mysteries of Slavery.

    Growing Acquaintance with Old Master—His Character,

    Evils of Unrestrained Passion—A Man of Trouble,

    Supposed Obtuseness of Slave—Children,

    Brutal Outrage on My Aunt Milly by a Drunken Overseer,

    Slaveholders’ Impatience at Appeals Against Cruelty,

    Wisdom of Appealing to Superiors,

    Attempt to Break Up a Courtship,

    Slavery Destroys All Incentives to a Virtuous Life,

    A Harrowing Scene,

    Chapter VI.

    Treatment of Slaves on Lloyd’s Plantation.

    The Author’s Early Reflections on Slavery,

    Conclusions at Which he Arrived,

    Presentiment of One Day Being a Freeman,

    Combat Between an Overseer and a Slave-Woman,

    Nelly’s Noble Resistance,

    Advantages of Resistance,

    Mr. Sevier, the Brutal Overseer, and His Successors,

    Allowance-Day on the Home Plantation,

    The Singing of the Slaves No Proof of Contentment,

    Food and Clothing of the Slaves,

    Naked Children,

    Nursing Children Carried to the Field,

    Description of the Cowskin,

    Manner of Making the Ash Cake—The Dinner Hour,

    Contrast at the Great House,

    Chapter VII.

    Life in the Great House.

    Comfort and Luxuries—Elaborate Expenditure,

    Men and Maid Servants—Black Aristocracy,

    Stable and Carriage House,

    Deceptive Character of Slavery,

    Slaves and Slaveholders Alike Unhappy,

    Fretfulness and Capriciousness of Slaveholders,

    Whipping of Old Barney by Col. Lloyd,

    William Wilks, a Supposed Son of Col. Lloyd,

    Curious Incident—Penalty of Telling the Truth,

    Preference of Slaves for Rich Masters,

    Chapter VIII.

    A Chapter of Horrors.

    Austin Gore—Sketch of His Character,

    Absolute Power of Overseers,

    Murder of Denby—How It Occurred,

    How Gore Made Peace with Col. Lloyd,

    Murder of a Slave-Girl by Mrs. Hicks,

    No Laws for the Protection of Slaves Can Be Enforced,

    Chapter IX.

    Personal Treatment of the Author.

    Miss Lucretia Auld—Her Kindness,

    A Battle with Ike, and Its Consequences,

    Beams of Sunlight,

    Suffering from Cold—How We Took Our Meals,

    Orders to Prepare to Go to Baltimore—Extraordinary Cleansing,

    Cousin Tom’s Description of Baltimore,

    The Journey,

    Arrival at Baltimore,

    Kindness of My New Mistress—Little Tommy,

    A Turning Point in My History,

    Chapter X.

    Life in Baltimore.

    City Annoyances—Plantation Regrets,

    My Improved Condition,

    Character of My New Master, Hugh Auld,

    My Occupation—Increased Sensitiveness,

    Commencement of Learning to Read—Why Discontinued,

    Master Hugh’s Exposition of the True Philosophy of Slavery,

    Increased Determination to Learn,

    Contrast between City and Plantation Slaves,

    Mrs. Hamilton’s Brutal Treatment of Her Slaves,

    Chapter XI.

    A Change Came o’er the Spirit of my Dream.

    Knowledge Acquired by Stealth,

    My Mistress—Her Slaveholding Duties,

    Deplorable Effects on Her Character,

    How I Pursued My Education—My Tutors,

    My Deliberations on the Character of Slavery,

    The Columbian Orator and Its Lessons,

    Speeches of Chatham, Sheridan, Pitt, and Fox,

    Knowledge Ever Increasing—My Eyes Opened,

    How I Pined for Liberty,

    Dissatisfaction of My Poor Mistress,

    Chapter XII.

    Religious Nature Awakened.

    Abolitionists Spoken of,

    Eagerness to Know What the Word Meant,

    The Enigma Solved—Turner’s Insurrection,

    First Awakened on the Subject of Religion,

    My Friend Lawson—His Character and Occupation,

    Comfort Derived from His Teaching,

    New Hopes and Aspirations,

    The Irishmen on the Wharf—Their Sympathy,

    How I Learned to Write,

    Chapter XIII.

    The Vicissitudes of Slave Life.

    Death of Young Master Richard,

    Author’s Presence Required at the Division of Old Master’s Property,

    Attachment of Slaves to Their Homes,

    Sad Prospects and Grief,

    General Dread of Master Andrew—His Cruelty,

    Return to Baltimore—Death of Mistress Lucretia,

    My Poor Old Grandmother—Her Sad Fate,

    Second Marriage of Master Thomas,

    Again Removed from Master Hugh’s,

    Regrets at Leaving Baltimore,

    A Plan of Escape Entertained,

    Chapter XIV.

    Experience in St. Michael’s.

    The Village and Its Inhabitants,

    Meteoric Phenomena—Author’s Impressions,

    Character of My New Master and Mistress,

    Allowance of Food—Sufferings from Hunger,

    Stealing and Its Vindication,

    A New Profession of Faith,

    Morality of Free Society Has No Application to Slave Society,

    Southern Camp-Meeting—Master Thomas Professes Conversion,

    Hopes and Suspicions,

    The Result—Faith and Works Entirely at Variance,

    No More Meal Brought from the Mill—Methodist Preachers,

    Their Utter Disregard of the Slaves—An Exception,

    A Sabbath School Instituted,

    How Broken Up and by Whom,

    Cruel Treatment of Cousin Henny by Master Thomas,

    Differences with Master Thomas, and the Consequences,

    Edward Covey—His Character,

    Chapter XV.

    Covey, the Negro Breaker.

    Journey to My New Master’s,

    Meditations by the Way,

    View of Covey’s Residence—The Family,

    Awkwardness as a Field Hand,

    First Adventure at Ox Driving,

    Unruly Animals—Hair-Breadth Escapes,

    Oxen and Men—Points of Similarity,

    Sent Back to the Woods,

    Covey’s Manner of Proceeding to Whip,

    His Cunning and Trickery—Severe Labor,

    Family Worship,

    Shocking Contempt for Chastity—An Illustration,

    Author Broken Down—His Only Leisure Time,

    Freedom of the Ships and His Own Slavery Contrasted,

    Anguish beyond Description,

    Chapter XVI.

    Another Pressure of the Tyrant’s Vice.

    Experience at Covey’s Summed Up,

    Scene in the Treading Yard,

    Author Taken Ill,

    Unusual Brutality of Covey,

    Escape to St. Michael’s—Suffering in the Woods,

    The Case Prejudged-Driven Back to Covey’s,

    Circumstances Narrated to Master Thomas—His Bearing,

    Chapter XVII.

    The Last Flogging.

    A Sleepless Night—Return to Covey’s,

    His Conduct—Again Escape to the Woods,

    Deplorable Spectacle—Night in the Woods,

    An Alarm—A Friend, Not an Enemy,

    Sandy’s Hospitality—The Ash Cake Supper,

    A Conjuror—His Advice—The Magic Root,

    Want of Faith—The Talisman Accepted,

    Meeting with Covey—His Sunday Face,

    His Manner on Monday—A Defensive Resolve,

    A Rough and Tumble Fight,

    Unexpected Resistance,

    Covey’s Ineffectual Commands for Assistance,

    The Victory and its Results,

    Effects upon My Own Character,

    Chapter XVIII.

    New Relations and Duties.

    Change of Masters—Resolve to Fight My Way,

    Ability to Read a Cause of Prejudice,

    Manner of Spending the Holidays,

    The Effects—Sharp Hit at Slavery,

    A Device of Slavery,

    Difference between Master Freeland and Covey,

    An Irreligious Master Preferred—The Reasons Why,

    The Reverend Rigby Hopkins,

    Catalogue of Floggable Offenses,

    Rivalry among Slaves Encouraged,

    Improved Condition at Freeland’s,

    Reasons for Continued Discontent,

    Congenial Society—The Sabbath School,

    Its Members—Necessity for Secrecy,

    Affectionate Relations of Master and Pupils,

    Confidence and Friendship among Slaves,

    Slavery the Inviter of Vengeance,

    Chapter XIX.

    The Run-Away Plot.

    New Year’s Thoughts and Reflections,

    Again Hired by Freeland,

    Still Devising Plans for Gaining Freedom,

    A Solemn Vow—Plan Divulged to the Slaves,

    Arguments in Its Support—The Scheme Gains Favor,

    Danger of Discovery—Difficulty of Concealment,

    Skill of Slaveholders—Suspicion and Coercion,

    Hymns with a Double Meaning,

    Author’s Confederates—His Influence over Them,

    Preliminary Consultations—Pass-Words,

    Conflict of Hopes and Fears—Ignorance of Geography,

    Survey of Imaginary Difficulties,

    Effect upon Our Minds,

    Sandy Becomes a Dreamer,

    Route to the North Laid Out—Objections Considered,

    Frauds Practiced on Freeman—Passes Written,

    Anxieties as the Time Drew Near,

    Appeals to Comrades—A Presentiment,

    The Betrayal Discovered,

    Manner of Arresting Us

    Resistance Made by Henry Harris—Its Effects,

    Unique Speech of Mrs. Freeland,

    Our Sad Procession to Easton,

    Passes Eaten—The Examination at St. Michael’s,

    No Evidence Produced—Who Was the Betrayer?

    Dragged Behind Horses—The Jail a Relief,

    A New Set of Tormentors,

    Release of My Companions,

    Author Taken Out of Prison and Sent to Baltimore,

    Chapter XX.

    Apprenticeship Life.

    Nothing Lost by the Attempt to Run Away,

    Reasons for Sending the Author Away,

    Unlooked for Clemency in Master Thomas,

    Return to Baltimore—Change in Little Tommy,

    Trials in Gardiner’s Ship Yard,

    Desperate Fight with the White Apprentices,

    Conflict between White and Black Labor,

    Description of the Outrage,

    Conduct of Master Hugh,

    Testimony of a Colored Man Nothing,

    Spirit of Slavery in Baltimore,

    Author’s Condition Improves,

    New Associates—Benefits Derived Therefrom,

    How to Make a Contented Slave,

    Chapter XXI.

    My Escape from Slavery.

    Manner of Escape Not Given—Reasons why,

    Craftiness and Malice of Slaveholders,

    Want of Wisdom in Publishing Details of Escape,

    Suspicions Implied by Master Hugh’s Manner,

    Difficulty of Escape—Discontent,

    Author Allowed to Hire His Time,

    A Gleam of Hope—Hard Terms,

    Author Attends Camp Meeting without Permission,

    Anger of Master Hugh Thereat,

    Plans of Escape Accelerated Thereby,

    Painful Thoughts of Separation from Friends,

    The Attempt Made—Its Success,

    Life as a Freeman.

    Chapter XXII.

    Liberty Attained.

    Author a Wanderer in New York—Feelings on Reaching That City,

    An Old Acquaintance Met,

    Unfavorable Impressions—Loneliness and Insecurity,

    Apology for Slaves Who Return to Their Masters,

    Make Known My Condition—David Ruggles,

    Author’s Marriage—Removal to New Bedford,

    Kindness of Nathan Johnson—Change of Name,

    Dark Notions of Northern Civilization Enlightened,

    Contrast between the North and the South,

    Colored People in New Bedford,

    An Incident Illustrating Their Spirit,

    The Author Finds Employment,

    Denied Work at His Trade,

    The First Winter at the North,

    Proscription in the Church,

    An Incident at the Communion Table,

    First Acquaintance with the Liberator,

    Character of Its Editor,

    Prompt Attendance at Anti-Slavery Meetings,

    Chapter XXIII.

    Introduced to the Abolitionists.

    Anti-Slavery Convention at Nantucket,

    Author’s First Speech,

    Becomes a Public Lecturer,

    Youthful Enthusiasm,

    Difficulties in His Position,

    His Fugitive Slaveship Doubted,

    Publishes His Narrative—Danger of Recapture,

    Advised Not to Publish His Story,

    Chapter XXIV.

    Twenty-one Months in Great Britain.

    Good Arising Out of Unpropitious Events,

    Embarks for England—Denied Cabin Passage,

    Mob on Board the Cambria—Happy Introduction to the British Public,

    Letter to Mr. Garrison,

    We Don’t Allow Niggers in Here,

    Time and Labors Abroad,

    Freedom Purchased—Free Papers,

    Abolitionists Displeased with the Ransom,

    How the Author’s Energies Were Directed in Great Britain,

    Reception Speech in Finsbury Chapel, London,

    Character of the Speech Defended,

    Causes Contributing to My Success,

    The Free Church of Scotland—Its Position,

    Agitation of the Slavery Question,

    Debates in the General Assembly—Send Back the Money,

    Dr. Cunningham’s Speech—A Striking Incident,

    The World’s Temperance Convention—Collision with Dr. Cox,

    Proposed Testimonial to the Author,

    Project of Establishing a Newspaper,

    Return to America—Again Denied Cabin Passage,

    Chapter XXV.

    Various Incidents.

    Unexpected Opposition to My Newspaper Enterprise,

    The Objections to It—Their Plausibility Admitted,

    Motives for Going to Rochester,

    A Change of Opinions—Causes Leading to It,

    Prejudice Against Color—The "Jim Crow

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