Douglass’s change of heart brought him into direct conflict with his former friends. He now stood on his own, attracted new disciples to the movement, and advocated greater black participation within the abolition crusade. “Ironically,” Sterling Lecater Bland, Jr., writes, “in the same way former slaves took language and transformed it into something slaveholders never intended, so, too, . . . [did] Douglass take the language of Garrisonian abolitionism and transform it into something abolitionists never intended.”61
Following his return from England, Douglass openly favored political action, supporting the Liberty Party in 1847 and the Free Soil Party in 1848. In the years after the Compromise of 1850 he promoted upstate New York abolitionist Gerrit Smith’s Radical Abolitionist Party and favored the new Republican Party that formed following passage of the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act. Douglass hoped that these political parties would aggressively legislate emancipation and then confer full citizenship on African Americans.62 During the 1850s Douglass’s emerging ideology included an integrated program to uplift free blacks, including protest, self-help, race pride, racial solidarity, and economic development.63 Douglass also committed what the Garrisonians considered a cardinal sin—allying politically and financially with Smith, Garrison’s bitter enemy. Douglass in fact dedicated his second autobiography to Smith. By 1860 Garrison judged Douglass’s apostasy so egregious that he denounced him “as destitute of every principle of honor, ungrateful to the last degree, and malevolent in spirit. He is not worthy of respect, confidence, or countenance.”64
It is essential, then, to frame the publication of My Bondage and My Freedom within the context of Douglass’s break from Garrison, the evolving place of slavery as a political force in the 1850s, and Douglass’s emergence as a political abolitionist. A decade after Douglass published his Narrative, Andrews explains, “a chastened Douglass testified to the prejudice and paternalism among the Garrisonian abolitionists”; and, not surprisingly, in My Bondage and My Freedom Douglass discussed in detail the segregation and other forms of racism he encountered while living as a freeman in the North.65
But while committed to attacking racial injustice, North and South, Douglass was careful not to use his personal history to glorify himself or to attack directly the “peculiar institution.” “It is not to illustrate any heroic achievements of a man,” he wrote in the preface to My Bondage and My Freedom, “but to vindicate a just and beneficent principle, in its application to the whole human family, by letting in the light of truth upon a system, esteemed by some as a blessing, and by others as a curse and a crime” (6). A leader in the wave of antebellum reform, including abolition, women’s rights, and the Negro convention movement, Douglass was determined to let facts and theory, not personal pleading, bury slavery. In 1845 he had been a recently escaped slave. In 1855 he was a successful, self-confident, and independent black activist with a following among free blacks in the North.
Whereas Garrison and Phillips had introduced Douglass’s Narrative in 1845, ten years later Dr. James McCune Smith, the Scottish-trained physician, black abolitionist, and vituperative opponent of Garrison, introduced My Bondage and My Freedom. “The son of a self-emancipated bond-woman,” Smith wrote, “I feel joy in introducing to you my brother, who has rent his own bonds, and who, in his every relation . . . does honor to the land which gave him birth.” Smith went on to laud My Bondage and My Freedom as “an American book, for Americans, in the fullest sense of the idea. It shows that the worst of our institutions, in its worst aspect, cannot keep down energy, truthfulness, and earnest struggle for the right” (24).
The publisher Miller, Orton, and Mulligan of New York City and Auburn, New York, issued Douglass’s 464-page My Bondage and My Freedom in 1855. It was reprinted in 1856 and 1857, and in 1860 Ottilie Assing, a German journalist, admirer, and close friend of Douglass’s translated the book into German as Sclaverei und Freiheit: Autobiographie von Frederick Douglass, making the text available to a larger audience, especially to the failed European revolutionaries of 1848. Douglass’s life testified to man’s persistent will to be free and appealed to those who sought to revive “liberalism” in Europe.
In her preface to the German edition, Assing emphasized the hypocrisy of Americans maintaining slavery—“a system of oppression whose cruelty has hardly been paralleled in the history of all peoples and countries”—“under a so-called republican form of government.” She lavished praise on Douglass as a “noble . . . passionate, spirited, gifted, and dynamic man, with [a] . . . burning love of freedom and the virtuosity of his implacable hatred of slavery and slave masters.” Had Douglass been born a white man, Assing concluded, his brilliance would have taken him to the greatest heights in America. “But as a mulatto—even though he is a famous man whose speeches attract large and eager crowds, whose importance and influence no one can gainsay, a man who belongs to the true elite of society, a man of intellect, personal amiability, and the purest character—he is excluded from any public office.” In 1879 Assing urged Douglass to prepare yet a third version of his autobiography, one that chronicled his life since breaking “the chains of a second bondage.”66
Not surprisingly, Garrison did not share Assing’s infatuation with Douglass, and he used his influence among reformers to guarantee that Douglass’s text would receive as little attention as possible. In January 1856, for example, Garrison’s The Liberator blasted the influential British abolitionist George Thompson for praising My Bondage and My Freedom as “frank and ingenious.” While Garrison agreed that the narrative of Douglass’s escape from slavery was “remarkable,” he panned his former-associate-turned-blasphemer’s treatment of his life as a freeman as infected “with the virus of personal malignity.” Under pressure from Garrison, Thompson retracted his initial positive comments on Douglass’s book and sheepishly toed Garrison’s line .67
Others, however, welcomed Douglass’s My Bondage and My Freedom. Writing in the New York Independent, Harriet Beecher Stowe complimented the book’s literary style over the “rude form” of his Narrative. She said that his second autobiography would “compare favorably in point of style and execution with any work of the kind in our language. Douglass has a natural genius for writing.”68 Putnam’s Monthly Magazine described Douglass as “the well-known fugitive slave” and found much to praise, “much that is profoundly touching,” in My Bondage and My Freedom. “The mere fact that the member of an outcast and enslaved race should accomplish his freedom, and educate himself up to an equality of intellectual and moral vigor with the leaders of the race by which he was held in bondage, is, in itself, so remarkable, that the story of the change cannot be otherwise than exciting.” The reviewer judged Douglass’s text as absorbing as Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) and considered this all the more significant because My Bondage and My Freedom was nonfiction. Admitting that it was difficult to ascertain the degree to which Douglass’s “prejudices, and remembrances of wrong, may have deepened the color of his pictures,” the critic nonetheless accepted them to be generally “truthful.” “He writes bitterly . . . taking incidents of individual experience for essential characteristics, but not more bitterly than the circumstances seem to justify.” Douglass must have appreciated the reviewer’s observation that while he denounced slavery and slaveholders, he refused to castigate “the persons whom that system has made.”69
Though My Bondage and My Freedom received less press attention than Douglass’s Narrative had received, it nonetheless sold well. Though reliable sales figures do not remain, the publisher reportedly sold five thousand copies the first two days the book was available and fifteen thousand copies in the first two months.70 Assing wrote that the book sold at least twenty thousand copies,71 while Quarles estimated around eighteen thousand copies.72 Douglass helped market his book by serializing excerpts in the North Star and by promoting it while on the lecture circuit.73 In August 1858, for example, while Douglass was speaking to an audience in Poughkeepsie, New York, one of his sons worked
the crowd selling copies of My Bondage and My Freedom for one dollar apiece.74 Two years earlier, while commenting on his personal finances, Douglass informed Gerrit Smith: “My Bondage and My Freedom will sell, as long as I can lecture—so that I regard myself well provided for for the present.”75
During the remaining four decades of his distinguished career following publication of My Bondage and My Freedom, Douglass continued to lecture in the cause of equality, freedom, and justice. He was not only an author, editor, and activist, but also a civil servant, serving from 1876 to 1877 as U.S. marshal for the District of Columbia, in 1881 as recorder of deeds for the District of Columbia, and from 1889 to 1891 as minister and consul general to Haiti. In Life and Times, another “rewriting” of Douglass’s life, though less inflammatory in its condemnation of slavery than his two previous works, Douglass again exposed “the physical cruelties of the slave system,” contrasting the comforts of the slave masters with the horrid lives of their slaves. “There were pride, pomp, and luxury on the one hand, servility, dejection, and misery on the other,” he wrote .76
Though Douglass devoted little attention to gender per se in his three autobiographies, he nevertheless favored equal rights for all persons, including women. He was a devoted feminist, attending the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848 and agitating over many years for women’s rights as well as for the emancipation of blacks.77 Significantly, women became more central figures in Douglass’s 1855 and 1881 texts than in his 1845 work. This no doubt reflected his own self-confidence and his interactions, personally and professionally, with varieties of women who admired him. Maria Diedrich has recently brought to light Douglass’s close relationship with Assing.78 In 1884 Douglass sparked a national dispute over racial intermarriage when he married Helen Pitts, his white former secretary. Responding to criticism from blacks as well as whites about his interracial marriage, Douglass declared “that there is no division of races. God Almighty made but one race.”79
Though many late-nineteenth-century African Americans criticized Douglass for abandoning the South’s ex-slaves by opposing the exodus of destitute Louisiana and Mississippi blacks to Kansas,80 he nevertheless remained the representative African American of the age.81 Douglass served symbolically as a mediator between black and white, between slave and free, even between the United States and other nations.82 He worried, however, about being considered too representative of all ex-slaves or of all former black abolitionists. Such ex-slaves as Harriet Tubman, he explained, literally had led slaves to freedom while he had only used his voice and pen to plead for emancipation.83 Convinced that by attempting to capture the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, John Brown “was going into a perfect steel-trap, and that once in he would never get out alive,” Douglass elected not to join Brown’s raid in October 1859. “Some have thought that I ought to have gone with him,” Douglass wrote defensively years later, “but I have no reproaches for myself at this point.”84 And despite his appeals to Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton and others to enter the Union Army during the Civil War, Douglass failed to gain an officer’s commission in the U.S. Colored Troops (USCT) and never fought. Two of his sons, however, Lewis and Charles R., served in the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Volunteers, and another, Frederick, worked as a recruiter for the USCT in the South.85
Years before, in his Narrative and in My Bondage and My Freedom, Douglass had begun his war of words against slavery’s arsenal of defenders. He underscored the idea, as Maria Diedrich explains, that “the longing for freedom was ingrained in every human being, in fact constituted humanity; it thus also defined the existence of those who had never had the privilege of experiencing it.”86 Contrary to the theories of proslavery apologists and pseudoscientists of his day, Douglass argued that freedom was the natural condition for all humankind.87 Consequently, he described in great detail the wretched psychological state of those poor African Americans who never had the privilege of experiencing freedom. Writing, for instance, of the deleterious impact slavery had on the black family, Douglass explained in My Bondage and My Freedom that “[i]t made my brothers and sisters strangers to me; it converted the mother that bore me, into a myth; it shrouded my father in mystery, and left me without an intelligible beginning in the world” (47). In each of his autobiographies Douglass connected his personal triumphs and tragedies to the experiences of oppressed peoples worldwide.
As Andrews and many other critics have pointed out, My Bondage and My Freedom is a complex and complicated text. In it Douglass provided subtle clues into his inner struggles with slavery and his conflicted sense of self after his self-emancipation. Though proudly deviant in his autobiographical texts, in My Bondage and My Freedom he also exposed his vulnerability, his inner torment over his conflicted racial identity. “For a time,” Douglass explained, reflecting on his newfound status as a freeman, “I was made to forget that my skin was dark and my hair crisped. For a time I regretted that I could not have shared the hardships and dangers endured by the earlier workers for the slave’s release. I soon, however, found that my enthusiasm had been extravagant; that hardships and dangers were not yet passed; and that the life now before me, had shadows as well as sunbeams” (265). As Douglass hinted in indirect ways, he remained consumed by slavery and racism, longing to overcome the double consciousness (he employed this literary device long before W. E. B. Du Bois) he had inherited as the son of a black mother and a white father and as an American and an African American. His rhetoric of black heroism aside, in My Bondage and My Freedom Douglass exposed his unsettledness and vulnerability, his longing to belong to one race, not two, and to share the privileges of nationality and citizenship of white Americans.
Historians and literary scholars agree that Douglass’s Narrative established his credibility as an authentic critic of slavery. But it was My Bondage and My Freedom that transformed Douglass into America’s foremost spokesmen for American blacks, free and slave, during the tense and politically charged 1850s. Having experienced “the ten thousand discouragements and the powerful hinderances [sic]” confronting black Americans, in 1855 Douglass pledged to fight black slavery in the South and white racism in the North so that “ ‘Ethiopia shall yet reach forth her hand unto God’ ” (298). He interpreted the U.S. Supreme Court’s infamous 1857 Dred Scott v. Sandford decision, denying persons of African descent citizenship, as a rallying cry for black Americans. “Come what will,” Douglass predicted, “in peace or in blood, in judgment or in mercy, slavery is doomed.”88
My Bondage and My Freedom provides an important reading both of Frederick Douglass and of his age. It charts Douglass’s evolution from slave, to ex-slave narrator, to independent abolitionist, to political activist, and penetrates Douglass’s heart and soul after his break with Garrison. His second autobiography chronicled this change and signaled a major departure from his Narrative.
In My Bondage and My Freedom Douglass used the written word as an instrument of selfhood and argument. His book was a drumbeat to arms for African Americans in the 1850s. Soon after, during the Civil War, Douglass put his words into action, pressing President Abraham Lincoln repeatedly to free and arm the slaves. In March 1863 Douglass implored black northerners “to fly to arms, and smite with death the power that would bury the Government and your Liberty in the same hopeless grave.”89 Douglass’s emerging life story had become his life’s work. He spent his remaining years fighting to transform the slaves into free men and women in word as well as in deed.
Notes to the Introduction
1 . Benjamin Quarles, Frederick Douglass (1948; New York: Atheneum, 1968), 1, 111.
2 . Nathan Irvin Huggins, Slave and Citizen: The Life of Frederick Douglass (Boston: Little, Brown, 1980), 21.
3 . David W. Blight, “Introduction: ‘A Psalm of Freedom,’ ” in Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself, ed. David W. Blight (1845; Boston: Bedford Books of St. Martin’s Press, 1993), 8.
4 . William L. Andr
ews, “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass” and “Slave Narrative,” in William L. Andrews, Frances Smith Foster, and Trudier Harris, eds., The Oxford Companion to African American Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 526-27, 668-69.
5 . C. Peter Ripley, “The Autobiographical Writings of Frederick Douglass,” Southern Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of the South 24 (spring 1985): 5.
6 . See William L. Andrews, “Introduction to the 1987 Edition,” in Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom, ed. William L. Andrews (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987), xi-xxx, and his other criticism cited in this introduction.
7 . Stephen Butterfield, Black Autobiography in America (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1974), 65.
8 . Waldo E. Martin, Jr., The Mind of Frederick Douglass (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984), 273.
9 . Andrews, “Douglass, Frederick,” in Andrews, Foster, and Harris, eds., The Oxford Companion to African American Literature , 225.
10 . Peter F. Walker, Moral Choices: Memory, Desire, and Imagination in Nineteenth-Century American Abolition (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978), 212, 222.
11 . Rachelle McGregor-Scissum, “ ‘The Positive Nature of Pain’ in Critical Reflection: Frederick Douglass’s Understanding as Expansion of the Form of his Life in My Bondage and My Freedom and Life and Times of Frederick Douglass” (Ph.D. diss., University of Alabama, 1996), xxv.