Memoir

PROBABLY THE SECOND MOST INFLUENTIAL autobiography of all time was Benjamin Franklin’s. He embarked on it in 1771, the same year Rousseau finished his. Franklin, sixty-six years old at the time and one of the most eminent men in all the colonies, begins in the form of a long letter to his son William, starting with the customary presentation of a rationale. First of all, he imagines William might find it “agreeable” to learn some of the circumstances of his father’s life. (In the course of composition, Franklin became bitterly estranged from William, and he dropped the epistolary motif.) He quickly moves on to other reasons, and these assume that other people besides family members will eventually read the book: “Having emerg’d from the Poverty and Obscurity in which I was born and bred, to a State of Affluence and some Degree of Reputation in the World, and having gone so far thro life with a considerable share of Felicity . . . my Posterity may like to know, as they may find some of them suitable to their own Situations, and therefore fit to be imitated.”

Franklin also says that he is endeavoring to write about his life because he expects to enjoy it. (Here, if nowhere else, he resembles Rousseau, who notes, “In writing about my travels I am as I was when traveling; I cannot bear to arrive.”) Finally, Franklin is the rare if not solitary memoirist who concedes that he writes because “perhaps I shall a good deal gratify my own Vanity. Indeed I scarce ever heard the introductory Words, Without Vanity I may say, &c. but some vain thing immediately follow’d. Most People dislike Vanity in others whatever Share they have of it themselves, but I give it fair Quarter wherever I meet with it.”

Immediately it ’s clear that we are in a different universe from Rousseau’s. Franklin is not quite the petit bourgeois shopkeeper that D. H. Lawrence pilloried in Studies in Classic American Literature, but he is a confident raconteur of polished anecdotes, most accompanied by a lesson or moral. The book is utterly lacking in scandal; one of the only female presences is his wife, whom he refers to as “Miss Read,” and his references to her are discreet and demure. And while Franklin has his low moments, they unanimously involve momentary discomfort or inconvenience, not soul torment or even self-doubt. Thus in an early passage he describes finding himself on the Market Street wharf in Philadelphia in October 1723, at the age of seventeen, having just taken the boat from New Jersey: “I was in my working dress, my best clothes being to come round by sea. I was dirty from my journey; my pockets were stuff ’d out with shirts and stockings; I knew no soul, nor where to look for lodging. I was fatigued with traveling, rowing, and want of rest, I was very hungry; and my whole stock of cash consisted of a Dutch dollar, and about a shilling in copper.”

No problem! Franklin is directed to a baker, where he asks for “three penny-worth of any sort. He gave me, accordingly, three great puffy rolls. I was surpriz’d at the quantity, but took it, and having no room in my pockets, walk’d off with a roll under each arm, and eating the other.” Then he finds comfortable lodging. Then he finds a job as a printer’s helper.

The first part of the book is about a young man striving to improve his circumstances and himself; as a visual aid, Franklin reproduces the chart he drew up showing his weekly performance in the thirteen virtues. In other hands this might not be very sufferable, but Franklin is saved by his self-deprecation, his wit, and his sharp eye for the people and the world around him.

After completing about fifty pages and taking the story up to 1730, Franklin put down his pen. As he succinctly explained, “The affairs of the Revolution occasion’d the interruption.” He was ready to begin again in 1783, and he reproduces, in their entirety, two letters from friends written in that year urging him to continue with the work. Both stress its great potential as a pedagogical tool. The first, by Abel James, points out that the influence autobiographical writings “have upon the minds of youth is very great, and has nowhere appeared to me so plain, as in our public friend ’s [Franklin’s] journals. It almost insensibly leads the youth into the resolution of endeavoring to become as good and eminent as the journalist.” The second correspondent, Benjamin Vaughan, also is in favor of autobiographies, provided that the autobiographer is, like Franklin, of high moral fiber: “If it encourages more writings of the same kind as your own, and induces more men to spend lives fit to be written, it will be worth all Plutarch’s Lives put together.”

So Franklin started in again. He worked intermittently, and by the time of his death, in 1790, had gotten only to the age of fifty-one. Soon afterward, passages from the manuscript appeared in two American periodicals; the following year a French translation of a pirated manuscript appeared in book form, under the title Memoirs of the Private Life of Benjamin Franklin, Written by Himself (Mémoires de la vie privée de Benjamin Franklin, écrits par lui-même). Two years later, two English translations from the French appeared; the editors of the twentieth-century Yale edition calculate that one of them was reprinted 150 times over the next seventy years. Meanwhile, in 1817, Franklin’s grandson William Temple Franklin began bringing out the authorized edition of Franklin’s writings. Greatly concerned with his grandfather’s reputation, he made some 1,200 changes, most of them for the worse, including replacing “stared like a pig poisoned” with “stared with astonishment.”

Since then there have been hundreds, perhaps thousands, of editions of the book; an 1868 one provided the title by which we know it, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. The future banker Thomas Mellon read the book in 1827, when he was fourteen, and later said he regarded “the reading of Franklin’s Autobiography as the turning point of my life.” Upon reaching an eminent position, Mellon had one thousand copies printed up and distributed to young men who came to him seeking advice. Alternatively, Lawrence is far from the only commentator who has criticized the book. In 1870, Mark Twain descried the way it showed Franklin as “living wholly on bread and water, and studying astronomy at meal time—a thing which has brought affliction to millions of boys since, whose fathers had read Franklin’s pernicious biography.”

Benjamin Vaughan’s 1783 letter encouraging Franklin to continue with his Autobiography contains this sentence: “This style of writing seems a little gone out of vogue, and yet it is a very useful one, as it will make a subject of comparison with the lives of various public cut-throats and intriguers, and with absurd monastic self-tormentors or vain literary triflers.” “Absurd monastic self-tormentors” was an obvious gibe at Rousseau, whose Confessions was published the previous year. The “vain literary triflers” were his growing flock of epigones. All of these would be outnumbered, however, by the “public cut-throats and intriguers.” Vaughan was prescient, but even he could not have envisioned how autobiography in early America would become a fertile ground for thieves, murderers, beggars, and marginal individuals of every variety.

To be sure, a substantial number of quite eminent citizens of the period, besides Franklin, were inspired to write their life stories. In a book published in 1779 (and republished at least eighteen times before the Civil War), Colonel Ethan Allen applied some of the conventions of the Indian captivity narrative to his description of cruel treatment by the hands of his British captors. Subsequent autobiographies by notables included Narrative of the Adventures of an American Navy Officer, by Nathaniel Fanning, in 1806; Anne Grant ’s Memoirs of an American Lady, in 1808; and the memoirs of Alexander Graydon, a Revolutionary War veteran and Pennsylvania Federalist, in 1811. One of the biggest successes of antebellum American publishing was A Narrative of the Life of David Crockett, of the State of Tennessee, the 1834 memoirs of the backwoodsman-turned-Indian-fighter-turned-politician, which self-consciously followed Franklin in telling the story of a self-made American man and which continued to be reprinted well into the twentieth century.

Possibly the best-selling book—in any category—of the first half of the nineteenth century was a personal narrative written by a Connecticut merchant captain, James Riley. In 1815, his ship, the Commerce, was wrecked off the coast of Africa. Along with the eleven other survivors, Riley was captured and enslaved by a band of nomadic Arabs. After suffering miserable treatment, Riley eventually came in contact with a British consul who purchased his freedom. Riley’s 1817 account of his experiences, An Authentic Narrative of the Loss of the American Brig Commerce (often referred to as Captain Riley’s Narrative), was an immediate bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic. Not only was it a rip-roaring tale, but in its depictions of the pain and indignity Riley suffered in bondage, it provided the young U.S. abolitionist movement with a talking point on the horrors of slavery. At least seven editions came out within two years, and at least sixteen more American editions appeared between 1820 and 1859. According to American National Biography, “In 1851 a million Americans then alive were said to have read the book, including Abraham Lincoln, who listed it as one of his favorite works.” Equally popular, if less harrowing, was Two Years Before the Mast (1840), by Richard Henry Dana, Jr., the young son of a prominent Massachusetts poet and journalist. Dana’s book was the true story of his time as a common seaman on a five-month voyage around Cape Horn and on to California.

But what was remarkable was how many life stories were being turned out by those hanging on to the lower rungs of the social ladder. Narratives by criminals, in particular, picked up on a longtime trend on the other side of the Atlantic. As early as the late seventeenth century, miscreants of various kinds were telling their stories in the pages of several different English periodicals. One such publication featured the confessions of prisoners executed at Tyburn prison and, according to a contemporary account, “experienced a ten times greater sale than either the Spectator, the Guardian or the Rambler.”

In the colonies, two notable murderers’ tales—A Narrative of the Life Together with the Last Speech, Confession and Solemn Declaration of John Lewis and An Authentic and Particular Account of the Life of Francis Burdett Personel, written by Himself—were published as books in 1762 and 1773, respectively. The narrators were repentant, in the manner of a conversion narrative, but in the books that followed Lewis’s and Personel’s, readers increasingly began to expect violence and gore. A Brief Narrative of the Life and Confession of Barnett Davenport Under Sentence of Death, for a series of the most horrid Murders, ever perpetrated in this Country, or perhaps any other, published in 1780, tried to justify its title by describing in excruciating detail how Davenport, a nineteen-year-old Continental Army deserter, beat to death his landlord, the man’s wife, and one of their three grandchildren, then set fire to the house, causing the death of the remaining two children. Davenport seemed to revel in his crime, referring to the “shrieks, cries, and doleful lamentations” of his victims and noting how the face of one of them was “covered with gore and streaming blood.”

The first-person criminal genre picked up steam after the turn of the century. For her book Interpreting the Self, Diane Bjorklund collated two major bibliographies of American autobiography and found that between 1800 (the year the bibliographers began counting) and 1849, the second-highest occupational category was Criminal/Deviant, accounting for 56 of the 225 published autobiographies, or 24.9 percent. (Clergy/Religious ranked first and Military third.)⁷ Especially among prisoners sentenced to death, a printed confessional narrative became expected. Typically, these texts had an unbeatable combination of chilling details and sanctimonious remorse. Charles Boyington, a journeyman printer convicted of murder, wrote in 1835, “It is natural that the public should anticipate some statement from me: yet it is not for the gratification of curiosity, however laudable, that I have been induced to commence this exposition, but a deep sense of duty to my distant relatives and friends and to my memory.”

Public executions were mass spectacles in the antebellum period. The great popularity of condemned prisoners’ narratives was another reflection of this ghoulish interest, and hack writers competed to get the plum commission as amanuenses. In her fascinating book The Unvarnished Truth: Personal Narratives in Nineteenth-Century America, historian Ann Fabian tells the story of John Lechler, a Pennsylvanian who in 1822 “caught his wife Mary in bed with his friend and neighbor, Bernhart Haag. Haag tried to get away, but while he cowered bare-bottomed in the cellar, Lechler strangled his wife.” Then he picked up his gun, followed Haag home, attempted to shoot him through the door of his house, but missed, killing Mrs. Haag instead. Before he was hanged, he ended up writing two narratives. He explained why in the opening pages of one of them:

My good old friend, Samuel Carpenter, agrees to receive my confession, and have it published to raise a little money, after paying the printers, to educate my poor children. And I declare with my dying breath that it contains the whole truth. The jailor has frequently, as I have told several people, told me that I must give him my confession, because he gave me such good victuals—and at last I was compelled, for I am his poor prisoner, in chains to write a history for him, which he intends to have published also.

As the genre solidified, the texts became marbled with bows to convention: a statement of the criminal’s remorse, an avowal of the confession’s truth, an explanation of how an illiterate prisoner’s testimony was (or was not) rendered into proper English and, frequently, a description of how the document was transferred from the condemned man to the publisher. The confession of Jesse Strang, a notorious murderer executed in 1827, contained a third-person framing narrative of his statement on the gallows: “Holding a pamphlet in his hand, he said, ‘This contains a full confession of the great transaction for which I am about to die, and every word that it contains, to the best of my knowledge and belief, is true: if there is a single word in it that is not true, it has been inserted by mistake and not by design.’ ” Then he handed it to a minister, who arranged to have it published.

One of the blockbusters of early-nineteenth-century American letters was the Memoirs of Stephen Burroughs. Burroughs, the son of a New Hampshire minister, was a self-admitted rogue, acknowledging, for example, that when he posed as a minister, he “violated that principle of veracity which we implicitly pledge ourselves to maintain toward each other.” He also confesses to adultery and details his association with counterfeiters and subsequent three-year imprisonment, his work as an itinerant schoolteacher, his trial on a charge of rape, and his involvement in land fraud. The first volume of the book was published to excellent sales in 1798, the second in 1804, and both together in many editions beginning in 1811.

Autobiography seemed to be sufficiently democratic to embrace all Americans, natives as well as their immigrant captors. In 1832, the Sauk leader and warrior Black Hawk led a party that attempted to reclaim land in Illinois that he believed had been signed away to the United States through illegitimate treaties. Federal and Illinois forces fired on them, even as they waved a surrender flag, eventually killing three hundred of their people (including women and children) and taking Black Hawk and many others prisoner. While in captivity, Black Hawk told his life story to an interpreter. And the result was a bestseller: Life of Ma-Ka-Tai-Me-She-Kia-Kiak, or Black Hawk, Embracing the Traditions of His Nation, Various Wars in Which He Has Been Engaged, and His Account of the Cause and General History of the Black Hawk War of 1832, His Surrender, and Travels Through the United States. The diction is clearly a product of Black Hawk’s white editors, but recent scholarship has shown that the sense of most of the text came from Black Hawk, and, indeed, a sense of dignified outrage emanates from the page. Here is his description of the initial treaty that ceded Indian lands to whites:

Here, for the first time, I touched the goose quill to the treaty—not knowing, however, that by that act I consented to give away my village. Had that been explained to me, I should have opposed it, and never would have signed their treaty, as my recent conduct will clearly prove.

What do we know of the manner of the laws and customs of the white people? They might buy our bodies for dissection, and we would touch the goose quill to confirm it, without knowing what we are doing. This was the case with myself and people in touching the goose quill for the first time. . . .

My reason teaches me that land cannot be sold. The Great Spirit gave it to his children to live upon, and cultivate, as far as is necessary for their subsistence; and so long as they occupy and cultivate it, they have a right to the soil—but if they voluntarily leave it, then any other people have a right to settle upon it. Nothing can be sold, but such things as can be carried away.

Women on the margins told their life stories in striking number as well. In 1809, someone who signed her name “K. White” published a narrative of her Life, Occurrences, Vicissitudes and Present Situation. The book begins with the familiar motif of being taken captive by Indians, but within a few pages she has escaped and moved on to other adventures, including the suicide of her fiancé and marriage to another man, “S. White,” who seduces the maid, impregnates his wife, then abandons her, saddled with debt. As a result of the latter condition, White flees the authorities—occasionally disguising herself as a man—but spends some time in jail. Another woman, Elizabeth Munro Fisher, became embroiled in a legal battle over inherited land with her half brother. Not only did she lose, but she was convicted of forgery and sent to prison for six years. She wrote her memoirs when she was released and self-published them in 1810. Four years later, Lucy Brewer published a book, The Life of Louisa Baker (later reprinted as The Female Marine), telling of her experiences as a prostitute and as a disguised sailor in the War of 1812. The Memoirs of Mrs. Abigail Bailey, published in 1815, is the harrowing tale of the author’s escape from marriage to a violent husband who sexually abused their daughter.

In the 1830s, two sensational memoirs combined a dizzying mix of genres: captivity narratives, gothic novels, and anti-Catholic screeds. The first was credited to a young woman named Rebecca Reed, who had fled from a Charlestown, Massachusetts, convent in 1832 and immediately began telling stories of the abuse she had suffered there. In large part because of these allegations, rioting townspeople burned the convent to the ground. In 1835, a book titled Six Months in a Convent was published under Reed’s name; it detailed the bizarre and cruel practices she had supposedly witnessed and endured. It concluded: “If, in consequence of my having for a time strayed from the true religion, I am enabled to become an humble instrument in the hands of God in warning others of the errors of Romanism, and preventing even one from falling into its snares, and from being shrouded in its delusions, I shall feel richly rewarded.” The book was a smash, selling, according to historian Ray Allen Billington, 200,000 copies in the first month of publication.

The following year saw the publication of Awful Disclosures of the Hotel Dieu Convent of Montreal, or the Secrets of Black Nunnery Revealed, by Maria Monk. Monk had also supposedly escaped from a convent and in the book she exposes its lurid secrets, most of which had to do with nuns being forced to have sex with priests. She also describes a lime pit in the convent’s basement where the murdered progeny of these unions were thrown. The book became an immediate bestseller and Monk was taken up by New York society. However, even more so than Reed’s memoir, Monk’s was spurious. Several investigations revealed that she had never in fact been in the convent. She disappeared from public life and died in 1849 in a New York prison.

Just as the fictional Robinson Crusoe gave a kick-start to actual autobiographical writing in the early eighteenth century, so these varied first-person life stories had a profound influence on the American novel. James Fenimore Cooper traded heavily on the Indian captivity story, and Herman Melville’s first six works of fiction—from Typee (1846) to Moby-Dick (1851)—were all first-person tales that adapted and played on the conventions of the sea-adventure narrative. The novel Melville published in 1856, Israel Potter: His Fifty Years of Exile, had a more direct connection to the autobiographical tradition. It was based on the story of a real man who in 1824 published a real book, The Life and Remarkable Adventures of Israel Potter. Potter was a destitute veteran of the Battle of Bunker Hill who took pen to paper out of anger that when he petitioned Congress for a pension, as he writes, “on no other principle, than that I was absent from the country when the pension law passed—my Petition was REJECTED!!!” In the book, which he sold for twenty-eight cents, Potter describes his meetings with King George III and Benjamin Franklin; Melville invents encounters with Ethan Allen and John Paul Jones as well. More broadly, thanks to these texts, the first person singular insinuated itself into the American literary consciousness until it became the predominant mode. Emerson was writing a veiled autobiography in his essays of the 1840s and 1850s, and Thoreau a more direct one in Walden and his other documentary narratives. Whitman’s Leaves of Grass was autobiography in verse; so was Lowell’s Life Studies a century later. As for fiction, from Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, through The Great Gatsby, The Sun Also Rises, and The Catcher in the Rye, to The Adventures of Augie March and three-quarters of the works of Philip Roth, it’s hard to find an important American novel that ’s not some variation on a memoir.

THE MOST ORIGINAL AND REMARKABLE American autobiographical subgenre that emerged in the first half of the nineteenth century drew on narratives of conversion, repentance, captivity, and adventure. It had a chance to emerge because of the singular American tradition of the lower orders telling their stories. Indeed, the authors of these books inhabited the lowest position society had to offer. The first published work by an African-American was NARRATIVE Of the UNCOMMON SUFFERINGS, AND Surprizing DELIVERANCE OF Briton Hammon, A Negro Man . . . , issued in Boston in 1760. The fourteen-page pamphlet actually told a fairly typical captivity narrative: while at sea, Hammon, a slave, was captured by Caribbean Indians and held by them for thirteen years. The ironic (in contemporary minds) happy ending comes when Hammon is reunited with his American master.

Approximately one hundred American slave narratives were published in book or pamphlet form before 1865; until the Depression era, slave narratives outnumbered every other kind of book by African-Americans, including novels. The first widely read narrative was the work of Olaudah Equiano, who, like many earlier and later autobiographers, begins with a self-conscious reflection on his literary project: “It is not a little hazardous in a private and obscure individual, and a stranger, too, thus to solicit the indulgent attention of the public, especially when I own I offer here the history of neither a saint, a hero, nor a tyrant.” Equiano was kidnapped by slave traders at age eleven and was eventually purchased by a sea captain, Michael Henry Pascal. He bought his own freedom in 1766, and settled in England, where he became an active abolitionist. And, like most subsequent slave narratives, his book, published in 1789 and reprinted in fifty different editions in Europe and the United States before 1850, was in large part designed to further that cause. It contained many memorable passages, such as Equiano’s first view of the slave ship that would take him to the New World. This held “a multitude of black people of every description chained together, every one of their countenances expressing dejection and sorrow, I no longer doubted of my fate; and, quite overpowered with horror and anguish, I fell motionless on the deck and fainted. When I recovered a little I found some black people about me. . . . I asked them if we were not to be eaten by those white men with horrible looks, red faces, and loose hair.”

Unlike Equiano’s Narrative, early works published in this country by former slaves tended to be spiritual autobiographies in familiar forms. Others were confessions by criminals. Sometimes they resembled such narratives by whites, sometimes they were very different. The ostensible author of the most notorious such text was Nat Turner, a Virginia slave who experienced a vision that led him to believe that God had chosen him to lead a great uprising: he “heard a loud noise in the heavens, and the Spirit instantly appeared to me and said the Serpent was loosened, and Christ had laid down the yoke he had borne for the sins of men.” He understood that he should watch the heavens for signs, and then “I should arise and . . . slay my enemies with their own weapons.” The sign came in the summer of 1831; by the time they were through, Turner and his supporters had killed more than fifty whites. The rebels were arrested and eventually executed (along with dozens of other blacks unfortunate enough to be in the area). But before his hanging, Turner gave an interview to Thomas R. Gray, a white lawyer, and from this testimony Gray produced The Confessions of Nat Turner, published in Baltimore and widely distributed. Given that the text was produced by this unsympathetic editor, it’s striking if not surprising that Turner’s voice is straightforward and not undignified, even as he recounts the acts of terrible violence taken by his confederates and himself. They commenced at the home of his master, Mr. Travis:

I entered my master’s chamber, it being dark, I could not give a death blow, the hatchet glanced from his head, he sprang from the bed and called his wife, it was his last word, Will laid him dead, with a blow of his axe, and Mrs. Travis shared the same fate, as she lay in bed. The murder of this family, five in number, was the work of a moment, not one of them awoke; there was a little infant sleeping in a cradle, that was forgotten, until we had left the house and gone some distance, when Henry and Will returned and killed it.

But a very different sort of slave narrative had started appearing and would continue to do so until the Civil War. The dozens of such texts from this period were so resonant and numerous not only because they were timely, dramatic, and moving; more than that, they took the figurative journey of many past autobiographies, from spiritual bondage to spiritual liberation, and made it absolutely literal. As the genre became closely aligned with the views and aims of abolitionism, it developed certain conventions that were so often present that they reached almost the level of ritual. In the words of the scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr., the books constituted “a communal utterance, a collective tale.” A prefatory apparatus would include an engraved portrait, signed by the author, and several signed statements by white abolitionists and/or editors testifying that not only is every word straight from the ex-slave’s mouth and totally true, but that the account, if anything, underestimates the horrors of slavery. The narrative itself starts with the formulaic clause “I was born . . .” The scholar William Andrews describes some characteristics of the text itself:

Usually the antebellum slave narrator portrays slavery as a condition of extreme physical, intellectual, emotional, and spiritual deprivation, a kind of hell on earth. Precipitating the narrator’s decision to escape is some sort of personal crisis, such as the sale of a loved one or a dark night of the soul in which hope contends with despair for the spirit of the slave. Impelled by faith in God and a commitment to liberty and human dignity comparable (the slave narrative often stresses) to that of America’s Founding Fathers, the slave undertakes an arduous quest for freedom that climaxes in his or her arrival in the North. In many antebellum narratives, the attainment of freedom is signaled not simply by reaching the free states, but by renaming oneself and dedicating one’s future to antislavery activism.

Almost all slave narratives contain a scene or scenes of a master beating or cruelly treating a female slave, often the narrator’s mother, and painful scenes of family separation. Harriet Beecher Stowe acknowledged drawing on five separate slave narratives in Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), and this emotional material was clearly the most powerful thing she borrowed. Also in the 1850s, a writer who called herself Hannah Crofts composed a novel in the form of a slave narrative and titled it The Bondwoman’s Narrative. The work was not published and lay in obscurity for some 140 years, until Henry Louis Gates purchased the manuscript at auction, declared it the first novel written by an African-American woman, and edited it for publication in 2002. (In recent decades, the “neo-slave narrative” has become a fertile genre, beginning with Margaret Walker’s Jubilee in 1966, and continuing with such novels as Ishmael Reed’s Flight to Canada, William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner, Ernest J. Gaines’s The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, Sherley Anne Williams’s Dessa Rose, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Charles Johnson’s Middle Passage, and Edward P. Jones’s The Known World.)

Working within established conventions, the authors of slave narratives often fashioned passages of great power. At the close of his 1825 book, William Grimes declares, “I am now entirely destitute of property; where and how I shall live I don’t know; where and how I shall die I don’t know, but I hope I may be prepared. If it were not for the stripes on my back which were made while I was a slave, I would in my will, leave my skin as a legacy to the government, desiring that it might be taken off and made into parchment, and then bind the constitution of glorious, happy and free America. Let the skin of an American slave, bind the charter of American liberty.” It is impossible to measure the exact mixture in the passage of irony and sincerity, and it is the more striking for it.

There was, in addition, considerable variation in terms of plot; the varied means by which slaves made their escape, often pursued by barking dogs, was rich in picaresque adventure. Henry Brown’s narrative of 1849 described how he paid eighty-six dollars to have himself surreptitiously shipped, in a two-foot-by-three-foot box, to Philadelphia abolitionists. (The following year the Fugitive Slave Law forced Brown—by that time he had acquired the nickname “Box”—to flee to England, where he set up a traveling show featuring a replication of his escape, including the famous box.) William and Ellen Craft, a married couple, tell the extraordinary tale of their escape in Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom (1860): Ellen presented herself as William’s master, that is, a white male.

One of the classic slave narratives is Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Written by Herself, published pseudonymously in 1861. Born in North Carolina in 1813, Jacobs describes, with a candor rare in any book of the time, how, at the age of sixteen, she felt that the only way to escape the sexual advances of her master was to enter into a liaison with a young white neighbor. Some years later the master renewed his demands, and she ran away. She hid for almost seven years in a tiny space under the roof of her grandmother’s home; occasionally she could hear the voices of her two children. In June 1842, she escaped to Philadelphia, and she was eventually reunited with her children in the North. In 1850, she was offered the chance to buy her freedom but declined: “The more my mind had become enlightened, the more difficult it was for me to consider myself an article of property; and to pay money to those who had so grievously oppressed me seemed like taking from my sufferings the glory of triumph.”

Freedom and dignity, suffering and triumph, were not the only profound issues confronted by slave narratives. William Wells Brown’s Narrative of 1847 constitutes to a large extent a meditation on truthfulness and deceit. Slavery, says Brown, “makes its victims lying and mean.” He recounts all sorts of lies associated with the institution, including one of his jobs when he worked for a slave trader: “blacking” slaves being sold for auction, that is, coloring their hair to make them seem younger. He describes an episode where he escaped flogging by convincing the overseers that the intended victim was actually somebody else, an innocent free black man who had the misfortune to be wandering by. Like Rousseau, Brown says he “deeply regretted the deception I practiced on this poor fellow.” Frederick Douglass, whose three autobiographies, published between 1845 and 1881, constituted the acknowledged masterpiece of the genre, directly addressed the issue of truth, in all its complicated subtlety. Because of their circumstances, he observed, slaves habitually

suppress the truth rather than take the consequences of telling it, and in so doing prove themselves a master of the human family. If they have anything to say of their masters, it is generally in the masters’ favor, especially when speaking to an untried man. I have been frequently asked, when a slave, if I had a kind master, and do not remember ever to have given a negative answer; nor did I, in pursuing this course, consider myself as uttering what was absolutely false; for I always measured the kindness of my master by the standard of kindness set up among slaveholders around us.

The opening of Douglass’s first book, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, shows his commanding, distinctive, and allusive style:

I was born in Tuckahoe, near Hillsborough, and about twelve miles from Easton, in Talbot County, Maryland. I have no accurate knowledge of my age, never having seen any authentic record containing it. By far the larger part of the slaves know as little of their ages as horses know of theirs, and it is the wish of most masters within my knowledge to keep their slaves thus ignorant. I do not remember to have ever met a slave who could tell of his birthday. They seldom come nearer to it than planting-time, harvest-time, cherry-time, spring-time, or fall-time. A want of information concerning my own was a source of unhappiness to me even during childhood. The white children could tell their ages. I could not tell why I ought to be deprived of the same privilege. I was not allowed to make any inquiries of my master concerning it. He deemed all such inquiries on the part of a slave improper and impertinent, and evidence of a restless spirit.

Douglass escaped in 1838, when he was about twenty, and made his way to New Bedford, Massachusetts. He was invited to speak at an antislavery convention three years later, and was such a success that, like many former slaves, he was sent on a lecture circuit by the Massachusetts Anti Slavery Society. He was a riveting and eloquent speaker, which ironically created problems. Audiences, he recounted in his second autobiography, My Bondage and My Freedom, “said I did not talk like a slave, look like a slave, nor act like a slave, and that they believed I had never been south of the Mason and Dixon line.” And so his abolitionist sponsors “said to me, ‘Better have a little of the plantation manner of speech than not; ’tis not best that you seem too learned.’ ” Clearly, as a means of delivering one’s story, live recitation has the advantage of sensory and emotional immediacy. The self-editing Douglass was forced into was one drawback. Another, he discovered, was staleness: “It was impossible for me to repeat the same story month after month and keep up my interest in it. It was new to the people, it is true, but it was an old story to me; and to go through with it night after night, was a task altogether too mechanical for my nature.”

Writing and publishing his story, obviously, could expose many more people to it. And, as Douglass recognized, the very act of writing had deep implications. The idea of freedom—immediately important to black Americans of the nineteenth century, essential, in some way, to all people in all eras—was tied up with notions of literacy. Douglass quotes his master, Mr. Auld: “ ‘Learning will spoil the best nigger in the world. Now,’ he said, ‘if you teach that nigger (speaking of myself ) how to read, there would be no keeping him. It would forever unfit him to be a slave.’ ” The introductory apparatus to his 1845 Narrative stresses that he employed no collaborator, ghostwriter, or editor (revealing, incidentally, that the audience was aware of and perhaps expected such assistance).

The publication of the book was itself a courageous act. Unlike other former slaves who took pen to paper, Douglass did not disguise his own or his former master’s names, or any part of his story. As a result, he ran the risk of being captured and re-enslaved. But this did not happen, and the book was greeted in the North, and in England, with near-universal acclaim. The New York Tribune’s notice was typical: “Considered merely as a narrative, we have never read one more simple, true, coherent, and warm with genuine feeling.” By 1859, thirty thousand copies had been sold and Douglass was a literary and moral luminary. His friend James McCune Smith referred to him as a “Representative American man” who “passed through every gradation of rank comprised in our national make-up, and bears upon his person and upon his soul everything that is American.”