COMMENTS & QUESTIONS

In this section, we aim to provide the reader with an array of perspectives on the text, as well as questions that challenge those perspectives. The commentary has been culled from sources as diverse as reviews contemporaneous with the work, letters written by the author, literary criticism of later generations, and appreciations written throughout the work’s history. Following the commentary, a series of questions seeks to filter Frederick Douglass’s My Bondage and My Freedom through a variety of points of view and bring about a richer understanding of this enduring work.

Comments

DAILY SOUTH-SIDE DEMOCRAT

The author of [My Bondage and My Freedom] is no less a person than the bosom friend of Professor Greeley and Abby Kelly Foster, Frederick Douglass. Fred. is a fugitive from labor whom the sagacious negrophilists of Faneuil Hall and the Tribune office, with a few other candidates for State aid as lunatics, have been endeavoring to civilize a good many years for the purpose of proving that God knew not what he was about when he stamped inferiority on every line and lineament of the African. This christian-like task has been undertaken and prosecuted with the usual zeal of monomaniacs, and we may add with about their usual success. Fred. has been feted and toasted and glorified and dressed up for worship like the shapeless post that receives the homage of a Feejee islander, and the faithful have vowed with many protestations that their idol was a prodigy of intellect and virtue, with the hope that their protestations would induce the censorious world to believe their divinity at last, respectable.

And now Fred. to prove himself worthy of all this idolatry—how often he must have scratched his woolly head with delight at the stupid blindness of his white brethren!—has written a book. We have not yet had the fortune to meet with it, and must content ourselves with noticing its contents at second hand. The N. Y. Sun finds two things worthy of especial notice, and only two in the book.

First, that Fred. should speak in such mild and temperate terms of the institution of slavery—for the peaceful simplicity of which life he has doubtless often sighed, and

Second, that he should rail so unmercifully at the white population of the North for their continued denial in practice of their theory of the equality of the races....

Can a more significant commentary on abolition fanaticism be imagined than the testimony of this slave (the best treated African in the Northern States) that he is an out cast and a Pariah in the land where he was promised freedom and equality? How powerful is this unwilling evidence, extorted by the bitter consciousness of degradation, and a disgust more bitter, at the falsehood and treachery of his pretended friends!

If it were reasonable to hope for any exhibition of sanity from men so hopelessly crazed as the freesoilers of the North, we might look for some mitigation of a fanaticism so sternly rebuked by the cherished object of its zeal. May we not at least hope that upon the calm, reflecting mind of the North this bitter rebuke may operate some wholesome result? May we not expect that it will bring to the absorbing question of Slavery more rational and deliberative consideration, and that men may learn the short-sighted weakness of their attempts to mend the workmanship of the Omniscient Eternal?

—September 5, 1855

DAILY TIMES

Compared with the actual and startling revelations of this plain biography of a living man, the melodramatic imaginings of Uncle Tom’s Cabin are of small value. It may be said, as it has been, that taking a number of isolated circumstances and weaving them together on a wool of fiction, Mrs. Stowe produced a romance of no ordinary power. But here is a man, not yet forty years of age, who was born a thrall; who has himself suffered as a slave; who felt the iron eat into his soul; who records only what he personally experienced; who gives dates and places; who names circumstances and persons; whose body yet bears the marks of the cruelty of slavery; who, a self-taught man, has exhibited true eloquence of speech and pen, at home and in Europe, in advocacy of his race’s claim to freedom; who has conducted a newspaper in this State for several years with success; whose exemption from being claimed as a fugitive is owing solely to the fact that, long after his escape, his friends purchased his freedom from his quondam “master”; and who, living, acting, speaking among us, possesses more vital interest for men who think than would the heroes of twenty negro romances, even though each of them was as highly wrought as that written by Mrs. Stowe. My Bondage, so forcible in its evident truth, is one of the most interesting, exciting and thought-awakening books in our language. In every way it is remarkable—not only in what it relates, but in the manner of the relation.

—September 17, 1855

WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

Frederick Douglass’s new volume, ‘My Bondage and My Freedom’ [is] a volume remarkable, it is true, for its thrilling sketches of a slave’s life and experience, and for the ability displayed in its pages, but which, in its second portion, is reeking with the virus of personal malignity towards Wendell Phillips, myself, and the old organizationists generally, and full of ingratitude and baseness towards as true and disinterested friends as any man ever yet had on earth, to give him aid and encouragement. The Empire speaks of the work as ‘frank and ingenious’—when it is precisely the reverse of this. The preface by J. McCune Smith is, in its innuendoes, a very base production.

—from a letter printed in the Empire (December 15, 1855)

CHRISTIAN WATCHMAN AND REFLECTOR

People who say that “Uncle Tom” is an exaggerated fiction, and pin their faith on such books as “A South-side View of Slavery,” cannot find a more profitable book than this autobiography. They will find not the outside or inside of a plantation alone, but an introduction to the mind of a slave. They will see something of the relations of slavery to the souls of men.

—December 20, 1855

FREDERICK DOUGLASS

No man can put the chain about the ankle of his fellow man without at last finding the other end fastened around his own neck.

—from his speech at the Washington D. C.

Civil Rights Mass Meeting (October 22, 1883)

BOOKER T. WASHINGTON

[Frederick Douglass’s] accomplishments as a speaker and as a reasoner seemed inconsistent with the representation made by him, that he had had no schooling, and that he had been a slave until he was twenty-one years of age. There was a desire for the exact facts. Yet to give them was dangerous. His growing popularity was likewise a peril. The possibility of his capture and return to slavery increased with his influence as an orator and agitator.

—from Frederick Douglass (1906)

Questions

1.Professor Edwards’s notes make clear how many of the leading advocates for “Negro” emancipation were pastors of black churches. Can you explain this connection historically?

2.Frederick Douglass was a supporter of women’s suffrage and friendly with such people as Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. He clearly saw similarities between their movement and the anti-slavery movement. And then, later, when the modern Women’s Liberation movement was getting off the ground, there were a number of articles with titles like “The Woman as Nigger”; clearly, feminists of that time saw similarities between their cause and the movement for black equality. As in Douglass’s day, the two movements are allies, friends. But what happens when the goals of one conflict with the goals of the other? What should we do with black men who are sexist or white women who are racist? Or when Affirmative Action favors a black man over an equally qualified white woman, or when a suit by the National Organization for Women gets a woman hired or promoted instead of a black man?

3.Do you get a clear sense from this book of Frederick Douglass the man? Can you imagine what he would be like relaxing with family or friends?

4.What do you admire most about Frederick Douglass—his physical courage, his moral courage, his intellect, his reasoning, his eloquence, his truthfulness, his values?