My Bondage and My Freedom (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)

With the publication of My Bondage and My Freedom by the New York house of Miller, Orton, and Mulligan in August 1855, Frederick Douglass became the first African American to compose a second autobiography. His previous effort, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, had appeared only ten years earlier, and it had by no means faded from view. On the contrary, particularly given the celebrity Douglass had gained as an anti-slavery lecturer and newspaper editor during the intervening years, the Narrative had already taken its place as one of the best known of the few dozen narratives by former slaves printed in the decades leading up to the Civil War. With the “sheer poetry” of its taut style and the “unrelenting power of its narrative line,” Douglass’s 1845 book is often considered to have set the high water mark of literary composition for an entire generation of African American authors attempting to pen their life stories under the pressures of the abolitionist cause (Stepto, From Behind the Veil, p. 21; O’Meally, “Introduction” to Narrative, pp. xiv—xv; see “For Further Reading”). The appearance of My Bondage and My Freedom would seem to beg the question, then: Why would Douglass have been compelled to write the story of his life again?

Interestingly enough, contemporary reviewers in the 1850s appear to have been little troubled by this question; they took My Bondage and My Freedom as the kind of autobiographical effort befitting a public figure of Douglass’s achieved stature: The second book, more than three times longer than the first, was read “more as a conventional account of the life of an unusual man than as an antislavery document” in the model of the Narrative (Blassingame, “Introduction to Volume Two,” in The Frederick Douglass Papers. Series 2, vol. 2, p. xxxi). Sales were robust, as they had been with the Narrative: reportedly My Bondage and My Freedom sold 5,000 copies in the first two days it was available (with a thousand copies purchased in its first week in the city of Syracuse alone). A second edition appeared in 1856 and a third in 1857; more than 20,000 copies had been sold by 1860, when the German translation of the book appeared. One might not expect such a success if the book were only a half-hearted rehashing of the Narrative. Nevertheless, as John Blassingame and others have pointed out, twentieth-century readers have often had the tendency to consider My Bondage and My Freedom as no more than a “propagandistic and didactic gloss on Douglass’s ‘real’ self-portrait, the Narrative” (p. xlii). Until recently, the few literary critics who took the time to discuss the book tended to dismiss it as “diffuse and attenuated,” a “flabby” sequel to the pristine and “righteous” Narrative (quoted in Andrews, To Tell a Free Story, pp. 266-267). At best, they have characterized the second book as though it were simply a second edition of the Narrative, an update taking into account Douglass’s activities between 1845 and 1855, as when Stephen Butterfield in his 1974 Black Autobiography in America opined blandly that My Bondage and My Freedom “includes most of the material from the early Narrative, with some rewriting, plus the experiences and development that occurred after 1845” (quoted in John David Smith’s “Introduction,” p. xxi).

In the past decade and a half, a handful of scholars such as William Andrews, Eric Sundquist, John Blassingame, John David Smith, and C. Peter Ripley have begun to draw our attention to the importance and independent accomplishment of My Bondage and My Freedom. In the words of Ripley, it is crucial to recognize that Douglass’s three autobiographies—the last, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, was published in 1881 and revised and expanded in 1893—appeared “at distinct periods of Douglass’s life for different reasons” (p. 5). Andrews, whose work has made the most forceful and sustained case for the significance of Douglass’s second book, has wondered in pointed terms just why the Narrative is so habitually seen not just as prior but as privileged, even authoritative: “If the second autobiography can be seen as the successor of the first, why can’t the Narrative be examined as the precursor of My Bondage and My Freedom?” (To Tell a Free Story, p. 267).

It is necessary to read the two books carefully, side by side, to begin to get a sense of exactly how different they are. Clearly, with its expanded length and its twenty-five chapters in the place of the Narrative’s eleven, the 1855 autobiography is “bigger, roomier, more detailed, and more expository” than its predecessor (Andrews, “Introduction to the 1987 Edition,” p. xvii). But more significantly, even given the parallels in narrative, argument, and phrasing, My Bondage and My Freedom is written from an entirely different vantage point—one might almost say that it is composed by an entirely different writer. If the second book contains a more mature style, it is directly related to what Douglass had been doing over the past decade: not just speaking against slavery, traveling the country, and raising subscriptions for abolitionist periodicals such as the Liberator, but also reading and writing—that is, giving himself a thorough training in literature and journalism, in a way that (for obvious reasons) he had never had the chance to do before composing the Narrative.

By the mid-1850s, Douglass was writing about a half-dozen editorials, articles, and reviews each week in various periodicals; he had published nearly a thousand editorials over the previous eight years, and had given almost the same number of speeches in a range of locales throughout the United States as well as in Canada, England, Scotland, and Ireland. After 1847, as a publisher and editor of his own newspaper, he kept up with the current papers, magazines, and journals, and his regular reading included not only the principal abolitionist venues but also mass-circulation periodicals such as the North American Review, Harper’s New Monthly, the London Quarterly Review, and the Atlantic Monthly. Perhaps most significantly, Douglass had been able to educate himself in autobiography itself; he read extensively in contemporary examples of the genre (including works by writers such as Thomas De Quincey, Thomas Hart Benton, Robert Romain, and Sargent S. Prentiss) and reviewed a good number of the twenty-one slave narratives published between 1846 and 1855 (by authors including Solomon Northrup, William Wells Brown, Henry Bibb, Wilson Armistead, Austin Steward, and James W. C. Pennington) (see Blassingame, pp. xxii-xxiii). In other words, My Bondage and My Freedom became necessary in part as a result of this extensive experience and exposure to a wide segment of the American literary scene.

In this respect, John Blassingame has argued convincingly that there is a wide “intellectual gulf” separating the twenty-seven-year-old orator and the thirty-seven-year-old writer and activist. Between 1845 and 1855, writing his editorials and reviews, Douglass had continually made recourse to his own memories of the South and of slavery. For Blassingame, this journalistic practice “became for him a way to systematically order, reconstruct, and recreate formative events and gave readers insight into his changing sense of self. As time passed, Douglass sensed that his first autobiography no longer provided the symmetry needed to balance his past and present in the 1850s. He published Bondage and Freedom to provide this new interpretation” (p. xxvi). In 1855 Douglass had a much clearer sense of the kind of autobiography he wanted to write, and a much broader expertise in the craft of writing to do it.

To approach the question from another angle, one might note that it was precisely the publication of the 1845 Narrative that propelled Douglass on the path that led to the composition of My Bondage and My Freedom—a trajectory that made the second text not a simple sequel, but instead “a quiet but thorough revision of the significance of the life of Frederick Douglass” (Andrews, To Tell a Free Story, p. 217). As Douglass himself explains in the second book, he originally wrote the Narrative to counter the virulent critics who denounced him as a fraud; in the early 1840s, many claimed that he was too articulate, too educated, too charismatic, to have ever been a slave. “In a little less than four years, therefore, after becoming a public lecturer,” Douglass informs us, “I was induced to write out the leading facts connected with my experience in slavery, giving names of persons, places, and dates—thus putting it in the power of any who doubted, to ascertain the truth or falsehood of my story of being a fugitive slave” (p. 270). But the Narrative, if it quelled the suspicions of some doubters, also brought increased danger for Douglass; it was not uncommon for escaped slaves in the North to be “recaptured” and returned to their masters. With an irony that was to become characteristic, Douglass explains that the publication of the Narrative, that great tale of an escape from slavery, actually “endangered my liberty” and “led me to seek a refuge from republican slavery in monarchical England” (p. 272). Over twenty-one months between 1845 and 1847, Douglass undertook a triumphant speaking tour in England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales that increased his international fame beyond his wildest imaginings.

Like most of the black intellectuals and fugitive slaves who spent time in Europe during the period, Douglass was impressed by the relative absence of racism there. In the title of the Narrative, Douglass qualifies his name with the phrase, “an American Slave,” and forcefully claims the principles of American democracy as rightfully his own inheritance. Likewise in the introduction to My Bondage and My Freedom, James McCune Smith contends that Douglass is “a Representative American man,” having “passed through every gradation of rank comprised in our national make-up” (pp. 29—30). For Smith, the book is above all “an American book, for Americans, in the fullest sense of the idea” (pp. 35—36). Yet in the text of My Bondage and My Freedom, Douglass grows increasingly critical of American pretenses and American hypocrisy, especially in chapter 5, on his voyage to Europe, and in the appendix, which includes extracts from his magisterial 1852 speech “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” (pp. 340—344). As he makes clear, it is his experience of “semi-exile” (as he terms it) that first drives him to question a number of his assumptions about racial identity and national belonging (pp. 283, 291). In a scathing January 1846 letter to his mentor William Lloyd Garrison, reproduced in full in the book, Douglass states baldly: “I have no end to serve, no creed to uphold, no government to defend; and as to nation, I belong to none. I have no protection at home, or resting-place abroad” (p. 274). As Eric Sundquist has pointed out, there is a deep and rich “dissonance” in Douglass’s work—perhaps more evident in My Bondage and My Freedom than in any other of his writings—between his claiming of the revolutionary, democratic legacy of the American founding fathers in its most robust sense, and his unmasking of the perversity that allows slavery to flourish in the very midst of that legacy of liberation (Sundquist, To Wake the Nations, pp. 127-128).

The letter to Garrison is notable not just for its rhetorical power but also for the way that it contrasts the paucity of color prejudice in England with instances of discrimination in the United States. But the examples (all punctuated with the lacerating refrain, “We don’t allow niggers in here”) are taken neither from slavery nor from the South. Douglass is refused entry to a menagerie in the Boston Common; he is ejected from a religious revival meeting in New Bedford, Massachusetts; he is informed that he cannot attend an event at the Lyceum (a public lecture hall); on a cold, wet night, traveling by steamship up the East Coast, he is thrown out of the ship’s cabin, which he had entered seeking shelter; he is denied service by a restaurant in Boston; he is told by a driver in “fiendish” tones that he will not be allowed to ride a carriage—these instances all enumerate the prevalence of racism in the North. Douglass goes on to tell Garrison that he had dined with the lord mayor of Dublin, and comments sarcastically:

What a pity there was not some American democratic christian at the door of his splendid mansion, to bark out at my approach, ‘They don’t allow niggers in here!’The truth is, the people here know nothing of the republican negro hate prevalent in our glorious land. They measure and esteem men according to their moral and intellectual worth, and not according to the color of their skin. Whatever may be said of the aristocracies here, there is none based on the color of a man’s skin. This species of aristocracy belongs preëminently to ‘the land of the free, and the home of the brave.’ I have never found it abroad, in any but Americans. It sticks to them wherever they go. They find it almost as hard to get rid of, as to get rid of their skins (p. 278).

My Bondage and my Freedom, in other words, is critical of racism not just as the cornerstone of the “peculiar institution” of southern slavery, but more disturbingly as a central characteristic of the American “democratic” temperament in general. Color prejudice has nothing to do with melanin or with innate capacities, and everything to do with a “species of aristocracy” infecting white Americans, as unshakable as their own hides. The title of the second section of the book, “Life as a Freeman” (p. 249), takes on a certain edge, as Douglass underlines that the condition of the “free” black in the North is far from being some sort of unqualified, absolute deliverance. Toward the end of the text, he reminds us that a major “thread” running throughout the book is “American prejudice against color, and its varied illustrations in my own experience” (p. 295). He adds, perhaps most daringly, that even white northern abolitionists, his friends and supporters during the previous decade and a half, “themselves were not entirely free from it” (p. 295). As he put it in an editorial in the spring of 1855, African Americans must rescue “our whole race, from every species of oppression, irrespective of the form it may assume, or the source whence it may emanate” (quoted in Andrews, To Tell a Free Story, p. 217).

In the wake of this shift in his sense of the nature of American prejudice, Douglass decided to found a newspaper upon his return to the United States. In his view, “a tolerably well conducted press” run by African Americans would be an invaluable “means of removing prejudice” and “chang[ing] the estimation in which the colored people of the United States were held.” A vibrant periodical, more than any other institution, would assist in the struggle “by calling out the mental energies of the race itself; by making them acquainted with their own latent powers; by enkindling among them the hope that for them there is a future; by developing their moral power; by combining and reflecting their talents” (p. 289). In the spring of 1847, he came back with approximately $2,500 that abolitionist allies in England had raised to support his endeavor. Of course, it was this decision that led to Douglass’s first difficulties with his “Boston friends,” the circle of abolitionists linked to William Lloyd Garrison and the American Anti-Slavery Society. Douglass was surprised to encounter their vehement objection to his plan to start a paper, and their barrage of opposition almost convinced him to “abandon the enterprise”: they told him that “first, the paper was not needed; secondly, it would interfere with my usefulness as a lecturer; thirdly, I was better fitted to speak than to write; fourthly, the paper could not succeed” (p. 292). In the end, Douglass persevered, moving to Rochester, New York, to found his periodical in the fall of 1847. The North Star (later renamed Frederick Douglass’ Paper) was successful by any measure: even after Garrison conspired to have the Anti-Slavery Society withdraw its funding in 1851, Douglass’s paper grew in circulation and influence, and was the longest continually published black newspaper before the Civil War.

We should not forget that what Douglass terms the “development of my own mental and moral energies” (p. 293) was closely linked to his work on the paper. It became a key part of his identity; by the 1850s, asked how he wished to be addressed publicly, Douglass was known to respond, “Mr. Editor, if you please” (quoted by Sekora, p. 614). The attendant responsibilities forced Douglass to become conversant in the political debates of the day, with the result that he rethought many of his old positions. He eventually came to disagree with Garrison’s call for “disunion” (the notion that non-slaveholding states should dissolve their federation with the slave states of the South), and with his position that abolitionists should refrain from voting. Douglass declared on the contrary that not to vote would be “to refuse to exercise a legitimate and powerful means for abolishing slavery,” since the Constitution of the United States was the supreme “anti-slavery instrument” (p. 294). In My Bondage and My Freedom, Douglass tells us that “but for the responsibility of conducting a public journal, and the necessity imposed upon me of meeting opposite views from abolitionists in this state, I should in all probability have remained as firm in my disunion views as any other disciple of William Lloyd Garrison” (p. 294).

Biographer Benjamin Quarles notes that Douglass’s “editorship expanded the scope of his abilities. He acquired the sense of authority that goes with the power to hire and discharge. He grew familiar with the economics of journalism and learned the mysteries of debit and credit” (Frederick Douglass, p. 96). More significantly, running the paper expanded the scope of Douglass’s political alliances, as it placed him in contact with the period’s leading black intellectuals and activists, many of whom were opposed to Garrison’s vision of anti-slavery strategy. The North Star was initially co-edited by Douglass and the talented black nationalist and novelist Martin R. Delany, and its contributors included many of the most savvy African-American political figures of the day, including James McCune Smith (who sent a regular column from his home in New York City), William J. Wilson (based in Brooklyn), and Samuel Ringgold Ward (who sent articles from Canada) (see Quarles, p. 85). There was a concomitant broadening of Douglass’s political concerns, as he moved beyond the abolitionist cause to take up other issues—such as voting rights, feminism, vocational training, emigration, and colonization—affecting not just his “brethren in bonds” (as he phrased it in the last lines of the appendix to the Narrative) but also the free black community. As Douglass explains in My Bondage and My Freedom: “Since I have been editing and publishing a journal devoted to the cause of liberty and progress, I have had my mind more directed to the condition and circumstances of the free colored people than when I was the agent of an abolition society” (p. 300). In this period, James McCune Smith went so far as to exclaim that “only since his Editorial career has he seen to become a colored man! I have read his paper very carefully and find phase after phase develop itself as in one newly born among us” (quoted in Sekora, p. 614). Another black journal, The Rising Sun, concluded emphatically that “Frederick Douglass’ ability as an editor and publisher has done more for the freedom and elevation of his race than all his platform appearances” (quoted in Sundquist, p. 104). As Smith puts it in his admiring introduction to My Bondage and My Freedom, Douglass “raised himself by his own efforts to the highest position in society. As a successful editor, in our land, he occupies this position. Our editors rule the land, and he is one of them” (p. 29).

Readers have long noted the oratorical qualities of the Narrative. It has been described as a “political sermon” and even as “something of a memorized lecture performance transferred to paper” (Andrews, To Tell a Free Story, p. 126; Sundquist, p. 89). If Douglass’s first book is the story of “how a slave was made a man,” it is equally the story of how a man was made a public speaker. The book concludes not with his escape from slavery but instead with a sort of vocational epiphany, as Douglass is “moved” to speak in an anti-slavery meeting in Nantucket, Massachusetts, in the summer of 1841. Here is the passage that concludes the book:

I had not long been a reader of the “Liberator,” before I got a pretty correct idea of the principles, measures and spirit of the anti-slavery reform. I took right hold of the cause. I could do but little; but what I could, I did with a joyful heart, and never felt happier than when in an anti-slavery meeting. I seldom had much to say at the meetings, because what I wanted to say was said so much better by others. But, while attending an anti-slavery convention at Nantucket, on the 11th of August, 1841, I felt strongly moved to speak, and was at the same time much urged to do so by Mr. William C. Coffin, a gentleman who had heard me speak in the colored people’s meeting at New Bedford. It was a severe cross, and I took it up reluctantly. The truth was, I felt myself a slave, and the idea of speaking to white people weighed me down. I spoke but a few moments, when I felt a degree of freedom, and said what I desired with considerable ease. From that time until now, I have been engaged in pleading the cause of my brethren—with what success, and with what devotion, I leave those acquainted with my labors to decide (Narrative, edited by O’Meally, p. 99).

One might add that this self-discovery (under the shadow of the Liberator) is also the story of the making of a Garrisonian. As William Andrews has pointed out, William Lloyd Garrison frames the Narrative, not just by writing its preface and “authenticating” the validity of Douglass’s story, but more generally in the way Garrison is positioned as “a crucial parameter in the text that dictated in an inevitably restrictive way the range of Douglass’s thinking about some key questions” (To Tell a Free Story, p. 217).

My Bondage and My Freedom tells a very different sort of tale. First of all, Douglass locates the origins of his oratorical skills much earlier, during discussions with his fellow slaves on Mr. Freeland’s farm in early 1836. “All my little reading, which had any bearing on the subject of human rights,” Douglass writes, “was rendered available in my communications with my friends,” as he strives to convince them to attempt an escape from slavery (p. 207). The anthology he had bought in Baltimore, The Columbian Orator, “with its eloquent orations and spicy dialogues, denouncing oppression and slavery—telling of what had been dared, done and suffered by men, to obtain the inestimable boon of liberty—was still fresh in my memory, and whirled into the ranks of my speech with the aptitude of well trained soldiers, going through the drill. The fact is, I here began my public speaking” (p. 207). As a result, Douglass’s intervention at the Nantucket anti-slavery convention five years later seems less a spontaneous epiphany—the sudden revelation of a great orator—and more the culmination of a long career of study and argument Douglass had pursued even while a slave.

Furthermore, in the second book Douglass radically downplays the importance (and the “ease”) of his moment of inspiration at the anti-slavery convention—he makes it seem less the anointing of a spokesman or the messianic assumption of a “severe cross” of leadership. The passage describing the event in My Bondage and My Freedom is much more hesitant and self-deprecating than the scene in the Narrative. Singled out in the crowd by Coffin, Douglass was induced to speak out the feelings inspired by the occasion, and the fresh recollection of the scenes through which I had passed as a slave. My speech on this occasion is about the only one I ever made, of which I do not remember a single connected sentence. It was with the utmost difficulty that I could stand erect, or that I could command and articulate two words without hesitation and stammering. I trembled in every limb. I am not sure that my embarrassment was not the most effective part of my speech, if speech it could be called. At any rate, this is about the only part of my performance that I now distinctly remember (pp. 266-267).

In the second book, then, Douglass’s “hesitation and stammering” is but the prelude to a memorable speech by Garrison. The meaning of the event is thereby drastically altered. The moment of speaking is no longer the moment when Douglass discovers a “degree of freedom,” but now the moment when he is taken as someone else’s “text.” This structure sets the tone of the entire chapter in My Bondage and My Freedom devoted to Douglass’s career as an abolitionist lecturer. Over and over again, he points out the ways that Garrison and others treat him as an example, as a living document of slavery, but never as an emerging intellectual in his own right, with his own, shifting opinions and his own hunger for knowledge. During his years as an agent of the Anti-Slavery Society, when Douglass gave public lectures he was

generally introduced as a chattel—a “thing”—a piece of southern ”property“-the chairman assuring the audience that it could speak. Fugitive slaves, at that time, were not so plentiful as now; and as a fugitive slave lecturer, I had the advantage of being a ”brand new fact“—the first one out.... During the first three or four months, my speeches were almost exclusively made up of narrations of my own personal experience as a slave. ”Let us have the facts,”said the people.... ”Give us the facts,” said Collins, “we will take care of the philosophy.” Just here arose some embarrassment.... It did not entirely satisfy me to narrate wrongs; I felt like denouncing them (pp. 268-269).

This instrumental relationship is echoed in the very form of the Narrative, where Garrison’s preface is poised to offer the “philosophy” to Douglass’s “facts.” Garrison assures the reader that Douglass’s tale is “essentially true in all its statements,” with “nothing drawn from the imagination”; his case “may be regarded as a very fair specimen of the treatment of slaves in Maryland” (Narrative, p. 7, 8). The Narrative is marked by a “tension,” as the scholar Robert Stepto has pointed out, between the patronizing, fact-finding tone in Garrison’s preface, on the one hand, and Douglass’s unprecedented professions of autonomy in the text itself, on the other (Stepto, p. 18). Douglass insists that “I prefer to be true to myself” rather than to temper his words to the expectations of white readers (Narrative, p. 39; see also Andrews, To Tell a Free Story, p. 103).

In My Bondage and My Freedom, Douglass tells us how he was taken as a “text” by the abolitionists, and in doing so he leaves that relationship behind. The second book, and its account of the break with Garrison, is an announcement that Frederick Douglass will no longer be anyone’s “brand new fact.” It is altogether accurate, then, that biographer William McFeely has described My Bondage and My Freedom as “its author’s declaration of independence” (Frederick Douglass, p. 181). Although Garrison was incensed at what he perceived to be a stinging betrayal, in fact his former protégé’s “declaration” is less polemic than one might expect. Describing his work with the Anti-Slavery Society, Douglass writes rather generously that his abolitionist “friends were actuated by the best of motives, and were not altogether wrong in their advice; and still I must speak just the word that seemed to me the word to be spoken by me” (p. 269). In My Bondage and My Freedom, it is left to James McCune Smith’s introduction to highlight the implicit parallels the book constructs between different kinds of “bondage,” different kinds of “freedom,” in the North as well as the South: Smith reminds us pointedly that “the same strong self hood” that allowed Douglass “to measure strength with Mr. Covey” also allowed him “to wrench himself from the embrace of the Garrisonians” (p. 35).

One way to describe the difference between the two books is to suggest that if the Narrative is the story of the making of a public speaker, My Bondage and My Freedom is the story of the making of an editor. This point is made not only by the historical trajectory I have outlined, but also in the form of the second book itself On the one hand, there is an editorial revision and elaboration of passages in the Narrative, marked by what William Andrews terms a strategy of “novelization”: a departure from the blunt, documentary style of the 1845 book with techniques drawn from the writing of fiction (particularly in the use of reconstructed dialogue and the increased turn to reflective and humorous digressions) (To Tell a Free Story, p. 271). The effect of this strategy is reflected in reviews of the book in the 1850s, which continually laud its “literary merit,” describing it as “more enthralling than any fictional account of slavery” and “more exciting” than any “romance” (quoted in Blassingame, p. xxxii). On the other hand, there is an editorial quality in the arrangement of the book, involving elements such as the proliferation of chapter titles and subheadings, and the illustrations preceding each of the book’s two sections. The appendix is another case in point. Whereas the appendix to the Narrative is a critique written by Douglass of the hypocrisy of “religious” slaveowners, in My Bondage and My Freedom this material is refashioned and integrated into chapter XVIII (pp.189-203), and the book’s appendix is instead a sampling of extracts from Douglass’s speeches between 1846 and 1855. In other words, the 1845 book transcribes the oratorical Douglass, while the 1855 book edits and anthologizes his speaking career as a part of his writing.

Another editorial gesture is the extensive use of self-quotation in My Bondage and My Freedom. On four occasions, the book quotes extended passages from the Narrative: the well-known discussion of the power of the slave songs (p. 85); the moving evocation of Douglass’s grandmother’s old age and demise (pp. 141-142); the powerful depiction of Douglass watching the “moving multitude of ships” on the Chesapeake Bay (pp. 141—142); and the vivid, polyvocal scene of men working in the Baltimore shipyard (pp. 168—169). From one perspective, this practice of quoting might seem puzzling, given that there are a number of other passages where Douglass takes language whole-cloth from the earlier book without feeling the need to give a citation. But as Robert Levine has explained, the gesture is evidence of the degree to which Douglass considered the two books to be separate: “when he conceives of his earlier version as particularly apt in its phrasings—which he does only a handful of times—he quotes from Narrative rather than revise” (Martin Delany, Frederick Douglass, and the Politics of Representative Identity, p. 268, note 29). Another scholar, Eric Sundquist, adds usefully that quotation represents a process of “textual objectification,” a mode of claiming the Narrative as Douglass’s own “property” to employ and remake as he sees fit. Thus Douglass’s practice of “detaching himself in successive‘quotations’ from the objectified selves of his past” is “an act of revision—more specifically an act of revolt against the constraining authority of slavery, the radical wing of abolitionism, and the racism that Douglass fervently believed could be separated from the idea of democratic equality” (To Wake the Nations, p. 92).

It is worth spending a bit of time investigating Douglass’s process of revision in My Bondage and My Freedom, looking at the types of things he changed or added or removed—and why. It is only by doing so that one gets a full sense of the originality of the book, and of Douglass’s extraordinary abilities as a writer. At many points, revision of material from the Narrative means a relatively straightforward, albeit subtle, attempt at clarification or felicity in phrasing. In the seventh chapter of the Narrative, the young Douglass is determined to learn to read, and enlists his white playmates to teach him the rudiments of the alphabet and spelling. He begins to study the Bible and the single book in his possession, The Columbian Orator. But Douglass finds that knowledge only increases his torment: it makes him sick and bitter with hatred at the great crime of slavery. Learning to read, he writes, “had already come, to torment and sting my soul to unutterable anguish. As I writhed under it, I would at times feel that learning to read had been a curse rather than a blessing. It had given me a view of my wretched condition, without the remedy. It opened my eyes to the horrible pit, but to no ladder upon which to get out. In moments of agony, I envied my fellow-slaves for their stupidity” (Narrative, p. 45).

In My Bondage and My Freedom, Douglass adds one sentence and revises the passage as follows: I was no longer the light-hearted, gleesome boy, full of mirth and play, as when I landed first at Baltimore. Knowledge had come; light had penetrated the moral dungeon where I dwelt; and, behold! there lay the bloody whip, for my back, and here was the iron chain; and my good, kind master, he was the author of my situation. The revelation haunted me, stung me, and made me gloomy and miserable. As I writhed under the sting and torment of this knowledge, I almost envied my fellow slaves their stupid contentment (p. 127).

The changes are minor, but they are clearly an improvement. The implied allusion to the garden of Eden is strengthened, first, by pointing to a prior innocence (“the light-hearted, gleesome boy” Douglass had been upon arriving in the city), and then, by driving home the key metaphor (the “sting”) rather than confusing matters with unconnected images (such as the “pit” and “ladder”). There is added precision in the last two words as well: at his worst moments, Douglass envies the unthinking satisfaction (“the stupid contentment”) of his fellow slaves; the point is not to generalize that all slaves are characterized by “stupidity.”

Another example is found in the previous chapter of the Narrative, when Douglass’s master Hugh Auld stops his wife from teaching her young slave how to read. Auld’s angry warning against educating slaves, because of the danger that they would become “unmanageable” and “discontented,” is a “revelation” to Douglass. He writes,

These words sank deep into my heart, stirred up sentiments within that lay slumbering, and called into existence an entirely new train of thought. It was a new and special revelation, explaining dark and mysterious things, with which my youthful understanding had struggled, but struggled in vain. I now understood what had been to me a most perplexing difficulty—to wit, the white man’s power to enslave the black man. It was a grand achievement, and I prized it highly. From that moment, I understood the pathway from slavery to freedom. (Narrative, p. 41)

His iron sentences—cold and harsh—sunk deep into my heart, and stirred up not only my feelings into a sort of rebellion, but awakened within me a slumbering train of vital thought. It was a new and special revelation, dispelling a painful mystery, against which my youthful understanding had struggled, and struggled in vain, to wit: the white men’s power to perpetuate the enslavement of the black man. “Very well,” thought I; “knowledge unfits a child to be a slave.” I instinctively assented to the proposition; and from that moment I understood the direct pathway from slavery to freedom. This was just what I needed; and I got it at a time, and from a source, whence I least expected it (p. 118).

Again, note the honed quality of the revised language, specifying that while Auld’s aggressive words provoke emotions of resistance in Douglass, they simultaneously “awaken” a sleeping train of his thinking (see Sundquist, pp. 106-107). Furthermore, whereas the reader has to divine the “pathway from slavery to freedom” in the Narrative, in the revision we have the “proposition” spelled out, in Douglass’s own internal voice. That it is in quotes (but unspoken) reminds us, as he puts it earlier in the book, that “slaveholders ever underrate the intelligence with which they have to grapple” (p. 72). Douglass sees the greater truth behind Auld’s scolding, and knows just as well to keep it to himself.

In numerous instances, Douglass’s revisions of language from the Narrative involve not just clarification but also elaboration. A description is given at greater length, or a line of argument is more fully elaborated. One of the more striking examples occurs in the passage in which Douglass discusses his first, unsuccessful escape attempt from Freeland’s farm. He is at some pains to explain the psychological difficulty of running away, in a situation where every factor seems weighted against the effort, and the imagined dangers are even more treacherous than the real ones. He catalogues in excruciating detail every trap and pitfall, giving the reader an idea of just how hopeless he and his co-conspirators feel-and just how determined to escape they remain, all the same. The passage contrasts the known, oppressive reality of slavery with the vague possibility of liberty: “Away back in the dim distance, under the flickering light of the north star, behind some craggy hill or snow-covered mountain, stood a doubtful freedom—half frozen—beckoning us to come and share its hospitality” (Narrative, p. 77). Douglass adds that, “in coming to a fixed determination to run away, we did more than Patrick Henry, when he resolved upon liberty or death. With us it was a doubtful liberty at most, and almost certain death if we failed. For my part, I should prefer death to hopeless bondage” (p. 78).

The force of the argument is undeniable. But the revision of this passage in My Bondage and My Freedom ratchets up the tension a few notches further: “Far away, back in the hazy distance, where all forms seemed but shadows, under the flickering light of the north star—behind some craggy hill or snow-covered mountain—stood a doubtful freedom, half frozen, beckoning us to her icy domain” (p. 212). Douglass comments succinctly that, from the perspective of the would-be fugitive, the “inequality” between slavery and freedom “was as great as that between certainty and uncertainty” (p. 212). And he adds two exquisite sentences that distill the reasons that to the slave the choice seems so impossible: “All that he has is at stake; and even that which he has not, is at stake, also. The life which he has, may be lost, and the liberty which he seeks, may not be gained” (p. 213). Then, the allusion to American patriotism is moved to a new paragraph and expanded:

Patrick Henry, to a listening senate, thrilled by his magic eloquence, and ready to stand by him in his boldest flights, could say, “GIVE ME LIBERTY OR GIVE ME DEATH,” and this saying was a sublime one, even for a freeman; but, incomparably more sublime, is the same sentiment, when practically asserted by men accustomed to the lash and chain—men whose sensibilities must have become more or less deadened by their bondage. With us it was a doubtful liberty, at best, that we sought; and a certain, lingering death in the rice swamps and sugar fields, if we failed. Life is not lightly regarded by men of sane minds. It is precious, alike to the pauper and to the prince—to the slave, and to his master; and yet, I believe there was not one among us, who would not rather have been shot down, than pass away life in hopeless bondage (p. 213).

The comparison with Patrick Henry is slightly opaque in the Narrative but leaps off the page in this version, through a juxtaposition of the stakes between rhetorical daring, on the one hand, and a “practical” life-wager, on the other—the latter undertaken with no clear comprehension (much less lived experience) of the supposed “liberty” on one side of the balance. The point of the passage is still to give weight to the African American’s determination to escape slavery by equating it with the American revolutionary ethos—to lay claim to that founding national tradition of claiming the right to “liberty.” Yet in Douglass’s revision, the comparison is drawn in a manner that makes the slave’s struggle “incomparably more sublime.” The concluding sentences tilt the balance of the argument away from the specter of possible death, and toward “life” as a universal, absolute value. At the same time, they avoid the reversion to individual choice in the Narrative version (“For my part, I should prefer death to hopeless bondage”), instead making the men’s determination a matter of a shared commitment (“not one among us”) to living life in freedom.

Although My Bondage and My Freedom is much longer and more multifaceted than the Narrative, it may be even more successful than the earlier text in drawing the reader’s attention to its argumentative and figurative “threads” (to use Douglass’s term). In chapter 5 of the Narrative, for example, Douglass recalls leaving Colonel Lloyd’s plantation as he is taken to the Auld’s in Baltimore: “On setting sail, I walked aft, and gave to Colonel Lloyd’s plantation what I hoped would be the last look. I then placed myself in the bows of the sloop, and there spent the remainder of the day in looking ahead, interesting myself in what was in the distance rather than in things near by or behind” (Narrative, p. 38). Douglass uses almost the same words in My Bondage and My Freedom, but adjoins two other observations by adding the following sentences: “The vessels, sweeping along the bay, were very interesting objects. The broad bay opened like a shoreless ocean on my boyish vision, filling me with wonder and admiration” (p. 111). This small adjustment deepens the resonances in the later text. Immediately, the reader is reminded of the earlier passage in which Douglass describes the sloop at the Lloyd plantation as a “wondrous thing” that is “full of thoughts and ideas. A child cannot well look at such objects without thinking” (p. 61). The lines echo again later on, in a passage quoted from the Narrative where Douglass offers an apostrophe to the ships passing on the Chesapeake Bay, wishing that he “were on one of your gallant decks, and under your protecting wing! Alas! betwixt me and you the turbid waters roll. Go on, go on.... The glad ship is gone; she hides in the dim distance” (p. 220). Still later, the theme returns in another new passage in My Bondage and My Freedom, emphasizing the way that the bay comes for Douglass to symbolize not just the possibility of liberation (free “flight”) but also the possibility of a future—all that is unknown and to come:

As in these passages, many of the themes discussed in the Narrative remain present in My Bondage and My Freedom: the linking of liberty and literacy; the sense of slavery as a system that dehumanizes master as well as slave; the necessity of resistance to oppression. Some, however, are thrown into a new light in their new surroundings. The 1845 book is centered around Douglass’s individualism, while the 1855 volume offers a much more complex balance between Douglass’s attraction to authority figures, on the one hand—including Lawson, his “spiritual father” in Baltimore, and William Lloyd Garrison (Douglass describes himself as “something of a hero worshiper, by nature”) (pp. 132,264)—and his willful independence in the face of any overbearing control or overarching influence, on the other. The middle term the book discovers between these poles is hinted at in the Patrick Henry passage I quoted earlier: My Bondage and My Freedom is above all a search for community, and in the end it turns away from models of familial paternity, political hierarchy, and artistic apprenticeship in favor of fraternity. Some of Douglass’s most evocative writing recalls his fellow slaves on Freeland’s farm, whom he terms a “band of brothers” (pp. 202, 221).

By far the most striking revision and elaboration involves a passage from chapter 9 of the Narrative, which describes the period when Douglass leaves Baltimore in March 1832 to live on the farm of his owner, Thomas Auld. He spares little sympathy for Auld, saying that he was a “mean man,” and charging him with nearly starving his own slaves. Douglass, his sister, his aunt, and another slave working in the kitchen are “reduced to the wretched necessity of living at the expense of our neighbors. This we did by begging and stealing, whichever came handy in the time of need, the one being considered as legitimate as the other. A great many times have we poor creatures been nearly perishing with hunger, when food in abundance lay mouldering in the safe and smoke-house, and our pious mistress was aware of the fact; and yet that mistress and her husband would kneel every morning, and pray that God would bless them in basket and store!” (Narrative, pp. 54—55). These words of complaint are well designed to elicit the sympathy of the reader. But in My Bondage and My Freedom, Douglass is less concerned with triggering his white readers’ sentiments in opposition to slavery, and more concerned with offering an incisive argument about the place of ethical reasoning in the slave’s daily life. The passage starts with the same words, and then is amplified into an entirely different register:

We were compelled either to beg, or to steal, and we did both. I frankly confess, that while I hated everything like stealing, as such, I nevertheless did not hesitate to take food, when I was hungry, wherever I could find it. Nor was this practice the mere result of an unreasoning instinct; it was, in my case, the result of a clear apprehension of the claims of morality. I weighed and considered the matter closely, before I ventured to satisfy my hunger by such means. Considering that my labor and person were the property of Master Thomas, and that I was by him deprived of the necessaries of life—necessaries obtained by my own labor—it was easy to deduce the right to supply myself with what was my own.... In the case of my master, it was only a question of removal—the taking his meat out of one tub, and putting it into another; the ownership of the meat was not affected by the transaction. At first, he owned it in the tub, and last, he owned it in me (p. 148).

I shall here make a profession of faith which may shock some, offend others, and be dissented from by all. It is this: Within the bounds of his just earnings, I hold that the slave is fully justified in helping himself to the gold and silver, and the best apparel of his master, or that of any other slavebolder; and that such taking is not stealing in any just sense of that word.

The morality of free society can have no application to slave society. Slaveholders have made it almost impossible for the slave to commit any crime, known either to the laws of God or to the laws of man. If he steals, he takes his own; if he kills his master, he imitates only the heroes of the revolution (p. 149).

The great originality of My Bondage and My Freedom resides above all in its complex portrait of slavery, which goes far beyond the polemical aims of the great majority of slave narratives to offer a more nuanced rendering of the complexities of power and the vicissitudes of human interaction. In the Narrative, structured around binary oppositions, there is a juxtaposition of bondage and freedom as absolutes: thus, for Douglass, the victory in the battle with Covey represents “a glorious resurrection, from the tomb of slavery, to the heaven of freedom” (Narrative, p. 69). The Narrative opens with the unforgettable scene in which Douglass, as a child, is “a witness and a participant” to his owner Captain Anthony’s whipping of Douglass’s aunt Hester: the spectacle “was the blood-stained gate, the entrance to the hell of slavery, through which I was about to pass” (Narrative, p. 20). These episodes are included in My Bondage and My Freedom (he calls his aunt “Esther” in the 1855 book—as he reminds us later, “I write from sound, and the sounds on Lloyd’s plantation are not very certain” (p. 101), but without the melodrama. There is no gothic initiation scene. Instead, Douglass opens the book with a long, loving portrait of his grandmother, who had been mentioned only in a single sentence in the Narrative. He sketches his early childhood spent with her (“the only home I ever had”), and recounts the trauma of the day when he reached the age old enough to leave her cottage and move to Colonel Lloyd’s plantation. Most of chapter II is devoted to the day his grandmother walked him there, a twelve-mile journey (pp. 46—50). The chapter ends with Douglass explaining the reason he has narrated “so minutely an incident apparently so trivial”: the unexpected, forced separation affected him “so deeply,” and the event was, “in fact, my first introduction to the realities of slavery” (p. 50).

Thirty years later, Douglass still remembers a lesson he learned on that long walk through the woods between the town of Tuckahoe and the Wye River in Maryland. Now and then, frightened by the unfamiliar path and the enormous, “somber” trees, Douglass clutches at his grandmother’s skirts for protection:

This insight about the relativity of perspective comes to inform the tone of the entire book. Everything is qualified. In the Narrative, with its intoned cadences, the whip is the symbol of racism and oppression in the hand of Captain Anthony or the “rightly named” overseer Mr. Severe. In My Bondage and My Freedom, in contrast, Douglass tells us about Uncle Isaac Copper, the slave who taught the Lord’s Prayer to the children on the plantation, noting that he would mercilessly flog any boy who made an error. “Everybody, in the south, wants the privilege of whipping somebody else,” Douglass comments: “The whip is all in all. It is supposed to secure obedience to the slaveholder, and is held as a sovereign remedy among the slaves themselves, for every form of disobedience, temporal or spiritual. Slaves, as well as slaveholders, use it with an unsparing hand” (p. 66).

The plantation itself is a place of ambiguity and contradiction. On the one hand, Douglass explains at some length the brutal autonomy of the key institution of slavery, its removal from the controlling influences of law, government, and civil society: Colonel Lloyd’s plantation “is a little nation of its own, having its own language, its own rules, regulations and customs. The laws and institutions of the state, apparently touch it nowhere. The troubles arising here, are not settled by the civil power of the state.... [The plantation is] full three hundred years behind the age, in all that relates to humanity and morals” (p. 60). On the next page, however, he says that “though the whole place is stamped with its own peculiar, iron-like individuality; and though crimes, high-handed and atrocious, may there be committed, with almost as much impunity as upon the deck of a pirate ship,” still the plantation is “a most strikingly interesting place, full of life, activity, and spirit” (p. 61), with many objects to stir the imagination of even an eight-year-old slave. (The emphasis on the importance of qualities such as curiosity and wonder in My Bondage and My Freedom almost becomes a refrain, over and over showing the shortsightedness of William Lloyd Garrison’s anxious reassurance that Douglass’s first autobiography contained “nothing drawn from the imagination.”)

Douglass’s ambivalence concerning slave culture is well documented, and it molds his description of slave spirituals and “jubilee beating.” He quotes the lyrics of one song particularly critical of racist exploitation, and says, “This is not a bad summary of the palpable injustice and fraud of slavery” (p. 191). But Douglass frames this comment in a longer passage on the ways that “slave holidays”—and music, sport, and celebration among slaves in general—serve as “safety valves” on the plantation, carrying off “explosive elements” that might otherwise lead to insurrection (p. 192; see Sundquist, p. 129). Elsewhere, Douglass informs us that he and his “band of brothers” had used music as a secret code—singing about “sweet Canaan’ to communicate a plan to escape to Canada, for example—while planning their escape from Freeland’s farm. But again, the revolutionary potential of black culture is qualified, since Douglass is telling us about a failed escape plot and referring to the singing only for the purpose of self-criticism: it is one of the ”many silly things” (possibly awakening their masters’ suspicions) that they did, lost in the excitement of their planning (p. 209).

In one of the most brilliant “threads” of My Bondage and My Freedom, Douglass attempts to explain the reasons that for the slave, the very notion of mobility—not even escape, but movement from one place to another in general—is so extremely difficult, so threatening. He offers a compelling analysis of the ways that, even though the plantation is the space of unending victimization and “brutification” (p. 187), the slave is nonetheless inexorably attached to it. The slave, Douglass writes, “is a fixture; he has no choice, no goal, no destination; but is pegged down to a single spot, and must take root here, or nowhere. The idea of removal elsewhere, comes, generally, in the shape of a threat, and in punishment of crime. It is, therefore, attended with fear and dread” (pp. 138-139). In the next lines, Douglass makes recourse to the metaphor I discussed earlier, from the famous binary in the Narrative. But it is no longer the “tomb” of slavery on one side, and the “heaven” of freedom on the other. The real situation is much more shadowed—to invoke another of his favorite words—and much more troubling. It is now precisely the slave’s “going out into the world” that is “like a living man going into the tomb, who, with open eyes, sees himself buried out of sight and hearing of wife, children and friends of kindred tie” (p. 139).

Douglass returns to this theme in discussing his arrival in New York City after his escape. It is the moment that should be the culmination of his journey: at long last, the achievement of freedom. But he finds himself overwhelmed with “loneliness and insecurity” (p. 252). He writes:

This passage is a fair example of the tone of the book as a whole, which is the tone of the mature, reflective Douglass. He refuses to trade in stark oppositions and clear victories, but instead paints himself in a world of shadows. Here, escaping slavery can also mean losing home, and liberty can also mean the loss of all certainty and succor. Although the political goals remain clear, one is less certain of the ground one stands on. At times, there is freedom even in the midst of bondage, it seems, and new forms of bondage even in freedom. Or as Douglass himself phrases it, as he navigates the path to becoming a writer, “the settling of one difficulty only opened the way for another” (p. 271).

Brent Hayes Edwards is Associate Professor in the Department of English at Rutgers University. He is the author of The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Harvard University Press, 2003) and of numerous articles on twentieth-century African-American literature, contemporary poetry, Francophone Caribbean literature, surrealism, and jazz. He is coeditor of the anthology Uptown Conversation: The New Jazz Studies (Columbia University Press, 2004). He is an accomplished translator; his versions of works by Jacques Derrida, Jean Baudrillard, Edouard Glissant, Monchoachi, and Sony Labou Tansi have been published widely. Coeditor of the journal Social Text, he serves on the editorial boards of Transition and Callaloo. Edwards also wrote the Introduction and Notes for the Barnes & Noble Classics edition of Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo.