Introduction to Volume Two by John W. Blassingame
Introduction to Volume Two
With the publication of My Bondage and My Freedom in August 1855, Frederick Douglass became the first black American to produce a second and entirely new autobiography, joining a select company of his countrymen who revisited a past they had earlier described. A former slave who had grown up in ignorance in Maryland, Douglass could have claimed that he had achieved more with a second autobiography than white dual autobiographers, most of whom had the advantage of formal educations. Douglass represented a largely enslaved and illiterate people whose total output of disciplined, self-conscious literature in the form of books between 1760 and 1854 consisted of at least eleven volumes of poetry, one novel, three histories, twenty-four full-length autobiographies, and one travel account.1For a fuller description of African-American literary production in the antebellum era, see John W. Blassingame et al., eds., The Frederick Douglass Papers, Series 2: Autobiographical Writings, 2 vols. to date (New Haven, 1999-), 1: xiii-xvi, xxviii, xxxii (hereafter cited as Douglass Papers).
Given the limited African-American literary tradition upon which Douglass could draw, literary critics would judge his second autobiography not only against his first, but also against such classic life histories as those of Benjamin Franklin, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Thomas De Quincey, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Since Douglass's 1845 autobiography, the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, had been such a critical success, the publication of Bondage and Freedom was in some ways a perilous undertaking. Even so, Douglass had so many more advantages in 1855 than in 1845 that he was willing to take the risk.
Bondage and Freedom is the autobiography of a thirty-seven-year-old black man unusually well read in English and American history, biography, and literature. In startling contrast to the young man who had written the Narrative, by 1855 Douglass had become an accomplished writer accustomed to composing about a half-dozen editorials weekly. He had published at least one poem, a novella, and many thoughtful reviews of autobiographies, novels, pamphlets, and speeches. As editor of the longest continuously published antebellum black newspaper, Douglass had written more than one thousand editorials. Between 1845 and 1855 Douglass had
also perfected his rhetorical techniques by delivering more than one thousand speeches in the United States, England, Scotland, Ireland, and Canada. The intellectual gulf separating the twenty-seven-year-old author of the from the thirty-seven-year-old author of Bondage and Freedom was much greater than a mere difference in age. No longer a follower of William Lloyd Garrison, Douglass had adopted philosophical principles that would have been heretical in 1845. With seventeen years of freedom Douglass had elevated himself to key leadership positions in the northern free black and American reform communities. Through his newspaper he had established such a reputation for sincerity that thousands of British and Americans accepted his editorial and oratorical representations as truth.2Benjamin Quarles, Frederick Douglass (Washington, D.C., 1948), 138-53; William S. McFeely, Frederick Douglass (New York, 1991), 119-82; Waldo E. Martin, Jr., The Mind of Frederick Douglass (Chapel Hill, 1984), 18-106.
Douglass read extensively in the years after the publication of his first autobiography. English and American literary magazines played a major role in elaborating and revising the autobiographical canon he had known in the early 1840s, which had consisted largely of secondhand information gained from the Columbian Orator, reviews of autobiographical works and slave narratives in abolitionist newspapers and magazines, and Theodore Weld’s American Slavery as It Is. After Douglass began publishing the North Star in 1847, he gained direct knowledge of autobiographical conventions by reading more widely in the genre and by perusing reviews of and essays on autobiographies published in such literary magazines as the London Quarterly Review, North British Review, Westminster Review, Blackwood's Magazine, Harper's New Monthly Magazine, and the Atlantic Monthly. Douglass regularly noted and reviewed the contents of these periodicals in the North Star and Frederick Douglass' Paper.3Eric J. Sundquist, ed., Frederick Douglass: New Literary and Historical Essays (New York, 1990), 10-12; P. Dolores Brewington Perry, Frederick Douglass: Editor and Journalist (Chapel Hill, 1972), 242-43. See also NS, 24 August, 14 September 1849; FDP, 22 January, 30 July 1852; 16 September 1853; 27 January, 24 March 1854; 4 December 1857.
An examination of Douglass’s readings about autobiographies between 1847 and 1854 is crucial to understanding why his second autobiography differed so dramatically from his first. The shape of the 1845 Narrative represented in many ways a response to current critical canons. Most had been laid down by the English essayist John Foster in 1805. Foster and other critics writing in the first four decades of the century stressed the importance
of revealing the development of moral character, the acquisition of self-knowledge, avoidance of exhibitions of self-love, credibility, minuteness of detail, the inspiration of youth, descriptions of upright deportment, and a simple style.4John Foster, Essays in a Series of Letters (New York, 1853), 69, 71 -78.
After 1845 literary critics expanded these conventions.5The Dictionary of National Biography, 22 vols. (London, 1921-22), 7: 497-99. American editions of Foster's Essays available to Douglass in 1855 appeared in Hartford, 1807, 1844, 1845, 1847, and 1854; Boston, 1811, 1833, 1839; Utica, 1815; Andover, 1826; New York, 1835, 1846-54. Whereas Foster had focused on the lessons authors learned about themselves in the course of writing their autobiographies, critics after 1845 expressed more interest in what such works revealed about the past, enabling readers to peer inside past societies, to gain accurate knowledge of what motivated historic personages, and to separate truth from mythology. Though recognizing the extent to which autobiographies destroyed illusions about the past by placing readers behind the scenes, critics reflected that the historical value of such works depended on the authors’ opportunities for participating in and observing the dramas of their times.6Blackwood's Magazine, 66: 292-304 (September 1849); Harper 's New Monthly Magazine, 9: 276 (July 1854).
By the mid-1840s critics demonstrated considerably less concern with defending the interests of the privileged classes or protecting the established order and public morality. Whatever the character of the lives described in the autobiographies, the critics tried to find something instructive for readers, and the degree of instructiveness—the critics insisted—depended on the author's tone. Critics evenhandedly rejected works heavily stressing the author's joys or sorrows. One writer in the Democratic Review, for example, held that autobiographers should record much more than the shadows that had enveloped their lives because people were “rather prone to exaggerate their sufferings than their enjoyments; hence one half of the world is continually complaining to the other, without ever seeming to think that each one already has sorrows enough of his own.” Relief from the “brood of whiners" was necessary if one was to learn how to obtain happiness. An author who “shows us how his bitter hours were made to bear the fruit of joy" taught “the true secret of a happy life."7The United States Magazine, and Democratic Review, 21: 525 (December 1847). Some autobiographers, in contrast, focused too much on their enjoyments. An Atlantic Monthly critic found little to admire, for instance, in Lady Morgan's Passages from My Autobiography (1859) because it was "painfully vivacious. The poor old
lady smirks and capers and ogles, until one becomes sick of this sexagenarian agility.”8Atlantic Monthly, 3: 651 (May 1859). See also Blackwood’s Magazine, 66: 292-304 (September 1849); Harper's New Monthly Magazine, 1: 572 (September 1850), 5: 856-57 (November 1852), 8: 427 (February 1854), 14: 407 (February 1857).
Autobiographies marked by simplicity of language and plot found greatest favor among critics. Typical was the comment on Josiah Henson’s second autobiography in the Methodist Quarterly Review that the book was “written in a style of pure simplicity and genial piety.” The New Englander, reviewing the autobiography of Peter Still in November 1856, declared: “The style is, as it should be, simple and lucid, with no offensive attempt at fine writing.”9Methodist Quarterly Review, 40: 500 (July 1858); New Englander, 14: 629 (November 1856). See also Lib., 1 October, 26 November 1847. Ornate, or fine, writing had the ring of insincerity. Reviewing “the melancholy spectacle” of Lady Morgan’s autobiography, an Atlantic Monthly critic reflected the general attitude by severely castigating the author for her affected language: “she likes to parade her French. . . . This mania for inlaying her writing with French scraps rises with her Ladyship to a species of insanity.”10Atlantic Monthly Magazine, 3: 651 (May 1859).According to one Harper's reviewer, unless the author was an unusually skilled writer, the autobiographer should “never [attempt] the minute and delicate finish of the literary artist” and, instead, present his or her work “without art or ostentation.”11Harper's New Monthly Magazine, 9: 276 (July 1854); North American Review, 63: 481 (October 1846). See also Harper's New Monthly Magazine, 13: 555 (September 1856). The North American Review's critique of Captain Canot, or Twenty Years of an African Slaver went further: “It would have been better if the editor had restrained his ambition to write a lively and entertaining book, and had been content to tell Captain Canot’s story in a plain and straightforward way, without those embellishments which now certainly give it the air of romance.”12North American Review, 80: 160 (January 1855).
Perspicacity, balance, economy, clarity, precision, plainness of narration, logical arrangement, and swift movement were all sought in autobiographies. Such works should be “well arranged, simply and concisely written,” while displaying “a fluency of language and a variety and aptness of illustration.” Above all, authors should avoid the “sins of prolixity,” to which autobiographers seemed especially prone.13North American Review, 70: 332 (April 1850); Harper's New Monthly Magazine, 2: 139 (December 1850). See also North American Review, 63: 481 (October 1846), 90: 473 (April I860). A North American Review
critic complained in 1848 about the “increased and increasing size” of
biographies and autobiographies that attempted to “furnish a complete his
tory of the world from the creation to the present day.” There were several
keys to such prolixity. First, the “number of volumes given to the record of
a man’s life is apparently regarded as truly indicating his real position in the
world.” The second key was inherent in the nature of autobiographies: of
ten written by men and women in their old age, they were egocentric works
composed “when small events become dignified, and great events are belit
tled, . . . when the faculty of nice discrimination is, in a good degree, lost,—
and when the temptation to discursiveness, garrulity, and all manner of gos
sipry has become irresistible.”14
Critics perhaps retained far more interest in the moral lessons supplied
by autobiographers than they cared to admit. Though generally rejecting
John Foster’s vilification of autobiographers who were courtesans, drunk
ards, and criminals as “self-describers who thus think the publication of
their vices necessary to crown their fame,” late-antebellum critics seemed
incapable of deciding whether they wanted “faithful” accounts focused on
the exterior or the interior of an autobiographer’s life. They struggled to de
termine how “modest” an autobiographer should be. On this point, the crit
ics represented two schools. The first argued that autobiography should
serve as an “example of a life which gives at once a proof of the possibility
of virtue, shows the means of its attainment, and the glorious results of its
acquisition.”15Foster, , 78; , 70: 333 (April 1850).
Such critics viewed autobiographies primarily as documents revealing
the nature of the times in which authors lived. They saw autobiographers as
providing a view behind the scenes while drawing a curtain over the inti
mate details of personal lives. In 1859 an Atlantic Monthly reviewer ex
pressed such a moralistic view: “We think there is getting to be altogether
too much unreserve in the world. We doubt if any man have the right to take
mankind by the button and tell all about himself, unless, like Dante, he can
symbolize his experience. Even Goethe we only half thank, especially
when he kisses and tells, and prefer Shakespeare’s indifference to the inti
macy of the German.”16, 4: 771,773 (December 1859). See also , 6: 373-76 (September 1860).
The second school of critics wanted “to be admitted behind the scenes,
as it were, to the private life” of an autobiographer.17North American Review, 74: 250 (January 1852). The revelations in Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (reprinted in 1852) compelled these critics to express views such as the following statement in the North American Review: “Men often live two lives, quite disconnected and contradictory,—the inner life of thought, resolution, judgment, and fancy, and the outer life of dull, common-place fact, or insane and low excitement.” Because of this duality, it was necessary “to go behind the screen . . . and see how far the reality corresponds with the picture” even in “the unusually frank narrative.” While denying that critics had “a right to pry into personal secrets which the writer chooses to conceal,” the reviewer declared that “we are sometimes in doubt whether what is stated apparently as narrative is not really meant for brilliant fiction, or at least for ‘fiction founded on fact.’”18Ibid., 74: 425-26 (April 1852).
The two schools of critics did agree, however, that egotism generally determined how much autobiographers disclosed about their interior lives. While, for example, an Atlantic Monthly reviewer complained when autobiographers displayed “too much unreserve,” he realized that the general tendency ran the other way. It was the rare autobiographer “who spoke to himself of himself with perfect simplicity, frankness, and unconsciousness . . . a creature unique as the dodo.” Autobiographers protected their egos and reputations by giving limited versions of both their lives and their times: “Most men dress themselves for their autobiographies, as Machiavelli used to do for reading the classics, in their best clothes.”19Atlantic Monthly, 4: 771, 773 (December 1859).
Less circuitously than the Atlantic, Harper's concluded that impartiality was not always to be found in descriptions of scenes in which the autobiographer was “a prominent actor.” Harper's expressed many of its general sentiments in the course of reviewing Thomas Hart Benton’s Thirty Years in the United States Senate (1854). While Benton had “aimed at fairness and accuracy,” he “was too deeply mixed up in person with the scenes he describes to affect the dignity of the philosophic historian. . . . He gives his own views with equal frankness and ardor, and in reading them we must make constant allowance for the position of the writer.” In regard to his point of view, Benton typified most autobiographers: “In a narrative of this character it would be more than human to preserve a rigid impartiality.”20Harper's New Monthly Magazine, 9: 276 (July 1854).
One person most clearly united the early and late antebellum critics—the popular English essayist and autobiographer Thomas De Quincey. Like John Foster, De Quincey published numerous periodical essays on biographies and autobiographies. The appearance of American editions of De Quincey’s Confessions and Autobiographic Sketches in the early 1850s sparked a lively round of critical debate about the nature of autobiographies. De Quincey recognized that he was unconventional in his approach to life histories and used his preface to the to explain it. He argued that Confessions was a mode of “impassioned prose ranging under no precedents.” Sketches was, on the other hand, an amusing “real story, thoughtfully and faithfully related, moving through a succession” of varied scenes.21Thomas De Quincey, Autobiographic Sketches, [22 or 23] vols. (Edinburgh, 1853), 12: x, xviii.De Quincey devoted much of his preface to explaining the revelation of the most intimate personal details of his life. On this point he challenged the critics, arguing that “much more than amusement ought to settle upon any narrative of a life that is really confidential.” Yet “vast numbers of people, though liberated from all reasonable motives to self-restraint, can not be confidential—have it not in their power to lay aside reserve.” Believing that the “single force of absolute frankness” in an autobiography produced a work of “deep, solemn, and sometimes even of a thrilling interest,” De Quincey adopted the rule of “perfect sincerity: saying everywhere nothing but the truth; and in any case forbearing to say the whole truth only through consideration for others.”22Ibid., xi-xii.
Critics reacted with ambivalence to De Quincey’s autobiographical writings. Under the lingering influence of John Foster, they castigated De Quincey for reveling in “low excitement” and representing “in high favor personages who, in real life, would be scouted from all decent society”: opium addicts, drunkards, tramps, criminals, and the like. From the time De Quincey's Confessions first appeared in 1821, the pubic rebelled against the critics and avidly read it. By 1852, when a new edition of the work appeared, the critics' railing against De Quincey had softened. The collection and republication in the 1850s of his widely scattered essays and longer works in a multivolume set caused critics to reconsider their original judgments and to develop less moralistic theories of autobiographies than those propounded earlier by Foster.23North American Review, 74: 425-26 (April 1852).
John Foster and his successors established the general framework for critical assessments of autobiographies between 1805 and 1845. Their influence, especially on style, persisted until the 1850s and resonated clearly in critical writings about autobiography. By then, the reader had far outdistanced the author as the perceived chief beneficiary of autobiography, credibility had acquired more significance than an accurate tracing of the stages in one’s moral development, narrative technique had taken precedence over concern about exhibitions of self-love, and documentation of the past had become more important than self-revelation.
Originally published as a review of De Quincey’s Autobiographic Sketches in the London Quarterly Review in 1853, Thomas McNicoll’s sixty-four-page essay “Auto-Biographies” symbolized the expansion of Foster’s conventions. Interestingly, McNicoll did not question De Quincey's self-revelations so much as his style. His works, McNicoll charged, were episodic and lacked “beauty of form and highest symmetry.” Furthermore, De Quincey was not “content with indulging in a copious and ramifying text, this also, in its turn, is loaded and enriched by numerous illustrative notes, often of great value, which hang loosely on the body of the work, like the scalps in an Indian’s wampum-belt.” Yet because De Quincey tried to present “a daguerreotype portrait,—a literal and detailed truth to nature," he qualified as a “writer of subtle genius” whose works represented “a kind of riches that our judgment might have forbidden us to desire, but which our avarice will not suffer us to refuse.”24Thomas McNicoll, Essays on English Literature (London, 1861), 60-61. McNicoll divided autobiographies into the episodic, common life, adventure, history/adventure, and the literary. He gave considerable space to those of Benvenuto Cellini, Benjamin Franklin, Goethe, Leigh Hunt, Bayard Taylor, Chateaubriand, and Lamartine, and argued that autobiographies varied as widely as nature. Unlike Foster, McNicoll found all autobiographies instructive. Even though the autobiographer be the
vilest, poorest, and idlest of his race . . . as man he is joined to a far higher economy, and stamped with a more Divine significance; nor can he fail to illustrate, even in his obscurest wanderings, and in his most humble deeds, the majesty of spiritual laws and the mystery of human life. . . . there is in every man a separate individuality of thought and action, each breathing its peculiar moral. . . . if we follow carefully the least of these despised, we shall find him to be the central
figure of some imaginable moral circle, and the hero of a true dramatic unity.25Ibid., 4.
The revelation of human diversity in autobiography demonstrated the “cause and consequence” of various actions, suggested parallels in the lives of readers, and elicited their sympathy with the author. “It is no subject of wonder, then,” McNicoll asserted, “that man should have a peculiar and absorbing interest in man, where his intellect and sympathies may expatiate together.” He held narrative technique, sincerity, and commitment to truth to be the touchstones of the successful autobiography. The autobiography should consist of a “literal transcript of real life,” describe “outward circumstances, as well as inward growth,” manifest “a freshness in the details, a simplicity in the characters, and a modest dignity in the author’s manner,” be “characterized by an air of manly sincerity and sterling moral sense,” and contain “evidence of a native taste for the good and the beautiful, improved by diligent self-culture.”26Ibid., 3, 8, 10-11. See also Atlantic Monthly, 3: 650-51 (May 1859), 4: 770-73 (December
1859).
Convinced that the interesting and instructive autobiography bore little relation to the fame or attainments of the autobiographer, McNicoll insisted that “the detailed story would have at once the charm of fiction and the persuasiveness of truth." He concluded: “Truth, however desultory, will manifest a beauty of its own; however disconnected, its parts will finally cohere." Continuation of the interest in autobiography
seems to demand only, what may be termed genuineness in the narrative, and directness in the narrator. . . . In all these confessions, however, we look for a certain openness and freedom, and even a simplicity of speech . . . insisting only that the writer reveal himself, with real candour, or through some transparent artifice, and that all his cunning and duplicity, though so great as to include self-deception, shall not deceive us. . . . All extra-literal matter, if not put in with artist-like, judicious touches, tends to destroy vraisemblance, and cause endless contradictions.27McNicoll, Essays, 5, 8-10. See also Atlantic Monthly, 4: 770-73 (December 1859).
Since publishing his Narrative in 1845, Douglass had learned a great deal about the formal characteristics of autobiographical writings. In his newspapers Douglass regularly reviewed such literary magazines as the
North American Review, Harper's New Monthly, London Quarterly Review, Blackwood's, and Atlantic Monthly. He also noted, excerpted, or reviewed the autobiographical writings of Thomas De Quincey and others. Among the antebellum English and American autobiographies listed in the inventory of Douglass’s library were those of Thomas Hart Benton, Robert Romain, Henry C. Wright, Sargent S. Prentiss, and the anonymous Autobiography of a Working Man. Through such reading Douglass became thoroughly acquainted with the autobiographical conventions discussed by De Quincey, McNicoll, and other critics. As a consequence, he could consciously or unconsciously shape Bondage and Freedom more directly to the concerns of critics and encompass in the book more autobiographical elements than had been the case in 1845.28FDP, 20 May 1853.
Douglass and his coeditors reviewed many of the twenty-one slave autobiographies published between 1846 and 1855. His critical comments indicate that he viewed them primarily as documents useful in shedding light on slavery. He applauded simplicity and sincerity in such accounts. In 1849 Douglass reviewed the Narrative of the Life of Henry Bibb, calling it “certainly one of the most interesting and thrilling narratives of slavery ever laid before the American people.” Douglass applauded Bibb’s exposure “of the horrors of slavery,” his description of the slave’s “longing for freedom” and “narrations of the cruelty of individual slaveholders.” Accepting the veracity of the work, Douglass contended that it was “a most valuable acquisition to the anti-slavery cause.” In an earlier 1849 review of Wilson Armistead’s compilation of narratives and biographical sketches of blacks, A Tribute for the Negro, Douglass revealed considerably more of the critical canon that he applied to autobiographical works. Commending Armistead as “a calm, disinterested Christian and scholar,” Douglass praised his book because it was “plain, simple, truthful and is chiefly valuable as the repository of a luminous and brilliant array of testimony, in favor of our claims to be regarded as equal members of the great human family, with the rest of mankind, gathered with much industry, from the most valuable sources.”29NS, 7 April, 17 August 1849.
Many of Douglass’s friends in the black community published autobiographies between 1846 and 1860. The black autobiographers read each other’s works and shared a vision of the conventions governing and the purposes served by their self-portraits. Douglass was thoroughly acquainted with African-American antebellum autobiographical writings, and in fact
an overwhelming majority of the autobiographers corresponded with Douglass through his newspapers. As an editor, Douglass excerpted, noted, reviewed, and advertised in his journals or sold at his newspaper office the autobiographies of Solomon Northup, William Wells Brown, Henry Bibb, Wilson Armistead, and Austin Steward.30NS, 7 April, 17 August 1849; FDP, 19 November 1852, 29 April and 13 May 1853, 19 December 1856.
James W. C. Pennington, the former Maryland slave who officiated at Douglass’s wedding, illustrated many of the conventions of black autobiographies in his long prefaces to successive editions of The Fugitive Blacksmith; or, Events in the History of James W. C. Pennington. In the first edition, in 1849, Pennington declared that he had written the book to counteract a widespread tendency of Americans and English to “talk about the 'mildest form of slavery’” in a fashion “calculated to mislead the public mind." The first two editions sold a total of six thousand copies. In his preface to the third edition, in 1850, he asserted: “Since the second edition was printed, I have been constantly engaged in preaching and lecturing. . . . In almost every instance where I have gone into a place, I have found the way prepared by the book."31James W. C. Pennington, The Fugitive Blacksmith; or, Events in the History of James W. C. Pennington, 3d ed. (London, 1850), x, xvi. For Pennington, his written narrative and oral description of slavery were intimately related.
John Thompson and Henry Bibb demonstrated even more convincingly than Pennington the relationship between written and oral narratives. Asserting in 1856 that he was "one who has worn the galling yoke of bondage," Thompson declared that he had written his autobiography to give “permanent form" to his oral tales of bondage and freedom. The quintessential statement on the relation between written and oral voices appeared in the introduction and preface to the autobiography of Henry Bibb. Lucius Matlack, Bibb's editor, explained the author's otherwise “elevated style, purity of diction, and easy flow of language . . . [which] appear unaccountable," by observing that "to the thousands who have listened with delight to his speeches . . . these same traits will be noted as unequivocal evidence of originality. Very few men present in their written composition, so perfect a transcript of their style as is exhibited by Mr. Bibb.” In his preface Bibb asserted that his autobiography was an elaboration of a story he had recounted "publicly all through New England and the Western States to multiplied thousands." He had written a full account of his life because “in
no place have I given orally the detail of my narrative; and some of the most interesting events of my life have never reached the public ear. . . . I have undertaken to write the following sketch, that light and truth might be spread on the sin and evils of slavery as far as possible.”32John Thompson, (1856; New York, 1968), v-vi; Henry Bibb, Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, an American Slave, written by Himself (New York, 1849), i-ii, xi-xii.
Austin Steward published his autobiography for reasons similar to those noted by Pennington, Thompson, and Bibb. Viewing the “aggressions of the slave power” in the 1850s, when the institution threatened to spread into new territories, Steward felt that he had to speak out against “an evil of so much magnitude.” Steward wrote in 1857 that while the increasing efforts to extend the “hateful and God-provoking ‘Institution’” represented obvious and “practical commentary upon its benefits,” he was “anxious, to lay alongside of such arguments the history of his own life and experiences as a slave,” and to describe slavery “as he has seen and felt it himself.” Steward concluded by observing: “In his old age he sends out this history—presenting as it were his own body, with the marks and scars of the tender mercies of slave drivers upon it, and asking that these may plead in the name of Justice, Humanity, and Mercy, that those who have the power, may have the magnanimity to strike off the chains from the enslaved, and bid him stand up, a Freeman and a Brother!”33Austin Steward, Twenty-two Years a Slave, and Forty Years a Freeman (Rochester, N.Y., 1857), xi-xii. See also Samuel Ringgold Ward, Autobiography of a Fugitive Negro (London, 1855), vi-vii; [Jermain W. Loguen], The Rev. J. W. Loguen, as a Slave and as a Freeman: A Narrative of Real Life (Syracuse, 1859), iii-x.
Though sharing many of the sentiments of his fellow black autobiographers, Douglass entered profoundly different ground in 1855 when he began writing Bondage and Freedom. After all, only ten years had elapsed since Douglass had published his Narrative. Almost inevitably the critical reception of the Narrative influenced the shape and tone of the reception of Bondage and Freedom when it appeared in 1855.
Before examining the publication history and critical reception of Bondage and Freedom, it is necessary to explain what drove Douglass to write a second autobiography. The growth of Douglass’s public reputation played a part. Increasing discussion of slavery, its place in western territories, the great publicity given to the rendition of fugitive slaves, and the splintering of the Whig and Democratic parties as they wrangled over the Compromise of 1850 and the Kansas-Nebraska Act all contributed to larger demands
for former slaves like Douglass to recount the stories of their bondage. What, the free populace kept asking, was it like to be a slave? Novelists tried to supply answers, none of them as successfully as Harriet Beecher Stowe. Fictional depictions of slave life, however, only whetted the public’s appetite for personal, factual accounts. Stowe tried to satisfy demands for information by providing excerpts from the narratives of Douglass and other former slaves in her Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Ultimately, and paradoxically, the Key may have increased the public’s desire to see, hear, and read about actual former slaves in much the same way that Stowe’s Uncle Tom's Cabin did when it appeared in 1852. Among the most widely read of antebellum novels, throughout much of the 1850s excited interest in the autobiographies of former slaves. The New Englander briefly explored the phenomenon in an 1856 review: ‘The literature of slavery is becoming a very considerable affair. . . . Mrs. Stowe's works, of world-wide fame, are awakening in all quarters a demand for authentic personal narratives of experience in slavery; and the demand is likely to be well supplied.”34New Englander, 14: 628-29 (November 1856). See also Robert S. Levine, (Chapel Hill, 1997), 72-90, 146.
Swept along by the clamor for written and oral narratives of the lives of former slaves, Douglass in the 1850s received frequent requests to discuss his bondage. As demands increased for details of Douglass’s personal history, publishers sought to convince Douglass to write a second account of his life. In fact, so frequent were the calls for Douglass to narrate the story of his life, he became ambivalent about responding to them. On one occasion in 1852 he reported that “it was most gratifying” to fulfill a request to recount the “simple story” of his life. Two years later, however, Douglass expressed his exasperation over having to satisfy such appeals because he felt they limited the amount of time he could devote to other interests: “Almost everywhere I go, 1 am strangely pressed to tell the story of my life; and if I responded to all the demands made upon me in this behalf, I should have time for little else. In whatever mood one finds himself, joyous or sad, contemplative or talkative, one must tell his experience in slavery.” And even in the preface to Bondage and Freedom he repeated these sentiments, noting that he had “often refused to narrate my personal experience in public anti-slavery meetings, and in sympathizing circles, when urged to do so by friends, with whose views and wishes, ordinarily, it were a pleasure to comply.”35FDP, 8 April 1852, 3 February 1854; Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom (New York and Auburn, N.Y., 1855), vi.
Douglass protested too much for us to accept entirely the characterization of his attitude toward recounting his life story. Sometimes reticent under circumstances that suggested undue vanity or made him merely an awful example of bondage, Douglass recalled his past over and over, using editorials as his outlet, and became more accustomed to writing than speaking his reminiscences. Composing about a half-dozen editorials weekly from 1847 to 1854 for the North Star and Frederick Douglass’ Paper, Douglass drew on memories to give weight to his opinions. Those words 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 to provide this new interpretation.36NS, S September 1848, 25 May 1849, 30 May 1850; FDP, 29 April 1853.
Douglass’s decision to revisit his past, though uncommon, was not unique. He shared the impulse with Americans as diverse as Charles A. Siringo, Theodore Dreiser, Hamlin Garland, Ludwig Lewisohn, Sherwood Anderson, and Mabel Dodge Luhan. But Douglass had most in common with other black Americans and Victorian autobiographers. A “pervasive reminiscential mood” was characteristic of the Victorians and appeared clearly in the works of Thomas Carlyle. David J. DeLaura has written of Douglass’s English contemporaries: “This presentation of one's own past, as part of a search for new meanings in a deteriorating cultural situation, is perhaps the most central binding activity of serious nineteenth-century literature. It is the great ‘task,’ a kind of implicitly shared program for the century. This everywhere evident autobiographical pressure of the period . . . reaches a kind of climax around mid-century.”37David J. DeLaura, “The Allegory of Life: The Autobiographical Impulse in Victorian Prose,” in George P. Landow, ed., Approaches to Victorian Autobiography (Athens, Ohio, 1979), 334, 338.
Many African-American autobiographers have revisited their past. The impulse is buried in the complex relationship between the history and culture of blacks in the Americas and symbolized by the repetitive themes in that most distinctive musical genre, the blues. For some literary critics, black autobiography is the prose analogue of the blues. To explain the distinctive features of antebellum slave autobiographies such as Douglass's, the scholar John Bayliss, for instance, concluded: “The slave narratives are the Blues in prose.” In her study of black autobiographies, Sidonie Smith extended Bayliss’s analogy:
The blues is a peculiar response to the vicissitudes of life emanating from the black American experience, and thus, like the slave narrative, is wholly a black form. It is a form of individualized expression characterized basically by a repeated second line, a loose associative structure, colloquial language, irony, and painful lament. . . . In the act of writing, the slave narrator again liberated himself, now from psychological imprisonment in an oppressive past, by giving distance to his past through the imposition of artistic form. Through the use of such techniques as humor and irony, the narrator gained control over his memories and thereby transcended them.38John H Bayliss, ed., Black Slave Narratives (London, 1970), 9; Sidonie Smith, Where I'm Bound: Patterns of Slavery and Freedom in Black American Autobiography (Westport, Conn., 1974), 173. See also Elizabeth Schultz, “To Be Black and Blue: The Blues Genre in Black American Autobiography,” Kansas Quarterly, 7; 81-96 (summer 1975); Mutlu Konuk Blasing, The Art of Life: Studies in American Autobiographical Literature (Austin, 1977), x-xxi.
The significance of the blues analogy as an explanation for such black authors as Douglass, Booker T. Washington, Josiah Henson, and W. E. B. Du Bois who wrote several autobiographies was first explored by the great novelist Ralph Ellison in his 1945 essay "Richard Wright’s Blues.” Searching for one source of black literary expression in African-American culture, Ellison focused on the similarities between the blues and autobiography: "The blues is an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one's aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism. As a form, the blues is an autobiographical chronicle of personal catastrophe expressed lyrically.”39Ralph Ellison, Shadow and Act (1953; New York, 1964), 78-79.
Douglass showed an early interest in self-examination through the , and it may be that a person of Douglass's sensitivity was compelled to probe his painful past repeatedly in order to determine who he was. Mutlu K. Blasing, an astute student of autobiographies, explained this feature of the genre by observing that “autobiography is not a static meditation on the self. . . . When one casts oneself as the center of reality . . . one becomes committed to continuous self-scrutiny." Douglass resolved this disjuncture by the creative use of his memory as described by the literary critic James Olney. Such autobiographers as Douglass, according to Olney, draw on “a creative memory that shapes and reshapes the historic past in the image of the present, making that past as necessary to this present as this
present is the inevitable outcome of that past. . . . Memories and present reality bear a continuing, reciprocal relationship, influencing and determining one another ceaselessly: memories are shaped by the present moment and by the specific psychic impress of the remembering individual, just as the present moment is shaped by memories.”40Blasing, The Art of Life, xx-xxi; James Olney, “Some Versions of Memory / Some Versions of Bios: The Ontology of Autobiography,” in James Olney, ed., Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical (Princeton, 1980), 243-44. Douglass’s repetition of the autobiographical act in Bondage and Freedom enabled him to revisit and reshape a painful past indirectly, become a representative of fellow blacks who had shared similar experiences, relieve emotional stress, reaffirm his identity, control his anger, denounce those responsible for his grief, and satisfy increasing public demands for more information about his personal life.
Like other antebellum black autobiographers, Douglass wrote most of his literary productions before the issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 out of a desire to contribute to the abolition of slavery. As a consequence, Douglass’s preface to his second antebellum autobiography, Bondage and Freedom, has features in common with those of his fellow black autobiographers. No longer concerned with authenticating his former slave status, Douglass dispensed with prefatory remarks by abolitionist friends. Instead, Douglass wrote his own prefatory letter in which he declared that his initial hesitation about writing his second autobiography was overcome by the need to demonstrate that the enslaved and oppressed blacks were not, as their detractors claimed, “naturally, inferior; that they are so low in the scale of humanity, and so utterly stupid, that they are unconscious of their wrongs, and do not apprehend their rights.” More central to the purpose of the autobiography was Douglass’s claim that it was “calculated to enlighten the public mind, by revealing the true nature, character, and tendency of the slave system.”41Douglass, Bondage and Freedom, vii.
Douglass’s prefatory letter to Bondage and Freedom demonstrated his understanding of antebellum autobiographical conventions. For example, Douglass tried to allay suspicion of his egotism or ulterior purpose. In his long statement Douglass stressed his humility and focused on the larger issues associated with his life. He contended that he based his opposition to slavery “upon the indestructible and unchangeable laws of human nature.” In writing his autobiography Douglass hoped to escape “the imputation of
weakness, vanity, and egotism,” noting that he was trying “not to illustrate any heroic achievements of a man, but to vindicate a just and beneficent principle, in its application to the whole human family.”42Ibid., vi-vii.
Scarred by a series of disputes with his former Garrisonian allies, Douglass deliberately emphasized his independence from the competing abolitionist groups by turning to the erudite black physician James McCune Smith for an introduction to Bondage and Freedom. Even more than Garrison’s and Phillips’s 1845 authentications of Douglass’s self-portrait, Smith’s introduction sought to shape critical response. Quoting frequently from Bondage and Freedom, Smith focused variously on ethnography, ancient and American history, literature, politics, journalism, and oratory. To counter potential concern about the credibility of the account, Smith referred repeatedly to Douglass’s “uncommon memory.” Bondage and Freedom provided incomparable testimony to this aspect of Douglass’s intellectual powers because it contained numerous examples of an “unfailing memory bringing up all the facts in their every aspect.” In contrast to Garrison and Phillips, Smith demonstrated familiarity with a wide range of black and white autobiographies; compared Douglass’s account favorably with those of Hugh Miller, William Wells Brown, Samuel Ringgold Ward, and Henry Bibb; and claimed that the book was an illustration of manhood and American national character. The most prescriptive elements of Smith’s introduction stressed Douglass’s perspicacity, logical acumen, controlled passion, and style, and Smith drew special attention to Douglass’s logical development of arguments as a rhetorical strategy and revelation of intellectual strength.43Ibid., xviii, xxvi.
Contending that Douglass's style was his “most remarkable mental phenomenon," Smith admitted that it was to him “an intellectual puzzle." The style was a mystery, however, only in determining its source. Eventually Smith located its roots in Douglass’s black family antecedents. Succinctly summarized, the stylistic elements of Bondage and Freedom included “strength, affluence and terseness" as well as a "rare polish . . . which, most critically examined, seems the result of careful early culture among the best classics of our language.”44Ibid., xxviii, xxix.
Although Smith's authentication of Bondage and Freedom did not guarantee Douglass the publicity he had gained from the prefatory letters of
Garrison and Phillips in the Narrative, Douglass’s activities between 1845 and 1855 partially offset the loss of their notoriety. Because he was far better known in 1855 than he had been ten years earlier, Douglass’s reputation gave some assurance that Bondage and Freedom would be well received, and although the publication of the second autobiography lacked some of the drama of the first, there was an immense market for it.
The appeal of Douglass’s second autobiography was roughly comparable to that of the other black autobiographies published from 1846 to 1860. Among these forty works, only twelve appeared in two or more editions, and two of them were translated into three foreign languages in the nineteenth century. The most successful were the narratives of Zamba (one English and one German edition), James W. C. Pennington and Austin Steward (three English-language editions), and Sojourner Truth and William Wells Brown (four English-language editions). Josiah Henson, the only African-American other than Douglass to publish two distinct autobiographies during the antebellum period, stood in a class by himself. His first autobiography was published in three English-language editions; his second appeared in one English-, one Dutch-, and one French-language edition. In addition to the intrinsic merit of his account, Henson had, of course, an incomparable advantage over all other black autobiographers in being able to claim that he was the model for Harriet Beecher Stowe's fictional character Uncle Tom.45Among the multiple editions of other black autobiographies were those of Henry Bibb, Henry Box Brown, Thomas H. Jones, Solomon Northup, Daniel H. Peterson, Levin Tilmon, and Sally Williams. See Marion Wilson Starling, The Slave Narrative: Its Place in American History (Boston, 1981), 339-50; George P. Rawick, From Sundown to Sunup: The Making of the Black Community (Westport, Conn., 1972), 179-89.
Douglass’s Bondage and Freedom, though ultimately not as successful as the autobiographical works of Henson, nevertheless enjoyed brisk sales when it appeared in August 1855. Five thousand copies sold the first two days after its publication, and residents in Syracuse, New York, alone purchased one thousand copies during the first week the book was available. Although more expensive at $1.25 per copy and less well publicized than the Narrative, the second autobiography sold well. Because the 464-page book was too large to publish in a “cheap” or paperback edition, Douglass’s publishers, Miller, Orton, & Mulligan, developed a newspaper notice designed to maximize its appeal. Beginning with the statement that “5000 Copies Sold in Two Days,” the notice proceeded:
WHY SO POPULAR?
It is the Work of an American Slave,
Therefore excites American Sympathy!
Every line and letter are his own,
And it is a Volume of Truth and Power!
It tells the earnest, startling truth,
Without ranting or madness!
It addresses the intellect and the heart!
Every free Press chants its praise,
Every free Voter will read it,
And every Bookseller supply it.46Lib., 24 August 1855. See also New York Evangelist, 30 August 1855.
This kind of publicity succeeded splendidly: the book required second and third editions in 1856 and 1857, and by the time a German edition appeared in 1860, some twenty thousand copies had been sold.47The foreign-language editions were Sclaverei unci Freiheit: Autobiographie von Frederick Douglass, trans. Ottilie Assing (Hamburg. 1860); Mes annees d’esclavage et de liberte par Frederick Douglass, marshal de Colombie (d’apres l'anglais), trans. Catherine Valérie Boissier Gasparin (Paris, 1883).
As with the , Douglass combined sales of Bondage and Freedom with his speeches, a tactic that kept him financially stable. From the time of the book's publication through 1859, Douglass took copies of Bondage and Freedom on his lecture tours, announcing its sale at the end of his orations. In an 1856 letter to Gerrit Smith, Douglass asserted, “My Bondage and my freedom—will Sell, as long as I can lecture—so that I regard myself well provided for—for the present."48Douglass to Gerrit Smith, 23 May 1856, Gerrit Smith Papers, NSyU. See also New York Herald, 3 August 1858.
Although the commercial success of rivaled that of the , it received a different critical reception. The 1855 autobiography was widely reviewed in the United States and abroad, and more nonabolitionists wrote about it than had been the case with the 1845 edition. In contrast to reviewers of the Narrative, critics of Douglass’s second autobiography viewed it more as a conventional account of the life of an unusual man than as an antislavery document. Partially as a consquence of this stance, critics showed far more concern with the literary qualities of Douglass's second autobiography than they had when considering his first.
Many critics found Bondage and Freedom more enthralling than any fictional account of slavery. In its five-thousand-word review, the New York Daily Tribune described Douglass’s autobiography as “one of the most striking illustrations of American Slavery which either fact or fiction has presented to the public. It abounds in scenes of breathless excitement, often curdling the blood with horror, and revealing the miseries of servile life with an intense vividness scarcely surpassed by the most impressive descriptions of recent popular romance.”49New York Daily Tribune, 15 August 1855. The Yates County Whig reviewer felt virtually the same way: “No romance can be more exciting to the reader than this truthful narrative.” The popular writer Fanny Fern declared flatly: “I confess never to have read a novel more thrillingly fascinating.”50Yates County Whig, n.d., quoted in FDP, 23 November 1855; Fern quoted in Bondage and Freedom (New York, 1856), endpages. The October 1855 review in the Radical Abolitionist was similar: “If any one wishes to adjust the rival claims of simple biography and the best tales of fiction, let not the final decision be made without comparing this narrative of Frederick Douglass with the most admired productions of the imagination.”51New York Radical Abolitionist, October 1855.
Reviewers most frequently compared Bondage and Freedom with Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “romance” Uncle Tom's Cabin. For example, the literary critic for Frederick Douglass' Paper, reviewing Douglass's autobiography along with two slavery novels, declared: “We have read nothing since Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which so thrilled every fibre of the soul and awoke such intense sympathy for the slave as this touching autobiography.”52FDP, 21 September 1855. Putnam 's Monthly's reviewer also had Stowe’s novel in mind as he read Douglass’s autobiography. “We need hardly say that it abounds in interest,” he wrote. “For ourselves, we confess to have read it with the unbroken attention with which we absorbed Uncle Tom’s Cabin. It has the advantage of the latter book in that it is no fiction.”53Putnam’s Monthly, 6: 547 (November 1855). See also Boston Christian Watchman and Re flector, 20 December 1855. Stowe’s novel also framed the New York Daily Times review of Bondage and Freedom:
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 a born thrall; who has himself suffered as a slave; who felt the iron eat into his soul . . . who remained twenty-one years in bondage . . . 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.54New York Daily Times, 17 September 1855.
Some critics exhibited as much interest in the credibility of the book as they did in comparing it to fiction. The Boston Journal critic found Bondage and Freedom of “absorbing” interest and declared: “The truthfulness of the narrative which he gives of his bondage will be generally conceded, and certainly realizes the truth of the old adage—‘truth is strange—stranger than fiction.’’’ The Putnam's Monthly reviewer expressed similar sentiments in an extended commentary on the author, his style, and his life. Although Douglass’s prejudice may have affected his depictions of slavery, “the general tone of them is truthful.’’ Douglass generalized from his individual experiences and bitterly portrayed slavery from the vantage point of “a personal provocation.’’ Even so, his account portrayed the institution “not more bitterly than the circumstances seem to justify. His denunciations of slavery and slaveholders are not indiscriminate, while he wars upon the system rather than upon the persons whom that system has made.”55Boston Journal, n.d., quoted in FDP, 23 November 1855; Putnam's Monthly, 6: 547 (November 1855).
The New York Daily Times, New York Independent, and New York Daily Tribune were less cautious in their assessments of Douglass’s credibility than Putnam's Monthly. The Independent contended that the statements in the book “must be regarded as direct, positive, and reliable. . . . This narrative written without any vindictiveness of spirit or violence of language, will convey to whoever may read it a clear and just view of the system of American slavery.”56New York Independent, 1 November 1855. The Daily Times noted that Douglass was well-known to its readers as a person “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.” More to the point, Douglass in his
autobiography was an author “who records only what he personally experienced; who gives dates and places; who names circumstances and persons.”57New York Daily Times, 17 September 1855.
The most detailed discussion of the credibility of Bondage and Freedom appeared in the New York Daily Tribune's review. It was an emphatic affirmation. By “any criterion of ability,” Douglass was “an uncommonly able man.” The reviewer then remarked that Douglass had risen from the ignorance and degradation of slavery to a “place as an equal in the ranks of freemen, attained distinction as a writer, public speaker, and member of an intellectual profession. . . . The life of such a person belongs to history.” Next came an extended defense of the credibility of the autobiography. Douglass had wisely confined his narration “to plain matters of fact, without the embellishments of fancy. . . . and endeavored to give merely a literal transcript of his past experience.” Douglass had successfully established his claim that “there is not a fictitious name or place in the whole volume, and that every transaction occurred as therein described.” Probability and comparative reading supported Douglass’s assertions; “His story reads like an ‘o’er true tale.’ It exhibits all the natural marks of probability. Nothing is related to which a parallel may not be discovered in other veracious accounts of Southern life.”58New York Daily Tribune, 15 August 1855.
Most reviewers concentrated on the literary qualities of Bondage and Freedom. They commented on the vigorous writing, graphic details, and rhythmic style. The Vermont Journal reviewer wrote that Bondage and Freedom “reveals the miseries of servile life with an intense vividness and impressiveness, that can but fasten its facts and arguments upon the reader’s mind as with a pen of iron and with the point of a diamond.” The Rochester Daily American, Buffalo Daily Courier, American Spectator, Buffalo Morning Express, Utica Morning Herald, and Oswego Times all commended Douglass’s writing style as powerful, vivid, spirited, polished, graceful, classical, calm, dispassionate, and dignified. Bondage and Freedom, such critics contended, elevated Douglass to the top ranks of American writers.59All quoted in FDP, 23 November 1855. The reviewer in the Radical Abolitionist typified the attitude of many critics when he wrote that Douglass’s “autobiography exhibits his literary powers in a new phase. It will always hold a rank among the model writings of that class—simple, straightforward, easy, unpretending, yet
graphic, life-like, and touching the chords of sympathy with resistless power.”60New York Radical Abolitionist, October 1855.
Some critics demonstrated little restraint in their praise of the stylistic characteristics of Bondage and Freedom. The review in Frederick Douglass' Paper was typical: “My Bondage and My Freedom is a remarkable book. We could not but wonder, as we read, at the terseness, vigor and polish of the style, which would do credit to the ripest scholar and most practiced writer in our country.” Clearly, the New York Daily Times reviewer was among the critics most impressed by the literary qualities of the book:
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 is it remarkable—not only in what it relates, but in the manner of the relation. In truth, the literary merit of the book is very great. Suppose that it had been written by some college-trained man, the lucidity of its style and the thoroughly Saxon character of its language would have attracted attention. But here is a man of color, instructed merely how to spell words of three letters, while yet a child—subsequently forbidden to acquire any further knowledge of this sort,—gleaning the elements of learning literally on “the highways and by-ways,”—teaching himself to write by copying printed letters—and producing a work which, as a mere literary production, would be creditable to the first English writer of the day. . . . It stands far above all rivals, at the head of the peculiar class to which it belongs.61FDP, 21 September 1855; New York Daily Times, 17 September 1855.
Even more than in the Narrative, Douglass's pathetic appeals in Bondage and Freedom impressed the critics. Characteristic was the declaration of Putnam's Monthly that the book contained “much that is profoundly touching. Our English literature has recorded many an example of genius struggling against adversity . . . yet none of these are so impressive as the case of the solitary slave, in a remote district, surrounded by none but enemies, conceiving the project of his escape, teaching himself to read and write to facilitate it, accomplishing it at last, and subsequently raising himself to a leadership in a great movement in behalf of his brethren.”62Putnam’s Monthly, 6:547 (November 1855). Although the New York Daily Tribune review concentrated on the credibility
of Douglass’s autobiography, the critic contended that “the startling revelations which abound in his volume, give it the glow and often the pathos of a high-wrought fiction.”63New York Daily Tribune, 15 August 1855.
Critics argued that the descriptive powers displayed in Bondage and Freedom were especially impressive. The British Banner reviewer felt that each chapter was more finely drawn than the one preceding it. The first chapter was one “beautifully detailing the facts and incidents” of Douglass’s childhood, while others were “copious and most affecting,” “long and wonderful,” and “a tremendous indictment against the slaveholder.” An early general chapter on slave life led the reviewer to conclude: “The plantation here so vividly pourtrayed is a hell upon earth.”64London British Banner, 6 March 1856.
For the critics, Douglass’s most memorable character sketches were those of his mother and of the slave breaker Edward Covey. Regarding his mother, the London Inquirer reviewer declared: “He fondly treasures and eloquently details his few recollections of her.” While noting the finely drawn portraits of Douglass’s grandmother, master and mistresses, the critics found no characterizations to match that of Edward Covey. The reviewer for the British Banner gave one of the fullest reactions when he wrote about that “horrible history” Covey whose “terrible man” was a catalogue of cruelty, profligacy, and “matured wickedness. We have no name adequately to describe him. We may not charge him with brutality, as Mr. Douglass does, for it is a libel on the bestial tribes. He is not a man, he is not a beast, he is not a fiend; but a strange something which Slavery alone can produce, and which is known only in slave territory.”65London Inquirer, 19 April 1856; London British Banner, 6 March 1856.
The New York Evangelist and Detroit Daily Advertiser contained the most detailed critiques of Douglass’s style. The New York Evangelist reviewer argued that Douglass “writes in a nervous, clear and most telling manner, clothing his narrative with intense interest, and conveying his moral impressions with a vividness that leaves the reader scarcely any escape.” Drawing similar conclusions, the reviewer for the Detroit Daily Advertiser asserted: “The book is written with the happiest descriptive power, with nerve and vigor of expression, and with richness of style. It has an ample resource in phrase, great perspicuity, and a musical, resonating, and half rhythmatic style, which reminds the reader of the author’s origin, and of the native melodies of his race. The book manifests a high, and, to us, unexpected
polish. The interest aroused and kept up by a perusal of this book is of a high order, and rarely degenerates.”66Quoted in FDP, 23 November 1855, and in New York Radical Abolitionist, Supplement (November 1856).
As with the Narrative, a few reviewers saw Douglass the orator in Douglass the writer. They discovered cadences of his speeches in the rhythms of his autobiography. The Rochester Daily American reviewer declared, for example, that observers ranked Douglass “among the first orators of the day” noted for “his graceful elocution, his cutting satire, and his frequent bursts of eloquence.” For such reviewers, in Bondage and Freedom Douglass displayed some of the same traits and achieved the same renown as he did at the lectern. The Buffalo Daily Courier, the Daily Ohio State Journal, the Christian Advocate, and the Utica Morning Herald reflected these views. The Morning Herald review was typical: “Frederick Douglass is a remarkable man. . . . As a writer and speaker, he ranks with the most effective and natural—after our master authors and orators.”67Quoted in FDP, 23 November 1855. When comparing Bondage and Freedom to the best efforts of American whites, Putnam s Monthly contended: “The mere fact that the member of an outcast and enslaved race should accomplish his freedom, and educate himself up to an equality of intellectual and moral vigor with the leaders of the race by which he was held in bondage, is, in itself, so remarkable, that the story of the change cannot be otherwise than exciting.”68 Putnam's Monthly, 6:547 (November 1855).
Some reviewers compared Bondage and Freedom favorably with other black autobiographies. The London British Banner published a typical assessment. Having reviewed Samuel Ringgold Ward’s autobiography, The Autobiography of a Fugitive Negro, in a previous issue (29 February 1856), the Banner began its assessment of Bondage and Freedom by comparing the two writers: Douglass’s autobiography was “a formal, elaborate, condensed, and telling treatise on the general question,” while Ward’s was “a free, friendly, grateful, valedictory record of the Author’s treatment in Great Britain.” Because Douglass intended his book “to produce a permanent influence" rather than service the “temporary purpose” of Ward’s account, Douglass's autobiography, in “point of solid value and comprehensive interest,” surpassed that of Ward. “Mr. Douglass stands forth, not simply as the autobiographer, but as the philanthropic orator, the advocate of his people,” argued the Banner. “There is, therefore, a maturity, a fulness,
and an elaboration in Douglass, which was not be expected in Ward.” The reviewer then summarized the first seven chapters of Bondage and Freedom, describing them as “affecting,” “subdued,” “brilliant but painful portraiture,” “striking,” and “remarkable.” The critic concluded: “No publication has yet appeared admitting of a moment’s comparison. It is Slavery vivified by the spirit of genius. It is an indictment against the system framed by a hand inferior to nothing that the world of White Americans can supply.”69London British Banner, 6 March 1856.
Often using metaphors, reviewers expressed their appreciation for Douglass’s revelations about the development of his character, the internal man. The New York Daily Tribune, for example, described Douglass’s “spirit” while a slave and his description of how he had “overcome obstacles which no one in his position has ever before been called to encounter. Doomed by his birth to bondage, ignorance, and degradation, he has literally broken the fetters of Slavery.” Douglass had written an autobiography filled with lessons for the “student of human nature.” The Christian Watchman and Reflector gave unstinting praise to the revelations in Douglass’s autobiography. His “well-told story” presented a feast for readers surpassing any works of fiction, for in it they would obtain a view of “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.”70New York Daily Tribune, 15 August, 1855; Boston Christian Watchman and Reflector, 20 December 1855. The New York Radical Abolitionist expressed similar sentiments: “If any one wishes to find or to cite a rare specimen of what is called a ‘self-made man,’ or to learn or show from what depths, against what obstacles, and amid what discouragements, the humblest of our species may rise to an enviable pre-eminence, the life of Frederick Douglass is, emphatically the book for the purpose.”71New York Radical Abolitionist, October 1855.
In some ways the reactions to Bondage and Freedom were similar to
the reception of the Narrative. Reviewers saw, for example, in Bondage and Freedom evidence of the intellectual capabilities of African Americans. The London Literary Gazette came to characteristic conclusions in its review, saying that Douglass’s life “presents a conspicuous instance of the capabilities of the oppressed race for whose social and intellectual improvement he is a zealous and able advocate.”72London Literary Gazette, 20 October 1855.
Occasionally reviewers compared the Narrative and Bondage and Freedom. For example, the London Inquirer began its review by discussing the Narrative:
He who would prevent the wrongs done to the coloured race must maintain their rights: and perhaps Douglass has been as useful in exemplifying their capacities for freedom as their sufferings in bondage. Few can see and hear him, without abhorrence of the system which made him a slave; yet a Mr. Thompson, who knew him about a year before he became free, denied that he could have written his narrative, for “he was an unlearned and rather ordinary negro.” Those who will not, or cannot, listen to his oratory, may read his book . . . it shows calm reflection, and artistic skill. Few slaveholders could compose a work of so much ability and interest; and the reputation which it has attained, and the warm eulogies which have been pronounced on it by the organs of various parties, may suggest to some of his old oppressors the uneasy apprehension, that “a rather ordinary negro” may be an extraordinary man.73London Inquirer, 19 April 1856.
The comparison of Bondage and Freedom and the Narrative, critics contended, demonstrated Douglass's intellectual development. The London Inquirer critic, while praising the “thrilling facts so simply and graphically told” in the Narrative, felt that Douglass had “done wisely . . . to re-write his autobiography. As a literary production, ‘My Bondage,’ &c., does ample credit to his self-culture during the ten years which elapsed since he became an author.” The reviewer for Frederick Douglass' Paper also discovered that Douglass had “entirely rewritten” his early reminiscences, “and many of the incidents have not before been made public, while the grouping and arrangement of them, together with the whole style and spirit of the book, indicate the rapid growth of the author during these ten years.”74Ibid.; FDP, 21 September 1855.
Southern whites claimed that Bondage and Freedom, like the Narrative, was an incendiary document not to be circulated in slaveholding areas. As a consequence, in November 1856 the citizens of Mobile, Alabama, chased a bookseller out of town for selling copies of Douglass’s autobiography and Harriet Beecher Stowe's Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin. Similarly, in 1860 a Holt County, Missouri, grand jury threatened to indict a man for lending a copy of Bondage and Freedom to a neighbor.75Douglass' Monthly, 3: 355 (September 1860); London Inquirer, 15 November 1856.
As in the case of the Narrative, members of the household of Douglass’s master challenged the former slave’s account of his Maryland years in Bondage and Freedom. The criticisms of the second autobiography came, however, long after its publication, when Aaron Anthony’s great-granddaughter, Harriet Lucretia Anthony, annotated her copy of the book in 1919 with forty-nine corrections, expansions, or corroborations. Although many of her annotations consisted of biographical data on individuals mentioned in the text, she also noted passages that she felt were untrue or that contradicted plantation records in her possession. Some of Douglass's statements she labeled simply as “an exaggeration" or “unlikely.” In summarizing her general reaction to Bondage and Freedom, Anthony declared that Douglass “exaggerates the story of the many cruelties he suffered as a slave in my great grandfather’s, Aaron Anthony, family.”76See Appendix D.
Douglass would probably have been delighted with Harriet Anthony's annotation because she corroborated so many of his statements. Often when she rejected his characterization of people she based her response on what she perceived as the logical behavior of rational slaveholders. Anthony tried to be fair in her evaluations and conceded that some of her own relatives had probably been as intemperate as Douglass described them. On other occasions she corroborated Douglass's descriptions. For example, she wrote beside Douglass’s portrait of the cruel slave breaker Edward Covey: “This Mr. Covey was really noted for his cruelty and meanness."77Ibid.
Whereas Douglass received lavish praise from abolitionists when he published the Narrative, he incurred the wrath of the Garrisonians with his portrayal of them in Bondage and Freedom. In 1845 Douglass was a protege and such a faithful follower of William Lloyd Garrison that the editor of the Boston Liberator joined Wendell Phillips in writing prefatory letters to the Narrative and later publicizing it in his newspaper. By 1855 Douglass had abandoned many of the antislavery principles still dear to Garrison and discussed his new ideas in Bondage and Freedom.78McFeely, Douglass, 175-78; Martin, Mind of Frederick Douglass, 25-48. The consequence was that the Garrisonian journals generally refused to review the book. The praise eventually heaped on the autobiography in the United Kingdom, however, led Garrison to mount a concentrated attack on it. The immediate catalyst was a favorable review written by the English abolitionist George Thompson in the London Empire. Upon reading the review, Garrison fired
off a letter to Thompson criticizing his recent actions and especially his “panegyric” on Douglass’s book, “which, in its second portion, is reeking with the virus of personal malignity towards Wendell Phillips, myself . . . 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.” Thompson quickly retreated and wrote Garrison that he had based his evaluation of the book on extracts and reviews in the American press, that he heartily disapproved of Douglass’s attacks on his former friends, and that he only intended “to herald a literary production from the pen of one whom we knew to be singularly qualified to reveal the secrets of the prison-house.”79Lib., 18 January 1856. See also London Empire, 1 September 1855.
Neither Douglass nor nonabolitionist journals were as willing as George Thompson to back away from a fight with Garrison. The London Inquirer's response to Garrison's letter was typical:
This language is rather that of a “kind old Massa” respecting a thankless fugitive, than of one gentleman regarding another, whom he had stimulated by his example to think and write without fear or favour. Douglass has called on him to adduce the passages in fault; but no answer has been made, which we are not surprised at. Those who do not read the book will infer, either that Douglass, being guilty of virulent malignity and base ingratitude to his best friends, of course cannot be trusted when he speaks of his old oppressors, or, that this bitter charge being quite groundless. Garrison’s judgments must generally be received with caution, when his self-love is touched, or his party criticised. Those who do read the book will form their own opinion of the temper of the author, and of the self-lauded truth and disinterestedness of his critic.80London Inquirer, 19 April 1856.
Uncharacteristically, Douglass refrained from engaging in a sustained debate with Garrison. Instead, he wrote to Garrison on 13 January 1856, asking him to point out “the offensive portions” of the book so that readers could judge for themselves.81Douglass to Garrison. 13 January 1856. Anti-Slavery Collection, MB. See Appendix B. Receiving no response from Garrison, Douglass pursued the matter no further.
Garrison may have remained silent, but his displeasure affected the book’s reception by American abolitionists. Antislavery proponents practically
banned reviews of the book in their publications, and they did not reprint notices from general interest journals as they had with the Narrative. Consequently, scholars were denied ready access to reviews of Bondage
and Freedom.
Unlike nineteenth-century reviewers, twentieth-century literary critics did not systematically examine the complex structure, metaphors, and richness of details in Bondage and Freedom. Having developed little framework for analyzing autobiographies, they produced relatively unsophisticated readings of both of Douglass’s self-portraits. Viewing autobiography in static terms, many treated Bondage and Freedom as a propagandistic and didactic gloss on Douglass’s “real” self-portrait, the Narrative. Crude literary analyses led to some confusion regarding Douglass's second self-portrait, and as critics discovered how to decode aspects of autobiographical works, they perhaps inevitably applied new techniques to the Narrative rather than to the longer and more complex Bondage and Freedom. Instead, crude literary analyses led to some confusion regarding Douglass’s second self-portrait and a retrogression from nineteenth-century sophistication. In their lackadaisical encounter with Bondage and Freedom, twentieth-century critics failed to find an appropriate vocabulary for assessing it.82Starling, The Slave Narrative, 249-93; Sundquist, Frederick Douglass, 3-5, 66-83; Frances Smith Foster, Witnessing Slavery: The Development of Ante-bellum Slave Narratives, 2d ed. (Madison, Wisc., 1979), 147-48; Stephen Butterfield, Black Autobiography in America (Amherst, Mass., 1974), 65-89; Albert E. Stone, “Identity and Art in Frederick Douglass’s Narrative," College Language Association Journal, 17: 192-213 (December 1973); Houston A. Baker, Jr., “The Problem of Being: Some Reflections on Black Autobiography,” Obsidian: Black Literature in Review, 1: 18-30 (1975); G. Thomas Couser, American Autobiography: The Prophetic Mode (Amherst, Mass., 1979), 51-61; Robert B. Stepto, From Behind the Veil: A Study of Afro-American Narrative (Urbana, Ill., 1979), 3-31; Dexter Fisher and Robert B. Stepto, eds., Afro-American Literature: The Reconstruction of Instruction (New York, 1979), 177-233; Nancy T. Clasby, “Frederick Douglass’s Narrative: A Content Analysis,” College Language Association Journal, 14: 242-50 (March 1971); Peter F. Walker, Moral Choices: Memory, Desire, and Imagination in Nineteenth-Century' American Abolition (Baton Rouge, 1978), 207-61; William L. Andrews, To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of AfroAmerican Autobiography, 1760-1865 (Urbana, Ill., 1986), 265-91; Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the “Racial” Self (New York, 1987), 80-124.
By concentrating almost exclusively on the Narrative, twentieth-century critics denied Douglass's complexity. In the process, they abandoned the role succinctly described by the scholar Charles T. Davis in 1973:
No black writer of excellence can deny his blackness. If he is shrewd, he will manage a tight chemical equation for his talents, choosing those elements in the general tradition that accommodate best with the ore of
his native genius. The role of the critic is to analyze the alloy, to affirm it when it works (that is, organizing successfully the varied talents of the writer), to deplore it when the compound seems loosely joined or lacking in force or grace. It is not the critic’s right to restrict the range of the artist, because he understands how complicated the creative process is.83Charles T. Davis, Black Is the Color of the Cosmos: Essays on Afro-American Literature and Culture, 1942-1981, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (New York. 1982), 52-53.
Sophisticated comparative examinations of Douglass’s literary self-portraits show that each of his antebellum autobiographies broadens our outlook on the other. Writing in 1845 with no less disciplined concentration than in 1855, the twenty-seven-year-old autobiographer had vivid memories of the first twenty years of his life spent in slavery. The perspective on the scenes, the people, the places that constituted Douglass’s early life history naturally changed as his temporal distance from them increased. Even so, in both 1845 and 1855 Douglass tried to find the keys to his identity in the amorphous experience that constituted his life history by drawing on his memory, perception, understanding, and imagination and then selecting and giving proportion to those facts that would provide unity and coherence to his self-portraits.
Although it is easier to trace the critical response to the Narrative than to Bondage and Freedom. it is clear that the antebellum critics appreciated the similarities and differences between Douglass’s two accounts of his life. As two distinct autobiographies written ten years apart, the Narrative and Bondage and Freedom differ as profoundly as the daguerreotypes adorning their frontispieces. Representing Douglass’s binocular vision, the two accounts sometimes diverge because each reflects his memory and point of view at different times. The structure, sequence of events, and style of each autobiography varies, and the second autobiography adds details not found in the first.
Wye House, Captain’s House.
The Maryland Historical Society, Baltimore, Maryland.
Wye House, Entrance Front.
The Maryland Historical Society, Baltimore, Maryland
H. F. Walling, Map of the City of New Bedford and the Village of Fairhaven
(New Bedford, 1850).
Alonzo Lewis, Map of Lynn and Saugus, Settled in 1629 (Boston, 1829).
G. G. Lange Darmstadt, Buffalo St. 1844, Rochester (New York, 1844). Rochester Historical Society, Rochester, New York
S. Cornell, Map of the City of Rochester (New York, n.d.), Rochester Historical Society.
Rochester. New York.
Frederick Douglass
Frontispiece, 1855 edition, Indiana Historical Society.