In brief
Frederick Douglass published this short book in Boston on 1 May 1845, when he was about twenty-seven and still, in law, the property of Thomas Auld of Maryland. It runs from a childhood he cannot date (“I have no accurate knowledge of my age”) through the plantation, Baltimore, a slave-breaker’s farm and the shipyards, to a meeting in Nantucket in 1841 where he was urged to speak to a white audience and found that he could.
It is a piece of evidence, an indictment and a work of art, written to be used, in sentences built by a man who had been saying them on platforms for four years to audiences some of whom doubted he had ever been a slave.
Why it had to prove he existed
The book’s first problem was belief. Douglass spoke too well. In My Bondage and My Freedom ten years later he recalled the anti-slavery lecturers’ advice. “Give us the facts,” said John A. Collins, the society’s general agent, “we will take care of the philosophy.” Another friend warned him, “People won’t believe you ever was a slave, Frederick, if you keep on this way”, and someone told him it was “not best that you seem too learned”. He had also been withholding his old name, his master’s name and his county, for safety, which made him easier to doubt.
So the book says who he is, and comes with two white guarantors. William Lloyd Garrison’s preface describes “in natural eloquence a prodigy” at Nantucket, and says that “Mr. Douglass has very properly chosen to write his own Narrative, in his own style”. Wendell Phillips’s letter vouches for him and adds a shudder: “I am free to say that, in your place, I should throw the MS. into the fire.” Then Douglass himself begins, and his claim to authorship keeps recurring. Remembering childhood cold, he writes, “My feet have been so cracked with the frost, that the pen with which I am writing might be laid in the gashes” (chapter 5). The scar and the pen appear in one sentence, and each proves the other.
These prefaces are a kindness and a cage. Garrison tells the reader what the story means before Douglass has opened his mouth, and insists that his case “was not a peculiar one”, against the writer’s evident singularity. Robert Stepto’s study of slave narratives sorts them by how far such authenticating documents are merely attached and how far the story absorbs them. Douglass’s answer is to write so well that the frame looks small. The doubters came anyway. A. C. C. Thompson, a neighbour of Auld’s, published a letter saying that the slave he knew could not have written it.
The shape of the book
There are eleven chapters and an appendix, with one sentence as the hinge.
- Chapter 1. No birthday, a mother seen “four or five times”, a father rumoured to be his master, and the whipping of his aunt: “the blood-stained gate, the entrance to the hell of slavery”.
- Chapters 2 to 5. Colonel Lloyd’s plantation, the songs, the overseers, hunger and cold.
- Chapters 6 and 7. Baltimore, Sophia Auld and reading.
- Chapter 8. The valuation of the estate, with people ranked among the livestock, and his grandmother left to die alone in the woods.
- Chapter 9. Back to Thomas Auld, whose conversion at a camp meeting made him “more cruel and hateful in all his ways”.
- Chapter 10. Covey, the longest chapter and the pivot, then Freeland’s farm, a Sunday school, a failed escape plot and the Baltimore shipyards.
- Chapter 11. The escape not told, New York, New Bedford, a new name from Scott’s The Lady of the Lake, the Liberator and Nantucket.
- Appendix. A declaration of war on the churches, dated Lynn, 28 April 1845.
Covey
Thomas Auld hired Douglass out for a year to Edward Covey, a poor farmer with a reputation as a breaker of slaves. It works. “I was broken in body, soul, and spirit,” he says, and “behold a man transformed into a brute!” Sundays he stands on the shore of the Chesapeake and addresses the sails: “You are loosed from your moorings, and are free; I am fast in my chains, and am a slave!”
Then comes the sentence the book is built around: “You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man.” It is a chiasmus, a figure from the platform, and it says two things that an abolitionist audience needed to hear. Slavery is manufactured, by procedure, and it can be unmade.
The fight itself is told plainly. It is August 1833. Covey catches him by the legs in the stable with a rope: “at this moment—from whence came the spirit I don’t know—I resolved to fight”. Another enslaved man, Bill, refuses Covey’s order, saying “his master hired him out to work, and not to help to whip me”. “We were at it for nearly two hours.” Covey claims he has won, and Douglass, like an accountant, notes that “he had drawn no blood from me, but I had from him”.
What matters is the conclusion: “however long I might remain a slave in form, the day had passed forever when I could be a slave in fact.” Freedom here is won in the body, and defined as manhood. That is the book’s power and also its limit, I think. Women in the Narrative are mostly seen being whipped, or kindly, or corrupted, and Anna Murray, who gave him money and a sailor’s uniform for the escape, reaches the page as a wife who “came on”, with a footnote: “She was free.”
Learning to read
Literacy arrives as a story of an overheard lesson. Sophia Auld, new to slaveholding, starts teaching a boy his letters. Her husband stops her, telling her “that it was unlawful, as well as unsafe, to teach a slave to read”, and goes on to explain why, in words Douglass quotes in full, slur included. Reading would make him unmanageable, and “It would forever unfit him to be a slave.” Hugh Auld is the most useful teacher the boy ever has: “From that moment, I understood the pathway from slavery to freedom.” And: “What he most dreaded, that I most desired.” This is the book’s best joke, and the master never knows it was told (chapter 6).
The cost falls on Sophia, whose “angelic face gave place to that of a demon”. Douglass trades bread with hungry white boys for “that more valuable bread of knowledge”. He would name them, but “prudence forbids”, since “it is almost an unpardonable offence to teach slaves to read in this Christian country” (chapter 7).
At about twelve he gets hold of The Columbian Orator, Caleb Bingham’s schoolbook of speeches, first published in 1797. Its dialogue between a master and a slave gives him “the power of truth over the conscience of even a slaveholder”. Hugh Auld was also right, though: “I would at times feel that learning to read had been a curse rather than a blessing.”
The songs
Chapter 2 holds the book’s finest piece of criticism. Slaves going to the Great House Farm for their allowance sing through the woods, “the most pathetic sentiment in the most rapturous tone, and the most rapturous sentiment in the most pathetic tone”. To outsiders the words seem meaningless, and northerners told him that such singing was evidence of contentment. “It is impossible to conceive of a greater mistake. Slaves sing most when they are most unhappy.”
The subtle point follows. He did not understand them either. “I was myself within the circle; so that I neither saw nor heard as those without might see and hear.” So there is no innocent listener. The outsider hears cheer, the insider cannot hear at all, and only the man who has left and come back in memory can say that “Every tone was a testimony against slavery” (chapter 2).
What he leaves out
At the point every reader has been waiting for, the book closes a door. Chapter 11 opens by stating “my intention not to state all the facts”. Telling would endanger those who helped him and would be “the means of guarding a door whereby some dear brother bondman might escape”. He attacks the abolitionists’ boasting about what they call the underground railroad, which he calls “the upperground railroad”, and he wants the slaveholder left “profoundly ignorant of the means of flight”. When the day comes, there is a single line: “on the third day of September, 1838, I left my chains, and succeeded in reaching New York”.
A genre that lived on sensation is denied its big scene, and “the curious” are told they will go without. The reader matters less than the next man trying to run.
The story came out in Life and Times in 1881, with slavery gone. He travelled by train from Baltimore dressed as a sailor, carrying a borrowed seaman’s protection with an American eagle on it, and the conductor barely looked. He warns that there was nothing very heroic in it: “My success was due to address rather than courage; to good luck rather than bravery.”
Naming names
The silence about helpers makes the other thing more striking. Those who hurt him, or whom he saw kill, are named, some with an address. Austin Gore shoots a man called Demby in a creek for refusing to come out and be whipped, and “Mr. Gore lived in St. Michael’s, Talbot county, Maryland, when I left there”. If he is living, “he is now, as he was then, as highly esteemed and as much respected as though his guilty soul had not been stained with his brother’s blood.” Thomas Lanman of St. Michael’s “killed two slaves”. The wife of Giles Hicks beat a girl to death for letting a baby cry (chapter 4). Garrison spells out the dare: “His statements, therefore, may easily be disproved, if they are untrue.”
Since no enslaved person could testify against a white man, this printed page was the only witness box available. Phillips reminded him that there was “no single spot” where a fugitive could say he was safe. In August 1845 Douglass sailed for Liverpool. British supporters bought his legal freedom in 1846 for $710.96, and he came home in the spring of 1847. In 1877 he visited Thomas Auld on his deathbed and the two were reconciled.
The appendix
Throughout the book, the pious are the worst. Thomas Auld whipped a lame young woman while quoting “He that knoweth his master’s will, and doeth it not, shall be beaten with many stripes” (chapter 9). So Douglass adds a page, worried that he may seem “an opponent of all religion”, and the clarification is more violent than what it clarifies.
“I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ: I therefore hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land.” “We have men-stealers for ministers, women-whippers for missionaries, and cradle-plunderers for church members.” Then he quotes the twenty-third chapter of Matthew at length and closes with a parody of a hymn on “heavenly union” (Appendix).
The voice
Douglass writes in two registers. One is the flat statement of a witness. The other is oratory, schooled on The Columbian Orator: balanced clauses and reversals that a listener can follow without seeing the page. Gore “dealt sparingly with his words, and bountifully with his whip”.
Beneath both is the King James Bible. “His brother’s blood” comes from Genesis, and “a glorious resurrection” from the church he attacks. The Chesapeake passage is the summit, a speech to ships with nobody to hear: “Is there any God? Why am I a slave? I will run away.” “I had as well be killed running as die standing.” He was forbidden to read, and he took up the masters’ own Book and used it better than they did.
Irony is the third tool. Hugh Auld’s tirade is “invaluable instruction”, and this is “this Christian country”.
The people
Hester and the women of the book
Douglass’s Aunt Hester, whipped in the first chapter, stands for what he first saw. His grandmother, Betsey Bailey, is abandoned in old age in chapter 8, in the book’s most furious passage.
The Aulds
Hugh Auld gives the lesson by accident. Thomas Auld, his brother, is the legal owner and the man who sends him to Covey, and who later, against expectation, does not send him to Alabama.
Edward Covey
Covey is “a poor man, a farm-renter” whose reputation for breaking slaves gets his fields worked cheaply. The slaves called him “the snake”.
Sandy Jenkins
Sandy gave him the root to carry against Covey, and Douglass half believes in it.
The later autobiographies
Douglass wrote his life twice more. My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), with an introduction by James McCune Smith, is mainly an expansion, and far longer. Written after his split from Garrison around 1847, it tells of being kept to facts, and it supplies the philosophy too. Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881, revised 1892) adds the escape, the Civil War, office and old age, with thirteen new chapters in 1892 ending with his post as minister to Haiti.
The later books know more. The 1845 book is shorter, angrier and in more danger, and I think it is the better book.
Readers and afterlives
The Narrative sold five thousand copies in about four months and nearly thirty thousand by 1860, and Margaret Fuller praised it warmly. In 1852, at Rochester, Douglass gave the speech now known as “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?”. Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) tells what the male version of this story left out, and for decades critics denied she had written it, as they had doubted him.
David Blight’s Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom (2018), which won the Pulitzer Prize for History, is the biography to read. Douglass died in Washington on 20 February 1895.
How to read it
- Know what the free text is. Project Gutenberg’s text is complete. A one-page biography headed “FREDERICK DOUGLASS”, placed after Phillips’s letter, is a later addition and not part of the 1845 book.
- Read the prefaces first. Hear how they talk about him, then hear how he talks.
- Expect what it reports. The book records slaveholders’ slurs, and whippings of women in detail, because that was its evidence.
Read next
- Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom (1855). The same life, retold after he had stopped taking direction.
- Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861). The narrative of what slavery did to women.
- Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852). The great antislavery novel by a white author, seven years after this book.