I found Douglass's autobiography to be a brilliant, moving, and impassioned piece of abolitionist literature. I can not say that I have found his autobiography to contain elements of exaggeration or self-glorification. Indeed, Douglass mentions times in which he fought back against slave owners, and some readers may find this difficult to accept. However, slave rebellions, on an individual and collective level, occurred consistently throughout the centuries of slavery. In fact, many slave owners feared the power and number of the human beings that they held in bondage and used many torturous means to prevent uprisings and individual resistance. However, these tactics did not always work, and there were certainly times when slave owners were unable to maintain full control. Douglass describes the slave owners by whom he was held in bondage in Baltimore as far less physically torturous than previous slave owners. It is certainly possible that Douglass was able to intimidate the Baltimore slave owner into behaving less aggressively towards him.

I think we generally imagine enslaved people to have been a monolithic group of docile, fearful, and powerless individuals. However, if one begins reading recounts of slave resistance, an entire other narrative is offered. Escaped slave Nat Turner led a rebellion in which he attacked entire plantations, cutting off the heads of slave owners and freeing the enslaved people on the plantations. Harriet Tubman, another famous formerly enslaved person, freed thousands upon thousands of enslaved people in numerous brilliantly executed plantation raids. I certainly don't believe that Douglass was self-glorifying in his text. I can not begin to truly understand what he endured in slavery, and am equally amazed by his brilliant escape and ensuing struggle to help free remaining enslaved people. It is not self-glorifying to be empowered by one's self-liberation.

Anyone familiar with the brutal rule under which most people treated slaves in the United States might recognize some possible instances of exaggeration in Frederick Douglass's narrative.

For instance, in chapter X, Douglass recounts his fight with the brutal overseer Covey after weeks of unjust abuse. Douglass describes his decision to retaliate against his master, saying,

I resolved to fight; and, suiting my actions to the resolution, I seized Covey hard by the throat. (42)

While the ensuing description of the scuffle certainly heightens the narrative action and allows Douglass to rebel against the injustice of slavery physically, it is a bit hard to believe that after the fight Douglass gets off virtually scot-free, not to mention the fact that he never had another negative encounter with Covey again.

While it may have been an anomaly, this encounter does not align with the brutal punishments that men like Covey would often inflict on slaves that rebelled or ran away. Whether Douglass exaggerates the memory of the encounter or made the whole thing up does not detract from the stunning autobiography, but it might be worth noting when instances in the narrative might seem too right to be true, either for the purposes of retaining a reading audience or solely for self-glorification.

To add to the point in the above post about Douglass's purpose to inspire people against the nature of slavery, Douglass also uses exaggerated moments to influence his audience.  For example, while in Baltimore, Douglass claims that he makes a grand apostrophe to the passing ships in the harbor.  In the apostrophe, he says that he cried out to the ships asking why they were free while he was kept in bondage.  The apostrophe is quite emotional and breaks the more objective tone developed previously in the narrative.  One assumes that Douglass did not actually orally address the passing ships in the harbor--surely a slave seen engaging in such behavior would be cause for the authorities to inflict punishment; however, Douglass may very well have had these thoughts and simply presented them in such an exaggerated manner to influence his reading audience.

I suppose in the final analysis that Douglass value of expanding the moral and ethical imagination of the reader is something that transcends the notion of exaggeration of self- glorifying.  His narrative is written at a time where people did not know or did not care to know about the nature of slavery.  The language and tone used in the work is meant to provoke individuals into action and meant to inspire individuals against the nature of enslavement.  It is going to be difficult to label any portion of the text as self- glorifying because of Douglass own experience as a slave, his connection to America's "original sin."