SOURCE: Blight, David W. “Introduction: ‘A Psalm of Freedom.’” In Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself, edited by David W. Blight, pp. 1-23. Boston: Bedford Books of St. Martin's Press, 1993.

[In the following introduction, Blight provides an overview of the composition and reception of Douglass's Narrative.]

Memory was given to man for some wise purpose. The past is … the mirror in which we may discern the dim outlines of the future and by which we may make them more symmetrical.

—Frederick Douglass, 1884

Therefore I will not refrain my mouth; I will speak in the anguish of my spirit; I will complain in the bitterness of my soul.

—Job 7:11

Frederick Douglass was the most important African American leader and intellectual of the nineteenth century. He lived twenty years as a slave and nearly nine years as a fugitive slave; from the 1840s to his death in 1895, he attained international fame as an abolitionist, reformer, editor, orator, and the author of three autobiographies, which are classics of the slave narrative tradition. As a man of affairs, he began his abolitionist career two decades before America would divide and fight a tragic civil war over slavery. He lived to see black emancipation, to work actively for women's suffrage long before it was achieved, to realize the civil rights triumphs and tragedies of Reconstruction, and to witness America's economic and international expansion in the late Gilded Age. He lived until the eve of the Age of Jim Crow (racial segregation), when America seemed in retreat from the very victories in race relations that he had helped to win.

Although Douglass lived long and witnessed many great events, perhaps his most important contribution to American history was the repeated telling of his personal story. Above all else, this book, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, is a great story told, like most other great stories, out of the will to be known and the will to write. This tale of a young African American's journey into and out of slavery provides a remarkable window on America's most compelling nineteenth-century social and political problem. In this introductory essay, several historical and literary themes will be explored as a guide for student readers. Such a guide may be useful either before or after reading the text. Some may wish to plunge right into Douglass's first chapter, a classic polemic against slavery's hostility to family life. Others may wish to read this introduction first and consider its many suggestions about the content and meaning of the text for American history. Either way, Douglass is, of course, his own uniquely informed, sometimes manipulative guide to his experience.

Douglass saw to the core of the meaning of slavery, both for individuals and for the nation. Likewise, the multiple meanings of freedom—as idea and reality, of mind and body—and of the consequences of its denial were his great themes. In 1855 he offered this timeless explanation of his hatred of slavery and his desire for freedom: “The thought of only being a creature of the present and the past, troubled me, and I longed to have a future—a future with hope in it. To be shut up entirely to the past and present is abhorrent to the human mind; it is to the soul—whose life and happiness is unceasing progress—what the prison is to the body.” No genre of literature has offered better descriptions of the meaning of hope, of the liberation of mind, body, and soul—that sense of future Douglass named—than the slave narratives. Douglass probed his past throughout his life, seeking to understand the relentless connection of past and present, telling his story in relation to the turbulent history of his time, and hoping to control or stop time itself. But, like all great autobiographers, he would only discover how memory is both absolutely essential and bewilderingly deceptive as a means to self-understanding.¹

Douglass was born Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey in the cabin of his grandmother Betsey Bailey along Tuckahoe Creek, in Talbot County, Maryland, in February 1818. His mother, Harriet Bailey, was a slave owned by Aaron Anthony, a former Chesapeake schooner captain and an overseer on a large Eastern Shore plantation. Douglass saw his mother for the last time when he was seven, making him in every practical way an orphan. The actual identity of his father is still unknown, but he was undoubtedly white, as Douglass declares in the Narrative. Douglass was, therefore, of mixed racial ancestry, including part American Indian, which came from his grandmother's family. As readers will readily see, Douglass's twenty years in slavery were marked by stark contrasts between brutality and good fortune, between the life of a favored slave youth in Baltimore and that of a field hand on an Eastern Shore farm, and between the power of literacy and the despair born of its suppression. The Frederick Bailey who became Frederick Douglass after his escape had a story well worth telling, and American and British audiences would be eager to read it.

In 1845 Douglass felt compelled by many factors to write his story. His extraordinary life as a slave, the circumstances of his escape, his emergence as a skillful abolitionist lecturer in the early 1840s, and suspicions as well as bigoted denials that so talented a voice could ever have been a chattel slave combined with the sheer popularity of slave narratives to prompt him to tell his tale. On September 3, 1838, at the age of twenty, Douglass, disguised as a sailor and having obtained the papers of a free seaman, escaped from slavery on the eastern shore of the Chesapeake in Maryland.² Within a week he was joined by his fiancée, Anna Murray, a free black woman from Baltimore. David Ruggles, the black abolitionist leader of the New York Vigilance Committee (one of a network of urban organizations by which the Underground Railroad operated), helped provide Frederick and Anna safe haven, which was no simple matter for fugitive slaves in the 1830s. On September 15 they were married by Rev. James W. C. Pennington, himself an escaped slave from Maryland's Eastern Shore. The Douglasses quickly moved from New York City to New Bedford, Massachusetts, a thriving port town with a significant free black population and where it was believed Douglass could ply his trade as a ship's caulker.³ It was there that Douglass and the growing band of Massachusetts abolitionists discovered each other during the next three years.

In its content and its strategies, therefore, Douglass's Narrative belonged to the world of abolitionism and to the national political crisis over slavery from which it sprang. Douglass's autobiographies are our principal sources for major aspects of his life, especially his early years. But they are perhaps as revelatory of the history of the times through which he lived as they are of his personality and his psychology. Close readings of the Narrative uncover not only Douglass's rhetorical strategies, which are many and complicated, but also a good deal about the moral and economic nature of slavery, the master-slave relationship, the psychology of slaveholders, the aims and arguments of abolitionists, and the impending political crisis between North and South that would lead to the Civil War.

Douglass's personal story, like American history itself, is both inspiring and terrible. Few writers have better combined experience with the music of words to make us see the deepest contradictions of American history, the tragedy and necessity of conflict between slavery and freedom in a republic. Douglass exposes the bitterness and absurdity of racism at the same time that he imagines the fullest possibilities of the natural rights tradition, the idea that people are born with equal rights in the eyes of God and that those rights can be protected under human law. Few have written more effectively about the endurance of the human spirit under oppression. And in American letters, we have no better illustration of liberation through the power of language than in Douglass's Narrative. With his pen, Douglass was very much a self-conscious artist, and with his voice and his activism, he was a self-conscious prophet.

Readers of the Narrative quickly come to realize that language, written and oratorical, had been a fascination and a weapon for Douglass during his years as a slave. When he first spoke before a meeting of New Bedford blacks against African colonization in March 1839, and when he delivered his first public speeches before a gathering of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society on Nantucket Island in August 1841, he was not merely appearing as the spontaneous abolitionist miracle he was often portrayed—and portrayed himself—to be. No doubt the first effort at “speaking to white people” at the Nantucket meeting was a “severe cross,” as he describes the experience in the Narrative.⁴ But Douglass was no stranger to oratory, or to the moral arguments, sentimentalism, and evangelical zeal that characterized the antislavery movement during that era. By 1841 he had been reading abolitionist speeches, editorials, and poetry in William Lloyd Garrison's newspaper, The Liberator, for at least two years. And as the Narrative tells us in a variety of ways, Douglass had been a practicing abolitionist of a kind—out of self-interest and for his fellow bondsmen—even while he was a slave. He had read the Bible extensively, and he had discovered and modeled his ideas and style on a remarkable 1797 book, The Columbian Orator, by Caleb Bingham, a selection from which is reproduced in this volume.

From the earliest period of his public career, Douglass knew that whether in the slave South or in the free North to which he had liberated himself, literacy was power. The nineteenth-century Western world owed much of its values and mores to the eighteenth-century Enlightenment's faith in human reason and its assertion of individual rights. To be judged truly human and a citizen with social and political recognition, therefore, a person had to achieve literacy. For better or worse, civilization itself was equated with cultures that could write their history. Hence, writes Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Douglass became an American “Representative Man because he was Rhetorical Man, black master of the verbal arts. Douglass is our clearest example of the will to power as the will to write. The act of writing for the slave constituted the act of creating a public, historical self.”⁵

The Douglass who spoke at Nantucket was quickly hired by Garrison and the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society to be a traveling lecturer, first around New England and eventually across the North. Thus the fugitive slave found his voice and his calling. From 1841 to 1845, on almost countless platforms, Douglass began to tell the “free story” that he would soon publish to great acclaim in the Narrative.⁶

In many ways Douglass's Narrative is a careful, artistic summing up of the many speeches he had delivered in the three years he spent on the abolitionist lecture circuit before he sat down in 1844 to create his own character and to try to make the world stop seeing him as a mere curiosity. To tell his story of suffering and liberation from slavery on platforms was one thing; to publish it for a reading public eager for the tales of escaped slaves was quite another. On the lecture platform it might appear that he only told stories. But in the Narrative he sought authentication. He wanted the world to know that fugitive slaves had histories. His book would make witness to the fact, contrary to popular attitudes, that blacks too were people, whose struggles and aspirations mattered in human society.

Douglass's oratorical brilliance, the “curiosity” of his audiences, and the relationship of the Narrative to the style and content of his early speeches are attested to by two addresses reprinted in this volume. The first, delivered in Concord, New Hampshire, February 11, 1844, and recorded by Nathaniel P. Rogers, offers a striking picture not only of Douglass “narrating his early life” but also of an angry young man who insists that Americans imagine slavery as a scene of horror. Rogers's description of the rhetorical pivot in the speech is stunning: Douglass finished narrating the story and “gradually let out the outraged humanity that was laboring in him, in indignant and terrible speech. It was not what you could describe as oratory or eloquence. It was sterner—darker—deeper than these. It was the volcanic outbreak of human nature long pent up in slavery and at last bursting its imprisonment.” Undoubtedly, some of those prison metaphors soon to appear in the Narrative emerged in the speech Rogers heard. Rogers was an abolitionist newspaper editor and adept in his own way at antislavery propaganda, but he seems to have been convinced that he had just listened to a latter-day prophet whose “terrible voice” would one day “ring through the pine glades of the South, in the day of her visitation.” He was surely right in his observation that he had watched “an insurgent slave taking hold on the right of speech.”⁷ Shortly after this speech, Douglass was hard at work writing the Narrative. The second speech reprinted here was delivered in New York City on May 6, 1845, only a little over a week after Douglass finished writing the Narrative and just three weeks before it was published. It is believed to be the first time he divulged numerous specific facts about his slave background beyond the general contours of the story which he had told many times. Both speeches provide a historical and rhetorical context in which to read the Narrative.

Although antislavery sentiment emerged in a variety of ways during the age of the American Revolution, the formative decades of organized abolitionism were the 1820s and 1830s, the period in which Frederick Bailey grew up a slave in Maryland. In the Narrative, following the moving passages about his achievement of literacy and the discovery of the human rights impulses in The Columbian Orator, Douglass describes his gradual realization of the antebellum meaning of the words abolition and abolitionist: He “always drew near” when those words were spoken, “expecting to hear something of importance to myself and fellow-slaves. The light broke in upon me by degrees.” With the life-giving power of literacy also came, as Douglass so honestly puts it, an “unutterable anguish.” “It opened my eyes to the horrible pit, but to no ladder upon which to get out.” Literacy afforded the young Douglass a whole world of thought, stirring dreams of freedom thwarted at every visible turn of his daily life. The truly thoughtful slave, as Douglass's master had predicted, was a desperately discontented one. Such slaves possessed a language by which to imagine freedom, but this awareness only made their condition more wretched. “It was this everlasting thinking of my condition that tormented me,” writes Douglass. But “every little while,” he remembers taking heart, because, as he says, “I could hear something about the abolitionists.”⁸

What he heard, and read in Baltimore newspapers, were stories of organized groups who sent petitions to the U.S. government demanding the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia as well as the interstate slave trade. He learned of activists who published their own antislavery newspapers and crusaded to change the condition in which he lived. He realized that many of those abolitionists considered slaveholding a mortal sin. Above all else perhaps, he gained the simple awareness that in the northern states slavery either did not exist or was rapidly dying out. Some of the reformers he read about would turn out to be racist and patronizing, but some of them would provide the community, friendship, and mentorship in which Douglass found his life's work. As he sat on a crate during break time as a caulker in the dockyards of Baltimore, or lamented away afternoons on William Freeland's farm on the Eastern Shore, he realized in half-formed ways, as he had learned from The Columbian Orator and the Bible in metaphorical ways, that up there in the free North there was an “argument” about slavery.⁹

Under the influence of evangelical religion, a growing realization of southern commitment to slavery, and especially the British antislavery movement, American abolitionists found their ideological roots in the 1820s. The campaign to end slavery in the British Empire profoundly shook the increasingly active defenders of slavery in the American South and helped to cause a steady radicalization of antislavery tactics in the North. After 1831, when William Lloyd Garrison founded The Liberator in Boston, as abolitionist societies sprang up across the North, and as a growing number of fugitive slaves and other free blacks entered the movement on their own behalf, American abolitionism became an organized crusade. By 1838, the year Douglass escaped from slavery, the movement had flooded Congress with petitions, experienced intense and deadly antiabolition violence, awakened a defiant South, and caused many conversions in the reformist North. It had also fomented the beginnings of antislavery political parties and, like most great reform movements, fallen into bitter factional dispute. Douglass was deeply inspired by Garrison himself, and by his newspaper. When he fell in with the Garrisonians in 1841, they represented the largest and most radical wing of the antislavery movement.

Garrison and many of his loyal followers were fierce radicals; they devoted their lives to ridding America of slavery and worked vigorously to eliminate discrimination against blacks and women in northern society. They roamed the frontiers of reform ideology in antebellum America. By the late 1830s, Garrison himself had taken some positions that increasing numbers of abolitionists found untenable and impractical. He denounced churches, the U.S. Constitution, political parties, and voting itself as institutional or personal complicity with the evil of slaveholding. “No Union With the Slaveholders,” part of the masthead of The Liberator, became the slogan of a Garrisonian doctrine of “disunion,” which urged northern abolitionists to sever all political and religious ties to the South. Such a plan would, through a strange logic, isolate slaveholders and their accomplices under the blinding light of moral condemnation and lead to emancipation through peaceful, ethical renewal. This was the doctrine of “moral suasion” taken to its fullest extent: The hearts and minds of the American people were first to be persuaded of the evil of slavery, then the laws and political structure would change.

After returning from his first trip to England in 1847, and having experienced a growing sense of organizational and intellectual independence, Douglass broke with his Garrisonian comrades in a protracted and bitter dispute. This split with his first abolitionist mentor had both ideological and personal causes. In the late 1840s and early 1850s, especially after his move to Rochester, New York, and the founding of his own newspaper, the North Star, Douglass became a more open, though no less committed, pragmatist about antislavery tactics. Under new influences, especially the New York abolitionist and philanthropist Gerrit Smith, Douglass came to believe that the Constitution could be used to exert federal power against slavery, especially its expansion into the West. He also embraced the use of political parties, and eventually even certain instances of violence, as a means of destroying slavery (through the political system or outside of it). Moreover, during and after his two-and-a-half-year tour of the British Isles, and because of his brilliant oratory, the impact of the Narrative, and the force of his personality, Douglass became an international star of the abolition movement. Simply put, he became a visible, independent, and less doctrinaire rival to the Garrisonians' leadership of the American antislavery movement.¹⁰

Readers of the 1845 Narrative, however, will find many influences of Garrisonian doctrines, especially the attacks on religious hypocrisy and the remarkable moment in Chapter 2 when Douglass compares trusted slaves who pleased overseers with the “slaves of the political parties.”¹¹ Indeed, like most slave narratives, the book is as much an abolitionist polemic as it is a revealing autobiography. What sets Douglass's work apart in the genre, though, is that he interrogated the moral conscience of his readers, at the same time that he transplanted them into his story, as few other fugitive slave writers did.

Douglass's writing is not cautious; he pays little regard to the tender sensibilities of his readers, and he is willing to manipulate their deepest fears and passions. Garrison's preface, itself a masterly piece of antislavery propaganda, attests to these qualities in Douglass's language: The mentor celebrates the substance and style of the “terrible chastisements,” the “shocking outrages,” and the continual access Douglass allows to “how he thought, reasoned, felt, under the lash of the driver, with the chains upon his limbs!” As William S. McFeely and William L. Andrews have suggested, Douglass's Narrative shares kinship with Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, published a decade later; it too is a “Song of Myself.” Even more, it may have influenced another great work of self-emancipation, Henry David Thoreau's Walden.¹² But mostly, Douglass's Narrative is a song of abolitionism, an argument with America's conscience, an appeal by the risen slave testifying to his own sufferings and making witness to the crimes of a guilty land.

As the literary critic Robert G. O'Meally has argued, Douglass's Narrative was, “in its way, a holy book … a text meant, of course, to be read, but … also a text meant to be mightily preached.” The book is imbued with biblical references, imagery, and metaphors, and it owes much to the black sermonic tradition from which Douglass had learned a great deal about the use of language and its powers. His exhortative tones and rhythms not only were modeled on the Old Testament prophets Douglass read but were undoubtedly the ones he had practiced among his band of brothers at the Sabbath school on Freeland's farm, as he and his charges learned to plot their own deliverance as well as to keep faith in one another and in God. Indeed, from Garrison's preface to Douglass's appendix about the perils of religious hypocrisy in slaveholding America, the work is framed and conceived as, in O'Meally's apt description,

a warning of the terror of God's fury. It is also an account of the black Moses' flight from “slavery to freedom.” It is an invitation to join “the church” of abolition, a church that offers freedom not only to the slave and the sympathetic white Northerner but also to the most murderous and bloodthirsty Southern dealers in human flesh. Sinners, Douglass seems to chant, black sermon-style, you are in the hands of an angry God!¹³

Douglass's burning contempt for “pious slaveholders” was not merely abolitionist propaganda, as it is too often portrayed. It was the fuel, the bitterly ironic energy of a spiritual autobiography.

Douglass's Narrative, like much of his oratory, also fits squarely into one of America's oldest literary traditions: the jeremiad. Named for the book of Jeremiah, and appropriated in America since the seventeenth-century Puritan sermons that chastised Christians for their declining faith, the jeremiad became a kind of political sermon and a literary form—functioning not only as a lamentation about waning zeal but also as a national ritual of both self-condemnation and optimistic assertions of the American mythology of mission. As the historian Wilson J. Moses has contended, jeremiads took on special urgency in the language of black abolitionists; they became the “constant warnings” issued to white audiences “concerning the judgment that was to come for the sin of slavery.” On hundreds of platforms Douglass had lent his voice to this ritual like no other black abolitionist. And in writing the Narrative, William L. Andrews has suggested, Douglass announced not only his literary calling but also “his ultimate self-appointment as America's black Jeremiah.”¹⁴

Douglass's Narrative appealed to readers in his own time for many reasons. Midnineteenth-century American readers were very familiar with jeremiads that reminded them of America's divinely appointed mission and of such betrayals of that mission as slavery. They might have been both troubled by and attracted to narratives about true and false Americanism. They were especially drawn to escape from captivity narratives, to tales of self-made men and self-liberation. And, perhaps most of all, readers were at home with spiritual autobiographies—ritualistic testimonies about the trial of the soul as well as the body, journeys from mental and spiritual darkness through severe tests to the light of regeneration.¹⁵

In one of the most memorable passages of the Narrative, Douglass remembers the terrible year he lived as a sixteen-year-old under the wrath of the slave breaker Edward Covey: It was his “dark night of slavery,” a time when he often felt “transformed into a brute,” and when he spent whole days “mourning over my wretched condition.” But all of this frames a story of resurrection and an unforgettable image of freedom. The Covey farm was only a short distance from Chesapeake Bay, and on its banks Douglass places himself, changing voice to the nearly suicidal sixteen-year-old slave, pouring out his “soul's complaint” in a psalmlike prayer for deliverance. The white-sailed vessels on the bay are “shrouded ghosts” that torment him one moment and become the dreamlike objects of his lonely prayer the next: “You are loosed from your moorings, and are free; I am fast in my chains, and am a slave! You move merrily before the gentle gale, and I sadly before the bloody whip! You are freedom's swift-winged angels, that fly round the world; I am confined in bands of iron!” Here Douglass reveals a mind and soul made captive, but, through moral imagination and belief in “a better day coming,” he keeps faith and wills his own freedom.¹⁶

In this famous passage Douglass reaches an early height in his craft as a writer and demonstrates the influence of the Negro spirituals and of the Psalms on his temperament. Appealing for deliverance from enemies and testifying to tattered but refurbished faith, Douglass writes what might best be called his own psalm, or a prose poem, about the meaning of freedom. In the decade before the Civil War, readers of the Narrative could sit with Douglass in the dark night of his soul along their own Chesapeakes and sense the deepest of human yearnings in their own souls. Today's readers can do so as well.

Well into the twentieth century, slave narratives were not considered proper historical sources for the study of slavery. They were deemed inauthentic and biased by Ulrich B. Phillips, the first major historian of slavery to make extensive use of plantation records. Phillips did not acknowledge that ex-slaves left any genuine testimony on what plantation slavery was really like. His American Negro Slavery (1918), the most authoritative work on the subject as late as the 1950s, pictured slavery as a patriarchal, benign institution in which masters and slaves acted out largely natural roles of fatherlike masters and chattel laborers. In Phillips's work, the slaves were the beneficiaries of a system that maintained white supremacy and an agricultural order. This “plantation legend”—an Old South living a kind of golden age in which the masters provided and the slaves labored in relative contentment—died hard in American historiography and still survives in popular culture. The most enduring examples of that survival come from motion pictures and popular fiction, especially the eternal, worldwide fascination with Gone With the Wind.¹⁷

But the revolution of interest in black history, which coincided with the modern civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s, brought a renewed attention to and use of the slave narratives.¹⁸ The first modern edition of Douglass's Narrative was published in 1960, and many other first-person accounts of bondage were brought back into print through the next decade and a half. Historians began to make careful use of the slave narratives as sources of historical information and, perhaps more important, as guides to the slaves' perspective on their own felt experience. With the works of John Blassingame, Eugene Genovese, Herbert Gutman, Lawrence Levine, and several others in the 1970s, the slave narratives emerged from obscurity and became a major tool by which historians were able to open the world the slaves made—their folk life, religious expression, modes of resistance and psychological survival.¹⁹

In this major shift in methodology, the use of previously suspect sources, and the rich analysis that flowed from it, we can see a prime example of how perceptions of historical truth can markedly change. Single documents and texts can be interpreted in different ways and from different perspectives. Indeed, historians can be directly influenced by the events and values in their own era; at the same time they must strictly adhere to evidence in order to seek the truth as they can best determine it. What actually happened in the past does not really change, of course. But the questions we choose to ask of the past change, and thereby new interpretations emerge. This is what is really meant by learning something new from or about the past. The questions change and thus yield new understandings. This is why, as historians often say, each generation must write its own history. From the 1960s, the old, neglected slave narratives, Douglass's in particular, became sources that had new uses and meanings.

What, indeed, was it like to be a slave? What were the slaves' daily feelings, yearnings, crises, and hardships? The best of the slave narratives offer complex answers to these questions. In spite of the propagandistic nature of a work like Douglass's Narrative, its principal historical value may be the access it allows us to the psychological world of a slave who had determined to be free. Although it is full of the language of the self-made hero ascending to his destiny and manipulates readers with the purple prose of sentimentalism, a close reading of Douglass's Narrative reveals much about the slave's inner torments. His descriptions of the loving bonds he shared with his pupils at the Sabbath school on Freeland's farm and his romantic but altogether believable images of the fears he and his fellows faced in plotting their escape serve as examples of the self-conscious artist struggling to recapture real experience. Douglass looks back to his Sabbath school “with an amount of pleasure not to be expressed. They were great days to my soul.” But the love he still feels for his band of brothers mixes with the memory of the “odds” and “obstacles” they faced in contemplating flight. “The thought was truly a horrible one,” remembers Douglass, and he converts the memory into a mixture of metaphors and terrible opposites:

At every gate through which we were to pass, we saw a watchman—at every ferry a guard—on every bridge a sentinel—and in every wood a patrol. We were hemmed in upon every side. Here were the difficulties, real or imagined—the good to be sought, and the evil to be shunned. On the one hand, there stood slavery, a stern reality, glaring frightfully upon us,—its robes already crimsoned with the blood of millions, and even now feasting itself greedily upon our own flesh. On the other hand, away back in the dim distance, under the flickering light of the north star, behind some craggy hill or snow-covered mountain, stood a doubtful freedom—half frozen—beckoning us to come and share its hospitality.²⁰

Thus could knowledge about the difference between slavery and freedom manifest in the ex-slave's imagination and, in turn, in that of his readers. Slavery, like all historical experience, must be imagined before it can be understood.

Alternating between parody and condemnation, one of the most persistent themes in Douglass's Narrative is his portrait of slaveholders. A striking feature of the book is the sheer range of slaveholders Douglass presents. Examples of unmitigated evil and depravity include Covey, Andrew Anthony (Master Andrew), and Orson (called Austin) Gore. Thomas Auld, both cruel and incompetent, is distinguished for his “meanness” but disrespected for his haplessness. At the other end of the human scale, though, we meet William Freeland, a master Douglass seems to have respected because he was educated, sought no religious sanction for slavery, and ran an economically efficient plantation where work expectations and treatment seemed in rational relationship. And, finally, there is Sophia Auld, Douglass's “kind and tender-hearted” mistress in Baltimore who first taught him to read. She becomes Douglass's principal example that slaveholding is learned behavior, and presumably can therefore be unlearned. In a document so full of anti-slavery propaganda, physical violence, and suffering, it may come as some surprise that Douglass could conclude that, for Sophia, “slavery proved as injurious to her as it did to me.”²¹ But such is the complex argument of this highly crafted narrative: It is a picture of a world that not only involved brutal dehumanization but also operated by the cunning and negotiation of human relationships.

This was, in part, the point of Douglass's famous 1848 public letter to Thomas Auld, reprinted in this volume. The letter, written after Douglass's freedom had been purchased for him by his British antislavery friends, is a highly polemical, at times factually inaccurate (see headnote with letter), attack on Auld as a prototypically evil slaveholder. The highly personal, even sensational, charges Douglass makes against Auld do not mask his honest admission at the end of the letter. In words so many slaves must have dreamed they could one day say as freedpeople to their masters, Douglass announces that “I intend to make use of you as a weapon with which to assail the system of slavery … and as a means of bringing this guilty nation with yourself to repentance.”²² Again Douglass mingles his personal story, its villains and its self-made hero, with his claims of national birthright.

Although the slave narratives have limitations as sources for the daily, material lives of slaves, as well as for the socioeconomic structure of the antebellum South, Douglass's account is a window into slave work and culture. In Chapter 2 Douglass allows us to observe the huge Wye plantation—the Great House Farm—in operation. We can almost see its bustling “business-like aspect,” and hear the “driver's horn” and the profanity of an overseer's voice in the field. In Chapters 3 and 4, slaves are shown to be the essential laborers at the center of southern economic production, but their work is framed and overwhelmed by the larger story of the potentially total power of masters and overseers. The overseer, Austin Gore, appears as a kind of absolute creation of the slave system—a grave, humorless man who performed all his duties, including the murder of insubordinate slaves, with military precision.²³ Douglass strives to describe the most terrible meanings of slavery—its existence outside any law or social control and its capacity to render African American life of no value.

The theme of family separation, a staple of abolitionist argument, emerges in all its potential capriciousness in Chapter 8. Frederick's old master had died, and the ten-year-old was forced to return from Baltimore to the Wye plantation on the Eastern Shore “to be valued with the other property.” Douglass's frequent use of animal imagery was never so stark, and his sense of the slaves' anxiety about being sold South is palpable: “Our fate for life was now to be decided. We had no more voice in that decision than the brutes among whom we were ranked.” Douglass was luckier than many of his relatives; he was sent back to Baltimore rather than to a much harsher fate on the Eastern Shore or at the hands of the “Georgia traders.”²⁴

Douglass's Narrative, like others in the genre, often reads like a tale of unremitting woe and dehumanization. This was, indeed, one of the aims of the private story converted to public, abolitionist purposes. Reading audiences in the 1840s had to be shocked before they could become a source of sociopolitical action. The five murders Douglass sketches in Chapter 4 and the family separations are tales of lawlessness and rightlessness in republican and Christian America. They point to the deep ironies, as well as a very American quality, of the book: As a Garrisonian at this stage in his career, Douglass could denounce politics and religious hypocrisy at the same time that he wrote with his own heartfelt political and religious motivations.

Douglass's rich use of irony leads us, finally, to an understanding of the complexities of slave resistance. Colonel Lloyd's magnificent garden was exotic and the object of admiration, but it also became for the slaves an education in both the risks and the righteousness of “stealing fruit.” The totalitarian capacity of masters to sell their slaves away for profit or spite is balanced with the slaves' control of their own language: The slaveholders' power was blunted by the slaves' “maxim, that a still tongue makes a wise head. They suppress the truth rather than take the consequences of telling it, and in so doing prove themselves a part of the human family.”²⁵ Thus, Douglass argues, the slaves' humanity manifests in their cunning accommodation to and subversion of evil authority.

Douglass makes this point most subtly, and anticipates modern historians' treatment of slave culture most directly, in his discussion of slave music. He portrays the slave songs as primarily expressions of sorrow and lament, but he also indicates the inseparability of the sacred and the secular in black folk music, of everyday life mixed with appeals for deliverance in “the most rapturous tone.” The scene in which he discusses music is, after all, that of a mass of slaves walking toward the Great House Farm on “allowance-day.” The “dense old woods … reverberate” with song as groups of selected slaves congregate at Colonel Lloyd's mansion for their periodic allotments of food and clothing. Here, Douglass brilliantly juxtaposes the dehumanizing power structure of slavery with the slaves' own best means of inner relief and self-expression. He even leaves an invitation to modern historians and folklorists: “If any one wishes to be impressed with the soul-killing effects of slavery, let him go to Colonel Lloyd's plantation, and, on allowance-day, place himself in the deep pine woods, and there let him, in silence, analyze the sounds that shall pass through the chambers of his soul.” Since the 1960s, this is precisely what historians like Lawrence Levine, Sterling Stuckey, Leon Litwack, and others have done with the lyrics and forms of slave music. Scholars have found various ways to gain access to the piney woods, to listen to the slaves' own voices, as they created an inner moral order out of potential chaos and forged what Levine has called an “improvisational communal consciousness.”²⁶ Although intended as confrontational abolitionist literature in its context, Douglass's Narrative has been used as a crucial source in the most significant revolution in slavery historiography in our time—the use of folklore and slave autobiographies themselves as sources for understanding how slaves created a culture of resistance amidst oppression.

Slave narratives are, of course, personal testimonies; but they are also the individual stories by which we begin to discern patterns of a collective experience that we can comprehend as history. Such is the view of the modern black novelist and essayist Ralph Ellison. Ellison has argued that autobiographical works (his own Invisible Man or the slave narratives) both emerge from history and allow us access to it. “One of the reasons we exchange experiences,” says Ellison, “is in order to discover the repetitions and coincidences which amount to a common group experience. We tell ourselves our individual stories so as to become aware of our general story.” W. E. B. Du Bois, author of The Souls of Black Folk (1903) and the most prolific black scholar of the twentieth century, also saw individual and collective meanings in Douglass's Narrative. In his Black Reconstruction in America (1935), Du Bois asks the question each generation of American students and scholars should ask: “What was slavery in the United States? Just what did it mean to the owner and the owned?” Du Bois answers by asserting that the plantation legend would only be overturned by consulting the slave autobiographies. “No one can read that first thin autobiography of Frederick Douglass,” he writes, “and have left many illusions about slavery … no amount of flowery romance and personal reminiscences of its protected beneficiaries can keep the world from knowing that slavery was a cruel, dirty, costly and inexcusable anachronism, which nearly ruined the world's greatest experiment in democracy.”²⁷

One of Douglass's favorite techniques was to connect his personal story to the plight of the nation, to link the Edward Coveys and Thomas Aulds in his own life to slaveholding America. He never did this more effectively than in the brilliant, bitterly ironic jeremiad “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” delivered in Rochester, New York, in 1852 and reprinted in this volume. In the Narrative, moreover, we find an intriguing link between the long chapter on the Covey fight, with its description of personal resurrection through force, and the appendix, which is an angry attack on both religious hypocrisy and the slaveholding republic, climaxing with a passage directly from Jeremiah: “Shall I not visit for these things? saith the Lord. Shall not my soul be avenged on such a nation as this?”²⁸ A major argument of Douglass's Narrative, and something he would repeat in many forms down to the Civil War, is that the “prison” of slavery housed blacks and whites, slaves and slaveholders, the entire nation in a single fate.

Douglass's Narrative quickly became a best-seller. Much anticipated among abolitionists, it sold five thousand copies in the first four months of publication. In August 1845 Douglass's possessive but encouraging sponsors among the New England abolitionists sent the young author on a tour of the British Isles. Britain had abolished slavery in its colonies more than a decade before, and strong ties existed between American and British abolitionists. Moreover, Douglass was still a fugitive slave, and after publishing his story and his true identity, a trip abroad might provide temporary safe haven from possible slave catchers.

His nearly twenty months out of the country were a personal and political awakening for Douglass. He took the Irish, Scottish, and British antislavery communities by storm, drew huge audiences to his speeches, and discovered environments that appeared to be devoid of the grinding racism he had encountered everywhere during his travels in America. Douglass helped finance his British tour by selling the Narrative, which went through nine editions and sold eleven thousand copies from 1845 to 1847. By the eve of the Civil War in 1860, approximately thirty thousand copies of the Narrative had been sold on two continents, and the book had been translated into both French and German editions.²⁹ Indeed, along with his public speeches, the Narrative made Frederick Douglass the most famous black person in the world.

Except for Harriet Stowe's enormously successful Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), the Romantic age in America had no more popular exemplars than the narratives of fugitive slaves. Indeed, the slave autobiographies published in the 1830s and 1840s may have helped prepare the audience for Stowe's classic best-seller. The great antebellum works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, or Margaret Fuller did not sell nearly as well as the approximately one hundred book-length slave narratives. The epic character of individuals who first willed their own freedom, then wrote the story proved irresistible to readers in the American North and in Britain. Those who would never literally see slavery could now find a literary medium through which to observe and perhaps understand it.

By attending a speech by Douglass or by reading his narrative, or those of the former fugitive slaves Harriet Jacobs, William Wells Brown, or Josiah Henson, white audiences not only encountered the heroic in form but heard or read the slave's own voice in substance. The abolitionist U.S. Senator Charles Sumner captured some of these sentiments in 1852, when, having read several narratives, he declared that fugitive slaves “are among the heroes of our age. Romance has no storms of more thrilling interest than theirs. Classical antiquity has preserved no examples of adventurous trial more worthy of renown.”³⁰

The two reviews of Douglass's work reprinted in this volume demonstrate the literary and social impact of slave narratives during the decade when the genre became an international sensation. In June 1845 the Transcendentalist Margaret Fuller found Douglass's story “so affecting” because it was the slave's “living voice.” She admired Douglass's artistic abilities, urging that his work be “prized as a specimen of the powers of the Black Race.” That strange but wonderful discovery—a black person who could write beautifully and compellingly—was to be celebrated. Douglass could not have asked for a better endorsement than Fuller's: “We wish that every one may read his book and see what a mind might have been stifled in bondage.” Fuller had, indeed, seen to the core of Douglass's own sense of the message of his book. In 1849 Ephraim Peabody, a Boston Unitarian minister and moderate abolitionist, groused over the “extravagance and passion and rhetorical flourishes” in Douglass's language but boldly announced America's “mournful honor of adding a new department to the literature of civilization,—the autobiographies of escaped slaves.” The slaves' quest for “freedom,” said Peabody, kept “poetry and romance” alive, and readers of this Romantic age could find a “whole Iliad of woes” and a “modern Odyssey” in the slave narratives.³¹

Sympathetic commentators on Douglass's Narrative could not resist reaching for antiquity to explain the book's impact. William Lloyd Garrison, in his famous preface to the original edition (reprinted here), found in the best passages of Douglass's writing a “whole Alexandrian library of thought, feeling, and sentiment” (referring to the ancient Egyptian cultural capital at the mouth of the Nile River). In Wendell Phillips's prefatory letter, which also accompanied the original edition (also reprinted here), the famed abolitionist orator opened by recalling the “old fable of ‘The Man and the Lion,’ where the lion complained that he should not be so misrepresented ‘when the lions wrote history.’ I am glad the time has come when the ‘lions write history.’”³²

Such expressions of admiration for Douglass's Narrative by his white abolitionist friends and critics served as sanctions (which Douglass both welcomed and resented) for the veracity of his authorship in a world that, unfortunately, doubted black abilities. A good many people maintained that such books must have been ghostwritten, that no black person could achieve such a high intellectual level. But verifications like Phillips's were also recognitions of the central themes of slave narratives: They are at their core, as literary critic William L. Andrews has argued, stories about freedom and about the act of writing freely.³³ Thus did Douglass, who eventually grew a great mane of hair and even looked a little like a lion, represent himself and write his own history.

Just as historians have made innovative use of the slave narratives in recent years, literary critics have made analysis of them, especially Douglass's, into a veritable industry. This was not always the case; for more than a century, from the 1850s to 1960, Douglass's Narrative went out of print. As a model leader and writer, Douglass was not ignored by black writers and intellectuals from the 1890s to the 1930s; they appropriated him to every conceivable cause and debated whether he was the precursor or the antithesis of Booker T. Washington or W. E. B. Du Bois, the two dominant African American figures of the turn-of-the-century era. By the 1950s a genuine Douglass revival may be said to have begun among literary scholars, and through the civil rights revolution and the rediscovery of black history during the following decade, at least three new editions of the Narrative were published by 1968.³⁴

During the 1970s and 1980s, Douglass's first autobiography emerged fully from obscurity and entered the larger American canon. The way analysis of the text became a kind of rite of passage in the burgeoning field of black literary criticism attests to the book's significance. Many insights of value to historians, as well as to all readers, have flowed from the unabated flood of literary essays on Douglass's Narrative. Critics have shown how the work fits many nineteenth-century literary traditions: sentimental fiction, the picaresque novel, and captivity narratives. But primarily the focus of analysis and debate has been Douglass's artful and self-conscious use of language.

Did Douglass, the seemingly self-taught writer, master the masters' language, or did that language still trap him within literary conventions, abolitionist and religious propaganda, and gendered assumptions? When read without adequate historical context and biographical background, some criticism of Douglass's Narrative renders the author a creature of language alone, a writer who somehow did not live or act in history. Feminist critics have recently opened a new avenue of analysis.³⁵ Douglass's virtual silence about his wife, Anna (who was a stalwart spouse, mother, and homemaker but never learned to read and write), as well as the manner in which he portrays the violence inflicted upon slave women (especially the beating of Aunt Hester in Chapter 1) have been brought under scrutiny. Douglass's quest to affirm his own “manhood,” through either violence or literacy, is a persistent and revealing theme in the book. Not surprisingly, he wrote and spoke with the male values of the Victorian age. Women rarely have voices in Douglass's autobiographical writing. He was, after all, creating one essential, heroic character—himself. And, as he says in the famous sentence that announces the bloody contest with Covey: “You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man.” Thus, drawing upon assertions of male virtue and religious metaphor, Douglass could declare his victory over the “snake” Covey to be his revival of a “sense of my own manhood” and his “glorious resurrection.”³⁶ Just as in analyzing the text as a historical document we must be aware of how we are influenced by our own values and the events of our time, so, too, in analyzing the Narrative as literature, we should all be aware of how much we let issues of the present inform, or intrude upon, the texts of the past.

Some of the most persuasive criticism simply allows us to see, indeed, how effective Douglass was in using his own memory and imagination to reverse some of the allegedly fixed oppositions of antebellum America: master and slave, human and animal, black and white, slavery and freedom. Douglass ceaselessly creates his own dualisms to demonstrate that language can liberate just as easily as it can degrade or enslave the human spirit. This has much to do with why the Narrative garners such an enduring readership; his are the dualisms of the free mind becoming ever freer. Near the end of the book, just as he is about to announce the date of his escape from Maryland, Douglass tries to remember his sentiments. He matches the “wretchedness of slavery, and the blessedness of freedom,” and declares that escape “was life and death with me.”³⁷ Such passages are full of sentiment and pathos, but in them readers have always been able to find their own stories, their own sense of the terrible oppositions in life that require decisions which may bind or liberate them.

Autobiography is self-indulgent by definition. As the reconstruction of the personal story, it often masks the most private of sentiments in favor of constructing a public self serviceable to the present. Autobiographical memory, writes James Olney, is not “an orderly summoning up of something dead—a sort of Final Judgment on past events—but … a creative figuration of the living present and a summary reconstruction of how the present came to be that which it is.”³⁸ Although Douglass left few hints as to exactly why or how he wrote his autobiographies, such present consciousness compelled him to write his story just as much as anyone else. Douglass's biographers have helped us understand how his autobiographies, though intended as public polemics, nevertheless reveal an orphan's endless quest to retrieve a “lost” and “usable” past in a life of great change, or to seek the truth about his unknown father. They have helped us notice the avoidances and silences in the Narrative—about his wife, women generally, and the fate of his brothers and sisters. They have helped us see that in Douglass's life there were, as William S. McFeely suggests, “private torments and horrors too deep in the well [of slavery] to be drawn up.” Moreover, biographers have argued that through Douglass's writing and speaking he desperately sought a secure social identity, a sense of belonging in a country that until emancipation had defined his people out of the social contract.³⁹

Like all autobiographers, Douglass sought to bring a sense of order to a life of potential chaos. As Douglass performed his story on abolitionist platforms and then took the spoken and written versions on the road in the British Isles, he boldly served both public and private needs. The ruptures and discontinuities of a fugitive slave's life made for an awesome journey from slavery to freedom. This was perhaps America's ultimate progress narrative, and it compelled the young Douglass, lover of words as the only real weapon he had, to tell and retell his story. It was propaganda, but in a great cause; it was also an act of self-creation, a thoroughly human quest to know himself. Like those of all good autobiographers, Douglass's motives were both social and personal, and this should be no surprise. He wanted to understand himself within the world that so controlled him, and that he sought so dearly to change.

The American philosopher William James once wrote that after “long brooding” he concluded that “the one and the many” is the “most central of all philosophic problems.” This is, indeed, the key to the relationship between autobiography and history. The one becomes the source of the individual narratives out of which we construct a sometimes coherent, sometimes conflicted, story about the many. The modern American writer Richard Rodriguez, himself the author of an autobiographical journey across boundaries of nationality and ethnicity, may have best captured the reasons why a fugitive slave like Douglass turned to first-person narrative. “Autobiography seems to me appropriate,” writes Rodriguez, “to anyone who has suffered some startling change, a two-life lifetime; to anyone who is able to marvel at the sharp change in his life: I was there once, and now, my God, I am here! (… was blind but now I see.)” In Douglass's great story, he was lost and then he was found, and he would not let anyone forget it. Neither pious psalm nor pleasing history did he offer to his readers. By an intangible grace, good fortune, and heroic initiative, Douglass became free. Surely this is why he places us on that ridge overlooking the Chesapeake Bay, marveling at the “moving multitude of ships,” as he imagines himself on one of their “gallant decks,” speaks to us and the ships in alternating voices of anguish and triumph, pouring out his “soul's complaint,” and converting it into an unforgettable image of the meaning of freedom.⁴⁰

Notes

1. Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom (1855; rpt. New York: Collier Books, 1969), 273. The literature on autobiography is massive, but for places to start on its relationship to personal memory and history, see James Olney, Metaphors of Self: The Meaning of Autobiography (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972); James Olney, ed., Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980); and Stephen Butterfield, Black Autobiography in America (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1974). A classic, and especially self-conscious, probing of the meaning of autobiographical writing is Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited (1947; rev. ed. New York: Random House, 1966).

2. Many other famous black abolitionists also escaped from the Eastern Shore of the Chesapeake in Maryland, among them Harriet Tubman, Henry Highland Garnet, and James W. C. Pennington.

3. See Benjamin Quarles, Frederick Douglass (1948; rpt. New York: Atheneum, 1968), 4-11. On vigilance committees, see Benjamin Quarles, Black Abolitionists (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969), 150-67; and Jane H. Pease and William H. Pease, They Who Would Be Free: Blacks' Search for Freedom, 1830-1861 (New York: Atheneum, 1974), 207-12.

4. Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself (1845; rpt. New York: Doubleday, 1963), 114. All subsequent references are to this edition. On Douglass's discovery of The Columbian Orator, see Dickson J. Preston, Young Frederick Douglass: The Maryland Years (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), 96, 98-100.

5. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the Racial Self (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 108.

6. See William L. Andrews, To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography, 1760-1865 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986). Andrews's persuasive argument is that the principal themes of the slave narratives were a multilayered quest for freedom, self-liberation, and the act of writing freely.

7. “Southern Slavery and Northern Religion,” two addresses delivered by Douglass in Concord, New Hampshire, 11 Feb. 1844, recorded by Nathaniel P. Rogers, in Herald of Freedom (Concord, N.H.), 16 Feb. 1844, in John W. Blassingame, ed., The Frederick Douglass Papers, vol. 1 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 26.

8. Narrative, 44, 42-43.

9. Ibid., 41.

10. For the best general histories of abolitionism, see James B. Stewart, Holy Warriors: The Abolitionists and American Slavery (New York: Hill and Wang, 1976); and Merton Dillon, The Abolitionists: The Growth of a Dissenting Minority (New York: W. W. Norton, 1979). On Garrison's ideas and leadership, see John L. Thomas, The Liberator, William Lloyd Garrison: A Biography (Boston: Little, Brown, 1963). On Douglass's break with Garrison, see Waldo E. Martin, The Mind of Frederick Douglass (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984), 40-46; William S. McFeely, Frederick Douglass (New York: W. W. Norton, 1990), 146-49, 175-76; and David W. Blight, Frederick Douglass' Civil War: Keeping Faith in Jubilee (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989), 26-31.

11. Narrative, 13.

12. Narrative, preface, xv. McFeely, Frederick Douglass, 115; William L. Andrews, “Introduction to the 1987 Edition,” Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987), xi-xxvi.

13. Robert G. O'Meally, “Frederick Douglass' 1845 Narrative: The Text Was Meant to Be Preached,” in Dexter Fisher and Robert B. Stepto, eds., Afro-American Literature: The Reconstruction of Instruction (New York: Modern Language Association, 1979), 210.

14. Wilson J. Moses, Black Messiahs and Uncle Toms: Social and Literary Manipulations of a Religious Myth (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1982), 30-31; Andrews, To Tell a Free Story, 124. On the jeremiad, see Sacvan Berkovitch, The American Jeremiad (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978), 148-210; Blight, Frederick Douglass' Civil War, 105, 117-20; James H. Moorhead, American Apocalypse: Yankee Protestants and the Civil War, 1860-1869 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), 43-49; and David Howard-Pitney, “The Enduring Black Jeremiad: The American Jeremiad in Black Protest Rhetoric, from Frederick Douglass to W. E. B. Du Bois, 1841-1919,” American Quarterly 38 (Fall 1986), 481-92.

15. On Douglass's Narrative as spiritual autobiography, see Andrews, To Tell a Free Story, 123-27.

16. Narrative, 66-67. On the nature of the Psalms, see The Interpreter's Dictionary of the Bible, vol. 3 (New York: Abingdon Press, 1962), 942 58. On biblical radicalism, see Peter Linebaugh, “Jubilating; Or, How the Atlantic Working Class Used the Biblical Jubilee Against Capitalism, with Some Success,” Radical History Review 50 (Spring 1991), 143-80. Douglass was so aware of the power and impact that the passage about the sailing ships had had on his readers that in his second autobiography he simply quoted it verbatim. See My Bondage and My Freedom, 219-21.

17. Ulrich B. Phillips, American Negro Slavery (New York: D. Appleton, 1918); and Ulrich B. Phillips, Life and Labor in the Old South (Boston: Little, Brown, 1929), 219.

18. For a rich survey of the revival of interest in slave narratives and an argument for their use by historians, see John W. Blassingame, ed., Slave Testimony: Two Centuries of Letters, Speeches, Interviews, and Autobiographies (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977), xvii-lxv.

19. The first modern edition was by Harvard University Press, Benjamin Quarles, ed., Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960). John W. Blassingame, The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972); Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Random House, 1974); Herbert Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750-1925 (New York: Random House, 1976); and Lawrence W. Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977). There are many good historiographical essays on slavery; for one of the best during the peak years of attention to this field, see David Brion Davis, “Slavery and the Post-World War II Historians,” Daedalus 3 (Spring 1974). For a single-volume survey of slavery historiography, see Peter J. Parish, Slavery: History and the Historians (New York: Harper & Row, 1989).

20. Narrative, 82, 84-85.

21. Narrative, 54-55, 39. On Douglass and slaveholders, see Blight, Frederick Douglass' Civil War, 43-44, 83-88.

22. Douglass to Thomas Auld, 3 Sept. 1848, in The Liberator, 22 Sept. 1848, in Philip S. Foner, Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass, vol. 1 (New York: International Publishers, 1950), 343. On the Douglass-Thomas Auld relationship and the inaccuracies in the letter, see Preston, Young Frederick Douglass, 184-87; and McFeely, Frederick Douglass, 40-43, 158-60.

23. Narrative, 11-12, 24-26.

24. Ibid., 47-48.

25. Ibid., 17, 20.

26. Ibid., 13-15; Levine, Black Culture, 29. Sterling Stuckey, “Through the Prism of Folklore,” Massachusetts Review 9 (1968), 417-37; and Leon F. Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery (New York: Random House, 1979). Douglass also discusses the slave songs in the other two autobiographies. See My Bondage and My Freedom, 253-54; and Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881; rpt. New York: Collier Books, 1962), 159-60.

27. Ralph Ellison, in a 1978 interview quoted in Charles T. Davis and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., eds., The Slave's Narrative (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), xviii-xix; W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880 (New York: Atheneum, 1935), 715.

28. Narrative, 121. The biblical reference is Jeremiah 6:29.

29. Davis and Gates, eds., Slave's Narrative, xvi; Andrews, To Tell a Free Story, 97-98. For more detailed sales statistics on slave narratives generally, see Charles H. Nichols, “Who Read the Slave Narratives?” Phylon 20 (Summer 1959), 149-62; Arna Bontemps, “The Slave Narrative: An American Genre,” in Great Slave Narratives (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), xvii-xix; and Marion Wilson Starling, The Slave Narrative: Its Place in American History (Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1988), 32-39.

30. Summer quoted in Davis and Gates, eds., Slave's Narrative, xxii.

31. Margaret Fuller, New York Tribune, 10 June 1845; Ephraim Peabody, Christian Examiner, July 1849. Both reviews are reprinted in William L. Andrews, ed., Critical Essays on Frederick Douglass (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1991), 21-26.

32. Narrative, xv, xxi.

33. Andrews, To Tell a Free Story, 103-4.

34. For the early argument that Douglass represented the black protest tradition, see Kelly Miller, “Radicals and Conservatives,” in Race Adjustment: The Everlasting Stain (New York: Ayer, 1908), 11-27. The revival of critical interest in Douglass can be traced to Benjamin Brawley, The Negro in Literature and Art in the United States (New York: Duffield, 1930); Vernon Loggins, The Negro Author: His Development in America to 1900 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1931); and J. Saunders Redding, To Make a Poet Black (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1939). The three editions of the Narrative were by Harvard University Press (1960), Dolphin Books of Doubleday (1963), and Signet (1968).

35. Some of the most important early essays on Douglass in the recent revival are Houston A. Baker, Long Black Song (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1973), 58-83; Albert E. Stone, “Identity and Art in Frederick Douglass' Narrative,” CLA Journal 17 (1973), 192-213; and Robert B. Stepto, “Narration, Authentication, and Authorial Control in Frederick Douglass' Narrative of 1845”; O'Meally, “The Text Was Meant to Be Preached”; and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., “Binary Oppositions in Chapter One of Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself,” all three in Fisher and Stepto, Afro-American Literature, 178-232. Two new collections of essays, literary and historical, have assembled a wide variety of work in the continuing scholarship. See Eric J. Sundquist, ed., Frederick Douglass: New Literary and Historical Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); and Andrews, ed., Critical Essays. For feminist critiques, see Deborah E. McDowell, “In the First Place: Making Frederick Douglass and the Afro-American Narrative Tradition,” in Andrews, ed., Critical Essays, 192-214. Also see Jenny Franchot, “The Punishment of Esther: Frederick Douglass and the Construction of the Feminine,” and Richard Yarborough, “Race, Violence, and Manhood: The Masculine Ideal in Frederick Douglass' ‘The Heroic Slave,’” in Sundquist, ed., Frederick Douglass, 141-88.

36. Narrative, 68, 74.

37. Ibid., 105. On Douglass's use of dualisms and oppositions, see Gates, “Binary Oppositions,” 212-32; and Andrews, To Tell a Free Story, 131-33.

38. Olney, Metaphors of Self, 264.

39. Peter F. Walker, Moral Choices: Memory, Desire, and Imagination in Nineteenth Century American Abolition (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978), 209-28; McFeely, Frederick Douglass, 116. On Douglass's need for a social identity, see Blight, Frederick Douglass' Civil War, 73-78, 165-67, 187-89. On Douglass's need for reconciliation with his masters' families and his homecomings to Maryland after the Civil War, see Preston, Young Frederick Douglass, 159-97. On the overall importance of the autobiographies to Douglass's developing self-image, see Martin, Mind of Frederick Douglass, 253-84.

40. William James, “The One and the Many,” in Bruce Kuklick, ed., Pragmatism (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1981), 61; Richard Rodriguez, “An American Writer,” in Werner Sollors, ed., The Invention of Ethnicity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 7-8; Narrative, 66. On the public and private motivations in Douglass's Narrative, see Donald B. Gibson, “Reconciling Public and Private in Frederick Douglass's Narrative,” American Literature 57 (1985), 551-69.