My Bondage and My Freedom

by Frederick Douglass

  Andrews argues correctly that My Bondage and My Freedom denoted a major departure, “more than a mere updated installment of the Narrative. The second autobiography offers a thoughtful revision of the meaning and goals of Douglass’s life.” It was at once both “more self-consciously literary, and more self-analytical.” My Bondage and My Freedom signified that Douglass’s “search for freedom had not reached its fulfillment among the abolitionists, although this had been the implication of his Narrative’s conclusion.” “During the decade between his two books,” he adds, “Douglass underwent a rite of passage totally unanticipated by the pattern of events in the Narrative and wholly unprepared for by Douglass himself.”22

  The central narrative of My Bondage and My Freedom is Douglass’s transformation into an independent and self-assertive free man. Throughout his enslavement, Douglass exhibited brief periods of free will and independence before making his final stand against the brutal slave breaker Edward Covey. Once he had defended himself against Covey’s whip and fist, Douglass mentally broke through the chains that bound him. He became increasingly independent, less slavelike, and finally risked being sold to the Deep South to gain his freedom. After his escape from slavery, Douglass became an active agent in the abolitionist movement but proved to be so individualistic and such a keen critic of American institutions that even William Lloyd Garrison, the dean of American abolitionists, could not control him.

  Three times longer than its predecessor, Douglass’s second narrative is significantly looser stylistically, structurally, and in its creative power.23 My Bondage and My Freedom tells a broader story—one that goes beyond Douglass’s own experiences as a fugitive from slavery and as a black abolitionist. Though focused minutely on his life as a slave, in My Bondage and My Freedom Douglass provided a more rounded word portrait of his life under the “peculiar institution.” In it, for example, he told of his privileged childhood status as a “favored slave,” the cruelties as well as the occasional kindnesses of his masters, and the role of his extended family and the slave community in ameliorating the horrors of bondage. According to Dickson J. Preston, My Bondage and My Freedom “is by far the most detailed and reliable in its treatment of Douglass’s early Maryland experiences.”24 The text, writes Eric J. Sundquist, also is “stylized, even melodramatic, in its exclamations of the right of revolution.”25 Douglass wrote My Bondage and My Freedom while serving as an abolitionist newspaper editor. According to Robert S. Levine, he incorporated into his second autobiography elements of the “temperate revolutionism”—anti-emigrationism, black assertiveness, capitalism, self-help, and temperance—that shaped his editorials.26

  My Bondage and My Freedom offers a more complex, balanced, and communal message than simply the heroic passage of one fortunate man’s journey from slavery to freedom. Douglass approached the book with a new frankness, a new mission, and a newfound political agenda: he wanted to lead his people out of slavery. Less a retelling of Douglass’s Narrative, his second autobiography suggested Douglass’s maturation, his developing ability to “read” new meaning in his own life, to identify and articulate his dissatisfactions with white abolitionists, and to redirect his efforts in the 1850s to a more radical and immediate fight for the freedom of all African Americans.

  As Lewis R. Gordon explains, My Bondage and My Freedom marked Douglass’s “existential journey . . . from un-freedom to a qualified freedom” within the context of the 1850s political battles over slavery’s extension into the federal territories and northerners’ growing concern, as expressed by the emerging Republican Party, that slavery might become a national institution. While on one level he chronicled the details of his personal path to freedom and the emancipation process, on another level Douglass’s escape from slavery freed him to uncover his life’s work—the emancipation and advancement of all blacks. “What would Frederick Douglass have been had he failed to escape?” Frederick Law Olmsted asked in 1856. “What has he become since he dared commit the sacrilege of coming out of bondage? All the statesmanship and kind mastership of the South has done less, in fifty years, to elevate and dignify the African race, than he in ten.”27

  Douglass explained the significance of his escape in his second autobiography, urging African Americans and their white friends to launch twin offensives against slavery. First, they had to convince slaveholders that slavery was immoral and corrupt. It was essential, Douglass believed, that masters understand the misery their slaves experienced. Second, abolitionists, especially blacks, had to declare war on slavery. They had to resist it physically by running away or revolting, and metaphorically by writing about it. More than in his Narrative, in My Bondage and My Freedom Douglass grasped the power of language, specifically the power of slave narratives, in combating slavery and the injustice that lay at its core. The success of his Narrative empowered Douglass to launch a second major offensive against slavery in My Bondage and My Freedom.

  Spirited by the success of his Narrative, driven by his determination to lead persons of color out of bondage and quasi slavery, and incensed by the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 and the political maneuvering that culminated in the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act, a year later Douglass published My Bondage and My Freedom. By 1855 Douglass had experienced an incredible metamorphosis from obscure slave to leading black abolitionist.

  Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey (in My Bondage and My Freedom Douglass spelled it Baily) was born a slave on the Holme Hill farm on Tuckahoe Creek, Talbot County, on Maryland’s Eastern Shore in February 1818, the son of the slave Harriet Baily and an unknown white father, possibly his master, Captain Aaron Anthony. Modern historians concur that Douglass was born in February 1818, but Douglass, like most slaves, remained unsure of his birth date, and assumed that it was in 1817.28 In his Narrative Douglass wrote unequivocally that his father was white. A decade later, however, in My Bondage and My Freedom, he left the matter unsettled, writing that his father was “a white man, or nearly white” (4 2).29 However, in My Bondage and My Freedom and in other writings Douglass further clouded the issue of his ethnic background. Like several other American antislavery activists of his day, he identified with the glorified ideal of Native Americans as “noble savages” and remarked that his master and probable father once referred to him as “his ‘little Indian boy’ ” (62).30

  Douglass’s outrage with slavery punctuates every page of My Bondage and My Freedom. He denounced the “peculiar institution” as a savage and brutal labor system, one that robbed both master and slave of their humanity and erased the slave’s family ties. Douglass found slavery humiliating. It “swallowed up” humans “in the sordid idea of property!” he complained, equating persons with animals (129). Throughout My Bondage and My Freedom Douglass asserted that, contrary to the slave holders’ rhetoric, slavery was an unnatural institution. “Nature has done almost nothing to prepare men and women to be either slaves or slaveholders,” he wrote. “Nothing but rigid training, long persisted in, can perfect the character of the one or the other” (113). Slavery’s sinfulness even permeated the white man’s religion, Douglass exclaimed. He considered “the religion of the south . . . a mere covering for the most horrid crimes; the justifier of the most appaling barbarity; a sanctifier of the most hateful of frauds; and a secure shelter, under which the darkest, foulest, grossest, and most infernal abominations fester and flourish” (188). White Christianity, he wrote, was hypocritical and contrary to God’s law.

  Slavery, Douglass complained further, taught African Americans many lessons, including dishonesty and trickery. When, for example, in 1833, he worked as a field hand at St. Michaels, Maryland, Douglass’s master, Thomas Auld, almost starved him to death. In order to survive, Douglass stole food from Auld. Douglass explained his actions by asserting that because white society had robbed him of his liberty, he was justified in stealing in return. “It was simply appropriating what was my own to the use of my master,” Douglass reasoned, “since the health and strength derived from such food were
exerted in his service. To be sure, this was stealing, according to the law and gospel I heard from St. Michael’s pulpit; but I had already begun to attach less importance to what dropped from that quarter” (139). Douglass’s point was that the morality of a free society had no bearing on slave society and that slaves were devoid of moral responsibility because they had no freedom of choice. “Make a man a slave,” he explained, “and you rob him of moral responsibility” (140). As a result, Douglass believed, a slave was “fully justified in helping himself to gold and silver, and the best apparel of his master, or that of any other slaveholder; and that such taking is not stealing in any just sense of that word” (140).

  Slavery, according to Douglass, also proved deleterious to the most basic unit of society—the family. Douglass knew little about his family, writing, “Genealogical trees do not flourish among slaves” (30). Without knowledge of his family, Douglass had difficulty in establishing his identity. Douglass argued that slaveholders purposely broke up families in order to “reduce man to a level with the brute. It is a successful method of obliterating from the mind and heart of the slave, all just ideas of the sacredness of the family, as an institution” (32). Toward the end of his life, Douglass visited a descendant of his first owner’s family, seeking information about his past, thus implying that Douglass mourned his own lack of family ties.31

  One way in which slave owners prevented the development of families among their slaves was to deny male slaves their masculinity. Slavery kept slaves permanent children, always under the care of another. Douglass expressed this sentiment upon his reunion with his former childhood companion, Tommy Auld. “He could grow, and become a MAN,” Douglass recalled; “I could grow, though I could not become a man, but must remain, all my life, a minor—a mere boy” (224). Enslaved men were not allowed to support themselves, protect their families, or stand up to other (white) men. In short, slavery prevented male slaves from asserting any of the qualities considered vital to male identity in mid-nineteenth-century America. Douglass commented that like himself, few slaves knew who their fathers were and that the very presence of slave fathers would have proven “antagonistic” to the institution of slavery (41).

  Just as slavery prohibited slave men from satisfying the contemporary male ideal, so too it stymied the development of black families on the white Victorian model. Raised by his grandmother, Betsey Baily, Douglass barely knew his immediate family. He saw his siblings for the first time in 1824 at age six—on the day that he moved to his master’s plantation. Acknowledging that they might have been related by blood, Douglass wrote, “slavery had made us strangers. I heard the words brother and sisters, and knew they must mean something; but slavery had robbed these terms of their true meaning” (39). Douglass’s mother, Harriet, occasionally walked twenty-four miles round-trip to see her children, but she died in early 1826, when Frederick was still young. He regretted that he had seldom had contact with his mother and that “[t]he domestic hearth, with its holy lessons and precious endearments, is abolished in the case of a slave-mother and her children” (39-40). Though Douglass expressed sorrow for his mother, in My Bondage and My Freedom he nevertheless portrayed her as both heroic and tragic—a literate woman who fought for her son’s well-being.32

  Throughout My Bondage and My Freedom, Douglass lamented that slave marriages went unrecognized, slave mothers were prevented from caring for their children, and slave women commonly were raped by their owners. “My poor mother, like many other slave-women, had many children, but NO FAMILY!” Douglass wrote (39). One of slavery’s many tragedies, according to Douglass, was miscegenation. The availability and powerlessness of slave women perverted the marriages of many slaveholding whites. “Women—white women, I mean—are IDOLS at the south, not WIVES,” Douglass asserted (47). The twin victims, however, were the African American women used by slave owners and overseers to satisfy their sexual appetites, and their children, who usually became slaves. According to Douglass, in a slave society a man “can be father without being a husband, and may sell his child without incurring reproach, if the child be by a woman in whose veins courses one thirty-second part of African blood” (41).

  Douglass remembered that as a slave he had little contact with the outside world. The plantation, he wrote, “is a little nation of its own, having its own language, its own rules, regulations and customs. . . . The overseer is generally accuser, judge, jury, advocate and executioner” (50). Overseers stood “between the slave and all civil constitutions—their word is law, and is implicitly obeyed” (53). Though bondmen could appeal to their masters for mercy if an overseer was excessively cruel, such pleas generally fell on deaf ears because masters did not want to undermine their overseers’ authority. Douglass’s master, Captain Anthony, for example, refused to interfere to protect a female slave from being savagely abused and beaten by an overseer. His refusal to intervene on behalf of the slave, Douglass explained, was part of the hierarchy of the plantation system. “Were slaveholders to listen to complaints . . . against the overseers,” he said, “the luxury of owning large numbers of slaves, would be impossible. It would do away with the office of overseer, entirely; or . . . would convert the master himself into an overseer” (64).

  Slaves, according to Douglass, had no protection against the cruel excesses of their masters and overseers. Legal authorities rarely enforced laws designed to protect slaves’ lives, and if questioned about the death of one of his slaves, a slaveholder generally replied that the slave had resisted his authority (96). A system that endowed slave owners with such power was not one calculated to produce thoughtful, merciful masters and overseers. Slavery degraded whites, Douglass observed, making them lazy, vicious, corrupt, and hypocritical. After observing the capricious and cruel nature of slave owners, Douglass argued that “there is no relation more unfavorable to the development of honorable character, than that sustained by the slaveholder to the slave. Reason is imprisoned here, and passions run wild” (61-62). Andrews observes that Douglass, like other antebellum slave narrators, portrayed slavery as corrupting for all concerned. In their narratives, “[u]nder slavery, civilization reverts to a Hobbesian state of nature.”33

  In a system where one individual held seemingly limitless power over another, the enslaved adopted ways to ensure that they did not incur the enslaver’s wrath. Slaves learned to avoid questioning their overseers’ or masters’ authority and attempted to conceal any trace of discontent or inquiry lest they be whipped for being impudent. Deference played a large role within the South’s labor system, Douglass recalled. Bondmen and -women knew their “place,” convincing Douglass that “[t]here is no better material in the world for making a gentleman, than is furnished in the African. He shows to others, and exacts for himself, all the tokens of respect which he is compelled to manifest toward his master” (54). Again, in My Bondage and My Freedom Douglass tried to convince his readers that slaves, and presumably free blacks too, had the potential to become middle-class Victorians like themselves.

  In My Bondage and My Freedom Douglass underscored the fact that slavery was an intensely human institution, and the ex-slave admitted that as a bondman he had witnessed varying degrees of brutality and kindness. Although bitter about his slave experiences, Douglass nonetheless wrote that he loved “to recall any instances of kindness, any sunbeams of humane treatment, which found way to my soul through the iron grating of my house of bondage” (99). As a white man’s son, Douglass no doubt received comparatively favorable treatment. 34 He remembered that his first eight years were spent as “a spirited, joyous, uproarious, and happy boy, upon whom troubles fall only like water on a duck’s back” (35). When, later in his childhood, he suffered a severe gash on the top of his head, Miss Lucretia Auld, his master’s daughter, cared for his wound. Not only did Lucretia’s treatment of Douglass’s injury heal the cut, but “her kindness was healing to the wounds in my spirit” (98). From this moment forward, Lucretia and Frederick developed a special relationship—th
ey were friends. The young woman watched over Douglass and fed him a slice of bread or a piece of pie whenever he appealed to her for food to supplement his meager slave ration. Douglass remembered Lucretia’s succor as “a great favor on a slave plantation” (98).

  In 1827, at age nine, Douglass was sent by his master to Baltimore to work as a house servant for Hugh and Sophia Auld, the brother and sister-in-law of Thomas Auld. Residing in the bustling port city transformed Frederick’s life. There he experienced a religious conversion (the best account of this among the autobiographies appears in My Bondage and My Freedom, chapter 12), and thanks to Miss Sophie the young slave learned to read and write, over his master’s objections. By learning to read, Douglass said, slaves struck a blow for freedom. “To make a contented slave, you must make a thoughtless one” (233). Once slaves’ intellects were awakened, they began to question the very nature of slavery. Intelligent, discontented slaves were more likely to run away or otherwise resist than ignorant, intimidated slaves. Miss Sophie taught the young slave the rudiments of reading, an act that Douglass credited as leading to his own escape from bondage. Blight credits much of Frederick’s intellectual development to his early reading of Caleb Bingham’s The Columbian Orator (1797). That influential text (Douglass described it as a “gem of a book” [201]) anthologized selections from various famous leaders and thinkers in the course of world history, including Milton, Socrates, and Cicero, as well as George Washington and Benjamin Franklin. Blight argues that The Columbian Orator “gave Douglass confidence, a sense of the heroic, and a host of ideas about human rights, the character of legitimate government, and the question of whether or not slavery might be a permanent condition.”35