Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass

Overview

The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself is a hundred and twenty pages, published in Boston in May 1845 when its author was about twenty-seven. The subtitle is the argument. Douglass had been speaking for the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society for four years, and he was so good at it that audiences had begun to doubt him; one abolitionist advised him to keep a little of the plantation speech in his delivery, because it was not best that he seem too learned.

So he wrote the book with names and places in it, which no fugitive could do safely. The consequence was immediate: he sailed for Britain in August, spent nearly two years lecturing there, and returned only after English friends raised the money to buy him from Thomas Auld.

It is prefaced by William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips, and their prefaces are part of the document. Both testify that Douglass wrote it himself, which is what a white readership required, and Phillips tells him openly that he would understand if he chose to burn the manuscript rather than risk recapture. The need for such vouching is one of the things the book is up against.

Douglass wrote two later and longer autobiographies, My Bondage and My Freedom in 1855 and Life and Times in 1881. The first is a richer book and more critical of his white allies. This one is the one that gets assigned, because it is short, controlled, and shaped like an argument.

What happens

Douglass was born in Talbot County, Maryland, and does not know the year, which is where the book begins. Slaves knew as little of their ages as horses knew of theirs, and he remarks that a want of information about his own birthday was a source of unhappiness to him even as a child. His mother was hired out twelve miles away and visited at night, lying down with him until he slept and walking back before dawn; he saw her perhaps four or five times and was not permitted to attend her funeral. His father was white and probably his master.

The first violence he sees is the whipping of his aunt Hester, stripped, tied by the wrists to a hook, and beaten until the blood ran. He was too young to understand it and hid in a closet, and he calls it the blood-stained gate through which he entered the hell of slavery.

At the Great House Farm of Colonel Lloyd he describes the allowances, the food eaten from a trough, the overseers, the killing of a slave named Demby for which nobody is charged. And he describes the singing, and corrects the northern reading of it: the songs were the sorrow of overcharged hearts, and every tone was a testimony against slavery.

At about eight he is sent to Baltimore to the household of Hugh and Sophia Auld, and this is the book’s hinge. Sophia has never owned a slave, treats him kindly, and begins teaching him the alphabet. Her husband stops it, and explains why in front of the boy: learning would spoil the best slave in the world, would make him discontented and unmanageable, and would forever unfit him for the work. Douglass understood at that moment that he had been given the answer to a problem he could not previously state, and he set out to learn by any means: trading bread to poor white boys in the street for lessons, copying letters from timber marks in a shipyard, reading The Columbian Orator, a schoolbook containing a dialogue between a master and a slave and a speech on Catholic emancipation, which gave him arguments and also made him wretched, because he could now see the whole thing and could do nothing about it.

Returned to the country and hired out to Edward Covey, a poor farmer with a reputation for breaking slaves, he is worked and whipped until, he says, he was broken in body, soul and spirit, and the disposition to read departed. Then, after a beating too many, he fights back. The struggle lasts two hours and Covey does not beat him again and does not report it, because to do so would ruin his professional reputation. Douglass calls it the turning point in his career as a slave and says it revived his sense of his own manhood.

He then teaches a Sabbath school for other slaves, which is broken up by armed men. He plans an escape with several others; they are betrayed, arrested and jailed, and he expects to be sold south and is not.

Back in Baltimore, apprenticed as a ship’s caulker, he is beaten nearly blind by white apprentices and finds that no white witness will testify for him and a black man’s testimony is inadmissible. He hires his own time, saves, and on 3 September 1838 escapes to New York. He does not say how, and explains why: describing the method would close it for others and expose those who helped.

The book ends with his marriage to Anna Murray, the move to New Bedford, the surprise of finding northern working men living better than Maryland slaveholders, the change of name, and his first speech at Nantucket in 1841.

An appendix distinguishes the Christianity of Christ from what he calls the slaveholding religion of this land, and is the angriest thing in the book.

How to read it

Take it at a single sitting if you can. The book is built as a case, and its momentum is part of what it is arguing.

Read the prefaces and then notice what they are doing. Two white men are certifying that a black man wrote his own book, and the necessity of that is a fact about the audience rather than about Douglass.

Watch the structure. The book moves from a boy who does not know his birthday to a man who names his owners in print, and the two hinges are exact: the sentence he overhears about reading, and the fight with Covey. Knowledge and physical resistance, in that order.

Notice the restraint. Douglass has every reason to write luridly and does not. The horrors are reported flatly, with dates and names, because the point is evidence.

Read the appendix. It is the part most often skipped and it contains his sharpest writing, on the men who whip a woman on Monday and take the sacrament on Sunday.

Then read What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July, from 1852, which is the greatest speech in American history and does in an hour what this book does in a hundred pages.

Questions it raises

• Douglass published names and places knowing it exposed him to recapture. What did he judge was worth that risk?
• The overheard sentence about reading is presented as the decisive moment. Why does knowing why you are being kept ignorant do more than the ignorance itself?
• He says the fight with Covey made him free in fact long before he was free in law. What is freedom in that sentence?
• Sophia Auld begins kind and becomes cruel. Is Douglass arguing that slavery corrupts owners, and does that argument risk shifting the focus?
• He refuses to describe his escape route, for the sake of others still enslaved. What does that omission do to a book written as testimony?
• The appendix separates Christianity from the religion of the slaveholders. Can that distinction be maintained, and who gets to draw it?