Douglass the Autobiographer

Frederick Douglass published three autobiographies during his lifetime—Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave (1845), My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), and Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881, 1892)—as well as numerous autobiographical lectures and essays. In his three major autobiographies, Douglass consistently presents himself as a heroic black figure whose energy, will, and intelligence helped him to rise from slavery to become one of the great black leaders of his time. But there are contradictory moments in these autobiographies, key events that he recounts somewhat differently as his politics and circumstances changed over time. Central to Douglass’s autobiographical art from the 1840s to the 1890s is the practice of revision: deciding how to portray himself for particular audiences at particular historical moments in order to convey the “truths” of his life as he understood them and as they served his political and rhetorical purposes at the time of composition.

Douglass’s best-known autobiography remains his first, the 1845 Narrative, published when he was twenty-seven and a lecturing agent for William Lloyd Garrison’s Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, an organization that preached the virtues of a nonviolent moral suasion. Douglass, who at the time revered the white abolitionist Garrison, was motivated to tell his story in order to address those skeptics who declared that such an eloquent black speaker could never have been a slave. Slave narratives were an increasingly popular genre, and Garrison, the publisher of the Narrative, may have also hoped to make money for his organization. The Narrative, with an admiring preface by Garrison, was immediately popular, garnering a number of positive reviews. Such was the publicity surrounding the Narrative that the Massachusetts-based Douglass, still legally a slave in Maryland, was at risk of being hunted down by fugitive slave catchers. With Garrison’s help, he sailed to England and spent the next eighteen months abroad as the celebrity anti-slavery speaker who had authored the Narrative. But while there he became less enamored of being a foot soldier in Garrison’s organization, and with the help of the Irish publisher Richard Webb, Douglass brought out two new editions of the Narrative which began not with Garrison’s somewhat patronizing remarks but with Douglass’s own preface. With these Irish editions published in 1845 and 1846 Douglass began the revision of the Narrative that would culminate in My Bondage and My Freedom.

In the main body of the Narrative, some of which would survive into My Bondage and My Freedom, Douglass tells his life history through a series of vivid scenes. He begins with the words that open many slave narratives, “I was born,” while emphasizing that he didn’t know his father and barely knew his mother. Over the course of the Narrative Douglass traces his movements back and forth between the Eastern Shore of Maryland and Baltimore, where he had more freedom. One of his great heroes was Benjamin Franklin, the man who rose from rags to riches, and there’s a Franklinian dimension to the autobiography in the way Douglass traces his ingenious efforts to rise from slavery to freedom, such as learning how to read and write by tricking white children to become his teachers. One of the most memorable scenes in theNarrative is Douglass’s account of his resistance to the slave-breaker Covey. Wounded and bleeding from Covey’s whippings, Douglass first appeals to his unsympathetic slave master, Thomas Auld, then tries a magical root supplied by the free black Sandy, and finally realizes he has to fight back on his own. But remember, Douglass at this point in his career is a Garrisonian committed to nonviolence. So he depicts his fight with Covey mainly as a self-defensive wrestling match that ends in a draw. According to Douglass, that draw is a victory that points the way to freedom. As he declares at this climactic moment: “My long-crushed spirit rose, cowardice departed, bold defiance took its place; and I now resolved that, however long I might remain a slave in form, the day had passed forever when I could be a slave in fact.” Douglass subsequently portrays himself as a black leader who teaches his fellow slaves the Bible, organizes an ultimately failed slave escape, and eventually escapes on his own to New Bedford, Massachusetts. Several years later, after meeting Garrison at an anti-slavery meeting in Nantucket, he takes up the “severe cross” of becoming a black abolitionist leader. Although there are various moments in the Narrative when Douglass is assisted by others, he mostly emphasizes his heroic individualism, especially in the account of his fight with Covey.

That fight is presented quite differently in the 1855 My Bondage and My Freedom, and the differences have much to do with Douglass’s changing situation. During the early to mid 1840s he supported Garrison’s nonviolent politics. But by 1850 he had broken with Garrison, convinced that the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 was an act of violence against African Americans that demanded violent resistance. He also disliked being subordinate to Garrison and other white abolitionists, and thus had his black friend, the New York–based physician James McCune Smith, write the preface to his second autobiography. My Bondage and My Freedom is considerably longer than the Narrative, as Douglass tells the story of his life both in slavery and freedom, moving well beyond the 1841 endpoint of the Narrative. Despite his likely genuine admiration for Garrison during the 1840s, he now depicts him as something like a slave master in the way he and his associates insist that black speakers should simply tell their stories while leaving the “philosophy” to the white leaders. In fact, Garrison allowed Douglass to denounce slavery, but in 1855 Douglass’s anger at Garrison, and his more radical politics, compel him to present aspects of his life very differently from the 1845 Narrative. To return to the Covey episode: In the Narrative Douglass acts by himself in resisting Covey; in My Bondage and My Freedom he is assisted by his fellow slaves, and as a group they are considerably more violent in their resistance. As he remarks: “We were all in open rebellion, that morning.” What is the true story about Douglass and Covey? Arguably, both stories speak to the truths that Douglass wanted to convey at the time he wrote these respective autobiographies.

Since its republication in 1960, the Narrative has been regarded as Douglass’s greatest autobiography. At approximately 100 pages, it is certainly the most accessible, though a number of critics now make claims for the more radical (and three times longer) My Bondage and My Freedom as Douglass’s most substantial autobiographical achievement. Douglass’s 600-page Life and Times, first published in 1881 and subsequently brought out in an expanded edition in 1892, has typically been regarded as bloated and overly self-regarding.But in many ways Life and Times is his most fascinating autobiography, as it traces Douglass’s life from his birth into slavery in 1818 to his dismissal as a US diplomat in Haiti in 1891, along the way offering dramatic accounts of his involvement with the radical abolitionist John Brown, his meetings with Abraham Lincoln at the White House, his seeming reconciliation with his former slave master in 1877, his disillusionment with the failure of Reconstruction, and his marriage in 1884 (following the death of his wife, Anna, in 1882) to the white woman Helen Pitts. Especially in this autobiography, as Douglass contemplates what he terms his “several lives in one,” we see a writer intent on revision. He presents his former slave master Thomas Auld, for example, as capable of reaching out to Douglass at the time of his death, and he presents Lincoln himself, whom he had criticized during the early 1860s, as a visionary whom Douglass influenced during their friendly exchanges. What Life and Times ultimately makes clear is that Douglass had many productive decades after he published the Narrative, and that an interest in Douglass as an autobiographer should not end in 1845. Taken together as a sort of collage, the three major autobiographies reveal a sometimes elusive but always brave and engaged African American freedom fighter whose life was regularly in flux.

Robert S. Levine is Distinguished University Professor of English at the University of Maryland, College Park. The general editor of The Norton Anthology of American Literature, his most recent books are The Lives of Frederick Douglass (2016) and Race, Transnationalism, and Nineteenth-Century American Literary Studies (2018).