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From Brent Hayes Edwards’s Introduction to My Bondage and My Freedom

With the publication of My Bondage and My Freedom by the New York house of Miller, Orton, and Mulligan in August 1855, Frederick Douglass became the first African American to compose a second autobiography. His previous effort, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, had appeared only ten years earlier, and it had by no means faded from view. On the contrary, particularly given the celebrity Douglass had gained as an anti-slavery lecturer and newspaper editor during the intervening years, the Narrative had already taken its place as one of the best known of the few dozen narratives by former slaves printed in the decades leading up to the Civil War. With the “sheer poetry” of its taut style and the “unrelenting power of its narrative line,” Douglass’s 1845 book is often considered to have set the high water mark of literary composition for an entire generation of African American authors attempting to pen their life stories under the pressures of the abolitionist cause (Stepto, From Behind the Veil, p. 21; O’Meally, “Introduction” to Narrative, pp. xiv–xv; see “For Further Reading”). The appearance of My Bondage and My Freedom would seem to beg the question, then: Why would Douglass have been compelled to write the story of his life again?

Interestingly enough, contemporary reviewers in the 1850s appear to have been little troubled by this question; they took My Bondage and My Freedom as the kind of autobiographical effort befitting a public figure of Douglass’s achieved stature: The second book, more than three times longer than the first, was read “more as a conventional account of the life of an unusual man than as an antislavery document” in the model of the Narrative (Blassingame, “Introduction to Volume Two,” in The Frederick Douglass Papers. Series 2, vol. 2, p. xxxi). Sales were robust, as they had been with the Narrative: reportedly My Bondage and My Freedom sold 5,000 copies in the first two days it was available (with a thousand copies purchased in its first week in the city of Syracuse alone). A second edition appeared in 1856 and a third in 1857; more than 20,000 copies had been sold by 1860, when the German translation of the book appeared. One might not expect such a success if the book were only a half-hearted rehashing of the Narrative. Nevertheless, as John Blassingame and others have pointed out, twentieth-century readers have often had the tendency to consider My Bondage and My Freedom as no more than a “propagandistic and didactic gloss on Douglass’s ‘real’ self-portrait, the Narrative” (p. xlii). Until recently, the few literary critics who took the time to discuss the book tended to dismiss it as “diffuse and attenuated,” a “flabby” sequel to the pristine and “righteous” Narrative (quoted in Andrews, To Tell a Free Story, pp. 266–267). At best, they have characterized the second book as though it were simply a second edition of the Narrative, an update taking into account Douglass’s activities between 1845 and 1855, as when Stephen Butterfield in his 1974 Black Autobiography in America opined blandly that My Bondage and My Freedom “includes most of the material from the early Narrative, with some rewriting, plus the experiences and development that occurred after 1845” (quoted in John David Smith’s “Introduction,” p. xxi).

In the past decade and a half, a handful of scholars such as William Andrews, Eric Sundquist, John Blassingame, John David Smith, and C. Peter Ripley have begun to draw our attention to the importance and independent accomplishment of My Bondage and My Freedom. In the words of Ripley, it is crucial to recognize that Douglass’s three autobiographies—the last, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, was published in 1881 and revised and expanded in 1893—appeared “at distinct periods of Douglass’s life for different reasons” (p. 5). Andrews, whose work has made the most forceful and sustained case for the significance of Douglass’s second book, has wondered in pointed terms just why the Narrative is so habitually seen not just as prior but as privileged, even authoritative: “If the second autobiography can be seen as the successor of the first, why can’t the Narrative be examined as the precursor of My Bondage and My Freedom?” (To Tell a Free Story, p. 267).

It is necessary to read the two books carefully, side by side, to begin to get a sense of exactly how different they are. Clearly, with its expanded length and its twenty-five chapters in the place of the Narrative’s eleven, the 1855 autobiography is “bigger, roomier, more detailed, and more expository” than its predecessor (Andrews, “Introduction to the 1987 Edition,” p. xvii). But more significantly, even given the parallels in narrative, argument, and phrasing, My Bondage and My Freedom is written from an entirely different vantage point—one might almost say that it is composed by an entirely different writer. If the second book contains a more mature style, it is directly related to what Douglass had been doing over the past decade: not just speaking against slavery, traveling the country, and raising subscriptions for abolitionist periodicals such as the Liberator, but also reading and writing—that is, giving himself a thorough training in literature and journalism, in a way that (for obvious reasons) he had never had the chance to do before composing the Narrative.