A Slave Narrative That Touched Many Hearts and Moved Many Souls Against Slavery:Douglas'
Author: Arthur Edgar E. Smith
Category: News and Society
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Born a slave Frederick Douglass emerged as one of the foremost leaders of the abolitionist movement, which fought to end slavery within the United States in the decades prior to the Civil War..
Douglass' best-known work is his first autobiography, The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, which was published in 1845.
Told in 125 pages, the story of Douglas's life is from early childhood until he escaped from bondage and changed his last name from Bailey to Douglas in 1838.
The vivid detail, the dignity of tone, and the sincerity of the writing itself left no doubt in the minds of all those who read it that Douglas had indeed suffered the horrors he had been describing in powerful lectures for several years.
It powerfully brings out in details the struggle for identity of a black man who in the mid-nineteenth century came to realize his own exclusion from the American myth of liberty and justice for all. His autobiographical record epitomizes the experience of many pre-Civil War slaves, but in its narrative skill, it also suggests how the writer's effort to achieve selfhood and freedom partakes of a more nearly universal pattern, incident to men and women of whatever colour.
The book became the most important resource available on Douglas. For virtually everything that is known of his early life comes from the Narrative itself which ends half a century before his death.
The book received generally positive reviews and became an immediate bestseller. Within three years of its publication, it had been reprinted nine times with 11,000 copies circulating in the United States; and already translated into French and Dutch.
At the time, some skeptics were questioning whether a black man could have produced such an eloquent piece of literature. A man who claimed to have known Douglas as a slave even said that he was incapable of writing such a book.
The book's success made Douglass' friends and mentors to fear that the publicity would draw the attention of his ex-owner who might try to get his "property" back. To steer their minds away from him and forestall the possibility of being caught, they encouraged him to tour Ireland, as many other former slaves had done. Douglass therefore set sail on the Cambria for Liverpool on August 16, 1845, and arrived in Ireland as the Irish Potato Famine was beginning .He was in Great Britain for two years making highly successful lecture appearances.
Douglas gradually enlarged and elaborated his Narrative into three subsequent versions: My Bondage and My Freedom (1855) and two different editions of Life and Times of Frederick Douglas (1881,1882)
Douglass published three versions of his autobiography during his lifetime (and revised the third ), each time expanding on the previous one.
The 1845 Narrative, which was his biggest seller, was followed by My Bondage and My Freedom in 1855. In 1881, after the Civil War, Douglass brought out Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, which he revised in 1892.
The first two accounts of his experiences belong to the tradition of fugitive-slave narratives which were popular in the North before the Civil War.
The final volume, published when Douglas was in his mid-sixties, reveals one of the most remarkable and successful lives of the nineteenth century.
The first version balanced a more detailed account of his life as a slave with the impressive record of his intellectual growth and personal achievement since he had joined forces with the abolitionists in 1841. It told of his intimacy with the Garrisonian wing of the abolitionist movement, of his successful speaking tour of the British Isles, the purchase of his freedom for $700 by a group of his admirers, two Englishwomen, and his moving over to Rochester, New York, where he brought out the first issue of the increasingly outspoken weekly newspaper he published for the thirteen years in December 1847 first as The North Star later as Frederick Douglas's Weekly and Monthly.
The third of Douglas' autobiographies subsumed the first two adding to them the events of his career just before, during and after the Civil War and traces the rising area of his fame and influence and ultimately honored recognition of his countrymen, black and white alike.
Douglass's autobiography is cast like an account of self-discovery, starting off by reporting what he does not know of himself. He must guess his age, he doesn't know much of himself. He doesn't know his birthday. Only through rumor could he tell his identity. Although he knows his mother, he spends virtually no time with her. She comes to him in the dark and leaves before dawn, so he had little idea of her face as he would be sound asleep on her arrival.
So all Douglas is left with as an identity is a generic identity: slave. His appearance too is spare and non-descript. Like other slave children, he wears nothing but a shirt - not the trousers that would symbolize his manhood, no shoes whatsoever to protect his feet from the bare earth, nothing whatsoever to differentiate him from others of his kind. Like the other slave children, he eats corn meal mush from a tray placed on the floor thus being treated like a pig or a dog being reduced to the level of animals. Everything in Douglass's experience denies him his individuality and declares his lack of particularized identity..
Douglass spent two years in Great Britain and Ireland giving several lectures, mainly in Protestant churches or chapels, some "crowded to suffocation," At his hugely popular London Reception Speech, which Douglass delivered at Alexander Fletcher's Finsbury Chapel in London in May 1846. Douglass remarked that there he was treated not "as a color, but as a man." He also met and befriended the Irish nationalist Daniel O'Connell.
Douglass later became the publisher of a series of newspapers: The North Star, Frederick Douglass Weekly, Frederick Douglass' Paper, Douglass' Monthly and New National Era.."
In 1851, Douglass merged the North Star with Gerrit Smith's Liberty Party Paper to form Frederick Douglass' Paper, which was published until 1860. Douglass came to agree with Smith and Lysander Spooner that the United States Constitution is an anti-slavery document, reversing his earlier belief that it was pro-slavery, a view he had shared with William Lloyd Garrison. Garrison had publicly demonstrated his opinion of the Constitution by burning copies of it. Douglass' change of position on the Constitution was one of the most notable incidents of a division that emerged in the abolitionist movement after the publication of Spooner's book The Unconstitutionality of Slavery in 1846.
This shift in opinion, as well as some other political differences, created a rift between Douglass and Garrison. Douglass further angered Garrison by saying that the Constitution could and should be used as an instrument in the fight against slavery. With this, Douglass began to assert his independence from the Garrisonians. Garrison saw the North Star as being in competition with the National Anti-Slavery Standard and Marius Robinson's Anti-Slavery Bugle.
By the time of the Civil War, Douglass was one of the most famous black men in the country, known for his oratories on the condition of the black race, and other issues such as women's rights.
Douglass and the abolitionists argued that the aim of the war was to end slavery and that African Americans should be allowed to engage in the fight for their freedom. Douglass wrote about this in his newspapers and gave several speeches declaring his thoughts and how the war was indeed for the liberation of the slaves.
On the night of December 31, 1862, when President Lincoln announced the Emancipation Proclamation, Douglass describes the spirit of those waiting for the announcement: "We were waiting and listening as for a bolt from the sky...we were watching...by the dim light of the stars for the dawn of a new day...we were longing for the answer to the agonizing prayers of centuries."
Once the slaves were freed, Douglass also wanted equality for his people as well. He and Lincoln worked together providing plans to move the liberated slaves out of the South. Lincoln had doubts about the war ever ending, but soon enough the Confederate forces gave in to the Union and the war to end slavery was won.
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Keywords: frederick douglas, writer, slave narrative, slave, freedomhero
View Count: 507
Date Submitted: 7/18/2008
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