My Bondage and My Freedom (Penguin Classics)

by Frederick Douglass

  11 . Rachelle McGregor-Scissum, “ ‘The Positive Nature of Pain’ in Critical Reflection: Frederick Douglass’s Understanding as Expansion of the Form of his Life in My Bondage and My Freedom and Life and Times of Frederick Douglass” (Ph.D. diss., University of Alabama, 1996), xxv.

  12 . David Leverenz, “Frederick Douglass’s Self-Refashioning,” Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts 29 (summer 1987): 341-70; Ben Slote, “Revising Freely: Frederick Douglass and the Politics of Disembodiment,” a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 11 (spring 1996): 20; McGregor-Scissum, “ ‘The Positive Nature of Pain,’ ” 139; Peter A. Dorsey, “Becoming the Other: The Mimesis of Metaphor in Douglass’s My Bondage and My Freedom,” PMLA 3 (May 1996): 439; Joseph Bodziock, “The Big Story of Frederick Douglass,” Proteus 12 (1) (1995): 8-9; Paul Baggett, “Transcending the Boundaries of Nation: Images and Imaginings of Frederick Douglass,” In Process 2 (spring 2000): 108; Jon Olson, “Frederick Douglass and a Process of Cultural Literacy Empowerment” (Ph.D. diss., University of Southern California, 1988), 103; Douglas Anderson, “The Textual Reproductions of Frederick Douglass,” Clio 27 (fall 1997): 65-66, 69-70.

  13 . William L. Andrews, “The 1850s: The First Afro-American Literary Renaissance,” in Literary Romanticism in America, ed. William L. Andrews (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981), 38-60; Lisa Brawley, “Frederick Douglass’s My Bondage and My Freedom and the Fugitive Tourist Industry,” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 30 (fall 1996): 98-128; Sarah Meer, “Sentimentality and the Slave Narrative: Frederick Douglass’ My Bondage and My Freedom,” in Julia Swindells, ed., The Uses of Autobiography (London: Taylor and Francis, 1995), 89-97.

  14 William L. Andrews, “My Bondage and My Freedom and the American Literary Renaissance of the 1850s,” in William L. Andrews, ed., Critical Essays on Frederick Douglass (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1991), 133-209.

  15 . J. Saunders Redding, “Let Freedom Ring,” in ibid., 59; Eric J. Sundquist, “Frederick Douglass: Literacy and Paternalism,” in ibid., 121.

  16 . Olson, “Frederick Douglass and a Process of Cultural Literacy Empowerment,” 101, 143, 164, 174.

  17 . Dickson J. Preston, Young Frederick Douglass: The Maryland Years (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), 210.

  18 . William S. McFeely, Frederick Douglass (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991), 180-82.

  19 . John Sekora, “Comprehending Slavery: Language and Personal History in the Narrative,” in Harold Bloom, ed., Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1988), 162.

  20 . Marion Wilson Starling, The Slave Narrative: Its Place in American History (1981; Washington: Howard University Press, 1988), 279.

  21 . Ripley, “The Autobiographical Writings of Frederick Douglass,” 5.

  22 . William L. Andrews, “My Bondage and My Freedom,” in Andrews, Foster, and Harris, eds., The Oxford Companion to African American Literature, 521; William L. Andrews, “Slave Narrative,” in Joseph M. Flora and Lucinda H. MacKethan, eds., The Companion to Southern Literature: Themes, Genres, Places, People, Movements, and Motifs (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2002), 806; William L. Andrews, To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography, 1760-1865 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986), 214.

  23 . Albert E. Stone, “Identity and Art in Frederick Douglass’s Narrative,” in Bloom, ed., Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, 26.

  24 . Preston, Young Frederick Douglass, 172-73, 209

  25 . Eric J. Sundquist, To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1993), 122.

  26 . Robert S. Levine, Martin Delany, Frederick Douglass, and the Politics of Representative Identity (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), chapter 3.

  27 . Lewis R. Gordon, “Douglass as an Existentialist,” in Bill E. Lawson and Frank M. Kirkland, eds., Frederick Douglass: A Critical Reader (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers, 1999), 218; Frederick Law Olmsted, A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States, With Remarks on Their Economy (New York: Dix & Edwards, 1856), 133.

  28 . Quarles, Frederick Douglass, 1, dated his birth as “some month in the year 1817.” For a thorough analysis, and proof that 1818 was the correct year, see Preston, Young Frederick Douglass, chapter 3.

  29 . See Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself, ed. Blight, 40.

  30 . John Stauffer, “Advent among the Indians: The Revolutionary Ethos of Gerrit Smith, James McCune Smith, Frederick Douglass, and John Brown,” in Antislavery Violence: Sectional, Racial, and Cultural Conflict in Antebellum America, eds. John R. McKivigan and Stanley Harrold (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1999), 240.

  31 . Walker, Moral Choices, 211.

  32 . Cynthia S. Hamilton, “Frederick Douglass and the Gender Politics of Reform,” in Alan J. Rice and Martin Crawford, eds., Liberating Sojourn: Frederick Douglass and Transatlantic Reform (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1999), 86.

  33 . William L. Andrews, “The Representation of Slavery and the Rise of Afro-American Literary Realism, 1865-1920,” in Slavery and the Literary Imagination, eds. Deborah E. McDowell and Arnold Rampersad (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 64.

  34 . Gregory Stephens, On Racial Frontiers: The New Culture of Frederick Douglass, Ralph Ellison, and Bob Marley (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 62.

  35 . Preston, Young Frederick Douglass, 100; Caleb Bingham, The Columbian Orator, ed. David W. Blight (1797; New York: New York University Press, 1998), xxiii.

  36 . T. Stephen Whitman, The Price of Freedom: Slavery and Manumission in Baltimore and Early National Maryland (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1997), 84.

  37 . Andrews, “Douglass, Frederick,” 225.

  38 . Frederick Douglass, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, Written by Himself, reprint of 1892 revised edition (1881; New York: Collier Books, 1962), 198-201.

  39 . McFeely, Frederick Douglass, 78.

  40 . On the Douglass-Garrison feud and the impact of Garrison’s ideas on African Americans, see Henry Mayer, All on Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition of Slavery (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998), 371-74, and Patrick Rael, Black Identity and Black Protest in the Antebellum North (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 205, 208.

  41 . John W. Blassingame, “Introduction,” in Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself, eds. John W. Blassingame, John R. McKivigan, and Peter P. Hinks (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), xxii.

  42 . Valerie Smith, Self-Discovery and Authority in Afro-American Narrative (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987), 21.

  43 . Benjamin Quarles, “Introduction,” in Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass An American Slave Written By Himself, ed. Benjamin Quarles (1845; Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1960), xiii.

  44 . Anonymous review of Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, in Spectator, November 29, 1845, in Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself, eds. William L. Andrews and William S. McFeely (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), 87-88.

  45 . Fuller, review of Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, in New York Daily Tribune, June 10, 1845, reprinted in Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself, eds. Blassingame and McKivigan, 127.

  46 . Houston A. Baker, Jr., “Introduction,” in Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself, ed. Houston A. Baker, Jr. (New York: Penguin Books, 1986), 22-23.

  47 . Ripley, “The Autobiographical Writings of Frederick Douglass,” 14.

  48 . Douglass to R. D. Webb, November 10, 1845, in Clare Taylor, ed., British and American Abolitionists: An Episode in
Transatlantic Understanding (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1974), 241.

  49 . Douglass to Garrison, January 1, 1846, in The Liberator, January 30, 1846, in Philip S. Foner, ed., The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass, 5 vols. (New York: International Publishers, 1950-1975), 1:127.

  50 . John W. Blassingame, ed., The Frederick Douglass Papers. Series One. Speeches, Debates, and Interviews, 5 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979-1992), 2:31.

  51 . Mayer, All on Fire, 350.

  52 . C. Duncan Rice, The Scots Abolitionists, 1833-1861 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981), 132-39; R. J. M. Blackett, Building an Antislavery Wall: Black Americans in the Atlantic Abolitionist Movement, 1830-1860 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983), chapter 3; Rice and Crawford, eds., Liberating Sojourn, 4-5.

  53 . Ripley, “The Autobiographical Writings of Frederick Douglass,” 14.

  54 . Blight, “Introduction: ‘A Psalm of Freedom,’ ” 7.

  55 . Gary Selby, “The Limits of Accommodation: Frederick Douglass and the Garrisonian Abolitionists,” Southern Communication Journal 66 (fall 2000): 55.

  56 . Robert Fanuzzi, “The Trouble with Douglass’s Body,” ATQ 13 (March 1999): 27.

  57 . Paul Baggett, “Transcending the Boundaries of Nation: Images and Imaginings of Frederick Douglass,” In Process 2 (spring 2000): 107.

  58 . Martin, The Mind of Frederick Douglass, 23.

  59 . Douglass in the North Star, December 3, 1847, reprinted in Louis Ruchames, ed., The Abolitionists: A Collection of Their Writings (1963; New York: Capricorn Books, 1964), 197.

  60 . Selby, “The Limits of Accommodation,” 53, 59.

  61 . Sterling Lecater Bland, Jr., Voices of the Fugitives: Runaway Slave Stories and Their Fictions of Self-Creation (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2000), 119.

  62 . See McFeely, Frederick Douglass, 156-58.

  63 . See August Meier, “Frederick Douglass’s Vision for America: A Case Study in Nineteenth-Century Negro Protest,” in Harold M. Hyman and Leonard W. Levy, eds., Freedom and Reform: Essays in Honor of Henry Steele Commager (New York: Harper & Row, 1967), 127-48.

  64 . Garrison to Samuel J. May, September 28, 1860, in Walter M. Merrill and Louis Ruchames, eds., The Letters of William Lloyd Garrison, 6 vols. (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1971-1981), 4:694. On Douglass’s emerging thought, see Martin, The Mind of Frederick Douglass, chapter 2.

  65 . Andrews, “My Bondage and My Freedom,” 521.

  66 . Assing, “Preface to the German Translation of My Bondage and My Freedom,” in Christoph Lohmann, ed., Radical Passion: Ottilie Assing’s Reports from America and Letters to Frederick Douglass (New York: Peter Lang, 1999), 68-70; Assing to Douglass, January 6, 1879, in ibid., 351.

  67 . Ripley, “The Autobiographical Writings of Frederick Douglass,” 18-19.

  68 . Harriet Beecher Stowe, “Anti-Slavery Literature,” New York Independent, February 25, 1856, quoted in Levine, Martin Delany, Frederick Douglass, 144.

  69 . “Editorial Notes—Literature,” Putnam’s Monthly Magazine 6 (November 1855): 547.

  70 . Ripley, “The Autobiographical Writings of Frederick Douglass,” 17; Frederick Douglass, Autobiographies, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (New York: Library of America, 1994), 1061.

  71 . Assing, “Preface to the German Translation of My Bondage and My Freedom,” 68.

  72 . Quarles, “Introduction,” xiv.

  73 . Marva J. Furman, “The Slave Narrative: Prototype of the Early Afro-American Novel,” in John Sekora and Darwin T. Turner, eds., The Art of Slave Narrative: Original Essays in Criticism and Theory (Macomb, Ill.: Western Illinois University, 1982), 123.

  74 . Blassingame, ed., The Frederick Douglass Papers. Series One. Speeches, Debates, and Interviews, 3:214.

  75 . Douglass to Smith, May 23, 1856, in Foner, ed., The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass, 2:396.

  76 . Frederick Douglass, The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, From 1817 to 1882, Written by Himself (1881; London: Christian Age Office, 1882), 29-30.

  77 . Hamilton, “Frederick Douglass and the Gender Politics of Reform,” 73. Also see Philip S. Foner, ed., Frederick Douglass on Women’s Rights (1976; New York: Da Capo, 1992).

  78 . See Maria Diedrich, Love across Color Lines: Ottilie Assing and Frederick Douglass (New York: Hill and Wang, 1999).

  79 . “God Almighty Made but One Race: An Interview Given in Washington, D.C., on 25 January 1884,” in Blassingame, ed., The Frederick Douglass Papers. Series One. Speeches, Debates, and Interviews, 5:145-47.

  80 . Nell Irvin Painter, Exodusters: Black Migration to Kansas after Reconstruction (1976; New York: W. W. Norton, 1979), 247-50.

  81 . Henry Louis Gates, Jr., “A Dangerous Literacy: The Legacy of Frederick Douglass,” New York Times Book Review (May 28, 1995), 16.

  82 . Stephens, On Racial Frontiers, 63.

  83 . Baggett, “Transcending the Boundaries of Nation,” 106.

  84 . Frederick Douglass, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass: His Early Life as a Slave, His Escape from Bondage, and His Complete History, An Autobiography (New York: Gramercy Books, 1993), 309, 310; James H. Cook, “Fighting with Breath, Not Blows: Frederick Douglass and Antislavery Violence,” in Antislavery Violence, eds. McKivigan and Harrold, 145-47.

  85 . David W. Blight, Frederick Douglass’ Civil War: Keeping Faith in Jubilee (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989), 170, and David W. Blight, “The Meaning or the Fight: Frederick Douglass and the Memory of the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts,” Massachusetts Review 36 (spring 1995): 146-49.

  86 . Diedrich, Love across Color Lines, 245.

  87 . See Barbara Jean Ballard, “Nineteenth-Century Theories of Race, the Concept of Correspondences, and Images of Blacks in the Antislavery Writings of Douglass, Stowe, and Brown” (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1992), 72.

  88 . Frederick Douglass, “The Dred Scott Decision: An Address Delivered, in Part, in New York, New York, in May 1857,” in Blassingame, ed., The Frederick Douglass Papers. Series One. Speeches, Debates, and Interviews, 3:171.

  89 . Frederick Douglass, “Men of Color, To Arms!” Douglass’ Monthly 5 (March 1863): 1.

  Suggestions for Further Reading

  Andrews, William L. To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography, 1760-1865. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986.

  ———, ed. African American Autobiography: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1993.

  ———, ed. Critical Essays on Frederick Douglass. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1991.

  ———, ed. The Oxford Frederick Douglass Reader. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.

  Blassingame, John W., ed. The Frederick Douglass Papers. Series One. Speeches, Debates, and Interviews. 5 vols. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979-1992.

  ———, ed. The Frederick Douglass Papers. Series Two. Autobiographical Writings. Volume 1: Narrative. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999.

  Blight, David W. Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln: A Relationship in Language, Politics, and Memory. Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 2001.

  ———. Frederick Douglass’ Civil War: Keeping Faith in Jubilee. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989.

  Bloom, Harold, ed. Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: Modern Critical Interpretations. New York: Chelsea House, 1988.

  Bruce, Dickson D. The Origins of African American Literature, 1680-1865. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001.

  Chesnutt, Charles W. Frederick Douglass. Boston: Small, Maynard & Company, 1899.

  Davis, Charles T., and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., eds. The Slaves’ Narrative. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.

  Diedrich, Maria. Love across Color Lines: Ottilie Assing and Frederick Douglass. New York: Hill and Wang, 1999.

  Douglass, Frederick. Autobiographies. Edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. New York: Library of Ame
rica, 1994.

  ———. Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, Written by Himself. Revised edition originally published 1892. New York: Collier Books, 1962.

  ———. My Bondage and My Freedom. Edited by William L. Andrews. Originally published 1855. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987.

  ———. My Bondage and My Freedom. Edited by Philip S. Foner. Originally published 1855. New York: Dover Publications, 1969.

  ———. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself. Edited by William L. Andrews and William S. McFeely. Originally published 1845. New York: W. W. Norton, 1997.

  ———. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself. Edited by Houston A. Baker, Jr. Originally published 1845. New York: Penguin Books, 1982. ———. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself. Edited by John W. Blassingame, John R. McKivigan, and Peter P. Hinks. Originally published 1845. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001.