My Bondage and My Freedom

From Brent Hayes Edwards's Introduction toMy Bondage and My Freedom With the publication ofMy Bondage and My Freedomby 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, theNarrativehad 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" toNarrative, pp. xivxv; see "For Further Reading"). The appearance ofMy Bondage and My Freedomwould 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 tookMy Bondage and My Freedomas 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 theNarrative(Blassingame, "Introduction to Volume Two," inThe Frederick Douglass Papers.Series 2, vol. 2, p. xxxi). Sales were robust, as they had been with theNarrative: reportedlyMy Bondage and My Freedomsold 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 theNarrative. Nevertheless, as John Blassingame and others have pointed out, twentieth-century readers have often had the tendency to considerMy Bondage and My Freedomas no more than a "propagandistic and didactic gloss on Douglass's 'real' self-portrait, theNarrative" (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. 266267). At best, they have characterized the second book as though it were simply a second edition of theNarrative, an update taking into account Douglass's activities between 1845 and 1855, as when Stephen Butterfield in his 1974Black Autobiography in Americaopined blandly thatMy Bondage and My Freedom"includes most of the material from the earlyNarrative, 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, EricDouglass, Frederick is the author of 'My Bondage and My Freedom ', published 2005 under ISBN 9781593083014 and ISBN 1593083017.