Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass Where Does the Reading Occur

The publication in 1845 of the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass was a passport to prominence for a twenty-seven-twelvemonth-onetime Negro. Up to that year most of his life had been spent in obscurity. Born on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, Douglass escaped from slavery in 1838, going to New Bedford, Massachusetts. Here for four years he turned his hand to odd jobs, his early on hardships as a free human being being lessened past the thriftiness of his wife. In August 1841, while attention an abolitionist meeting at Nantucket, he was prevailed upon to talk about his recollections of slavery. His sentences were halting but he spoke with feeling, whereupon the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society lost no fourth dimension in engaging him equally a total-time lecturer. For the following iv years the young ex-slave was one of the prize speakers of the Society, often traveling the reform excursion in company with the loftier priests of New England abolitionism, William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips.

HUP's get-go edition of the Narrative, published in cloth in 1960

The publication of the Narrative brought to Douglass widespread publicity in America and in the British Isles. This was all he needed; henceforth his ain considerable abilities and the temper of the times would fully suffice to keep him in the limelight. His was among the almost eventful of American personal histories.

Favorably endowed in physique, Douglass had the initial advantage of looking like a person destined for prominence. There was a dramatic quality in his very advent—his imposing figure, his deep-set, flashing eyes and well-formed olfactory organ, and the mass of pilus crowning his head. An exceptional platform speaker, he had a voice created for public address in premicrophone America. In speaking he was capable of various degrees of light and shade, his powerful tones hinting at a readiness to overcome faulty acoustics. His rich baritone gave an emotional vitality to every judgement. "In listening to him," wrote a gimmicky, "your whole soul is fired, every nerve strung—every faculty you possess gear up to perform at a moment's bidding." Douglass' famed oratorical powers account in function for the large crowds that gathered to hear him over the span of half a century.

If nature equipped Douglass for a celebrated role, nineteenth-century America furnished an appropriate setting. Douglass came to manhood in a reform-witting age, from which he was non slow to have his cue. Following the publication of his Narrative he went to the British Isles. There for two years he denounced American slavery before large and sympathetic audiences. The visits of Douglass and other ex-slaves contributed much to the anti-Amalgamated sentiment of the British masses during the Civil State of war.

Returning to America in 1847 Douglass moved to Rochester, where he launched an abolitionist weekly which he published for xvi years, a longevity well-nigh unusual in abolitionist journalism. Douglass' printing establishment cost nearly $ane,000 and was the first in America owned past a Negro. Douglass was a careful editor, insisting on high standards from office assistants and the contributors of weekly newsletters.

In addition to speaking and writing, Douglass took part in another of the organized forms of activity against slavery—the clandestine railroad. Himself a runaway, he was strongly in sympathy with those who made the dash for freedom. One time, in a heated controversy over the wisdom of giving the Bible to slaves, he asserted that it would exist "infinitely ameliorate to send them a pocket compass and a pistol." The fees from many of his lectures went to aid fugitives; at abolitionist meetings he passed the hat for funds to assist runaways to "get Canada nether their feet." He was superintendent of the Rochester terminus of the undercover railroad; his house was its headquarters. I of his paper employees related that it was no unusual thing for him, equally he came to work early in the morning, to find fugitives sitting on the steps of the printing shop, waiting for Douglass.

To help further in the destruction of slavery, Douglass in 1850 became a political abolitionist. Hitherto he had been a moral-suasionist, shunning political action. But subsequently three years in Rochester among the voting abolitionists, Douglass announced himself ready to utilize "the terse rhetoric of the ballot box," and his weekly became the official organ of the Liberty party. The fitful career of this political party was then about run, most of its followers having gone over to the Free Soil group. When in 1856 the small remnant of Liberty party diehards decided to merge into the Radical Abolitionist party, Douglass was i of the signers of the telephone call. In 1860 he was again one of the policy-makers of the Radical Abolitionists. The insignificant vote polled past that party in the national election is unrecorded, but past 1860 the abolitionists were nearer to their goal than they could discern.

Douglass was a confidant of the man who became the North's Civil War martyr, John Brown. In Nov 1848, eleven years earlier Harpers Ferry, Douglass visited Brown at Springfield at his invitation. The two reformers were friends from that time on. X years later, in February 1858, Chocolate-brown was a business firm guest for three weeks at Douglass' home; here it was that Brown drafted his blueprint for America, a "Provisional Constitution and Ordinances for the People of the The states." When Chocolate-brown was arrested on October sixteen, 1859, for attempting to seize the government arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Douglass sped to Canada lest he be taken into custody as an accomplice.

The coming of the war had a bracing effect on Douglass; to him the conflict was a crusade for liberty. Considering in his thinking the purpose of the state of war was the emancipation of the slaves, he was anxious that the Negro himself strike a blow. When President Lincoln called for volunteers immediately after the firing on Fort Sumter, Douglass urged colored men to form militia companies. He brash the President "How to Stop the War": "Let the slaves and the free colored people exist called into service and formed into a liberating army, to march into the South and raise the banner of Emancipation among the slaves."

When information technology became clear that Lincoln could not be rushed, Douglass' criticisms became astringent. His tone grew less impatient, yet, when "the deadening bus at Washington" finally began to move. Lincoln's signing of the Emancipation Annunciation somewhat mollified Douglass, and he was about won over after exposure to Lincoln's charm at 2 White Firm visits.

Too erstwhile to behave arms himself, he served as a recruiting agent, traveling through the North exhorting Negroes to sign upward. His offset enrollee was his son Charles; another son soon followed suit. Douglass' success as a recruiting amanuensis led him to expect a military commission equally an banana adjutant general under Full general Lorenzo Thomas. Douglass had talked with Secretary of State of war Stanton and had gone away believing the commission had been promised. But it never came.

After the war Douglass became a staunch supporter of the Republican party. His quadrennial commitment of the Negro vote did not get unrewarded; three G.O.P. presidents had political plums for him: Align of the District of Columbia, Recorder of Deeds for the District, and Government minister to Republic of haiti.

During these last twenty years of Douglass' life he was the effigy to whom the mass of Negroes chiefly looked for leadership. Booker T. Washington and West. E. B. Du Bois were fix in the wings, simply neither was prepared to step to the center of the stage until 1895, the twelvemonth Douglass died. In the seventies and eighties the colored people looked to Douglass for counsel on the correct line to take on such matters equally the annexation of Santo Domingo and the Negro exodus from the Southward. He had no choice but to assume such responsibilities every bit commending Clara Barton for opening an establishment in Washington to give employment to Negro women, explaining the causes for the mounting number of lynchings, and urging Negroes not to have as well literally the Biblical injunction to refrain from laying up treasures on globe.

The championing of the cause of the downtrodden points toward Douglass' major contribution to American democracy—that of holding a mirror up to it. He gave us no new political ideas; his were borrowed from Rousseau and Jefferson. But America had no more vigilant critic, and none more loving. "The Star Spangled Banner" was 1 of the arrogance he often played on his violin; he envisioned the freedom-possessed America of patriotic song and story. Until information technology emerged, at that place would e'er be work to practise: "In a discussion, until truth and humanity shall cease to exist living ideas, this struggle volition continue."

A 1969 paperback printing of HUP's edition of the Narrative

Douglass was a prolific writer; speeches, personal letters, formal lectures, editorials, and magazine articles literally poured from his pen. Most of this output has been brought together in a massive 4-book work past Philip Foner, The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass (New York, 1950–55). Not included in Foner'south collection, because of their length, are Douglass' most sustained literary efforts, his three autobiographies. The Narrative in 1845 was the outset of these; nosotros may note its distribution, reserving for a moment comment on its general nature and its influence.

The Narrative's initial edition of five,000 copies was sold in four months. Inside a twelvemonth 4 more editions of 2,000 copies each were brought out. An additional republication occurred in 1848 and some other in 1849. In the British Isles five editions appeared, two in Ireland in 1846 and three in England in 1846 and 1847. Four of these Irish gaelic–English printings were editions of two,000 and one was of v,000 copies. By 1850 a full of some thirty,000 copies of the Narrative had been published in America and the British Isles. To these may exist added an 1848 French edition, paperbound, translated by S. 1000. Parkes. The present text reproduces exactly that of the showtime edition, published in Boston in 1845.

The sales of the Narrative were boosted by skillful printing notices. The book could count on laudatory statements from the reformist sheets, but information technology also got a column-and-a-half front-folio review in the New York Tribune, lavish in its praise: "Considered merely as narrative, nosotros have never read ane more uncomplicated, true, coherent and warm with genuine feeling" (June ten, 1845). Beyond the Atlantic the response was likewise encouraging. The influential Chambers' Edinburgh Periodical praised the Narrative: it "bears all the appearance of truth, and must, we conceive, assist considerably to disseminate right ideas respecting slavery and its attendant evils" (January 24, 1846). An American periodical, Littell's Living Age, pointing out that the autobiography had received many notices in the public press abroad, gave an approximate of its reach: "Taking all together, not less than one million of persons in Great Great britain and Ireland have been excited by the volume and its commentators" (April, May, June 1846).

In 1855 Douglass published his second autobiography, My Bondage and My Liberty. In this work of 462 pages, well over three times the length of the Narrative, Douglass expands on his life as a freeman, and includes a fifty-eight page appendix comprising extracts from his speeches. My Bondage was reprinted in 1856 and again in 1857, its total publication running to 18,000 copies. In 1860 it was translated into German by Ottilie Assing, who subsequently became a treasured friend of the Negro reformer.

The terminal autobiagraphy, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, was published in 1881. In it Douglass had to reduce the space given to his slavery experiences in order to narrate his Civil War and postwar activities. As in My Chains, however, he included excerpts from his speeches. Life and Times did not sell well. On July 19, 1889, its publishers regretfully informed Douglass that although they had "pushed and repushed" the book, it had become axiomatic that "interest in the days of slavery was not as neat as we expected." Another Boston publisher brought out the autobiography in 1892, hoping that Douglass' appointment every bit Haitian minister had made the reading public eager to take a fresh wait at his career. A revised edition was issued in 1893, but its sale was "a disappointment to us," wrote DeWolfe, Fiske and Visitor on March 9, 1896, to Douglass' widow.

Life and Times was published in England in 1882 with an introductian by the well-known John Bright. A year afterwards a French edition was brought out by the house of E. Plon and Company, and in 1895 at Stockholm a Swedish edition was issued. To these may be added a twentieth-century printing; in 1941 the Pathway Press republished Life and Times "in preparatian for the one hundredth anniversary af Douglass' first appearance in the cause af emancipatian."

"Most of the narratives were overdrawn in incident and bitterly indignant in tone, but these very excesses made for greater sales."

Neither Life and Times nor My Bondage equaled the Narrative in sales or in influence. The last named had many advantages over its successors. As its title suggests, it was more than storytelling in tone. It was cohesive whereas the others were not. Moreover, the Narrative was confined to slavery experiences, and lent itself very well to abolitionist propaganda. A closer expect at this slim volume may advise the sources of its influence.

To begin with, it belongs to the "heroic avoiding" school of American literature. Slave narratives enjoyed a neat popularity in the ante-bellum Due north. "Romantic and thrilling, they interested by the sheer horror of their revelations, and they satisfied in the reading public a peckish for the sensational," writes John Herbert Nelson. Most of the narratives were overdrawn in incident and bitterly indignant in tone, but these very excesses made for greater sales.

Among the hundred or more of these slave-told stories, Douglass' has special points of merit. The championship page of the Narrative carries the words, "Written By Himself." So it was. "Mr. Douglass has very properly called to write his own Narrative," said Garrison in the Preface, "rather than to utilise some i else." The Douglass volume is therefore unusual among slave autobiographies, virtually of which were ghostwritten by abolitionist hacks. The Narrative has a freshness and a forcefulness that come up only when a document written in the starting time person has in fact been written by that person.

A paperback HUP edition of the Narrative from 2001

Except for the length of a few sentences and paragraphs, the Douglass autobiography would come out well in any modern readability analysis. It is written in simple and straight prose, gratis of literary allusions, and is almost without quoted passages, except for a stanza from "the slave's poet, Whittier," 2 lines from Hamlet, and one from Cowper. The details are ever concrete, an chemical element of way established in the opening line.

The Narrative is absorbing in its sensitive descriptions of persons and places; even an unsympathetic reader must exist stirred by its vividness if he is unmoved by its passion. It is non easy to make real people come to life, and the Narrative is too brief and episodic to develop whatever character in the round. Just information technology presents a serial of sharply etched portraits, and in slave-breaker Edward Covey we take ane of the more believable prototypes of Simon Legree.

Contributing to the literary effectiveness of the Narrative is its desolation. Douglass scorned pity, only his pages are evocative of sympathy, as he meant them to exist. Securely affecting is the paragraph on his nearest of kin, creating its mood with the opening sentence: "I never saw my mother, to know her equally such, more than than four or 5 times in my life; and each of these times was very curt in duration, and at dark."

Peradventure the most hitting quality of the Narrative is Douglass' ability to mingle incident with argument. He writes as a partisan, but his indignation is always under control. One of the most moving passages in the book is that in which he tells virtually the slaves who were selected to go to the home plantation to get the monthly nutrient allowance for the slaves on their farm. Douglass describes the style in which these black journeyers sang on the style, and tells u.s. what those "rude and incoherent" songs actually meant. He concludes, "If anyone wishes to exist impressed with the soul-killing effects of slavery, allow him become to Colonel Lloyd's plantatlon, and, on allowance-day, place himself in the deep pine wood, and in that location allow him, in silence, analyze the sounds that shall laissez passer through the chambers of his soul,—and if he is not thus impressed, it will only be considering 'there is no flesh in his obdurate middle.'"

Aside from its literary merit, Douglass' autobiography was in many respects symbolic of the Negro's office in American life. Its central theme is struggle. The Narrative is a articulate and passionate utterance both of the Negro's protest and of his aspiration. The volume was written, as Douglass states in the closing sentence, in the hope that information technology would do something toward "hastening the glad day of deliverance to the millions of my brethren in bonds."

The Narrative marked its author as the personification not just of struggle but of operation. "I can't write to much reward, having never had a day's schooling in my life," stated Douglass in 1842 (The Liberator, November 18, 1842). Yet three years subsequently this unschooled person had penned his autobiography. Such an achievement furnished an object lesson; information technology hinted at the infinite potentialities of man in whatever station of life, suggesting powers to be elicited.

The Narrative stamped Douglass as the foremost Negro in American reform. With the publication of this autobiographical work he became the first colored man who could control an audition that extended beyond local boundaries or racial ties. From the mean solar day his volume saw print Douglass became a folk hero, a figure in whom Negroes had pride. His writings took on a scriptural significance equally his accomplishments came to be shared imaginatively past his fellows.

"Douglass did not dislike whites—his close clan with reformers in the abolitionist and woman's rights movements, his many friends across the color line, and the choice he made for his 2d wife bespeak that he was without a trace of anti-Caucasianism. The signal is worth stressing."

But if Douglass emerged as the leading Negro amongst Negroes, this is not to say that the human being was himself a racist, or that he glorified all things black. Never given to blinking unpleasant facts, Douglass did not hesitate to mention the frailties of the Negroes, as in the case of the quarrels between the slaves of Colonel Lloyd and those of Jacob Jepson over the importance of their respective masters. Douglass did not dislike whites—his close association with reformers in the abolitionist and woman's rights movements, his many friends beyond the color line, and the choice he made for his 2nd wife point that he was without a trace of anti-Caucasianism. The point is worth stressing. For Douglass addressed his appeal less to Negroes than to whites—information technology was the latter he sought to influence. He did not propose to speak to Negroes exclusively; he wanted all America, if not all the earth, for his sounding board.

A production of its historic period, the Narrative is an American book in theme, in tone, and in spirit. Pre-Civil-War America was characterized by reformist movements—adult female's rights, peace, temperance, prison house improvements, among others. In the front rank of these programs for homo betterment stood the abolitionist crusade. During the middle decades of the nineteenth century, antislavery sentiment was widespread in the Western world, just in the The states more than distinctively than anywhere else the abolitionists took the role of championing civil liberties. Thus they identified themselves with the not bad American tradition of liberty which they proposed to interpret into a universal American birthright. Moreover, the abolitionist movement shaped this country's history as did no other reform. Information technology was destined to overshadow all other contemporary crusades, halting their progress almost completely for four years while the American people engaged in a ceremonious war caused in big part past sectional animosities involving slavery.

The Narrative swept Douglass into the mainstream of the antislavery movement. Information technology was a noteworthy addition to the campaign literature of abolitionism; a forceful book by an ex-slave was a weapon of no small caliber. Naturally the Narrative was a bitter indictment of slavery. The abolitionists did non call up much of the technique of friendly persuasion; it was non light that was needed, said Douglass on ane occasion, but fire. The Garrison–Phillips wing did not subscribe to a policy of soft words, and Douglass' volume indicated that he had not been a slow learner.

HUP'due south 2009 edition of the Narrative , with a comprehend analogy past Robert Carter, and a new Introduction by Robert Stepto replacing that of Quarles

Naturally the Narrative does not bother to accept up the difficulties inherent in abolishing slavery. These Douglass would have dismissed with a wave of the manus. Similarly the Narrative recognizes no claim other than that of the slave. To Douglass the bug of social adjustment if the slaves were freed were nothing, the property rights of the masters were nothing, states' rights were aught. He only refused to discuss these matters. Every bit he viewed information technology, his role was to shake people out of their lethargy and goad them into activity, not to discover reasons for sitting on the fence.

A final reason for the influence of the Narrative is its credibility. The volume is soundly buttressed with specific data on persons and places, not a unmarried one of them fictitious. Indeed, ane reason that Douglass produced an autobiography was to refute the accuse that he was an impostor, that he had never been a slave. No 1 seems always to have questioned the being of any person mentioned in the Narrative.

Really Douglass took pains to be as authentic every bit his memory and his knowledge permitted. His get-go master, Captain Aaron Anthony, tin can easily exist identified, since he was the general overseer for Colonel Edward Lloyd, the fifth Edward of a distinguished Eastern Shore family unit, the Lloyds of Wye. Anthony'south responsible position in the management of the Lloyd plantations is conspicuously indicated in the Lloyd papers at the Maryland Historical Society in Baltimore. Douglass' figures on the extent of the Lloyd holdings could, of course, be only surmise on his part. For example, Douglass states that Colonel Lloyd owned xx farms, whereas, as the family papers show, he had thirteen. Douglass states that in that location were "from three to iv hundred slaves" on the Home Firm plantation; actually for the fourth dimension of which Douglass spoke at that place were 167 slaves on that subcontract, equally is shown in the Lloyd inventory entitled, "1822 January…y Render Volume—A List of Negroes Stock and Farming Utensils—Corn Crop and Wheat Stocked on the Estate of Colonel Edward Lloyd."

Every white person mentioned at St. Michael'south in the Narrative is identifiable in some one of the county record books located at the Easton Court Firm: Talbot Canton Wills, 1832–1848; Country Index, 1818–1832 and 1833–1850; and Matrimony Records for 1794–1825 and 1825–1840. Included among the nineteen St. Michael'south whites are five for whom Douglass could supply only terminal names. Sometimes, as in the case of Sheriff Joseph Graham, the occupation listed in the official records is the same as that given in the Narrative. Douglass had not always defenseless the proper noun clearly: the homo he called William Hamilton was undoubtedly William Hambleton; the Garrison Due west of the Narrative was Garretson Due west, and the chaplain Douglass called Mr. Ewery was very likely the Reverend John Emory.

For the Baltimore years the Douglass book mentions half dozen whites. Of these urban center people 5 are listed either in Matchett's Baltimore Director for 1835–6 or Matchett'southward Baltimore Director for 1837. Just one, a Mr. Butler, owner of a "ship-yard near the drawbridge," is non readily identifiable.

For the incidents related in the Narrative we take of form simply Douglass' give-and-take, only in one instance there is a coincidence worth noting. Douglass states that on one of the Lloyd plantations an overseer, Austin Gore, shot in cold claret a slave named Demby. The "Return Book" for January 1, 1822, carries in the Davis Farm inventory the proper name of a "Bill Demby," aged twenty. The "Return Book" for the next year, 1823, carries the annotation, "Beak Demby dead."

While Douglass' facts, more often than not, can be trusted, tin can the same be said for his points of view? Did he tend to enlarge his case? It must be admitted that Douglass was not charitable to the slave-owning class, and that he did not practice justice to main Thomas Auld's expert intentions. Let it exist said, besides, that if slavery had a sunny side, it will not be establish in the pages of the Narrative. It may too exist argued that the bondage that Douglass knew in Maryland was relatively benign. For a slave, Douglass' "lot was not peculiarly a difficult one," as Garrison pointed out in his Preface.

Slavery differed from identify to identify and elicited differing responses (surface responses especially) from different slaves. Hence Douglass' treatment of slavery in the Narrative may be near as much the revelation of a personality as it is the description of an institution. Just, every bit the Narrative strongly testifies, slavery was not to be measured past the question whether the blackness workers on Colonel Lloyd'south plantation were better off or worse off than the laboring poor of other places; slavery was to be measured by its blighting outcome on the human being spirit.

It is ever easy to stir up sympathy for people in bondage, and perhaps Douglass seemed to protest too much in making slavery out as a "soul-killing" institution. But the first-mitt evidence he submitted and the moving prose in which he couched his findings and observations combine to make his Narrative ane of the most absorbing autobiographical statements in the unabridged catalogue of American reform.

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Source: https://www.hup.harvard.edu/features/frederick-douglass/

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