What Frederick Douglass Revealed—and Omitted—in His Famous Autobiographies
December 2, 2018 in History
By David Blight
The former slave, whose brilliant prose and soaring oratory pricked the conscience of a nation, carefully shaped his own myth. Details like a white second wife didn’t exactly fit.
Frederick Douglass, the most influential black man in 19th-century America, wrote 1,200 pages of autobiography, one of the most impressive performances of memoir in the nation’s history. The three texts included Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave (published in 1845); his long-form masterpiece My Bondage and My Freedom, (1855); and finally, The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881, revised in 1892). During his lifetime, the texts launched him to national prominence; since then, they have become essential texts of U.S. history.
In them, Douglass tells his extraordinary personal story—of the slave who endured and witnessed untold acts of brutality, then audaciously willed his own freedom. He describes the young slave who mastered the master’s language, and who saw to the core of the meaning of slavery, both for individuals and for the nation. And then he captures the multiple meanings of freedom—as idea and reality, of mind and body—as no one else ever did in America.
But as in so many autobiographies, there is also much Douglass holds back, details that don’t fit his carefully constructed narrative. He says little, for instance, of his complex family relationships—including his second marriage to a white woman—or his important female friends. Nor does he ever really reveal his true feelings about his improbable odyssey from a fugitive slave and radical outsider, a black man who gained fame for eloquently trumpeting the nation’s harshest truths, to a political insider warmly welcomed by Abraham Lincoln in the White House.
From orphaned slave to conscience of a nation
Douglass was born Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey, on the Holme Hill Farm, in Talbot County, Maryland in February, 1818. He was the son of Harriet Bailey, who he saw for the last time in 1824, at age six. Douglass never knew the accurate identity of his father, although some evidence indicates that it was either his first owner, Aaron Anthony, or his second owner, Thomas Auld, to whom he was bequeathed on Anthony’s death. Douglass was, therefore, in the fullest sense an orphan long in search of father and mother figures as well as any semblance of a secure “home.” He lived 20 years as a …read more
Source: HISTORY
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