My Bondage and My Freedom

FREDERICK DOUGLASS was born Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey in 1818 on a farm in Talbot County, Maryland. Enslaved from birth, he taught himself to read and write as a boy. At age twenty he escaped to Massachusetts with the help of his future wife, Anna Murray, a freeborn black woman. Adopting the surname Douglass (from an exiled nobleman in Sir Walter Scott’s poem The Lady of the Lake), he became prominent in the abolitionist movement and in 1845 published the first of three autobiographies, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself. It was followed by My Bondage and My Freedom (1855) and Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881; rev. 1892). In 1847, a group of British supporters purchased his freedom; five years later, he delivered a fiery address titled “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” that cemented his reputation as one of the greatest orators of his day. After the Civil War, he moved to Washington, D.C., and served in a succession of government posts. He died there on February 20, 1895. NICK BROMELL is Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He is the author of By the Sweat of the Brow: Labor and Literature in Antebellum America and The Time Is Always Now: Black Thought and the Transformation of U.S. Democracy. His articles and essays on Frederick Douglass and African American political thought have appeared in American Literary History, The American Scholar, and Political Theory. R. BLAKESLEE GILPIN is Assistant Professor of History at Tulane University. His first book, John Brown Still Lives!: America’s Long Reckoning with Violence, Equality, and Change, was a finalist for the Gilder Lehrman Center’s Frederick Douglass Book Prize. With Rose Styron, Gilpin compiled and edited The Selected Letters of William Styron. His next book will be about Nat Turner, William Styron, and the longevity of slavery’s hold on America’s racial imagination.