My Bondage and My Freedom
1855
This is the autobiography that proved Frederick Douglass was no longer the trembling young man who had escaped bondage a decade earlier. Written in 1855, after ten years of legal freedom and fiery abolitionist work, My Bondage and My Freedom reveals a writer in full command of his intellect and his fury. Douglass expands his first narrative into something far more ambitious: not merely the story of one man's escape from slavery, but a philosophically sophisticated reckoning with what freedom truly costs and what it means to claim one's humanity in a nation built on dehumanization. The book traces his journey from the rough quarters of Maryland plantations to his education in the North, from his painful separation from his grandmother as a child to his emergence as the most powerful Black voice in American abolitionism. Douglass writes with devastating clarity about the psychological violence of slavery, the corrosive effect of being legally defined as property, and the revolutionary act of learning to read. This is the Douglass who had broken with William Lloyd Garrison, founded his own newspaper, and begun to articulate a vision of racial equality that shocked even many white abolitionists.
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“The marriage institution cannot exist among slaves, and one sixth of the population of democratic America is denied it's privileges by the law of the land. What is to be thought of a nation boasting of its liberty, boasting of it's humanity, boasting of its Christianity, boasting of its love of justice and purity, and yet having within its own borders three millions of persons denied by law the right of marriage?””
— Frederick Douglass
“A man who will enslave his own blood, may not be safely relied on for magnamity.””
— Frederick Douglass
“The white slave had taken from him by indirection what the black slave had taken from him directly and without ceremony. Both were plundered, and by the same plunderers. The slave was robbed by his master of all his earnings, above what was required for his bare physical necessities, and the white laboring man was robbed by the slave system, of the just results of his labor, because he was flung into competition with a class of laborers who worked without wages. The slaveholders blinded them to this competition by keeping alive their prejudice against the slaves as men--not against them as slaves.””
— Frederick Douglass
“I had a wholesome dread of the consequences of running in debt.””
— Frederick Douglass
“Slavery blunts the edge of all our rebukes of tyranny abroad - the criticisms that we make upon other nations, only call forth ridicule, contempt, and scorn. In a word, we are made a reproach and a by-word to a mocking earth, and we must continue to be so made, so long as slavery continues to pollute our soil.””
— Frederick Douglass
“When I went into their family, it was the abode of happiness and contentment. The mistress of the house was a model of affection and tenderness. Her fervent piety and watchful uprightness made it impossible to see her without thinking and feeling”
— Frederick Douglass
“To enslave men, successfully and safely, it is necessary to have their minds occupied with thoughts and aspirations short of the liberty of which they are deprived. A certain degree of attainable good must be kept before them.””
— Frederick Douglass
“We were both victims to the same overshadowing evil”
— Frederick Douglass
“Behind the tall-backed and elaborately wrought chairs, stand the servants, men and maidens”
— Frederick Douglass
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Douglass, Frederick. My Bondage and My Freedom. Lex, lex-books.com/book/my-bondage-and-my-freedom-7d4090e5-ef4f-48fe-b42d-dafd20b6c04e.Douglass, F. (1855). My Bondage and My Freedom. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/my-bondage-and-my-freedom-7d4090e5-ef4f-48fe-b42d-dafd20b6c04eDouglass, Frederick. My Bondage and My Freedom. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/my-bondage-and-my-freedom-7d4090e5-ef4f-48fe-b42d-dafd20b6c04e.
