Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave

Introduction

“My Soul’s Complaint” David W. Blight, Yale University

Frederick Douglass’s Narrative is a work of prose poetry about the quintessentially American crisis of slavery and freedom in an expanding republic. In the world of letters and ideas of the 1840s, it spoke to universal values and aspirations. When Douglass asks, “Why am I a slave?”, he speaks for millions who were then enslaved across the globe. Over time, this existential question may have allowed countless others in his astonishingly wide readership to ask, “Why am I poor?”; “Why is he so rich and she only his servant or chattel?”; “Why am I hated for my religion, my race, my sexuality, my political beliefs, the accident of my birth on this side of the river or in that valley?”; “Why am I a refugee, a despised immigrant outsider?” Or, even, “Why do I hate these or those people?” In the past few decades, this work of memory, of history, and especially of lyrical storytelling has risen into the pantheon of American classics.

The Narrative is also a tale of personal torment and embittered discontent, written by a young former slave bearing the scars in his soul as a kind of sorrowful appeal for rebirth and hope. It is a coming-of-age story of violent redemption, the kind that has always appealed to Americans. Douglass, though, makes his readers wince and shudder on their way to his remaking. The author and his readers both pay a price for this knowledge of the interior worlds of slaves and slaveholders.

Frederick Douglass was born Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey in 1818 on a farm at a horseshoe bend in the Tuckahoe River, on Maryland’s Eastern Shore; his father was likely one of his two owners, and his mother, Harriet, the owner’s slave. Douglass lived twenty years in bondage, eleven intermittently on the Eastern Shore—where he experienced nearly every brutal treatment, physical and psychological, that a youthful slave could face—and nine in Baltimore, where he gained literacy, became religious, worked with his hands in the maritime trades, and found a cosmopolitan access to a larger world.

At age eighteen Douglass organized an escape plot with a small “band of brothers” among the slaves on a farm near St. Michaels, Maryland. Foiled and betrayed, he and his comrades were arrested, put in chains, and marched several miles to the jail in Easton, the Talbot County seat. After two weeks behind bars, in a stroke of great luck, Douglass’s owner, Thomas Auld, sent his slave back to Baltimore rather than selling him into obscurity in the deep South. Two years later, in a cunning and brave plot hatched with a few friends and his intrepid fiancé, Anna Murray, Frederick escaped from slavery by train, steamer, and ferryboat over some thirty-eight hours to New York City, disguised as a sailor.

His story is one of great drama and risk in the face of what he called the “prison” and the “tomb” of slavery. But in recollecting these events, Douglass also left us an illegal refugeeimmigrant’s language of fear and courage, and forged, in this text, the greatest of American slave narratives. He established that his greatest power always resided in the written and spoken word. He had a vital story to tell, and in many ways he never stopped telling it.

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One place to begin to understand America’s long history with outsiders, ethnicity, race, and immigration is with Douglass. “No man can tell the intense agony,” he wrote, remembering his flight, “which is felt by the slave, when wavering on the point of making his escape. All that he has is at stake; and even that which he has not, is at stake also. The life which he has may be lost, and the liberty which he seeks, may not be gained.” Throughout modern history, millions forced to flee as refugees and beg for asylum have felt Douglass’s agony. So many have felt the same terrors in deserts, in the billows of the oceans, in all manner of detention centers, on isolated street corners. In twenty-first century struggles over American pluralism, today’s outsiders might take heart from the anxious possibilities demonstrated by this text in slaveholding America.

Douglass was once called an “illustrious exile” for his triumphant antislavery lecture tours in Ireland, Scotland, and England in 1845–47, which he undertook just after publication of the Narrative and while still a fugitive. But even more importantly, he was perhaps America’s most illustrious internal exile. Indeed, until the Civil War, all African Americans, slave or free, lived as exiles in their own land. They were either owned as property or, if free, their civil and political rights were severely restricted. For nine years, until his British friends purchased his freedom from his Maryland owner in 1847, Douglass was a fugitive slave everywhere he trod. By law he was considered stolen property, a social danger, an alien and illegal Black person in white America. Fugitive slaves in the North were viewed by many as a menace to social and racial order, and a legal challenge to slavery itself. Douglass came to relish each of those roles. His telling of his selffashioned heroism enlists his readers in the cause of physical and mental freedom.

Hope and dread marched side by side in antebellum, slaveholding America, as they have at many other junctures in our country’s history. In 1836, as his band of potential runaways nervously plotted their escape, “we were confident,” Douglass claimed, “bold and determined at times; and, again, doubting, timid and wavering; whistling like a boy in the graveyard, to keep away the spirits.” They were bold but frightened. “We could see no spot this side of the ocean,” he declared, “where we could be free. We knew nothing about Canada. Our knowledge of the North did not extend farther than New York.” No romance about an “Underground Railroad” drove this escape scheme. No “Drinking Gourd” guided these desperate young men. Hesitation often became sheer terror of the unknown.

“The case . . . stood thus,” wrote the former slave: “At every gate through which we had to pass we saw a watchman; at every ferry a guard; on every bridge a sentinel; and in every wood, a patrol or slave-hunter. We were hemmed in on every side . . . The good to be sought, and the evil to be shunned.” Douglass used metaphors to take his readers into the heart of darkness, and usually back out. “On the one hand, there stood slavery, a stern reality, glaring frightfully upon us—its robes already crimsoned with the blood of millions,” he imagined, “and even now feasting itself upon our own flesh. On the other hand, away back in the dim distance, under the flickering light of the north star, behind some craggy hill or snow-covered mountain, stood a doubtful freedom—half frozen—beckoning us to come and share its hospitality.” Douglass continued with these images of “grim death” and the “terrible bloodhound” until his reader may have uttered, “Enough!” He was a penetrating and graphic writer; his memory drove his prose in dark, novelistic ways. Bravado also energized his writing; this was potent propaganda to persuade the uncommitted to the abolitionist cause. “With us,” he wrote, “it was a doubtful liberty at most, and almost certain death if we failed. For my part I should prefer death to hopeless bondage.”6 In romantic America, few could resist this story. Douglass invested his reader in his fate.