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View allMy Bondage and My Freedom
Douglass
1855
Douglass's second telling — no longer just the testimony, now the indictment.
My Bondage and My Freedom
Frederick Douglass · 1855
Ten years after the Narrative made him famous, Douglass wrote it all again — longer, angrier, and more analytical. My Bondage and My Freedom treats slavery as a system rather than a story: it studies how masters are made, why religious slaveholders were the cruelest, how northern racism and southern bondage propped each other up, and why he broke with the Garrisonian allies who wanted him to stick to narrating. With an introduction by James M'Cune Smith — the first African American to hold a medical degree — and an appendix of Douglass's greatest speeches, including 'What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?', it is the fullest account of his mind we have from the 1850s. The platform also carries the 1845 Narrative; the mentor is ready to compare the two tellings.
35 chapters · 132,841 words · ~10.1 hr read
Contents
Preface & Introduction
The editor's guarantee that every name and place is real, and James M'Cune Smith's landmark assessment of Douglass — a major Black intellectual introducing him to readers.
Life as a Slave
From a grandmother's cabin in Tuckahoe to the shipyards of Baltimore — twenty-one chapters tracing how a child learns what slavery is, how a teenager fights his way out of being 'broken,' and how a man plans his escape.
- 3Chapter 3~12 min
- 4Chapter 4~9 min
- 5Chapter 5~13 min
- 6Chapter 6~22 min
- 7Chapter 7~12 min
- 8Chapter 8~23 min
- 9Chapter 9~15 min
- 10Chapter 10~12 min
- 11Chapter 11~15 min
- 12Chapter 12~12 min
- 13Chapter 13~15 min
- 14Chapter 14~13 min
- 15Chapter 15~14 min
- 16Chapter 16~25 min
- 17Chapter 17~23 min
- 18Chapter 18~14 min
- 19Chapter 19~21 min
- 20Chapter 20~25 min
- 21Chapter 21~42 min
- 22Chapter 22~22 min
- 23Chapter 23~18 min
Life as a Freeman
New York, New Bedford, the Nantucket platform, and Britain — Douglass becomes an orator, buys back his own legal person, founds his newspaper, and breaks with the movement that discovered him.
Appendix
Eight of Douglass's speeches and letters, 1846–1855 — including the open letter to his former master and 'What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?'