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. He was the son of Harriet Bailey, who he saw for the last time in 1824, at age six. 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.įrom orphaned slave to conscience of a nationĭouglass was born Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey, on the Holme Hill Farm, in Talbot County, Maryland in February, 1818. He says little, for instance, of his complex family relationships-including his second marriage to a white woman-or his important female friends. 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.īut as in so many autobiographies, there is also much Douglass holds back, details that don’t fit his carefully constructed narrative. 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. 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. During his lifetime, they launched him to national prominence since then, they have become essential texts of U.S. 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). 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.

My bondage and my freedom 1855