Seth Kaller, Inc.

Douglass published his first autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, in 1845. Ten years later, after he had established himself as a newspaper editor, he published this second autobiography.

“What to the American slave is your Fourth of July? I answer, a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim.” (p445)

FREDERICK DOUGLASS. My Bondage and My Freedom: Part I-Life as a Slave. Part II-Life as a Freeman, 1st ed. New York and Auburn, NY: Miller, Orton & Mulligan, 1855. With an introduction by Dr. James M’Cune Smith; three plates including frontispiece portrait. 464 pp. (lacking the usual 4 pages of publisher’s ads), 5? x 7¾ in.

Inventory #27925       Price: $5,500

Excerpts
“A man who will enslave his own blood, may not be safely relied on for magnanimity.” (p59)

“Should a slave, when assaulted, but raise his hand in self-defense, the white assaulting party is fully justified by southern, or Maryland, public opinion, in shooting the slave down.” (p127-128)

“Without any appeal to books, to laws, or to authorities of any kind, it was enough to accept God as a father, to regard slavery as a crime.” (p133-134)

“‘If you learn him now to read, he’ll want to know how to write; and, this accomplished, he’ll be running away with himself.’ Such was the tenor of Master Hugh’s oracular exposition of the true philosophy of training a human chattel; and it must be confessed that he very clearly comprehended the nature and the requirements of the relation of master and slave.... ‘Very well,’ thought I; ‘knowledge unfits a child to be a slave.’...and from that moment I understood the direct pathway from slavery to freedom.” (p146-147)

“We were both victims to the same overshadowing evil—she, as mistress, I, as slave.” (p161-162)

“The marriage institution cannot exist among slaves, and one-sixth of the population of democratic America is denied its privileges by the law of the land. What is to be thought of a nation boasting of its liberty, boasting of its 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?” (p409)

“Why, my experience all goes to prove the truth of what you will call a marvelous proposition, that the better you treat a slave, the more you destroy his value as a slave, and enhance the probability of his eluding the grasp of the slaveholder; the more kindly you treat him, the more wretched you make him, while you keep him in the condition of a slave.” (p411)

“What to the American slave is your Fourth of July? I answer, a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass-fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are to him mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy—a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour.” (p445)

Historical Background
Henry Louis Gates Jr. describes Douglass’ writing: “With astonishing psychological penetration, he probes the painful ambiguities and subtly corrosive effects of black-white relations under slavery, then goes on to recount his determined resistance to segregation in the North.”[1] Douglass’ description of his life as an enslaved person in Maryland, his eventual escape to the North, his account of slavery and the antislavery movement, and his insights about the impact of slavery on whites and blacks, make this perhaps the greatest book of all time on the subject. My Bondage came out a few years after his rift over the U.S. Constitution with William Lloyd Garrison, who had written the introduction to Douglass’ earlier autobiography. My Bondage features an introduction by black abolitionist James McCune Smith.

The appendix includes Douglass’s famous “Letter to His Old Master,” Thomas Auld (p421-428), and extracts from some of his most notable speeches, including the address at Corinthian Hall in Rochester, New York, on July 5, 1852, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?,” which he gave after declining to speak on the fourth (p441-445).

Frederick Douglass (1817-1895) was an orator, journalist, abolitionist, and distinguished African-American leader. Born a slave in Tuckahoe, Maryland, as Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey, he assumed the name Douglass after he escaped from slavery in 1838. That year, he married Anna Murray (1813-1882), and they had five children. In 1841, Douglass successfully addressed a Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society convention and was employed as its agent. He wrote Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass in 1845 to document his experiences and sufferings and to silence those who contended that a man of his abilities could not have been a slave. Douglass soon became a noted anti-slavery orator and supporter of women’s rights, lecturing in both the United States and England. He attended the Seneca Falls Convention on women’s rights and signed its Declaration of Sentiments. Douglass edited his own newspaper, The North Star, for several years. In 1855, he published his second autobiography, My Bondage and My Freedom. During the Civil War, he was instrumental in advocating for African-American combat units, and in raising troops. He fought for passage of the Thirteenth (Abolition), Fourteenth (Equal Protection), and Fifteenth (Voting Rights) Amendments, through testimony to Congress, reports to the President, and regular appearances on the lecture circuit. In 1872, Douglass was nominated for vice-president by the Equal Rights Party on a ticket headed by Victoria Woodhull. Douglass was the first African American to serve in important federal posts, including Marshal of the District of Columbia (1877-1881), Recorder of Deeds for Washington D.C. (1881-1886), and Minister-General to Haiti (1889-1891). In 1881, he published Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, his third and final autobiography, which he revised in 1892. After the death of his wife Anna, Douglass married white suffragist Helen Pitts (1838-1903) in 1884, a marriage his children opposed.

Condition: Publisher’s cloth; moderate wear; intermittent foxing, pages 179-190 coming detached; faint 1855 inscription on front free endpaper.