My Bondage and My Freedom

When slavery was introduced into the Americas, I doubt anyone would have guessed the seeds for a great literary tradition would be planted along with the cotton and sugar cane. If Solomon Northup's 12 Years a Slave is the American Odyssey, then Frederick Douglass's autobiography is something akin to the works produced by the legendary Athenian philosophers. Simultaneously a straightforward, compelling biography and a rigorous humanist argument against slavery, this is an essential, thoroughly American, eminently important book.

Unlike the freeman Northup, Douglass was born into slavery. Thus Douglass very early grapples with the existential crisis with which such a life is laden. Why are some humans born masters, while some are born slaves? If there is a God, how can He allow this to happen? Through heartbreak and toil, Douglass acquires the resolve to tackle the injustice.

He is not alone, though. A kind mistress introduces him to reading and writing, unwittingly exposing Douglass to literary ammunition, and allowing light to shine into the dark cave in which the slave system necessarily traps its victims. This was one of the most enjoyable threads of the book for me. Douglass credits literature for lighting the fire in his soul, to seek freedom and justice.

"Once awakened by the silver trump of knowledge, my spirit was roused to eternal wakefulness. Liberty! the inestimable birthright of every man, had, for me, converted every object into an asserter of this great right. It was ever present, to torment me with a sense of my wretched condition. The more beautiful and charming were the smiles of nature, the more horrible and desolate was my condition. I saw nothing without seeing it, and I heard nothing without hearing it. I do not exaggerate, when I say, that it looked from every star, smiled in every calm, breathed in every wind, and moved in every storm."

Another interesting thread in the book is Douglass's appraisal of religion. While himself a religious man, he has no qualms about criticizing the religion of his masters. He makes the observations that his worst masters were religious, while his best master was not, and that more religion, far from making his cruel masters see the error in their ways, seemed to make his masters even more cruel. This data point supports the idea that religion, far from being implicitly good or bad, is a "force multiplier" that can make good people better or bad people worse. It can be leveraged to do good or evil. This neutral view of religion is very important today, in my opinion.

Most of the book is devoted to Douglass's time as a slave, but the last few chapters covering his life after escape are also a highlight. Here we see in vivid detail what an escaped slave's life is like in a country where it is legal to capture slaves and send them south (Solomon Northup's fate). Indeed, Douglass is vehemently critical of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, a law foisted upon the free states by the "state's rights" South. I also found it interesting that Douglass withholds details of his escape, a good indication of the paranoia of the times. Another highlight is his contrast of racial attitudes in the Northern U.S. and Europe. His description of the former, including separate accommodations for white and black people and all the associated racism, clearly echoes through to the 1960s at least, whereas he describes the latter as how we would like things to be in our country today.

Douglass was an incredibly gifted writer and, judging by the transcripts of his speeches, a powerful orator as well. Ironically, his abolitionist friends wanted him to "dumb down" his speeches so that his audience would believe he was recently a slave. Aside from the incredible narrative, this book includes extracts from several speeches, and a letter to his former master in which he takes him to task for his cruelty. An interesting common element of the speeches is his exasperation of "why do I need to prove that slaves are humans?", a feeling probably a lot of people feel today about different, though perhaps related, issues. I highly recommend this book to everyone.