My bondage my freedom

The introduction by James M'Cune Smith did give me momentary pause. Following this liberation, Douglass, a former slave, went on to become a prominent Abolitionist, speaker, author, and publisher. Frederick Douglass' account of his years as a slave and the early years of his public advocacy as a freeman is among the most poignant and morally forceful works I've ever read. These were the perplexing questions which began now to claim my thoughts, and to exercise the weak powers of my mind, for I was still but a child, and knew less than children of the same age in the free states. It had made my brothers and sisters strangers to me; it converted the mother that bore me, into a myth; it shrouded my father in Frederick Douglass, a bonafide American hero if ever there was one, was born into slavery in Maryland, For slaves, the death of the master could mean sale, relocation, the splitting up of family relationships, etc. Goodreads helps you keep track of books you want to read.

It was ever present, to torment me with a sense of my wretched condition. It was this everlasting thinking which distressed and tormented me; and yet there was no getting rid of the subject of my thoughts. Thus the narrator was never flogged again, this resistance performed helped. Chapter 23 relates Douglass' involvement with the American Anti-Slavery Society and describes his original impetus to write down his story the Narrative —"to dispel all doubt [about his background]. His name was Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey. If I remained in a separate room from the family for any considerable length of time, I was sure to be suspected of having a book, and was at once called upon to give an account of myself.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. The plea which I mainly adopted, and the one by which I was most successful, was that of using my young white playmates, with whom I met in the streets as teachers. It was, at least, necessary for her to have some training, and some hardening, in the exercise of the slaveholder's prerogative, to make her equal to forgetting my human nature and character, and to treating me as a thing destitute of a moral or an intellectual nature. While the appendix to his first autobiography serves primarily as a clarification about Douglass' views on religion, the appendix to My Bondage and My Freedom includes a letter to a former master, Thomas Auld—a ship captain—and various excerpts from Douglass' abolitionist lectures.