A very good copy of this vital work, published in the increasingly charged years after the passing of the Fugitive Slave Act and the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
Of course, by this time Douglass was already a household name. “[T]he Narrative made Frederick Douglass the most famous black person in the world” (Blight). He had already spent twenty months touring Europe where English abolitionists raised the money to buy back his freedom. “Published seven years after the author escaped slavery. It is probably the best known narrative of the ante-bellum period” (Blockson).
The second of Douglass’s four autobiographies, My Bondage and Freedom builds on the Narrative, is nearly three times the length, and documents his first decade of freedom. There are additional details of his life under slavery and a compendium of extracts from some of his most famous speeches.
Douglass would, of course, go on to help organise John Brown’s raid at Harper’s Ferry in 1859, lobby Abraham Lincoln to make emancipation a goal of the Civil War, become president of the Freedman’s Savings Bank, and in 1889 he was appointed US Minister to Haiti.
ANB outlines his achievements: “The most influential African American of the nineteenth century, Douglass made a career of agitating the American conscience. He spoke and wrote on behalf of a variety of reform causes: women’s rights, temperance, peace, land reform, free public education, and the abolition of capital punishment. But he devoted the bulk of his time, immense talent, and boundless energy to ending slavery and gaining equal rights for African Americans.”
Blight, David W. ed., Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (New York, 1993), p.16; Blockson, 9717; Sabin, 20714; Work, p.311.
