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Narrative of the Life of Frederick
Douglass, An American Slave, Written
by Himself Frederick Douglass (1845)
Although FREDERICK DOUGLASS wrote three autobi-
ographies—Narrative of the Life of Frederick Dou-
glass, An American Slave (1845), My Bondage and
My Freedom (1855), and Life and Times of Fred-
erick Douglass (1893)—Narrative, which James
Olney calls “the greatest of the slave narratives”
(3), became the classic.
Structurally, Narrative is divided into two parts.
In the first part, approximately the first nine chap-
ters, Douglass describes his birth into slavery in
Tuckahoe, Talbot County, Maryland, as Frederick
Bailey (noting that he had no certification of the
date of his birth); his vicarious awareness of his
status as a slave through the brutal treatment of
his Aunt Hester by their owner, Captain Anthony;
his lack of knowledge of his father’s identity (more
than likely his father was his slave master); his
lack of communication with his mother, Harriet
Bailey, and his deep love for his surrogate mother,
his grandmother, Betsey Bailey, who reared him
through age six; the violence of chattel slavery,
as practiced by overseers like Mr. Severe, “a cruel
man” (Douglass, 29); and the imaginative tactics
slaves created to deal on a daily basis with their
bondage, particularly their sorrow songs. Doug-
lass wrote, “They would sometimes sing the most
pathetic sentiment in the most rapturous tone,
and the most rapturous sentiment in the most

pathetic tone” (31). The second part of Narra-

tive, the last two chapters, describes Douglass’s

escape from “the jaws of slavery” (24), in which

he had been both “witness and participant” (25),

and his rebirth symbolized by his naming himself

Frederick Douglass.

Narrative represents Douglass’s early effort of

self-identification and authentification. Finding

that whenever he mounted the antislavery plat-

form to bear witness to and speak out against the

atrocities of slavery, his credibility was questioned

because he was deemed too polished, too articu-

late, and too intelligent to be a fugitive slave, Dou-

glass, encouraged by the major white abolitionists,

particularly William Lloyd Garrison, decided to

write his own story. Garrison, who wrote the pref-

ace to the Narrative, attests, “Mr. Douglass has very

properly chosen to write his own Narrative, in his

own style, and according to the best of his ability,

rather than to employ some one else. It is, there-

fore, entirely his own production” (ix).

So that readers would not mistakenly conclude

that an amanuensis had produced his text, Dou-

glass included the phrase “Written by Himself ”

in the title of his narrative. This was not mere

egocentrism on Douglass’s part but an act of

self-authorship:

an act of linguistic assertion and aggression, in

the language and literary mode of the oppres-

sor.... [I]t is explicitly an act of assertion and