Lesson 156: Narrative of Frederick Douglass, Part 1
Reading assignment: Chapter 1. Download here. [download id=”52218″]
Reading assignment: “Frederick Douglass.” Download here. [download id=”52221″]
Historical background: it was illegal to import slaves from Africa, beginning in 1807. The British banned the slave trade in that year. The British navy enforced this law on all nations.
The survival rate of slaves in the United States was far higher than anywhere in the Western hemisphere. The reproduction rates were also higher. So, most slaves in 1817, the year of Douglass’s birth, were descendents of slaves brought from Africa, not actual Africans. Virginia and Maryland became exporters of slaves to the lower South after 1807. This was a major source of revenue for large plantations on the Atlantic seaboard.
Book review, The Liberator (May 30, 1845), an abolitionist newspaper.
My readers will be delighted to learn that Frederick Douglass–the fugitive slave–has at last concluded his narrative. All who know the wonderful gifts of friend Douglass know that his narrative must, in the nature of things, be written with great power. It is so indeed. It is the most thrilling work which the American press ever issued–and the most important. If it does not open the eyes of this people, they must be petrified into eternal sleep.The picture it presents of slavery is too horrible to look upon, and yet it is but a faint picture of what to millions is a vivid life. It is evidently drawn with a nice eye, and the coloring is chaste and subdued, rather than extravagant or overwrought. Thrilling as it is, and full of the most burning eloquence, it is yet simple and unimpassioned. Its eloquence is the eloquence of truth, and so is as simple and touching as the impulses of childhood. There are passages in it which would brighten the reputation of any living author,–while the book, as a whole, judged as a mere work of art, would widen the fame of Bunyan or De Foe. A spirit of the loftiest integrity, and a vein of the purest religious sentiment, runs through its pages, and it must leave on every mind a deep conviction of the author’s strength of mind and purity of heart. I predict for it a sale of at least twenty thousand in this country, and equally great in Europe. It will leave a mark upon this age which the busy finger of time will deepen at every touch. It will generate a public sentiment in this nation, in the presence of which our pro-slavery laws and constitutions shall be like chaff in the presence of fire. It contains the spark which will kindle up the smouldering embers of freedom in a million souls, and light up our whole continent with the flames of liberty. Great efforts will be made in the name of the Constitution and the Bible, of James Polk and the Apostle Paul, to suppress it: but it will run through this nation from house to house, and from heart to heart, as the wild fire, finding wings in every wind which blows, flies across the tall and boundless prairies. Its stirring incidents will fasten themselves on the eager minds of the youth of this country with hooks of steel. The politics of the land will stand abashed before it, while her more corrupt religion will wish to sink back into the hot womb which gave it birth. It will fall in among the churches and state-houses of the land like a bomb-shell, and those who madly undertake to pick it to pieces will share the fate of that poor New-Yorker who attempted something of the kind on a bomb-shell picked up on the shores of Jersey, i. e., they will be blowed to atoms at the first blow.
I was raised among slaves, and have also owned them, and am well aware that the slaves live better and fare better in many respects than the free blacks.Yet, I am positively opposed to slavery, for I know it is a great evil; but the evil falls not upon the slave, but on the owner.
Intrigue and false accusations will never liberate the slave of the South; but, on the contrary, every such attempt will only forge for them new and stronger fetters.
Let the tender-hearted philanthropists of the North speak truth and love towards their southern brethren, and make a liberal application of their gold for the removing the blacks from the country, and their chance of success will be more flattering:
I have given a true representation of the persons connected with the aforesaid Narrative, and I respectfully submit the facts to the judgment of an impartial public.