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My Bondage and My Freedom: Part I-Life as a Slave. Part II-Life as a Freeman, 1st ed. New York and Auburn, NY: Miller, Orton & Mulligan, 1855. With an introduction by Dr. James MCune Smith; three plates including frontispiece portrait. 464 pp. (lacking the usual 4 pages of publishers ads), 5? x 7 3/4 in. Douglass published his first autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, in 1845. Ten years later, after he had established himself as a newspaper editor, he published this second autobiography."What to the American slave is your Fourth of July? I answer, a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim." (p445) Excerpts"A man who will enslave his own blood, may not be safely relied on for magnanimity." (p59)"Should a slave, when assaulted, but raise his hand in self-defense, the white assaulting party is fully justified by southern, or Maryland, public opinion, in shooting the slave down." (p127-128)"Without any appeal to books, to laws, or to authorities of any kind, it was enough to accept God as a father, to regard slavery as a crime." (p133-134)"'If you learn him now to read, he'll want to know how to write; and, this accomplished, he'll be running away with himself.' Such was the tenor of Master Hugh's oracular exposition of the true philosophy of training a human chattel; and it must be confessed that he very clearly comprehended the nature and the requirements of the relation of master and slave. 'Very well,' thought I; 'knowledge unfits a child to be a slave.'.and from that moment I understood the direct pathway from slavery to freedom." (p146-147)"We were both victims to the same overshadowing evil-she, as mistress, I, as slave." (p161-162)"The marriage institution cannot exist among slaves, and one-sixth of the population of democratic America is denied its privileges by the law of the land. What is to be thought of a nation boasting of its liberty, boasting of its humanity, boasting of its christianity, boasting of its love of justice and purity, and yet having within its own borders three millions of persons denied by law the right of marriage?" (p409)"Why, my experience all goes to prove the truth of what you will call a marvelous proposition, that the better you treat a slave, the more you destroy his value as a slave, and enhance the probability of his eluding the grasp of the slaveholder; the more kindly you treat him, the more wretched you make him, while you keep him in the condition of a slave." (p411)"What to the American slave is your Fourth of July? I answer, a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass-fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are to him mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy-a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour." (p445)Historical BackgroundHenry Louis Gates Jr. describes Douglass' writing: "With astonishing psychological penetration, he probes the painful ambiguities and subtly corrosive effects of black-white relations under slavery, then goes on to recount his determined resistance to segregation in the North."[1] Douglass' description of his life as an enslaved person in Maryland, his eventual escape to the North, his account of slavery and the antislavery movement, and his insights about the impact of slavery on wh. (See website for full description). N° de réf. du vendeur 27925
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