Frederick Douglass's second autobiography, My Bondage, and My Freedom, significantly revises key parts of his original narrative style and extends his life story to include his experiences as an itinerant lecturer in the United States as well as England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. Douglass also frames his second autobiography differently, replacing the introductory notes of white abolitionists William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips with profound ones by the eminent black abolitionist Dr. James M'Cune Smith. While the appendix to his first autobiography serves primarily as a clarification of Douglass's views on religion, the appendix to My Bondage and My Freedom includes a letter to a former commander, Thomas Auld, a ship captain, and various excerpts from the abolitionist lectures of Douglass. These prefaces and appendices provide the reader with insight into the larger historical movements in which Douglass plays an important role. Douglass later expanded and republished this autobiography two more times, in 1881 and 1892, both under the title Life and Times of Frederick Douglass. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay This genre flourished around 1760 and in the first decades after the abolition of slavery. One of the most famous examples is the Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, but the most famous writer of a slave narrative almost certainly has to be Frederick Douglas. The iconoclastic Douglass had so much to share about the realities of slavery that My Bondage and My Freedom is actually his second publication. The first, and most famous, is his groundbreaking An Account of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave: Written by Himself. Technically, My Bondage and My Freedom is considered a revised and expanded version of that original publication as it serves to update readers on what has happened in the decade since the previous story was published. These additions focus primarily on his encounter with racism in the Northern states, his activism in the name of abolition, and, above all, his decision to break away from William Lloyd Garrison and white abolitionist leaders to establish the primacy of the black voice in movement. call to end slavery. At the heart of this slave narrative is Douglass's frequent expression of his thesis that the institutions of slavery corrupt and dehumanize not only the slave, but the slaveholder and nonslaveholder who condones this practice. While Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave is much better known, My Bondage and My Freedom answered many of the burning questions left over from the first book. Published in 1855 a decade after the story, it expanded on many of the most intriguing points of his first book. Remember, both were autobiographies, but as Douglass wrote in his third autobiography, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, there was only so much information he could reveal at any given time in hopes of not preventing the escape of more fugitive slaves. Like Douglass's earlier tale, My Bondage and My Freedom begins with his birth in Tuckahoe, Maryland, but the revised version offers many additional details. In chapter 1, Douglass remembers at length his grandmother, Betsey Bailey: "Grandmother was... the whole world to me; and the thought of being separated from her, for any considerable time... was intolerable." However, when he is about seven years old, his grandmother takes him to live on Colonel Edward Lloyd's plantation, and the two are effectively separated, leaving young "Fed" with no family except his brothers andsisters, of whom he notes, "slavery had made us strangers." Douglass acknowledges that "it was sometimes whispered that my master was my father", but cannot confirm the accuracy of this rumor, because "slavery eliminates fathers, as it eliminates them. Away with families". In describing his early life on the plantation, Douglass expands the material of the first five chapters of his 1845. The narrative includes the death of his mother, descriptions of the brutal overseers, and the whipping of Aunt Esther to fill the first nine chapters of My Bondage and My Freedom. In chapter 10, Douglass describes life in Baltimore with his new master, Hugh Auld, a ship carpenter and brother of Thomas Auld “I had been treated like a pig on the plantation; Now I was treated like a child," he notes, but the "troops of hostile boys" on the streets still made him sometimes want to return to his "native plantation." When Hugh Auld discovers that his wife, Sophia, is teaching Douglass to read , insists that she stop immediately, because "[a slave] should know nothing but the will of his master" and literacy "would forever render him unfit for the duties of a slave." Auld's words actually convince him of the crucial importance of literacy: "In learning to read, therefore, I owe as much to the opposition of my master, as to the kind assistance of my amiable mistress. Having achieved literacy." Douglass is “forced to resort to indirect means,” such as exchanging bread for reading lessons taught by starving white children on the streets of Baltimore. “For a single biscuit,” he recalls, “any of my hungry little companions would give me a lesson more precious to me than bread". Chapters 13-20 of My Bondage and My Freedom chronicle the series of relocations and challenges Douglass faces from 1833 (then fifteen years old) to 1838, when he finally escapes slavery. “When one problem is over, another comes along,” Douglass recalls; "The life of the slave is full of uncertainties." This particular period of uncertainty begins with the death of Captain Anthony, who, Douglass notes, had remained his master "in fact and in law," although he had become "the informed slave of Master Hugh." Captain Anthony's death necessitates a division of his human "property," and soon after, Hugh Auld sends Douglass to work on his brother Thomas Auld's plantation on the eastern shore of Maryland. When Master Thomas finds that the severe whippings cause "no visible improvement in Douglass's character," he hires the young slave from Edward Covey, who is considered "a first-rate hand in taming the young negroes." On January 1, 1834, Douglass leaves for the Covey farm, fearing that "like a young wild work animal, I must be broken from the yoke of bitter and permanent slavery." The setting, one of his first assignments, is to tame "a team of intact oxen", which Douglass describes as a nearly impossible task. The oxen escape and Covey punishes Douglass harshly. But Douglass isn't about to let it get him down either, and his year with Covey culminates in a violent fistfight with the overseer. This brutal struggle, Douglass recalls, “rekindled in my breast the glowing embers of freedom…and revived the sense of my manhood.” Douglass highlights his victory over Covey as a turning point in the narrative: "This spirit has indeed made me a free man, while in one form I remained a slave." In 1835, Douglass leaves Covey to work for William Freeland, "a well-bred Southern gentleman," remarking that "he was the best master I ever had until I became my own master." After a quiet year, Douglass comes up with his first escape plan by conspiringwith five other young male slaves. However, their plan is discovered, Douglass is imprisoned for a time, and eventually Thomas Auld sends him back to live with Hugh. While working in a Baltimore shipyard as a hired laborer, Douglass is savagely beaten and nearly killed by four white carpenters. However, the job allows Douglass to save some money, finally allowing him to escape in September 1838. Douglass does not reveal the full details of his escape in My Bondage and My Freedom, fearing that he might "thus prevent a brother from suffering ". to escape the chains and shackles of slavery." He recounts his escape in Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, published well after emancipation. Douglass jumps instead to his first impressions of life in New York: "less than a week after leaving Baltimore, I walked among the hurried crowds and admired the dazzling wonders of Broadway." Although the title suggests that Douglass's second autobiography may devote as much time to his "freedom" as to his "slavery," only the latter four chapters are devoted to his life as a free man. Chapter 22 details Douglass' marriage to Anna Murray, his move to New Bedford, Massachusetts, his name change from Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey to Frederick Douglass. first encounter with "the mind of William Lloyd". Chapter 23 recounts Douglass's involvement with the American Anti-Slavery Society and describes his original impulse to write his story "to dispel all doubts about his past and to expose the secrets and crimes of slavery and slaveholders" . Chapter 24 describes Douglass's tumultuous Atlantic crossing on a ship full of slave owners, his exploits as an itinerant lecturer in England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, and the "many dear friends" abroad who collaborate to purchase Douglass's freedom by Thomas Auld. in 1846. Chapter 25 recalls Douglass's plan to start a newspaper after returning to the United States, which he carries out with the help of his "friends in England" despite some unexpected resistance from his abolitionist "friends in Boston." This difference of opinion was emblematic of a larger rift between Douglass and the followers of William Lloyd Garrison on various points of political philosophy. Determined to circulate his newspaper from a neutral location, Douglass begins printing The North Star in December 1847 and moves his family to Rochester, New York, in 1848. He concludes My Bondage and My Freedom with a revised mission statement: " promote the moral, social, religious and intellectual elevation of free people of color, to support the great and primary work of universal and unconditional emancipation of my entire race Douglass met a different kind of opposition within the ranks of the Anti Slavery Society itself. He was one of the few black men employed by the predominantly white company, and the society's leaders, including Garrison, often condescendingly insisted that Douglass merely told the "facts." of his experience and left philosophy, rhetoric, and persuasive arguments to others. Douglass's 1845 account of the life of Frederick Douglass, an American slave, can be seen as a response to both these types of opposition. The Narrative explicitly states that Douglass is its sole author, and contains two prefaces by Garrison and another abolitionist, Wendell Phillips, to attest to this fact. Douglass's use of the real names of people and places further silenced his detractors who questioned the veracity of his story and his status as a former slave. Furthermore, the story aimed to.