Frederick Douglass, from Narration to Denunciation

Abstract

Chapter 2 shows how Frederick Douglass issued two claims across two antebellum narratives. In his 1845 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, he both challenged the diminished legal and moral authority of black Americans and analyzed what of the plantation had oppressed him. Yet after his political ideas and ties developed in the following decade, Douglass wrote his 1855 My Bondage and My Freedom not as mere narrative but as denunciation. Whereas to narrate wrongs encouraged readers to judge Douglass’s story alongside moral criteria of justice, to denounce wrongs in Bondage implicated readers within the structures that create antebellum subjects on and off the plantation. This claim depended on Douglass’s renewed authority to analyze his life and on an analysis that revealed how the conditions of slavery implicate abolitionists and readers. Douglass’s book reached outward to demand his audience join him in solidarity for racial justice.