In surveying this relationship, scholarship shows that at the beginning of the nineteenth century the former American colonies were settling into new nationhood as the Republic of the United States. The democratic state was grounded on the Declaration of Independence, which reinforced a national sense of individual rights: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Here was the ideal impetus toward autobiography. Few, if any, among those who found themselves leading the destiny of the new nation, or those enabled by its -37- new Constitution to participate in its progress, questioned the legitimacy of who automatically shared those rights and privileges, and who were excluded from that largesse and why. But if the country ignored the human dimensions of African American life, individually and collectively, African Americans, including slaves, did not internalize concepts of inferior human status to whites. From its eighteenth-century beginnings, the first one hundred years of African American autobiography is the story of women and men struggling to claim, in writing, for white readers, that they were human beings capable of telling the "truth" of their experiences. In this context, the black "I" and the white reader, with separate racial identities within the same culture, were forced toward a common reading of experience.
Slave narratives, the predominant genre in early African American writing, were the personal accounts of former slaves telling their own stories, first, in search of the psychological freedom that the bonds of physical slavery denied them prior to their escape from its shackles; and second, as propaganda weapons in the struggle for the abolition of that slavery. Information and reformation were the root motives driving their production. African Americans felt that moral and just whites, especially those in the North, needed to know, firsthand, the conditions of slavery, and to rise up to purge the country of its scourge. What the nation needed most, they would have said, was a mighty contingent of John Browns — white men and women willing to give their all for the honor of the democratic promises of the Constitution. While the most complex and personally interesting narratives in this tradition were written by their subjects, dozens of narratives were as-told-to life stories, generally mediated through the offices of white male amanuenses. Much scholarly debate on slave narratives focuses on the authenticity or lack of it of these latter, primarily on the editorial authority of the transcriber to compose, shape, and interpret the textual lives of the former slaves.
In addition to the slave narratives, spiritual autobiographies emerged in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. While escaped slaves condemned the "peculiar" institution by indicting its atrocities, spiritual narrators claimed selfhood by way of equal access to the love and forgiveness of a black-appropriated Christian God, which therefore negated any notions that they were nonpersons as -38- whites would have them believe. Like the slave narratives, the spiritual narratives compelled a revisionary reading of the collective American experience. Thus, the slave and spiritual narratives, secular and religious self-stories intended largely for white audiences, offered profound second readings of the American and African American experiences against prevailing white American racial perspectives. These personal accounts, dozens in number, recount, expose, appeal, and remember the ordeals of blackness in white America.
The most well known slave stories are Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself (1845), and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Written by Herself (1861), by Harriet Jacobs, and published originally under the name of Linda Brent. Both Douglass and Jacobs determined at an early age that the most important goal of their lives was to gain their freedom. To this end, both, overt rebels against the system, devoted their best efforts and eventually succeeded in liberating themselves from their much hated shackles.
Born Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey on a Maryland plantation in 1818, as a slave, Douglass experienced both the harshness of the system and its most benevolent face. However, under all circumstances he refused to compromise his belief that the only acceptable condition of life was in securing his right as an autonomous human being. In 1838, while living in Baltimore, he escaped the South and changed his name. A few days later, in New York City, Douglass married Anna Murray, the free African American woman who had helped him to engineer his escape. The Douglasses lived together for almost four decades. They had two sons and two daughters. Anna was vital to his career but remained in his shadow for all their years together. She died in Washington, D.C., in 1882.
Although as an abolitionist speaker Douglass traveled extensively in the northern United States and Europe for more than twenty years, New Bedford, Massachusetts, was home to him for most of the time until the abolition of slavery. With the encouragement of William Lloyd Garrison, a leading white abolitionist whom he impressed with his articulateness on slavery, Douglass took to the abolitionist stump in 1841. In the years following, he dazzled audiences with his oratorical expertise. In 1845, Douglass, who learned to read and write surreptitiously while in slavery, published his first-person account of -39- slavery, Narrative, and in 1855 he brought out a second, My Bondage and My Freedom. He published a third autobiography, The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, in 1881. Douglass held several government appointments after the abolition of slavery, including that of Assistant Secretary of the Commission of Inquiry to Santo Domingo (1871) and United States Marshal for the District of Columbia (1877). He died of a heart attack in Washington in 1895.
Narrative was an instant success. More than 30,000 copies were sold in Europe and the United States in the first year after its publication (4500 in the first five months). The story delineates Douglass's firsthand knowledge of his parentage and early life, his struggles toward selfhood within the slave system, the consequences of his overt rebelliousness, one failed attempt at escape, and, finally, his success in achieving his life's goal. While the book is now a classic of African American literature, Andrews observes that, among its other qualities, readers and critics laud this narrative for its declaration of independence in the author's interpretation of his life, Douglass's claims to freedom through his text, and his literary and rhetorical sophistication. Although the second narrative is longer and more detailed, and is written by a more accomplished man of letters — a successful journalist and orator — in this text, as Andrews notes, Douglass turned to exploring his complex relationship with his environment in his search for a new group identity. Douglass biographer Dickson J. Preston (Young Frederick Douglass: The Maryland Years [1986]) estimates that for every person who has read either My Bondage and My Freedom or Life and Times, 300 have read Narrative. Both Andrews and Preston subscribe to Douglass's manipulation of the "facts" of his story to achieve greater advantage in audience interest. To this end, Andrews emphasizes Douglass's use of artifice — especially he credits the inventiveness of Douglass's rhetorical style. So successful are these strategies, Andrews concludes, that the imagined, fabricated, or deliberately exaggerated events in Douglass's story are of little significance in comparison to the literary and political effectiveness of the text, even if they remain matters for historians to continue to probe.