Book Review - Five Stars
My
Bondage and My Freedom (Original Classic Edition) by
Frederick Douglass
This
amazing autobiography of pre-Civil War history accurately depicts
America’s empathy towards brutal human rights that to this day is
passed down generation to generation while freedom and justice for
all is bantered about like the gospel.
Frederic
Douglass did a magnificent job of scrutinizing personalities and
conveying his analytical observations. This book is an absolute
classic!
EXCERPTS:
Hidden
away down in the depths of his own nature, and which revealed to him
the fact that liberty and right, for all men, were anterior to
slavery and wrong. When his knowledge of the world was bounded by the
visible horizon on Col. Lloyd’s plantation, and while every thing
around him bore a fixed, iron stamp, as if it had always been so,
this was, for one so young, a notable discovery. To his uncommon
memory, then, we must add a keen and accurate insight into men and
things; an original breadth of common sense which enabled him to see,
and weigh, and compare whatever passed before him, and which kindled
a desire to search out and define their relations to other things not
so patent, but which never succumbed to the marvelous nor the
supernatural; a sacred thirst for liberty and for learning, first as
a means of attaining liberty, then as an end in itself most
desirable; a will; an unfaltering energy and determination to obtain
what his soul pronounced desirable; a majestic self-hood; determined
courage; a deep and agonizing sympathy with his crushed and bleeding
fellow slaves, and an extraordinary depth of passion, together with
that rare alliance between passion and intellect, which enables the
former, when deeply roused, to excite, develop and sustain the
latter.
This
is American slavery; no marriage—no education—the light of the
gospel shut out from the dark mind of the bondman—and he forbidden
by law to learn to read. If a mother shall teach her children to
read, the law in Louisiana proclaims that she may be hanged by the
neck. If the father attempt to give his son a knowledge of letters,
he may be punished by the whip in one instance, and in another be
killed, at the discretion of the court. Three millions of people shut
out from the light of knowledge! It is easy for you to conceive the
evil that must result from such a state of things. I now come to the
physical evils of slavery. I do not wish to dwell at length upon
these, but it seems right to speak of them, not so much to influence
your minds on this question, as to let the slaveholders of America
know that the curtain which conceals their crimes is being lifted
abroad; that we are opening the dark cell, and leading the people
into the horrible recesses of what they are pleased to call their
domestic institution. We want them to know that a knowledge of their
whippings, their scourgings, their brandings, their chainings, is not
confined to their plantations, but that some Negro of theirs has
broken loose from his chains—has burst through the dark
incrustation of slavery, and is now exposing their deeds of deep
damnation to the gaze of the christian people of England. The
slaveholders resort to all kinds of cruelty, the slave has no wife,
no children, no country, and no home. He can own nothing, possess
nothing, acquire nothing, but what must belong to another. To eat the
fruit of his own toil, to clothe his person with the work of his own
hands, is considered stealing. He toils that another may reap the
fruit; he is industrious that another may live in idleness; he eats
unbolted meal that another may eat the bread of fine flour; he labors
in chains at home, under a burning sun and biting lash, that another
may ride in ease and splendor abroad; he lives in ignorance that
another may be educated; he is abused that another may be exalted; he
rests his toil-worn limbs on the cold, damp ground that another may
repose on the softest pillow; he is clad in coarse and tattered
raiment that another may be arrayed in purple and fine linen; he is
sheltered only by the wretched hovel that a master may dwell in a
magnificent mansion; and to this condition he is bound down as by an
arm of iron.
One
of the most telling testimonies against the pretended kindness of
slaveholders, is the fact that uncounted numbers of fugitives are now
inhabiting the Dismal Swamp, preferring the untamed wilderness to
their cultivated homes—choosing rather to encounter hunger and
thirst, and to roam with the wild beasts of the forest, running the
hazard of being hunted and shot down, than to submit to the authority
of kind masters.
The
slave finds more of the milk of human kindness in the bosom of the
savage Indian, than in the heart of his Christian master.
Absolute
and arbitrary power can never be maintained by one man over the body
and soul of another man, without brutal chastisement and enormous
cruelty.
What
as a nation we call genius of American institutions. Rightly viewed,
this is an alarming fact, and ought to rally all that is pure, just,
and holy in one determined effort to crush the monster of corruption,
and to scatter “its guilty profits” to the winds. In a high moral
sense, as well as in a national sense, the whole American people are
responsible for slavery, and must share, in its guilt and shame, with
the most obdurate men-stealers of the south. While slavery exists,
and the union of these states endures, every American citizen must
bear the chagrin of hearing his country branded before the world as a
nation of liars and hypocrites; and behold his cherished flag pointed
at with the utmost scorn and derision.
Even
now an American abroad is pointed out in the crowd, as coming from a
land where men gain their fortunes by “the blood of souls,” from
a land of slave markets, of blood-hounds, and slave-hunters; and, in
some circles, such a man is shunned altogether, as a moral pest. Is
it not time, then, for every American to awake, and inquire into his
duty with respect to this subject?
View my author's page on Amazon