My Bondage and My Freedom
After the success of his first narrative, which established him as a leading writer of his time, Douglass published My Bondage and My Freedom in 1855. His second, revised autobiography focused on his journey from enslavement to freedom and detailed the day-to-day trials of an enslaved person on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. Douglass aimed to highlight the continued racism he faced in the northern states even after gaining status as a free man. Douglass utilized his mastery of words to illustrate the horrors of enslavement: “there is not, beneath the sky, an enemy to filial affection so destructive as slavery. It had made my brothers and sisters strangers to me; it converted the mother that bore me, into a myth; it shrouded my father in mystery, and left me without an intelligible beginning in the world.”