My Bondage and My Freedom

New York and Auburn: Miller, Orton & Mulligan, 1855 Introduction by Dr. James McCune Smith. First edition, first printing. Original publisher’s brown cloth, with decoration in blind to boards, titles in gilt to spine, three engraved plates including frontispiece portrait of Douglass engraved by John Chester Buttre. Minor rubbing to cloth, spine lightly faded, touch of fraying to foot of spine, a bit of offsetting to endpapers, and pages lightly spotted. Overall, a very handsome copy, free of repairs or restoration. Extremely uncommon in this condition. Housed in a fine custom quarter-leather folding box. In My Bondage and My Freedom, Frederick Douglass gives an account of his life as an enslaved person in Maryland and his eventual escape to the North. Almost three times the length of his first autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845), My Bondage provides considerably more detail about Douglass’ time enslaved and updates his story to include some of the major developments in his life since becoming a legally free man. The book also includes an appendix with extracts from some of Douglass’ notable speeches, and his famous “Letter to His Old Master,” which Douglass originally printed as an open letter to his former owner, Thomas Auld. Douglass wrote My Bondage a few years after his rift with white abolitionist friend and mentor, William Lloyd Garrison, over disagreements regarding constitutional interpretation. While Garrison wrote the introduction to Narrative, My Bondage features an introduction by black abolitionist James McCune Smith, whom Douglass described as “the single most important influence” on his life. The book was an instant bestseller, selling around 5,000 copies in two days, and more than 20,000 copies by 1860. Douglass would write one more autobiography, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, published in 1881 and revised in 1892. . First Edition. Hard Cover. Near Fine.