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Appendix A. Reader Responses, 1855-56

The following are contemporary published reviews of Bondage and Freedom located by the editors. Those lengthy passages excerpted from Bondage and Freedom have been abridged. Deleted passages are indicated by ellipses and by bracketed notations of their page and line numbers in both the Yale edition and the 1855 copy-text. Some reader responses could be found only in Douglass's own newspaper.

LIFE IN BONDAGE AND FREEDOM. [Anon.] New York Daily Tribune, 15 August 1855. Excerpt reprinted in FDP, 21 September 1855; New York Radical Abolitionist, 2:3 (November 1856) Supplement.

If success in life is any criterion of ability, Frederick Douglass has fairly won his claim to the title of an uncommonly able man. He has overcome obstacles which no one in his position has ever before been called to encounter. Doomed by his birth to bondage, ignorance, and degradation, he has literally broken the fetters of Slavery, secured his place as an equal in the ranks of freemen, attained distinction as a writer, public speaker, and member of an intellectual profession, and gained possession of an influence which he has nobly exerted in behalf of human
rights. The life of such a person belongs to history. The truthful narrative of its events must be full of instruction as well as of exciting interest. Confined to plain matters of fact, without the embellishments of fancy, it would present a study equally significant to the philanthropist and the student of human nature. The author has wisely taken this view of the subject, and endeavored to give merely a literal transcript of his past experience. He claims that there is not a fictitious name or place in the whole volume, and that every transaction occurred as therein described. We know no reason to mistrust the accuracy of this statement. His story reads like an "o'er true tale." It exhibits all the natural marks of probability. Nothing is related to which a parallel may not be discovered in other veracious accounts of Southern life. At the same time the startling revelations which abound in his volume, give it the glow and often the pathos of a high-wrought fiction.

Douglass was born in Tuckahoe, a barren, famine-stricken, and unhealthy district on the eastern shore of Maryland. Like other slaves he is ignorant of his age, though from certain events, the dates of which have come to his knowledge, he supposes that his birth took place about the year 1817. His earliest remembrances were of the family of his grandmother and grandfather. They were advanced in life, and had long lived on the spot where they then resided. His old grandmother was a distinguished personage among the blacks, and was even held by the whites in un-

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