3

INTRODUCTION TO VOLUME THREE xv

twenty years in bondage. Douglass's Narrative enjoyed unprecedented suc-
cess among slave narratives published prior to 1846. Appearing in May
1845, by September of that year it had sold over 4,500 copies, and by 1848
it had been translated into French, German, and Dutch. During its first two
years in print, six new editions were published: two Irish and four English.
A grand total of twenty-one editions had appeared in print a scant six years
after Narrative's first publication. By 1853 approximately 30,000 copies of
the book had been sold.

Garrison arranged for Douglass to tour the British Isles after the publica-
tion of his Narrative. There, the book sold well and provided Douglass with
an oratorical platform from which to denounce the institution of slavery in
the United States. The tour was also timed to protect Douglass from his for-
mer masters, whose identities (as well as his own slave identity) Douglass
had revealed in the book. Experiencing widespread celebrity and presenting
well-reasoned, persuasive, and eloquent arguments against the institution,
Douglass converted a great many of his transatlantic readers and listeners to
the belief that immediate uncompensated emancipation would be the best
course for the United States. While Douglass was exhorting the British to
support abolition in the United States, American southerners, and particu-
larly those who had known Douglass as Frederick Bailey the slave, attacked
the book's veracity. One of Douglass's most vitriolic critics was A. C. C.
Thompson,⁴ whose father, a physician and slaveholder at St. Michaels,
owned a farm not far from that of Edward Covey during the time of
Douglass's work there. Denouncing Douglass's Narrative as a collection of
lies, Thompson defended the character and actions of Thomas Auld in a
public letter to the Delaware Republican calling Douglass "a recreant slave"
and accusing him of perpetrating falsehoods about slaveholders in general.⁵
Thompson's public exchange of letters with Douglass confirmed the authen-
ticity of events reported in the book and increased rather than diminished the
book's popularity.

Although Douglass's British sojourn from 1845 to 1847 was in most
ways a great success, it compromised his relationship with his Garrisonian
mentors. Irish abolitionist Richard Webb, who published an edition of the
Narrative, shared with Douglass a letter from Garrisonian Maria Weston
Chapman, in which she warned Webb to watch Douglass for signs of defec-

^{44. Douglass Papers, ser. 3, 1:86n.}

^{55. John W. Blassingame, "Introduction to Volume One," in Douglass Papers, ser. 2, l:xli; Douglass
to William Lloyd Garrison, in The Frederick Douglass Papers, Series 3: Correspondence, ed. John R.
McKivigan (New Haven, Conn., 2009), 1:81–88.}