In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Fleshing Out Abolitionist History:The Cases of Tubman and Douglass
  • Carol Margaret Davison (bio)
John W. Blassingame, John R. McKivigan and Peter P. Hinks, eds. The Frederick Douglass Papers. Series Two: Autobiographical Writings. Vol. 2: My Bondage and My Freedom. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003.
Jean M. Humez . Harriet Tubman: The Life and the Life Stories. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003.
Kate Clifford Larson . Bound for the Promised Land: Harriet Tubman, Portrait of an American Hero. New York: One World Ballantine, 2004.

As Adam Hochschild makes clear in his recent riveting book Breaking the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Shores, abolitionism was a multifaceted and broad-based transatlantic movement whose full history has yet to be written. For his contribution, Hochschild sketches out a compelling overview of this movement, filling in many outstanding gaps relating to its key players and components.

Three recent North American publications adopt Hochschild's agenda to expand the history of abolitionism. In the process, among other questions, complex issues relating to the aims, nature and limits of historical biography and autobiography are raised.

Jean M. Humez's Harriet Tubman: The Life and the Life Stories and Kate Clifford Larson's Bound for the Promised Land: Harriet Tubman, Portrait of an American Hero, two biographical accounts of the life of [End Page 311] Harriet Tubman, as well as a new edition of Frederick Douglass's second autobiography, My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), a publication of the Frederick Douglass Papers project at Yale, provide welcome additions to abolitionist scholarship. Despite the very different nature of their subjects—Douglass was a private, analytical and self-reflexive autobiographer, while Tubman was an illiterate, tireless activist who related life stories and anecdotes to various audiences and selected scribes—each of the three books aims to uncover private lives, thoughts and motivations. Given the nature of the available historical documents and resources for Douglass and Tubman, each author/editor approaches the issue of life writing in a radically different way and obtains different results.

Long regarded as the foundational literary genre in the history of African-American self-expression, ex-slave narratives are mixed forms vexed by categorical uncertainty. In 1988, in the face of scholars who denied ex-slave narratives the label "autobiography," which then connoted an androcentric genre chronicling the public life of a public white man, John Sekora defiantly deemed ex-slave narratives a politically powerful collective species of African-American autobiography. Arguing that to deny them authority was "to poison the well of African-American writing," Sekora advanced the following claim:

The [ex-slave] narrative is the only moral history of American slavery we have. Outside its pages, slavery for black Americans was a wordless, nameless, timeless time. . . . The written narrative encouraged a recollection that could be tested, corrected, replenished. Such recollection could then be united with other life stories to inscribe a history, a time beyond personal memory, a time beyond slaveholders' power.

Although Sekora positions the ex-slave narrative at the crossroads of an individual and collective enterprise, abolitionists proscribed the chronicling of an individual life and promoted a collective design aimed at describing the experience of slavery to an ignorant audience. In the 1850s, on the heels of the publication of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), the American public clamoured for written and oral narratives dealing with the lives of former slaves. In 1855, the thirty-eight-year-old Frederick Douglass rose to the occasion for the second time, with the publication of My Bondage and My Freedom, a volume that has since achieved [End Page 312] special status as the first ostensible black autobiography, as it exploded the narrow conventions of the slave narrative form. My Bondage and My Freedom was, in its essence, a revision of The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845), which poignantly and graphically recounted Douglass's experience under, and escape from, slavery. It annexed a more fully fleshed out, poetically meditative version of The Narrative to four chapters discussing Douglass's life and observations as a free man in the North who had been engaged in the abolitionist movement for seventeen years...

pdf

Share