My Bondage and My Freedom

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Pull quotes

• Douglass portrays himself as the reluctant prophet who must tell his story with a principle at stake for the 'whole human family.'
• Such a claim for the public duty of writing a second autobiography reflects just how much this new literary self-creation was a political act.
• The humanity of his people must be demonstrated before a racist world.

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Pull quotes

• For my own part, I had now become altogether too big for my chains.
• The book first recounts Douglass's early life in Maryland and the violence of his youth.
• Then his life as a freeman and his work alongside other abolitionists to end the inhuman institution.

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Pull quotes

• Douglass's major inspiration to escape slavery was his soon-to-be wife Anna.
• His first attempt, in 1837, fails and lands him locked in a jail.
• Eventually the two move to New Bedford, Massachusetts, a hotbed of abolitionist activity in the North.

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Pull quotes

• No sympathy was ever showed towards a slave from the behalf of a slaveholder or an overseer.
• Thus the realities of slavery opened before him.
• The narrator portrays the life of a slave and relationships established between slaveholders and slaves.