3 quotations linked to My Bondage and My Freedom by or associated with Frederick Douglass, with source notes, explanations and related topics.
Freedom, literacy, self-respect, identity, resistance, perseverance, work and the lived consequences of slavery.
Use these links when you want to inspect the wording in its wider work or edition.
“I WAS A MAN NOW.”
The emphatic line records Douglass’s restored sense of manhood and dignity after resisting physical domination; it belongs to a specific autobiographical struggle against enslavement.
My Bondage and My Freedom, immediately after Douglass describes his resistance to Covey; capitalization follows the represented Project Gutenberg text.
“I was a changed being after that fight.”
Douglass identifies resistance to Covey as a decisive psychological turning point in which a previously crushed sense of agency and personhood begins to return.
My Bondage and My Freedom, Chapter XVII, ‘The Last Flogging,’ Project Gutenberg #202. Douglass calls his fight with Edward Covey the turning point in his ‘life as a slave’ and writes ‘I was a changed being after that fight’ immediately before ‘I WAS A MAN NOW.’ The passage is autobiographical testimony about resistance to enslavement and restored self-respect, not a universal prescription for violence or a clinical theory of agency.
“Yet I did hope for success, and persisted in the undertaking.”
Douglass links hope with continued effort: uncertainty about the outcome does not prevent him from persisting in a difficult undertaking.
My Bondage and My Freedom; Douglass is recounting one of the practical struggles through which persistence accompanied his pursuit of greater freedom and independence.
