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Douglass wrote his Narrative both to authenticate his story, and to share his indictment of slavery with a wider audience.

In his pivotal text, Douglass acted as both the narrator and the protagonist, progressing from an uneducated and oppressed enslaved man to a worldly, articulate and rational political commentator. Douglass set out to change that with his memoir and treatise on abolition. Prior to the publication of the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, it was common for whites (both masters and abolitionists) to write stories on behalf of those who were in bondage. Douglass spent the next few years giving hundreds of anti-slavery speeches but frequently encountered hostility from Americans who did not believe that he, such an eloquent and intelligent man, had grown up enslaved. Upon hearing Douglass speak at an anti-slavery convention in Nantucket in 1841, Garrison and his Anti-Slavery Society hired Douglass to travel the country speaking about the injustices and brutalities of slavery. After settling in Massachusetts, Douglass began reading The Liberator and met William Lloyd Garrison. Frederick Douglass, born enslaved around 1818, escaped to the North in 1838.

OWNED BY CONTEMPORARY WOMAN ABOLITIONIST, SUSAN COPLEY CABOT. RARE FIRST EDITION IN ORIGINAL CLOTH WITH IMPORTANT PROVENANCE OF THE BEST KNOWN SLAVE NARRATIVE OF THE ANTEBELLUM PERIOD.