美国内战与重建美国内战与重建transcript05.doc

Civil War and Reconstruction: Lecture 5 Transcript
January 29, 2008
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Professor David Blight: In some ways, the greatest witnesses--there are many, many witnesses of ing of the Civil War--what caused it, what's percolating from beneath the society of the South, we've looked at, and the society of the North--and in so many ways, of course, the greatest witnesses--and their stories have only been with us, in a serious, robust way, for the past couple of decades or so, a few decades--are those of the slaves themselves. If it was somehow all about them--and in varying kind of ironic ways folks on both sides will say that--if it is somehow all about them, what did they think?
This week you're reading the greatest of the slave narratives. Frederick Douglass's first autobiography, published in 1845, is, I still would maintain, the greatest of the slave narratives, certainly in a literary sense. He was an almost mystically brilliant writer, for one so young. He first drafted this when he was 26. He escaped from slavery when he was 20-years-old. You'll find out in the text how he learned his literacy. He learned it first from his white mistress, Miss Sophia, who became like an angelic mother-figure to him until she took language away from him.
The book is full of metaphor, it is full of one kind of tale and story after another that Douglass shapes into telling a free story. Telling a free story, as the great literary critic of this genre, Bill Andrews, has put it. For a fugitive slave to emerge in the Northern states--for that matter a fugitive slave who goes to Britain, like Olaudah Equiano did, African born, or so we still think, and writes his story in Britain--but for a fugitive slave to write his or her story and publish it in English in the western world was to say: "I'm a person of letters, I am somebody, I have a history, I am free, but I am not free until you let me write, and I will make myself free, if I must, by telling you who I am." When a fugitive