The biography begins with Douglass’s public address in April 1876 at the dedication of a statue commemorating Abraham Lincoln’s emancipation of the slaves. The author speculates that Douglass performed a delicate balancing act in his speech between the dream of emancipation realized and the subsequent efforts in slave states to disenfranchise the newly freed slaves.

The narrative then shifts to Douglass’s earliest years. He is born in February 1818 on a farm owned by Aaron Anthony on the eastern shores of the Tuckahoe River in Maryland. Anthony also managed the much larger Wye Plantation 12 miles away. Douglass hardly knows his mother, Harriet Bailey, who works as a field hand at the Wye Plantation. She exists in Douglass’s imagination as a benevolent and beautiful figure who dies prematurely. While there are rumors that Anthony is Douglass’s father, Douglass discredits these stories in later life. Douglass feels that slavery subverts all sense of family relationships, and he perceives himself to be an orphan throughout his life. He later writes, “[Slavery] had made my brothers and sisters strangers to me; it converted my mother who bore me into a myth; it shrouded my father in mystery, and left me without an intelligible beginning in the world” (17).