Up from Slavery by Booker T. Washington: Free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB Download

Free edition · Up from Slavery · 1901

Up from Slavery

By Booker T. Washington — New York: Doubleday, Page & Co., 1901 — (Published 1901) · All Booker T. Washington books

Word Count ~73,000 words (estimated)

Reading Time Approx. 4.1 hours (estimated)

Copyright Status Public Domain in the US; check local laws

Source Project Gutenberg #2376

Source Edition Standard Ebooks edition, based on Project Gutenberg #2376

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The opening of Chapter 1

I was born a slave on a plantation in Franklin County, Virginia. I am not quite sure of the exact place or exact date of my birth, but at any rate I suspect I must have been born somewhere and at some time. As nearly as I have been able to learn, I was born near a crossroads post-office called Hale’s Ford, and the year was 1858 or 1859. I do not know the month or the day. The earliest impressions I can now recall are of the plantation and the slave quarters—the latter being the part of the plantation where the slaves had their cabins.

My life had its beginning in the midst of the most miserable, desolate, and discouraging surroundings. This was so, however, not because my owners were especially cruel, for they were not, as compared with many others. I was born in a typical log cabin, about fourteen by sixteen feet square. In this cabin I lived with my mother and a brother and sister till after the Civil War, when we were all declared free.

Of my ancestry I know almost nothing. In the slave quarters, and even later, I heard whispered conversations among the coloured people of the tortures which the slaves, including, no doubt, my ancestors on my mother’s side, suffered in the middle passage of the slave ship while being conveyed from Africa to America. I have been unsuccessful in securing any information that would throw any accurate light upon the history of my family beyond my mother. She, I remember, had a half-brother and a half-sister. In the days of slavery not very much attention was given to family history and family records—that is, black family records. My mother, I suppose, attracted the attention of a purchaser who was afterward my owner and hers. Her addition to the slave family attracted about as much attention as the purchase of a new horse or cow. Of my father I know even less than of my mother. I do not even know his name. I have heard reports to the effect that he was a white man who lived on one of the nearby plantations. Whoever he was, I never heard of his taking the least interest in me or providing in any way for my rearing. But I do not find especial fault with him. He was simply another unfortunate victim of the institution which the Nation unhappily had engrafted upon it at that time.

The excerpt below quotes the opening three paragraphs of Chapter 1, in which Washington records his birth into slavery in Franklin County, Virginia, the log cabin where he lived, and how little he was ever told about his ancestry.

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Further Reading

Read next: The Souls of Black Folk, Uncle Tom’s Cabin and The Jungle

Free edition

The Souls of Black Folk

By W. E. B. Du Bois · The book that answered Washington’s programme, essay by essay, eight years later

Free edition

Uncle Tom’s Cabin

By Harriet Beecher Stowe · The novel that shaped how Washington’s generation was taught to see slavery

Up from Slavery by Booker T. Washington: Summary, Characters & Themes

Up from Slavery is Booker T. Washington’s autobiography, published in 1901, and the book that fixed his public image for the rest of his life. This page gives a summary and analysis of the whole work, grouped by the movements of his life, together with the historical setting and the arguments that made the book famous. Washington was born into slavery in Virginia, worked as a boy in the salt furnaces and coal mines of West Virginia, and became the founding principal of Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. His life is the book’s subject, and he tells it in the plain, deliberate voice of a man who had spent twenty years asking audiences for money, land and trust. The result is part memoir, part report and part campaign document: it records what happened, explains what the school needed, and argues that the two stories are the same. It sold widely at home and abroad, and it made Tuskegee a national name.

The book has seventeen chapters and a short preface in which Washington explains that much of it was written on trains and in hotels while he travelled for the school, and thanks the young writer Max Bennett Thrasher for his help with the manuscript. The chapters follow his life in order, from the plantation to Malden, Hampton, Tuskegee and the lecture platform, and each one tends to end with a lesson rather than a scene. The style is deliberate: short sentences, few adjectives, and anecdotes that do the work of argument. Readers who know the novel that shaped his generation’s picture of slavery will recognise the moral seriousness of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, though Washington refuses the bitterness that runs through Stowe, and addresses his former masters’ children as neighbours rather than villains. He is asking them for money, and he never lets them forget it. The preface is brief and practical, like the rest of the book.

Tuskegee is the centre of the book. Washington describes buying an abandoned plantation with borrowed money, teaching in a stable and a henhouse, burning three kilns of bad bricks before the fourth succeeded, and feeding students from a basement kitchen with too few dishes. He is careful to say that white Tuskegee supported the school, that the state legislature raised its appropriation, and that Northern donors gave thousands without being asked twice. The chapters on money are unusually frank about credit, debt and the fear of failure. The same faith in practical training runs through the reform literature of the period, including The Jungle, though Washington’s subject is the school rather than the packinghouse, and his remedy is a trade rather than an inspection law. He keeps his accounts, and he expects the reader to notice.

The best-known chapter is the Atlanta Exposition address of 1895. Washington quotes the speech at length: the ship signalling for water, the bucket cast down where you are, the line about being as separate as the fingers and one as the hand. He records the applause, the telegram from Clark Howell calling the address a revelation, and the flood of invitations that followed. He also records the criticism from black readers who thought he had conceded too much, and his refusal to answer it. He had read the address to his assembled teachers the day before he left for Atlanta, and he prayed before he rose to speak. The full text of the address, and the chapters that lead up to it, is available at Project Gutenberg.

The book’s afterlife has been argued over ever since. Washington was the most powerful black man in America when it appeared, consulted by presidents and courted by philanthropists, and the memoir explains how he built that position. Later critics, above all W. E. B. Du Bois in The Souls of Black Folk, read the Atlanta address as a bargain that traded political rights for industrial peace. This edition keeps the whole book available for that argument. It follows the Standard Ebooks text, which is prepared from the 1901 printing, so the chapter divisions and the prose are the ones Washington’s first readers held, and the quotations above can be checked against it. The book has stayed in print ever since, and its account of the school’s first twenty years has not been replaced.

Historical Context

Tuskegee was founded in 1881, sixteen years after the end of slavery and four years after the last federal troops left the South. The Compromise of 1877 had ended Reconstruction; by the 1890s Southern states were rewriting their constitutions to strip black men of the vote, and lynching, convict leasing and segregated travel were facts of daily life. Macon County, where Tuskegee stands, had a black majority, most of it farming land it did not own, as tenants, labourers or smallholders. Any school for black Alabamians in that decade had to raise its own money, because the state paid teachers’ salaries and nothing else. That shortfall explains the book’s endless journeys north.

The 1895 Cotton States and International Exposition in Atlanta was a showcase for the New South, a region eager to attract Northern capital. Its organisers invited a black speaker for the opening day and chose Washington, who had helped lobby Congress for the federal appropriation. The Negro Building at the fair was designed and built by black mechanics, and its exhibits were meant to answer the question the speech raised. His address, delivered on 18 September 1895, was reported in full across the country and made him famous overnight. White Southern editors praised it; black readers were divided. The phrase Atlanta Compromise was applied to it later, by critics who thought the speech accepted second-class citizenship in exchange for economic opportunity. Within weeks, papers from Boston to San Francisco had reprinted the address in full.

Washington’s programme of industrial education was contested from the start. Hampton’s model, which he carried to Tuskegee, taught trades, farming and hygiene alongside reading, and it attracted Northern money because it promised a self-supporting, peaceful South. Critics argued that it narrowed black education to manual work at the very moment when the professions and the ballot were being closed. W. E. B. Du Bois made that case in 1903, and the argument has framed readings of Up from Slavery ever since. Washington answered his critics mostly by building, and the book is his account of what he built, in the order he wanted it understood. The school stayed independent of church and state, governed by its own trustees.

Key Characters & Literary Archetypes

• Booker T. Washington: The narrator, born enslaved in Franklin County, Virginia, in 1858 or 1859. He works in a salt furnace, walks to Hampton, teaches at Malden, and founds Tuskegee in 1881. By 1901 he is the most famous black educator in America, consulted by presidents and trusted by Northern donors. The book is his own account of how that happened, told without self-pity and with an eye on the audience he needed to persuade, and it is also the record of a man who never stopped raising money. His own name, he notes, was chosen at school.
• Olivia A. Davidson: Tuskegee’s co-founder, a Hampton graduate who had taught in Mississippi and nursed through a smallpox case before joining the school six weeks after it opened. She raised money in the North, taught, and married Washington in 1885. She died in 1889, after four years of marriage, having, in his words, worn herself out for the school and the work. Washington says no single person did more to lay the school’s foundations, and he says it twice.
• General Samuel C. Armstrong: The principal of Hampton Institute, the man Washington calls the noblest he ever met. Armstrong built Hampton around the idea that students should work for their board, sent Washington to Alabama, and visited Tuskegee until the year of his death. His last visit, carried by a special train and greeted by a torchlight of pine knots, is one of the book’s closing scenes, and his death is followed by the friendship of his successor at Hampton.
• Lewis Adams: A black mechanic in Tuskegee who had learned shoemaking, harness-making and tinsmithing in slavery and never attended school. With George Campbell he wrote the letter that brought Washington to Alabama. Washington credits such men, trained in a trade before freedom, with much of the practical leadership of the post-war South, and he notes that in most Southern towns the most reliable black citizen was a man who had learned a trade in slavery.
• George W. Campbell: A white merchant and banker, and a former slaveholder, who was one of Tuskegee’s two original sponsors. He advised Washington through the school’s early years, lent his standing to every appeal, and summed up his business philosophy in a sentence Washington never forgot: credit is capital. Washington quotes him more than once, and treats him as the model of the Southern white man who helped the school because it served the town, and who said so plainly.
• Margaret James Murray: Washington’s third wife, a Fisk graduate from Mississippi who came to Tuskegee as Lady Principal and married him in 1893. She ran a mothers’ meeting, a plantation mission and a woman’s club, and presided over the Federation of Southern Coloured Women’s Clubs. The last chapters describe her work as part of the school’s, not as an ornament to it, and they show how much of Tuskegee’s community work went on outside the classrooms and after the bells.

Core Literary Themes

• The dignity of labour: Washington’s central claim is that work is not a punishment but the ground of respect. The Tuskegee students build their own buildings, grow their own food and make their own bricks, and he reads their reluctance as the inheritance of slavery, which had taught that manual work belonged to slaves. His answer is not argument but example: a graduate who grows 266 bushels of sweet potatoes on an acre where the county average is 49, and whose white neighbours come to him for advice. Parents who wanted nothing but books were persuaded by such results, not by speeches, and the school measured itself by what its graduates could do. The phrase he uses is dignity, and he means it literally.
• Self-help and the useful life: The book is a manual of self-improvement as much as a memoir. It teaches the toothbrush, the nightgown, the saved dollar, the kept promise and the clean room, and it measures progress by houses bought, land cleared and money in the bank. Washington’s test of a person is whether he can do something the world wants done. It is a demanding creed, and it explains why he had so little patience with complaints that came without work behind them, and why he thought a trade was worth more than a grievance, and a school that taught both worth more than either. He wanted graduates who could keep accounts as well as crops.
• Reconciliation and its limits: Washington’s programme depends on white goodwill, and he works hard for it. He refuses bitterness, praises the Southern whites who helped the school, and insists that rights will come from the South itself rather than from outside pressure. The limits are visible in the same chapters: he does not demand social equality, he asks black voters to follow their neighbours, and he accepts that the first generation of students must prove itself before it can claim more. He calls the agitation of social equality the extremest folly, and the sentence is the one later critics never forgave. He knew what he was saying, and he said it in Atlanta, not in Boston.
• Money, credit and character: No memoir of the period says more about fundraising. Washington writes about pawned watches, drafts that arrive when the account is empty, donors who refuse him and then send ten thousand dollars two years later, and the humiliation of asking. He treats money as evidence of character, both in the giver and in the school, and he insists that the institution be run on strict business lines, with books a New York bank would approve. The chapters on money are the most concrete in the book, and the least sentimental about charity. He never pretends that asking was pleasant.
• Memory and the freedom generation: The early chapters are among the fullest accounts by a former slave of what Emancipation felt like: the mother’s prayers, the stranger reading the proclamation at the big house, the rejoicing and then the dread of responsibility, the older people who drifted back to the plantation. Washington writes as a member of the last generation born in slavery, and the book is partly a record for those who would not remember. The later chapters keep returning to that beginning, and the last page returns to Richmond, where he once slept under a sidewalk and later spoke in the Academy of Music. The circle is deliberate, and it closes the book.

Why Download Our Custom E-Reader Edition of Up from Slavery?

Up from Slavery has never been out of print, and cheap reprints often reset the text from whatever copy was nearest to hand. This edition follows the Standard Ebooks text, prepared from the Project Gutenberg transcription and checked against scans of the 1901 printing, with the chapter divisions and the original byline intact. That matters for a book quoted so often in fragments, and for a memoir whose chapter order is part of its argument: a reader who meets the speech alone misses the twenty years of asking that made it possible.

The arrangement is deliberate. Washington puts the Atlanta address in the middle of a life, between the brick kilns and the fundraising journeys, so that the speech reads as one episode in a long campaign rather than a single performance. A text that skips or reorders chapters loses that framing, and the closing pages in Richmond lose their force. Read in order, the book shows how the famous words were earned, and how quickly the earnings went back into bricks, beds and board.

If you want to compare editions, the complete text is also available at Project Gutenberg, where the 1901 printing can be read online or downloaded as plain text. Set a passage beside the files here and you can see for yourself how little the Standard Ebooks compositors changed. The chapters, the byline and the spelling are the same, and the text has been read against the scans line by line.

• Based on the Standard Ebooks Edition, via Standard Ebooks, whose text is prepared from the Project Gutenberg transcription and checked against scans of the 1901 printing; the chapter numbering and the byline follow that edition.
• A guide to the whole book, not only the famous speech Ten chapter groups cover all seventeen chapters, and the Tuskegee years, the fundraising trips and the European journey get as much room as the Atlanta address, which is how Washington himself balances the book.
• History kept in its own section The page separates what Washington says from what later historians add, so the summary never attributes to the book a fact that is not in it, and the context section can be read on its own.
• Clean text for e-readers The EPUB, AZW3 and KEPUB files are built from the Standard Ebooks edition, with working contents links, proper italics and no page scans, so the book reads the same on a phone, a tablet or a dedicated reader.

Part of: Classic Fiction · Victorian era