Frederick Douglass: The Separation Of Slave Children

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Recommended: Role of slave mothers

To imagine a life without your mother is hard to do for most people. Even if your mother was not there, you still had someone with you that took care of you as you grew up. Unfortunately, for many slaves this was not the case. Almost all slaves were separated from their parents around the age of one year. They did not know their age, their birthday, or their parents while they continued working for the masters of the plantations. Frederick Douglass was one of these many slaves. He always once spoke about this saying, “I could not tell why I ought to be deprived of the same privilege.” Frederick, like most others, had no idea why someone would separate them from their parents, but continued working anyway. The separation of slave children to their parents was cruel, but it made it easier to hold the slaves and keep them working. When separated from their mothers, slave children would not leave the plantation and no emotional bonds would be created. …show more content…

Throughout a child’s life, they grow strong emotional bonds to things and one of these, quite possibly the strongest bond, is to their parents or guardians. A child would grow up and be distracted by parents’ death. This would hinder the ability to work due to depression. Frederick Douglass said, “ . . . I received the tidings of her death with much the same emotions I should have probably felt at the death of a stranger.” This is just one of the quotes that prove they had no emotional bond to their mothers because of the separation at such a young age. The master wants the full amount of attention given to work. As a parent, you would want to focus on keeping your child safe and educating them to learn right from wrong. This would become a major distraction from the work that needed to be done in the fields. If the child is separated from it’s mother, the mother will go back to working and not having to care for the life of a new

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