Frederik Douglas: Story of a Former Slave

Fredrick Douglass was a former slave, talented writer and outspoken abolitionist. Douglass was a slave from Tuckahoe, Maryland who fled to New York and than later on to Massachusetts. He was born into slavery and was officially sent to a plantation to work at the age of seven. Prior to working in the fields he, as well as other slave children, was raised by an older woman. This was commonplace for the slave families, according to Douglass, "it's a common custom to part children from their mothers at a very early age. Frequently, before the child has reached it's twelfth month, it's mother is taken from it, and hired out on some farm a considerable distance off, and the child is placed under the care of an old woman, too old for field labor" (Douglass, 2). A man named Captain Anthony, who was aid to have been Douglass's father, owned Douglass's mother. Due to a series of deaths within his family, which would later include the Captain himself, there were a number of property disputes. Douglass was constantly shifted back and forth from Baltimore to the south. After a failed attempt at escaping he was sent back to Baltimore.

The life of a slave was an unfair and unjust degrading way to live. "I was often awakened at the dawn of the day by the most heart-rending shrieks, the louder that they screamed the harder they got whipped. Where the blood ran the fastest, there he whipped the longest" (Douglass, 3). Slaves were classified as property; they were inferior creatures that were not considered human. They were given the bare minimum to survive and no more. They were given two shirts, a pair of pants, a pair of stockings and a pair of shoes to last them the year. The slaves were not even given the simple luxury of beds or pillows and blankets. Douglass addresses how the institution of slavery narrows slaves' opportunities for self-knowledge. Slave owners hid information from the slaves about their birth dates to keep them from developing any form of a personality. "It is the wish of most owners to my knowledge to keep their slaves thus ignorant" (Douglass, 1). Douglass felt strongly against the fact that owners withheld such vital information from the slaves. He said, "most slaves do not know how old they are more than horses do" (Douglass, 1).