Plantation owners in the south hunted for, captured, and enslaved African Americans to do a wide variety of work at the plantations. Even though these slaves would get regularly whipped for arbitrary reasons, the owners and masters believed that it was in the best interest of the slaves to be in slavery. A slave masters wife started teaching a slave by the name of Fredrick Douglass how to read because she believed he would not have gotten the chance to learn if he was not in slavery. Slave masters also knew the slaves had a better live because they had food to eat. They claimed that if the slaves had not been captured or born of a slave family, they would not have had the adequate amount of food to survive. Douglass refutes that humanitarian views towards slavery are wrong by giving his insight on how he was dehumanized by slavery in the following ways: his ability to learn basic life skills, how to care and have a voice for himself and lastly, the gift of happiness.
The living conditions of Douglass and his fellow slave mates were not the first priority for the slave owners and masters. The slaves slept on what is described as the cold, damp floor every night and had no separate quarters (Douglass 23). Douglass recalls having huge cracks in his feet due to the fridged temperatures in the winter and having nowhere to escape from the elements. Not only did they have to sleep in the cold, they were made to work out in the field with clothing similar to what they wore in the summer months. Masters allotted their slaves a limited amount of food per week and to share between all of them. That small amount of food did not support the nutrition that a hard working slave needed.
To add onto the fact, slaves worked out in the blistering h...
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...re they would not develop the “natural affection of the mother for the child” (Douglass 16). With that being said, children brought up in slavery had not experience the feeling of unconditional love and have likewise will be hard to for them to love others.
After reading the narrative that Fredrick Douglass wrote about his life in slavery, escaping, and ultimately living a free life, I believe that slave owners could have treated slaves better, yet still have gotten the same amount of work from the slaves. If the slaves had adequate amount of food and clothing and were not whipped, they would have gotten more work done. If slaves had been treated like this, I believe the word “slave” would not have the same meaning but rather as a human employed for work. The abolition of slavery has given humans the ability to freely choose how we live and spend our everyday life.
Moreover, Frederick Douglass never ever in his entire life did he get to see his White father. Well he only knew that his father was but, nothing else. But he believed that’s his White father was his master. His master’s name was Aaron Anthony. So when Frederick Douglass was left abounded he had to leave with his grandmother to a plantation in Maryland. When Douglass the age of seven he started to witness slavery and racism. He witnessed firsthand brutal painful whippings to his fellow friends.
Douglass was not aware of what slaves were and why they were treated in a bad condition before he learns how to read. He was deeply saddened upon discovering the fact that slaves were not given the rights every human being should have. In an effort to clarify Douglass’s feelings of anguish, he states: “In moments of agony, I envied my fellow slaves for their stupidity” (Douglass 146). The fact that other slaves are content with their lives is what brings awareness to him because he knows that he is stripped of basic human rights. He envies his fellow slaves due to the reason that they are pleased with the life he cannot live to like anymore. Also, he is often wishing he never learned how to read because he doesn’t want to burden about his life. Douglass knows more about the disturbing conditions than most of the slaves around him, but he greatly regrets it. Before he started reading, he lived very much in contentment and now he cannot stand the fact of being
Douglass believed the slaves suffered immensely when it came to everyday living conditions. He writes on page 13 the slaves did not have beds, or the time to sleep. He talked about most slaves only having one coarse blanket and one common bed which was the cold, damp, floor. In contrast, Canot justified the sleeping conditions on the ship by saying “that native Africans are not familiar with the use of feather – beds.” The slaves on the ship were forced to sleep naked, side by side, and on the bare floor. He also did not even give them a
He believed that the ability to read makes a slave “unmanageable” and “discontented” (2054). Douglass discovered that the “white man’s power to enslave the black man” (2054) was in his literacy and education. As long as the slaves are ignorant, they will be resigned to their fate. However, if the slaves are educated, they would understand that they are as fully human as the white men and realize the unfairness of their treatment. Education is like a forbidden fruit to the slave; therefore, the slave owners guard against this knowledge of good and evil.
Slavery is a system under which people are treated as property to be bought and sold, and are forced to work. Slavery was cruelty at its best. Slavery is described as long work days, a lack of respect for a human being, and the inability for a man or a woman to have gainful employment. The slaves were victimized the most for obvious reasons. Next on the list would be the families of both the slave and slave owners. At the bottom of the list would be the slave owners. Slavery does in fact victimize slaves, slave owner and their families by repeating the same cycle every generation.
Frederick Douglass emphasizes the dehumanization aspect of slavery throughout his narrative. As is the general custom in slavery, Douglass is separated from his mother early in infancy and put under the care of his grandmother. He recalls having met his mother several times, but only during the night. She would make the trip from her farm twelve miles away just to spend a little time with her child. She dies when Douglass is about seven years old. He is withheld from seeing her in her illness, death, and burial. Having limited contact with her, the news of her death, at the time, is like a death of a stranger. Douglass also never really knew the identity of his father and conveys a feeling of emptiness and disgust when he writes, "the whisper that my master was my father, may or may not be true; and, true or false, it is of but little consequence to my purpose" (Douglass, 40). Douglass points out that many slave children have their masters as their father. In these times, frequently the master would take advantage of female slaves and the children born to the slave w...
Like most southern slave owners Thomas Auld was a cruel master who always disciplined his slaves for their wrong doings. He was a cowardly man because he didn’t have the ability or courage to properly hold slaves, but “he found himself incapable of managing his slaves either by force, fear, or fraud” (pg. 380). Auld was a merciless man that worked the slaves to the limit and barely gave them enough to eat. Douglass mentioned how often slaves stole food in order to survive and to prevent from becoming ill. “We were therefore reduced to the wretched necessity of living at the expense of out neighbors. This is what we did by begging or stealing […]” (pg. 379). Most slave owners were unsympathetic towards their slaves; however, Douglass found from experience that “adopted slaveholders are the worst”. Since adopted slave owners were married into slave owning and weren’t raised among slavery, Douglass believed that they didn’t know how to tr...
When first introduced to Douglass and his story, we find him to be a young slave boy filled with information about those around him. Not only does he speak from the view point of an observer, but he speaks of many typical stereotypes in the slave life. At this point in his life, Frederick is inexperienced and knows nothing of the pleasures of things such as reading, writing, or even the rights everyone should be entitled to. Douglass knowing hardly anything of his family, their whereabouts, or his background, seems to be equivalent to the many other slaves at the time. As a child Frederick Douglass sees the injustices around him and observes them, yet as the story continues we begin to see a change.
According to Douglass, the treatment of a slave was worse than an animal. Not only was he valued as an animal but also a slave was reduced to an animal when he was as much a man as his keeper. The mental faculty a slave had was diminished through the forbidden nature of reading and learning, as well as the constant drunkenness imposed on the slaves during holidays.
Frederick Douglass was born into slavery; that's what he thought he was going to be for the rest of his life. Later on he was tempted to do more, much more than to be someone's property. Whenever he could, he would turn children into teachers. “This bread I used to bestow upon the hungry little urchins , who, in return, would give me that more valuable bread of knowledge.”
In order for Douglass to reach his goal of becoming a free man he thought the only way out was education. He needed to learn how to read, write, and think for himself about what slavery was. Since literacy and education were so powerful to Frederick he persevered to get himself the education he wanted. …. Douglass knew it wouldn’t be easy, but that didn’t stop him. Douglass realized the “ conscious of the difficulty of learning without a teacher, I set out with a high hope, and
Douglass' enslaved life was not an accurate representation of the common and assumed life of a slave. He, actually, often wished that he was not so different and had the same painful, but simpler ignorance that the other slaves had. It was his difference, his striving to learn and be free that made his life so complicated and made him struggle so indefinitely. Douglass expresses this in writing, "I envied my fellow-slaves for their stupidity. I have often wished myself a beast It was this everlasting thinking of my condition that tormented me" (Douglass, 53). In his narrative, Douglass does generalize to relate his experience to that of other slaves, creating a parallel between his life and the life of any other slave. He writes about the brutality, physi...
Slave owners in the South were some of the most cruel and inhumane human beings out there. They used many tactics to maintain a prosperous system of slavery amongst them. Like many, Frederick Douglass was born a slave. Deprived of as much as possible, Douglass knew not much more than his place of birth. Masters were encouraged to dispossess slaves of any knowledge and several of them did not know their birthdays or other personal details of themselves. The purpose of this was to keep slaves as misinformed of anything other than labor as possible. Slave owners knew the dangers that would upraise if slaves became literate and brave enough to fight for freedom.
Within the “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave” Douglass discusses the deplorable conditions in which he and his fellow slaves suffered from. While on Colonel Lloyd’s plantation, slaves were given a “monthly allowance of eight pounds of pork and one bushel of corn” (Douglass 224). Their annual clothing rations weren’t any better; considering the type of field work they did, what little clothing they were given quickly deteriorated. The lack of food and clothing matched the terrible living conditions. After working on the field all day, with very little rest the night before, they must sleep on the hard uncomfortably cramped floor with only a single blanket as protection from the cold. Coupled with the overseer’s irresponsible and abusive use of power, it is astonishing how three to four hundred slaves did not rebel. Slave-owners recognized that in able to restrict and control slaves more than physical violence was needed. Therefore in able to mold slaves into the submissive and subservient property they desired, slave-owners manipulated them by twisting religion, instilling fear, breaking familial ties, making them dependent, providing them with an incorrect view of freedom, as well as refusing them education.
Douglass's narrative is, on one surface, intended to show the barbarity and injustice of slavery. However, the underlying argument is that freedom is not simply attained through a physical escape from forced labor, but through a mental liberation from the attitude created by Southern slavery. The slaves of the South were psychologically oppressed by the slaveholders' disrespect for a slave’s family and for their education, as well as by the slaves' acceptance of their own subordination. Additionally, the slaveholders were trapped by a mentality that allowed them to justify behavior towards human beings that would normally not be acceptable. In this manner, both slaveholder and slave are corrupted by slavery.