The Life of Frederick Douglass

The Life of Frederick Douglass

Frederick Douglass brilliantly intelligent and defiant once led a minor insurrection against his masters and escapes his venture alive. Douglass’s career as a militant, uncompromising leader of the American Negro.

A fugitive slave who was taught to read by his slave mistress, and who as an ex-slave, became the most famous and articulate rebuke to the monstrous institution of slavery ever to speak or to write in America.

In autumn of 1828, Frederick Douglass began his new life as a freeman in the old whaling city of New Bedford, Massachusetts.

Ambition, sensitivity, and a high degree of self-consciousness created in the young slave Douglass an unquenchable thirst for freedom and he became what every slave master feared, a smart and uppity Negro who would be content with nothing less than his freedom. A first attempt at escape ended in failure and with time in jail. The second attempt, however, was successful. He fled to New York City, where he married a free Negro woman with whom he moved to New Bedford. He was to date his freedom form September 3, 1838.

Douglas relentless exposure of the moral ambiguity of a Christian civilization which was built upon the gross inhumanity of chattel slavery. The White Christian South saw no such moral ambiguity. In fact, they read the Bible as a justification of their way of life, and resented bitterly the charge of northerners that they were un-Christian and immoral because of their support of slavery. They delighted in pointing out that nowhere in scripture is slavery condemned, and they even suggested that slavery was a form of evangelism without which the poor ignorant heirs of Africa would never have heard of the gospel and thus would be unable to know the joys of heaven.

Christianity stands against everything which is represented in a culture that makes peace with oppression on this subject there can be neither apology nor compromise.

With new found wealth purchased his freedom, a controversial more objected to by certain of the abolitionist who regarded the purchase of liberty as recognition of the legitimacy of bondage.

The term of the slave code: a piece of property, a beast of burden, chattel personal.

Slavery was a poor school for the human intellect and heart.

By the slave code, they are adjudged to be as incompetent to testify against a white man, as...

... middle of paper ...

...ility to manage slaves, to whip, alarm their fears a strike terror. Look word motion mistake accident want of powers all matters for which a slave may be whipped at anytime.

Minds had been starved by their cruel masters. Been shut up in mental darkness.

To make a contented slave, it is necessary to make a thoughtless one. It is necessary to darken his moral and mental vision and as far as possible, to annihilate the power of reason. He must be able to detect no inconsistencies in slavery; he must be made to feel that slavery is right; and he can be brought to that only when deceases to be a man.

The motto which I adopted when I started from slavery was this trusts no man. I saw in every white man an enemy and in almost every colored man cause for distrust.

Douglass changed his surname to conceal his identity after escaping slavery in 1838.

Life in the city was a turning point in Douglass life. It was there he learned how to read. Douglass later wrote that literacy was his pathway from slavery to freedom.

Douglass made an unsuccessful attempt to escape slavery. In 1838 Douglass posing as a freedman sailor successfully escaped to Philadelphia and then to New York.