Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass

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This book is a treasury of information that corrects the superficial view of the history of American slavery that seems to have developed under the pressure of partisanship. In this book, Frederick Douglass, born Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey, describes the life of a slave in ante bellum Maryland.

Douglass was born in approximately 1822 in Maryland. The approximation was necessary because slaves did not know or keep track of their birthdate as to either the date or year. Douglass reflects that this was an artifact of slave culture which took slave children from their mothers at an early age to retard the normal bond between mother and child. Douglass only saw his mother a few times, and she seems to have died when he was young. Nonetheless, one of Douglass's more poignant stories is how is his mother would walk all night from where she was enslaved in order to lay down with Frederick while he slept, only to leave well before dawn so that she could return to work.

Douglass experienced the various situations of slavery in Maryland. He was initially maintained on a farm, then spent his childhood in Baltimore, before returning to field work under a “Negro-breaker.” Finally, he returned to Baltimore where he learned the trade of caulking ships. In this position, he negotiated his own contracts, collected his own wages and turned those wages over to his masters.

Douglass' devotion to reading and education is inspirational. He began to be taught to read by one of his early mistresses, but she stopped the education when her husband objected that learning to read would spoil Douglass as a slave. Douglass then worked out ways to learn the alphabet, to read, and eventually to write. Reading opened up the world to Douglass, but it also showed him the limits of his condition. After reading “one of Sheridan's mighty speeches on and in behalf of Catholic emancipation,” Douglass writes:

“What I got from Sheridan was a bold denunciation of slavery, and a powerful vindication of human rights. The reading of these documents enabled me to utter my thoughts, and to meet the arguments brought forward to sustain slavery; but while they relieved me of one difficulty, they brought on another even more painful than the one of which I was relieved. The more I read, the more I was led to abhor and detest my enslavers. I could regard them in no other light than a band of successful robbers, who had left their homes, and gone to Africa, and stolen us from our homes, and in a strange land and reduced us to slavery. I loathed them as being the meanest as well as the most wicked of men. As I read and contemplated the subject, behold! that very discontentment which Master Hugh had predicted would follow my learning read had already come, to torment and sting my soul to unbearable anguish. As I writhed under it, I would at times feel that learning to read had been a curse rather than a blessing. It had given me a view of my wretched condition, without the remedy. It opened my eyes to the horrible pit, but no ladder upon which to get out.”

That is an awesome and awe-inspiring passage.

Douglass detested slavery. He shows us that slavery is detestable in dehumanizing human beings, both slaves and masters. The hopelessness of the condition of slaves was remarked upon by two Irish workers he met who could not wrap their mind around the permanence of slavery. Douglass describes the institutionalized violence of whipping and the occasional murder when slaves did not obey, or, perhaps, obeyed but not perfectly.

A passage that compares the free North and the Slave-holding South got me to thinking about the essential alienness of the South for us moderns. Douglass compliments the clean and bourgeoisie towns of the North where there were no whipping posts and a large section of the population didn't run around half-naked or in rags.

No whipping posts. What would it be like to live in a society where that level of violence was casual and institutionalized? Would we want to leave in that society? Would we feel comfortable living a society where a substantial portion of the population was ready to torture, maim and kill other people for not working hard enough?

It would be like living in Carthage.

Douglass wrote this memoir when he was in his late twenties and had just recently fled the South. He is very specific in not sharing how he made his escape, although he does describe how his original plan was betrayed by other slaves. The virtue of this memoir is that it allows us to see the reality of the culture that Douglass lived in, unfiltered by contemporary ideology.

Perhaps that is the reason that Douglass has become the forgotten man of American history. He shows that history is complicated. Rather than a narrative of institutional racism on the part of whites, we have many whites - the abolitionists - who reach out to Douglass and other blacks to show them kindness. These whites treated Douglass and other free blacks as their social equals in employment and the abolition movement.

Of course, there were many racist slave-owners. Douglass despises the religious hypocrites who claimed to be Christian one moment but held humans in bondage, committed adultery with slaves, and whipped slaves the next. A not insignificant part of Douglass' thesis is that these people were deformed by slavery as much as the slaves.

This is a short book and a quick read. I recommend it to those interested in history or in different cultures.