Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. Dover Publications Inc., New York: 1995.

Frederick Douglass was born sometime in 1817. His exact date of birth is not known because Douglass was born into slavery. He was also of mixed race and believed his father was his first master Captain Anthony. Douglass’ autobiography is his account of slavery and the ideas he produced from his experiences written to express his views and opinions. Douglass’ personal experience with the brutality and oppression of slavery is vividly told with great detail. Not only does he describe the horrors and evils of slavery, he tells how he believes the institution was able to survive for so long.

The greatest fear of any slave owner was that of a slave rebellion. Douglass states the many ways he encountered, of making slaves submissive despite their advantage in number. In several instances he uses the imagery of a slave beating to support his stance on abolition. Slave owners used the physical abuse as a way to “break” slaves and make them do what they were told or punish them for disobeying. However slaves were not only mistreated physical

I thought one of the best points Douglass made throughout the book was the way he saw the corruption of the slave owners family. An example is when a slave owner has a child with a slave. These children were sometimes singled out by the masters wife and treated even worse than normal because they were proof of her husbands sin and lack of commitment. These children were usually sold by the master to keep them away from the angry wives and to get rid of the reminder of adultery, but this, at the same time, forfeits his responsibility as a father. So simply put, the master is caught with a kind of double-edged sword, because by trying to be a good husband/father he is having to be a bad husband/father at the same time. This I take as proof of slaveries deviant nature and evidence that slavery is basically wrong on all fronts.

One important point he makes is that slave owners prevented slaves from developing a sense of self. As in Douglass’ case this began on the very day a slave was born by keeping their date of birth from them. The slave owners thought no more of the slaves than they did any other animal on their farm and it was important that the slaves made no distinction between the two either. Another way in which slave owners ruled over slaves was that they kept families from forming. By keeping a family separated or diluting the importance of family the owner made certain that no feelings of unification would form be

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