Frederick Douglass

Narrative of The Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave was first published in 1845. His first autobiography was so popular he actually ended up writing three different versions of his story called “ The Narrative”, “ My Bondage and My Freedom” and “ Life and Times of Frederick Douglass” . Something interesting about this narrative is that in the preface Frederick Douglass  William Lloyd Garrison ( a white abolitionist from the north) explains that everything in the narrative is true and that story isn’t milked or exaggerated. Frederick Douglass starts his narrative out by explaining how he is separated from his mother and doesn't actually know when his birthday is. He explains that it's very common for slaves not to know that much about their families or even themselves. Douglass starts out working at Colonial Lloyd's form but eventually is sent off to Baltimore to work for a ship carpenter named Hugh Auld. He finds out that working in the city is a lot different than working out in the country. In Baltimore his owners wife started teaching him how to read. She taught him the letters in the alphabet but Hugh quickly stepped in and stopped these lessons. He was sent back Colonial Lloyd's farm. This is when he actually understands what really means to be a slave. He is treated horribly and beaten very badly. He eventually escapes and settles down in Massachusetts and marries a free black women.

What I thought was super interesting was the change that Sofia goes through after Hugh Auld forces her to stop teaching Douglass. He actually tells her that helping him learn would spoil him as a slave. That it will make him “unfit” to be a slave. If he could read he would no longer be manageable as a slave.  Before this event, Douglass describes her as a loving, kind, caring women who did not own any slaves. She isn’t really sure how she “supposed” to treat slaves. Soon after her husband tells her to stop teaching him,  she turned into an incredibly cruel and awful slave owner. She became cold and nasty. She would relentlessly beat and scream at Frederick Douglass. He specifically says that at own point she actually “charged” at him. I think Frederick Douglass uses Sofia’s complete changeover to show how slavery not only affects blacks but also affects the white people. It’s not a one-sided thing, it affects all the people involved and everyone around it. It is impossible to not be affected by such a traumatic thing. It turn even the kindest people into monsters. And it’s not even just the men, it is the women too. We often look at the men as the rough and masculine one. The one that would beat and kill people. We have this idea of what a women should behave like and what a man should behave like. But with slavery, all bet’s are off. The women are just as bad as the men. They can just as easily turned from soft to hard. Sofia is the perfect example. She starts off kind and caring and quickly turns into a woman full of hatred. Slavery affects everyone, and I think that is a major message that Frederick Douglass is trying to send to his readers.

Owning slaves was a very common among white people for many, many years. There were lots of different views and opinions on the subject. Thomas Jefferson was actually one the major advocates for the abolition of slavery. What interesting about Thomas Jefferson is that he was completely against slavery and that it was an awful and cruel practice yet, he was still extremely racist. He thought slaves needed less sleep, that they weren’t as good as white people, they weren’t as smart or intelligent, and that they were animals. If you would like to read more about Thomas Jefferson and his opinion on slavery I suggest reading this article. https://www.monticello.org/site/plantation-and-slavery/thomas-jefferson-and-slavery. It goes into more detail on his attempt to abolish slavery and his racial beliefs. But back to Frederick Douglass, Hugh Auld didn’t think that slaves should learn how to read or write because it would ruin him as a slave and it would make him unmanageable. Thomas Jefferson believed that they simply couldn’t learn to read or write because they were incapable of doing so. Even though their ideas and opinions on blacks learning is slightly different they are still very closely related. They both play into the racist idea that blacks are inferior to whites. They simply can never be a good as whites. And this thought process is one of the major reasons why slavery went on for so long. And why it negatively affected many people.  

Sources:
Baym, Nina, and Robert S. Levine. The Norton Anthology of American Literature. 8th ed. Vol. A. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2013. Print.