March 9, 2010:


A Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave,
Written by Himself

Allan Lewis
History 2400
Professor Ross Cameron
 

I am glad the time has come when the "lions write history". We have been left long enough to gather the character 
of slavery from the involuntary evidence of the masters. (1)

(1) Excerpt from a letter from Wendell Phillips, Esq. To Frederick Douglass, April 22, 1845, Boston MA, quoted 
in A Narrative of the Life of an American Slave, (New York: Random House, 1989), page xxi, by Frederick Douglass.


Frederick Douglass was born into slavery about 1818 on a plantation in Talbot County, Maryland, USA. By 1845 he was a free man 
living in New Bedford, Massachusetts, and had written a book (a primary document) describing conditions in the pre-civil war 
American south. Two letters by prominent northern abolitionists form a preface to this book. William Lloyd Garrison, who 
founded the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1830, and Wendell Phillips both endorse the book as an accurate picture of the 
experiences of the life of one southern slave and also as a useful source for exposing the general and particular evils of 
slavery and supporting the abolitionist cause. 

The abolitionist movement gathered strength starting about 1820. Gradually white society in the north questioned slavery on moral 
grounds and by 1830, slaves had been emancipated in South America, the Caribbean and Mexico. The book by Frederick Douglass 
re-inforced the contemporary abolitionist position and today, serves as a window into the institution of slavery.

Frederick Douglass had two white masters before gaining his freedom.  The patriarchal society which existed in the south in 
the first half of the nineteenth century is exemplified by his relationships with his masters, their families, overseers, 
lower-class white society and the slave community. His first master, Captain Anthony may have been his father. Frederick 
Douglass lived on the plantation of Captain Anthony until the age of seven. He uses this period of his life to explain the 
slave experience and society in the American rural south. His life spent with his second master, Mr. Thomas Auld in
Baltimore, illustrates the urban slavery experience. As a child on the plantation, Frederick first worked in the Big House, 
a position of higher status than that of the older field hands. Working in the Big House involved close contact with genteel 
southern family life. It afforded him the chance to surrepticiously learn to read and write. Literacy was one measure of 
a slave's "independence" and increasing rates of literacy would later become one measure of the progress of American blacks 
after emancipation.
 
In 1838 Frederick Douglass escaped from his life of slavery and made his way, initially to New York city, and then to 
New Bedford, Massachusetts. The reader is then given a northern perspective of slavery, both from the black viewpoint 
of Mr. Douglass and his wife and the  perspective of supportive whites and abolitionists. Here another irony occurred. 
Trained in the shipbuilding trade, Mr. Douglass was unable to gain employment at his skill due to the white tradesmen 
refusing to work with black workers. The "free" labour market of the northern economy excluded free blacks. This was 
similar to his experience while working away from the plantation for wages while a slave in  Baltimore.

While in New Bedford he became involved in the meetings and work of black abolitionist groups and a subscriber to William 
Lloyd Garrison's Liberator. Gradually the details of his life became generalized by the northern abolitionists.
A Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglas, an American Slave gives a thorough documentation of slave life and society 
in the pre-Civil War era - from childhood to adulthood, urban and rural, north and south. It probes the depth of the 
degradations of everyday slave life and provides insight into the southern economy, culture and social conditions and 
the southern legal system as it affected slaves. 

Several articles both elaborate on the book by Frederick Douglass and provide different perspectives. Peter Kolchin in 
"The White South: Society, Economy, Ideology"  , discusses how slavery permeated all aspects of the south. It retarded 
southern economic development and urbanization. Based on the production of agricultural staples without a free market 
in its labour force, the south lacked the commercial and manufacturing institutions and infrastructure of the north. 
Per capita income and the standard of living of most of the population was much lower in the south. Politically, in the 
half century before the Civil War, the south gradually became more insular and conservative. Financial and banking 
centers were located in the north. Capital investment in transportation systems (roads, canals and railways) was 
concentrated in the northern states. The developing cities of the north attracted the bulk of nineteenth century 
immigration. The south had a distrust of urbanization, partly because of the difficulty of controlling slaves in an 
urban environment. Throughout the world-wide history of slavery, the American south was alone in its willingness to
go to war to preserve its lifestyle.
 
"The Masks of Obedience: Male Slave Psychology in the Old South" by Bertram Wyatt-Brown explores the personality trade-off 
of male slaves in regards to their subservience, on the one hand, and their honour and independence of thought on the other. 
Three categories of male subservience are described. First, the inherent pride and dignity of many slaves from Africa 
allowed them to retain a strong sense of self identity and thereby withstand the radical adaptation to life on a plantation 
in America. Secondly, a sense of shame and lack of self-worth kept many slaves subservient by habit, even after emancipation 
or relaxation of slave customs by enlightened slave owners. Third, the "Sambo" image whereby a male slave was able to 
assume a semi-fantasy world based on deceit was a common survival method. The tone of the slave-master relationship, 
established by the individual master, determined the form of obedience adopted by the slave. In the case of Frederick Douglass 
many references are made to the debilitating emotional effects of slavery on his life - the contrast he felt seeing white 
persons and freed slaves in comparison to his own life. In addition to the psychological damage done by slavery, throughout 
the book are many references to physical violence perpetuated by persons in power.

Drew Gilpin Faust, in  "Culture, Conflict and Community: The Meaning of Power on an Ante-bellum Plantation", describes the
complex social relationships within the slave community on the plantation of James Henry Hammond in Georgia.
Rather than using strict physical force, such as whippings, Hammond and his slave community worked out power relations 
by a system of informal daily negotiations. This strong slave "family" was able to successfully maintain and practice their 
religion, achieve the best working conditions within their system and acquire amenities such as holidays. There were 
some attempts at escape but only by slaves who had no close family ties to the slaves at Silver Bluff. If not caught and 
sold, runaways quite often returned of their own volition to their community. This sense of community and identity to 
particular slave communities sometimes led to a sense of pride in their own plantation. Frederick Douglass describes 
how slaves on his own plantation defended their sense of place even to the point of violence against slaves from 
neighbouring plantations.
 
The final article "Jezebel and Mammy" by Deborah Grey-White discusses two opposite perceptions of female slaves - that of 
a promiscuous temptress and that of a strong, matriarchal and super-competent household administrator and mother figure. 
The many individual family relationships and roles of black women are illustrated in the book by  Frederick Douglass. 
The difficulty in keeping slave families intact when any member could be sold away at any time and the degradation of 
black women at the hands, not only of white males, but black men too are shown to contribute to deep stresses on family 
life. For instance, while working for Mr. Covey, a small-time white farmer who had a reputation of being able to "break" 
slaves, Mr. Douglass  describes how black men and women were chained together in hopes of increasing the capital stock of slaves.

There were many paradoxes to slavery. In a country which had been created on the principles of freedom and equality, how could 
a society and economy based on a minority of aristocratic landowners who owned human beings as property, continue to exist? 
The institution of slavery was perversely defended by the south as being the "freedom" to own slaves. How could a Christian 
society, experiencing the religious fervour following the Second Great Awakening, justify slavery? Again, twisting logic 
the defenders of slavery stated that the African-Americans had been saved from a heathen African society. Thomas Auld, 
Mr. Douglass's  second master, ironically became more inhumane after experiencing a religious conversion at a Methodist 
camp meeting in 1832.  Mr. Douglass was of the opinion that the worst masters and overseers were the devout Christians. 
A slave labour market was justified by claiming that the slaves had more economic security than the poor white wage earners 
who worked in the factories in northern cities and in Britain. However, at times as a slave Mr. Douglass worked alongside 
white labourers who discriminated against him. The heirarchical, conservative southern society was held to enforce superior 
social controls than did the free labour system of the north which was subject to labour violence, insecurity, poverty and 
riots. The legal system held many inequities between black slaves and white society.  Reform influences in the north, such 
as the labour movement, feminism and the development of left-wing local politics were all seen by the southern aristocracy 
as detrimental to their ordered society.
 
The publication of Frederick Douglass's book in 1845 provided ammunition for the anti-slavery cause and helped to win 
over thousands to the cause. His work is an example of how contemporary literature helps to effect social change.

 

 

Bibliography

Douglass, Frederick, A Narrative of the Life of an American Slave, (New York: Random House, 1989).

Gilpin Faust, Drew, "Culture, Conflict and Community: The Meaning of Power on an Ante-bellum Plantation", Journal of Social History, 14:1 (Fall 1980): 83-97.

Grey-White, Deborah, "Mammy and Jezebel", from Ar'n't I a Woman: Female Slaves in the Plantation South (Norton, 1985): 27-61.

Kolchin, Peter, "The White South: Society, Economy, Ideology", American Slavery, 1619-1877,  (Hill and Wang, 1993): 166-199.

Murrin, John et al., Liberty, Equality, Power: A History of the American People, (Belmont: Thomson-Wadsworth, 2003).

Wyatt-Brown, Bertram, "The Masks of Obedience: Male Slave Psychology in the Old South", American Historical Review, (1988): 1228-1252.


 February 27, 2011:

The Bytown or Bust Library now has a copy of The Blacks in Canada. Written in 1971, this
556 page book by Robin W. Winks at Yale University is the authoritative book describing the history of the Black 
community in Canada from 1628 to the 1960's. 
... Al