“you have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man.”

4.5

The power of this book comes, in large part, from the fact that it is autobiographical. It is also eloquently written. While Douglass does describe his emotions in terms such as torment and despair, the general sense of the writing is factual and unadorned. The truth is that the facts don't need any hyperbole to have an emotional impact on the reader, and Douglass clearly understood this. As a reader from the UK, I probably don't have the same perspective as a US reader. I'm assuming that a US reader will be more familiar with the life and times Douglass describes and therefore, perhaps, the shocking nature of those life and times won't have the same impact on everyone. But I could well be wrong about that. Nonetheless, everyone should read this.

*The life of Frederick Douglass was different than that of the average slave.
The first event that shaped Frederick Douglass life was moving to Baltimore and meeting his new mistress Mrs. Auld. She taught him the alphabets. He never looked back on slavery the same away again after he started to read. He started to self teach himself how to write and he got his hands on whatever he could get, he became more aware of the white man’s power to enslave the black man. The more he read, the more he became aware of his miserable condition. He hated his position and he hated the white folk for their self-entitled superiority by taking him and his fellow enslaved brothers of the same kind from Africa and putting them as means of cheap labor. His mentality shifted from that of ignorance to knowledge, and with it came the prejudice that follows. Ignorance was a bliss it seemed to Frederick, but it was too late for him, he could no longer pretend he was content (Especially after coming to Baltimore and determining to make that new place his happy home), Learning how to read freed his mind from the old ways of thinking. He read about stories of other black people who escaped, but the more he read the more he wished himself dead, for it only showed that there can be no true freedom except in death. Reading set him apart from fellow ignorant slaves who were not aware of their miserable and sad existence. Reading gave him little comfort and great deal of sadness, knowing of his state and condition of wretched being.
The spark that ignited the idea of him escaping was not his own but those of a few good Irishmen he encountered on the wharf when petitions from the north were being discussed and the word abolition was in the air. They advised him as a lad to leave and run away to the north, he dismissed the idea with perplexity on his feature, but in his head it became a resolution that needed execution.
As Douglass gets older, he starts to experience the suffering of being a slave. He was equipped with determination so that nothing could break him. His master realized that no abuse he could possibly think of, nor whip lashing would be to an avail. It was decided that he would be handed to a man named Edward Covey, he was a “nigger-breaker” and so Frederick Douglass was sent to work on the field for the first time.
He stayed there for a year and during the first six months, he would get a whip lashing that would leave him sore till the next whipping came along, not a week went by without him being whipped senseless. He was being worked till exhaustion. Hunger was a thing that haunted him quite often and never left his side. What he endured in labor and what he couldn’t in hunger have left his spirit vacant. His rebelliousness to escape was replaced with that of submission. They have succeeded in breaking him and he became timid and weak. He was that of a broken body, soul and spirit. He was too exhausted to think of reading and writing or entertain any thoughts of escaping. His escape was again in forms of suicide and death.
Douglass feels alive again, rekindling the thoughts of freedom and setting them ablaze after his battle with Mr. Covey. It was the second turning point for him towards his journey to ending his slavery and becoming a free man. After the first six months of being in the hands of Mr. Covey, Douglass, feeling like a dead man with nothing to lose and only after failing to get the help he desperately wanted from his original master, decides that he will take no more whipping. He comes back full of resilience to fight the constant beating and rises to attack Mr. Covey, who in turn, shrieks from the attempt and never lays a hand on Douglass for the remainder of those last six months.
Life treated him good in the hands of his new master Mr. Freeland. He worked a whole year without being whipped, but even though he was treated fairly, his heart was determined and his mind was set upon becoming a free man and so, he devised a clever plan that would allow him to escape to New York with his slave brothers around Easter time, yet alas, his plan was a failure. It was never executed nor edged him closer to his goals.
The last event took place when Frederick Douglass learned the art of using mallet and iron; he became a calker and an experienced one at that. He began to conduct his own contracts, find the sweet balance of work and leisure time and most importantly, earn his own wages. It should come as no surprise that after all his hard labor during the week, his master, Master Hugh, ends up earning that money. He began to feel, yet again, the weight of slavery upon his shoulders, and even though he was never better off before as he is now, with all the idle time he could spend, he did nothing but revoke those old notions of rebelling to become free. His increasing ease in life only sought to make his hardships in thoughts of being in chains hardens and suffocate him. For he is no longer the ignorant slave after having read his first letter and uttered his first word. Slavery he could no longer withstand unless he ceases to be a man.
Despite his master’s effort’s in trying to maintain an outward sense of peacefulness by giving Douglass a percentage of his earning, it only helped revoke his rebelliousness even further because it conveyed to Douglass that he did have a right in earning those wager in full. He contracted the work and earned the money, his master had no role to play in earning that money, he did not own it, but he owned him; Douglass felt more oppressed than ever before and so, he began to plan his escape.
*Slaves were being used like cattle and sheep, a source to earn money, wages or free labor. When Douglass starts learning his trade, his master demanded his wager, his greed to earning easy cash through his slave corrupted him and made him demand more in return for Douglass’s entitlement to seek labor, make contracts and earn money.
Mr. Covey, a man of limited means seeks to increase his wealth by using his slave Caroline as a “breeder”. He impregnates her using a rented slave, who is to married to another woman, to get with his slave girl every night! The slave girl, after a year gives her master twins. The master is happy, having increased his net worth by owning more slaves. Slavery corrupted him. A religious man on the surface not only disregards the sanctity of marriage of the slave he rented, but of the virtue of his own slave girl, as if she is not a woman nor a human being with moral standings or honorable conduct but a cow to be bred and farmed with utter obedience and utmost level of compliance.
Mrs. Auld, a genuinely kind woman who showed Frederick Douglass kindness and taught him the alphabets, soon morphed into a cruel beast on demands of her husband. she was kind to him because she never owned a slave before and treated him as she would a human being, but soon after, that changed and a different tune was sung. She thought slavery needed hardship and fear to earn respect. Her owning a slave corrupted her. Slavery made her not only stop teaching him to read and write, but also resent what she had already taught him, she could never take that away from him though.

An incredibly important piece of American literature, that i think not everyone should read not just Americans. This was especially saddening to read with the current problems in the USA.

This book should be required reading for US History courses. And I am stunned that the book has not been made into a major motion picture movie yet. It has all the cinematic elements that an audience would expect.

Wow, that piece on Christianity in America!

While I was familiar with the general facts of Frederick Douglass's life, I'd never read any of his autobiographies until now. This book should definitely have been taught in my high school—but as is so often the case (especially in some parts of the South), slavery was pretty glossed over. This brief but powerful account includes both Douglass's first-hand experiences as a slave and some eloquent thoughts on intellectual liberty, human dignity, and the hypocrisy of those who claimed Christian values while owning slaves.