Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass

by Frederick Douglass

The first step in her downward course was in her ceasing to instruct me.

Someone will commit murder if put in the right circumstances. This is a similar situation.

and no precaution could prevent me from taking the ell.

“You will be free as soon as you are twenty-one, but I am a slave for life! Have not I as good a right to be free as you have?”

They gave tongue to interesting thoughts of my own soul,

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 reduced us to slavery. I loathed them as being the meanest as well as the most wicked of men.

that very discontentment which Master Hugh had predicted would follow my learning to read had already come, to torment and sting my soul to unutterable anguish.

I envied my fellow-slaves for their stupidity.

I saw nothing without seeing it, I heard nothing without hearing it, and felt nothing without feeling it.

be a slave for life. He

White men have been known to encourage slaves to escape, and then, to get the reward, catch them and return them to their masters.

I would then make the letters which I had been so fortunate as to learn, and ask him to beat that. In this way I got a good many lessons in writing, which it is quite possible I should never have gotten in any other way.

We had no more voice in that decision than the brutes among whom we were ranked.

it was their base ingratitude to my poor old

grandmother. She had served my old master faithfully from youth to old age. She had been the source of all his wealth; she had peopled his plantation with slaves; she had become a great grandmother in his service. She had rocked him in infancy, attended him in childhood, served him through life, and at his death wiped from his icy brow the cold death-sweat, and closed his eyes forever. She was nevertheless left a slave—a slave for life—a slave in the hands of strangers; and in their hands she saw her children, her grandchildren, and her great-grandchildren, divided, like so many sheep, without being gratified with the small privilege of a single word, as to their or her own destiny. And, to cap the climax of their base ingratitude and fiendish barbarity, my grandmother, who was now very old, having outlived my old master and all his children, having seen the beginning and end of all of them, and her present owners finding she was of but little value, her frame already racked with the pains of old age, and complete helplessness fast stealing over her once active limbs, they took her to the woods, built her a little hut, put up a little mud-chimney, and then made her welcome to the privilege of supporting herself there in perfect loneliness; thus virtually turning her out to die!

Not to give a slave enough to eat, is regarded as the most aggravated development of meanness even among slaveholders.

A great many times have we poor creatures been nearly perishing with hunger, when food in abundance lay mouldering in the safe and smoke-house, and our pious mistress was aware of the fact; and yet that mistress and her husband would kneel every morning, and pray that God would bless them in basket and store!

adopted slaveholders are the worst.

Prior to his conversion, he relied upon his own depravity to shield and sustain him in his savage barbarity; but after his conversion, he found religious sanction and support for his slaveholding cruelty.

in justification of the bloody deed, he would quote this passage of Scripture—“He

Men use the church and doctrine to justify their actions. This happened with the witch trials too.

Here was a recently-converted man, holding on upon the mother, and at the same time turning out her helpless child, to starve and die! Master Thomas was one of the many pious slaveholders who hold slaves for the very charitable purpose of taking care of them.

Mr. Covey had acquired a very high reputation for breaking young slaves, and this reputation was of immense value to him.

“nigger-breaker.”

making us feel that he was ever present with us.

he sometimes deceived himself into the solemn belief, that he was a sincere worshipper of the most high God; and this, too, at a time when he may be said to have been guilty of compelling his woman slave to commit the sin of adultery.

I was broken in body, soul, and spirit.

Slaves were too broken to break free. They were never able to have the desire to be free because they were too tired and broken. All they could do was be compliant.

My natural elasticity was crushed, my intellect languished, the disposition to read departed, the cheerful spark that lingered about my eye died; the dark night of slavery closed in upon me; and behold a man transformed into a brute!

“You are loosed from your moorings, and are free; I am fast in my chains, and am a slave! You move merrily before the gentle gale, and I sadly before the bloody whip! You are freedom’s swift-winged angels, that fly round the world; I am confined in bands of iron! O that I were free! O, that I were on one of your gallant decks, and under your protecting wing! Alas! betwixt me and you, the turbid waters

roll. Go on, go on. O that I could also go! Could I but swim! If I could fly! O, why was I born a man, of whom to make a brute! The glad ship is gone; she hides in the dim distance. I am left in the hottest hell of unending slavery. O God, save me! God, deliver me! Let me be free! Is there any God? Why am I a slave? I will run away. I will not stand it. Get caught, or get clear, I’ll try it. I had as well die with ague as the fever. I have only one life to lose. I had as well be killed running as die standing. Only think of it; one hundred miles straight north, and I am free! Try it? Yes! God helping me, I will.

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

but at this moment—from whence came the spirit I don’t know—I resolved to fight; and, suiting my action to the resolution, I seized Covey hard by the throat; and as I did so, I rose.

This battle with Mr. Covey was the turning-point in my career as a slave. It rekindled the few expiring embers of freedom, and revived within me a sense of my own manhood.

and I now resolved that, however long I might remain a slave in form, the day had passed forever when I could be a slave in fact. I did not hesitate to let it be known of me, that the white man who expected to succeed in whipping, must also succeed in killing me.

From what I know of the effect of these holidays upon the slave, I believe them to be among the most effective means in the hands of the slaveholder in keeping down the spirit of insurrection.

This will be seen by the fact, that the slaveholders like to have their slaves spend those days just in such a manner as to make them as glad of their ending as of their beginning.

took a long breath, and marched to the field,—feeling, upon the whole, rather glad to go, from what our master had deceived us into a belief was freedom, back to the arms of slavery. I have said that this mode of treatment is a part of the whole system of fraud and inhumanity of slavery.

The practice is a very common one.

For of all slaveholders with whom I have ever met, religious slaveholders are the worst.

Becuse they use the religon to justify bad actions

Does he ever venture to suggest a different mode of doing things from that pointed out by his master?

more attentive to the class, love-feast, prayer and preaching meetings, or more devotional in his family,—that prayed earlier, later, louder, and longer,—than

Those that overcompensate their religous acts are usually hiding a nasty side and are the most cruel.

This superstition is very common among the more ignorant slaves. A slave seldom dies but that his death is attributed to trickery.

Folklore?

for they had much rather see us engaged in those degrading sports, than to see us behaving like intellectual, moral, and accountable beings.

Their minds had been starved by their cruel masters. They had been shut up in mental darkness.

I will give Mr. Freeland the credit of being the best master I ever had, till I became my own master.

I say, this picture sometimes appalled us,

There was to much at stake and not a lot of hope for success.

For my part, I should prefer death to hopeless bondage.

The responsibility of success or failure lay heavily upon me.

Christian

I was kept in such a perpetual whirl of excitement, I could think of nothing, scarcely, but my life; and in thinking of my life, I almost forgot my liberty.

I have found that, to make a contented slave, it is necessary to make a thoughtless one. It is necessary to darken his moral and mental vision, and, as far as possible, to annihilate the power of reason. He must be able to detect no inconsistencies in slavery; he must be made to feel that slavery is right; and he can be brought to that only when he ceases to be a man.

for I feared that the giving me a few cents would ease his conscience, and make him feel himself to be a pretty honorable sort of robber.