Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass

Life as a slave began as a child, from being separated from your mother to the uncertainty of who you were or who your father was. Frederick Douglass was half white but did not know exactly who his father was masters. “The opinion was also whispered that” his master might have been his father, “but of the correctness of this opinion” could not be proven since the only person who knew was his deceased mother.  As enslaved children, they had to live through frightening events in the hands of brutal masters.  He describes his account of waking up in the middle of the night to one of his masters beating up his “own aunt” whom the master use to tie up and beat her until no word, cry, prayer was heard.  He remembers how the master would beat on her harder and harder so her screams would increase in tone and he could continue. This was Douglass’ first introduction to slavery.

People sometimes argued that masters were like parents to a slave, and in a very minimal sense they were. As described by the Narrative in chapter two, masters would provide slaves with a monthly allowance of food which consisted of “eight pounds of pork” and eight of fish, a “bushel of corn meal” which can be equivalent to about 64 pints. Slaves had to be able to survive hard working days, they had to be healthy in order to be able to work therefore some white people argued that they were feeding them in exchange for labor. This was clearly not their main purpose, if the slaves could survive working without eating whites would have probably not fed them.  Frederick Douglass also describes the yearly worth robe allowance, two rough linen shirts, a pair of linen trousers, one jacket, one pair of trousers made of “negro cloth” for the winter, a single pair of stockings, and a pair of shoes.  Children were expected to live with two linen shirts per year and if they outgrew them or they fell apart, they would have to be naked for the rest of the year. 

The Narrative of the life Frederick Douglass is not a narrative of only how the brutality of masters affected slaves in the United States in this period of history but how society view slaves as an inferior species. Douglass describes on chapter four how the killing of a person that was black was not considered a crime of if questioned could easily be dismissed by a silly story. Mr. Gore a much respected, cold hearted, brutal slave owner killed slaves for no excusable reason but did not face any charges or any courts. He cold heartedly shot Demby because he had become “unmanageable” and could influence other slaves to do the wrong thing. Another story Douglass mentions is about Ms. Hicks who beat one of her slaves to death with a stick because she had fallen asleep and left the child crying. The coroner examined the slave’s body and said the she was beaten to death. However, nothing happened to Ms. Hicks, she was served a warrant for her arrest, but no one served it.

An important fact to learn from the Narrative is that slaves during this time were uneducated people and that played a big role in why they allowed themselves to withstand so much horror and pain. Slaves had no sense of what day it was or what was happening around them. They could not form alliances of plan rebellions, most resources were held by whites and no white was going to risk his life or dignity to help a slave. Whites believed that slaves could not make friendships with others therefore would never be able to form a large group of people to fight for the cause, but Douglass had been a slave and knew that they would die for each other.  He mentions in his narrative a that once a slave obtains knowledge of the evils of the life he is living and how wrong and unfair the entire society is the slave would now have the same chance to do what Frederick Douglass did which was to escape. There was no excuse for slavery and there will never be any as we have seen from this narrative.

Work Cited

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself. Ch 2 N.p.: n.p., n.d. N. pag. E-Text. Web. 11 Nov. 2012. <>.

Eric Foner, Give Me Liberty!:An American History (New York: W.W. Norton, 2011),