Portrayal Strategy of Frederick Douglass - Essay Example

Douglass's narrative about slaveholders was peppered with cruelty making it obvious that in general, slaveholders were cruel. It began with Anthony the superintendent of Colonel Lloyd who allowed the slaves to be maltreated. Colonel Lloyd himself, the boss of Anthony and the wealthiest slaveholder in Maryland whose plantation was known as the Great House Farm had cruel overseers himself who would brutally beat slaves. But the cruellest of the slaveholders in Douglass's narrative was Edward Covey, the famous “slave breaker” who had the perversion of taking pride in taming the slaves. According to the narrative of Frederick Douglas, “Mr Covey had acquired a very high reputation for breaking young slaves, and this reputation was of immense value to him. It enabled him to get his farm tilled with much less expense to himself than he could have had it done without such a reputation” [53]. Thus, this reputation was deliberately concocted by Mr Covey to profit from the slave by making them till his land at a lesser cost under the pain of fear.

Douglass also portrayed his masters as hypocrites particularly Edward Covey who had the pretension of righteousness by donning the mantle of Christian religiosity. In Douglass's narrative, Mr. Covey was singled out as the exemplar of the slave owner’s hypocrisy of pretending to be a good and charitable man but in fact, oppressing another human being through slavery and worst, brutally maltreating the slaves with the pride of breaking them. In Douglass's words, “Mr Covey, he was a professor of religion—a pious soul—a member and a class-leader in the Methodist church. All of this added weight to his reputation as a “nigger-breaker” [53]. It may sound strange but in Douglass's eyes, Mr Covey’s religiosity did not impress him but rather compounded his anxiety as it added to Mr Covey’s reputation as “nigger breaker”.

Douglass also portrayed slaveholders to be greedy and unjust. This portrayal was present in his narrative in the characters of his favourite tormentor Mr Covey, the wealthy landowner Colonel Lloyd and his benign master Thomas. Mr Covey deliberately instilled fear among slaves with his reputation as a “nigger breaker” to short-change them into tilling his lands. Colonel Lloyd on the other hand would provide meager allowances to his slaves while overworking them. Thomas is more subtle in his ways of letting Douglass find employment by calking but still, he was unjust to Douglass. He let Douglass work but his earnings in calking go to Thomas. Douglass bitterly resented this set-up with his narrative that “He received all the benefits of slaveholding without its evils; while I endured all the evils of a slave, and suffered all the care and anxiety of a freeman. I found it a hard bargain. But, hard as it was, I thought it better than the old mode of getting along [84]. But just when he thought that Thomas was different from all the slaveholders in the sense that he do not beat them, he was proven wrong when he came home late from work because the remittance of his earnings was also given late to Thomas. Douglas recalled “I found him very angry; he could scarcely restrain his wrath. He said he had a great mind to give me a severe whipping [84].

Almost unanimously, almost all slaveholders in Douglass's narrative were either cruel or unjust except for a little exception in the person of Mrs Auld who did not maltreat him.  In fact, in her kindness, she offered to teach Douglass how to read and write. But again, the kind persons were overwhelmed in Douglass’ narrative as Mrs Hugh was prevented by her husband from teaching him to write. Mrs Auld’s kindness was evident in Douglass's narrative as he talked of her fondly as she “teach me the A, B, C. After I had learned this, she assisted me in learning to spell words of three or four letters” [36]. His progress was interrupted however when Mr. Auld forbade Mrs. Auld to teach Douglass any further.  Telling her “that it was unlawful, as well as unsafe, to teach a slave to read. To use his own words, further, he said, “If you give a nigger an inch, he will take an ell. A nigger should know nothing but to obey his master—to do as he is told to do [36].

In the end, however, Frederick Douglass still managed to teach himself how to read and write and he even became capable of writing a narrative of his experience as a slave.