The True Liberation of Slaves - Essay Example

The True Liberation of Slaves Slavery in America was a life-time condition that extended to include successive generations. It handed absolute power of life and death to the owner providing the slave with no recourse regardless of the conditions, abuse or mutilation. As a means of keeping them in their allotted place, it was actually against the law to teach slaves how to read or write. Many aspects of their lives were designed to dehumanize them. For example, they were separated from their families at very young ages to decrease emotional attachments and were regularly physically and emotionally beaten as a means of keeping them in line. These tactics forced the slaves to adopt survival tactics of living, reinforcing the beliefs of white people that menial labor was all the slaves were capable of – higher thought was clearly beyond the capacity of their more primitive brains. Making the situation even worse, this societal attitude was successful in convincing many of the slaves that these assumptions were correct. Proving that this was not the case, though, was Frederick Douglass. An escaped slave from Maryland, he was the first black man to appear on a presidential ticket in America. Douglass told the world his story revealing in the process how literacy changed him deeply to transform him from a masterless slave to a freethinking human being. These ideas are also revealed in his early narrative Frederick Douglass: Life of an American Slave. Although his exact birth date is unknown, Douglass believed he was born sometime in February of 1818. He died on February 20, 1895. Today’s common perception is that slavery, at least the brutal form of it, was confined mostly in the south on the big plantations yet Douglass witnessed many brutal beatings on his master’s Maryland farm where he lived for his first seven years. As a child, he was often required to endure cold and hunger because the master kept most of the slave-generated products, including food and fuel, for his own comfort and well-being. Normally a very traumatic event for a child, when 7-year-old Douglass’ mother died, he felt almost no grief. “Never having enjoyed, to any considerable extent, her soothing presence, her tender and watchful care, I received the tidings of [my mother’s] death with much the same emotions I should have probably felt at the death of a stranger” (Ch. 1). The important lesson Douglass tries to convey in these early chapters is how the slave is created from birth. He is separated from his family to destroy any natural human feelings of attachment, to cut off any type of interpersonal support and he is cruelly treated to keep him always in fear. By the time Douglass left the farm at age 8, he had learned of the death of his mother, watched his aunt brutally whipped and had been assigned to work in the fields. With no sense of love, togetherness or even basic needs looked to, Douglass illustrates the necessary descent into bestial thinking. In order to survive one more day, he had to think only for that day and only for himself. The servile, grateful manner adopted when in the presence of white people was just one more survival tactic. At eight years old, Douglass was sent to Baltimore to work, still as a slave, for a ship’s carpenter. It was during this first stay in Boston that Douglass became aware that concepts of slavery were not universal (People and Events, 2008). It was also during this period that he was first introduced to the liberating effects of literacy. His new master’s wife was from the north and was unfamiliar with the strategies used by slave-owners to keep the slaves subdued. She treated Douglass with kindness, showed him love and support beyond anything he’d previously experienced and introduced him to the concepts of reading and writing. In Chapter 4, he describes how Mrs. Auld taught him the alphabet and how to put together small words before she was ordered to stop teaching him. Through the learning process, he discovered an unsuspected capacity to think and this capacity made him feel, for the first time in his life, human. Then Douglass heard his mistress being reprimanded by her husband for giving a slave the information he needed to cause a rebellion. “Whilst I was saddened by the thought of losing the aid of my kind mistress, I was gladdened by the invaluable instruction which, by the merest accident, I had gained from my master” (Ch. 6). Through his master’s reaction to the enlightening concepts then emerging in the boy’s head about letters and reading, Douglass made a tight association between the ideas of learning and freedom. He realized, even at that young age, that the key to freedom was in literacy and knowledge and vowed to continue the process. This realization that there was another plane of mental existence that could lead to freedom spurred him to continue learning how to read on his own and to encourage other black people to learn as well. From his early childhood bestiality to this enlightening experience in Baltimore, Douglass again uses his own life to stress the difference between the literate man forced to work for another and the non-literate slave who is not a man even when free. Douglass was returned to brutal slavery when he was 15 and inherited by a new master. Having developed a dangerous sense of independence in the city, Douglass was cruelly beaten every day by the ‘slave breaker’ Edward Covey until he couldn’t take it anymore (People and Events, 2008). Although his ‘education’ in Baltimore had awakened his humanity and intellect, these attributes were not desired in the farm slave. Covey’s brutal tactics worked on his body, mind and spirit to reduce Douglass back to his bestial nature. “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!” (Ch. 10). Within this chapter, Douglass illustrates how the brutal conditions of slavery function to drive thought and humanity from the mind, but that literacy and learning were capable of opening the mind and spirit to entirely new possibilities. Only when he is finally pushed beyond the limits of endurance is he able to overcome the shackles of slavery in his mind and determine to be free. After beating up Covey and attempting to escape, Douglass was caught and sent back to Baltimore as a slave, but once there, he was able to put together a more successful plan of escape. He borrowed the identification papers of a sailor friend of his and made a second, and this time successful, escape attempt on September 3, 1838 (McElrath, 2008). For the rest of his life, Douglass worked diligently to bring freedom to his race by encouraging literacy and thought. In his speaking appearances and in his narrative, he demonstrates that slaves do not necessarily have a natural inclination towards laziness or a mental inability to process complicated information more than any other race of men. The slaves’ mental state is in bondage as the result of the conditioning experienced throughout his lifetime without the benefit of education or training in something better. At the time this first book was published, it broke open the subject of slavery by providing mental encouragement to other slaves that the internal bonds of slavery placed upon them could be broken through education and literacy. Coupled with the speeches he gave throughout the north with the abolitionist movement, it also revealed the psychological conditioning that was occurring in the south to create an illusion that slavery was justified. By telling his story in the way that he did, Douglass demonstrated that the making of a slave was not limited to the black man, but was effective in training a man of any color to take on the role of slave. He openly discusses the inner attributes of a slave that must be overcome individually in order to become a truly free man with or without a master and points to literacy as a means of lighting that candle. In expressing these ideas, he captures the danger of a mindset in limiting a person’s potential, regardless of race or gender. They are concepts well-understood by people today trapped within low-wage jobs and women trapped within the concept that her role is simply and only mother and homemaker. Although these may be expressed as only mental states, Douglass reveals their stark reality. In telling his own story, Douglass illustrates how true freedom can only be found in letters. Works Cited Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. Yale University Press,2001. McElrath, Jessica. “The Life of Frederick Douglass.” African-American History. About.com. (September 30, 2008). “People and Events: Frederick Douglass, 1818-1895.” Africans in America. New York: Public Broadcasting Station (PBS), 2008. Read More