The Life of Frederick Douglass

Frederick Douglass brilliantly intelligent and defiant once led a minor insurrection against his masters and escapes his venture alive. Douglass's career as a militant, uncompromising leader of the American Negro.

A fugitive slave who was taught to read by his slave mistress, and who as an ex-slave, became the most famous and articulate rebuke to the monstrous institution of slavery ever to speak or to write in America.

In autumn of 1828, Frederick Douglass began his new life as a freeman in the old whaling city of New Bedford, Massachusetts.

Ambition, sensitivity, and a high degree of self-consciousness created in the young slave Douglass an unquenchable thirst for freedom and he became what every slave master feared, a smart and uppity Negro who would be content with nothing less than his freedom. A first attempt at escape ended in failure and with time in jail. The second attempt, however, was successful. He fled to New York City, where he married a free Negro woman with whom he moved to New Bedford. He was to date his freedom form September 3, 1838.

Douglas relentless exposure of the moral ambiguity of a Christian civilization which was built upon the gross inhumanity of chattel slavery. The White Christian South saw no such moral ambiguity. In fact, they read the Bible as a justification of their way of life, and resented bitterly the charge of northerners that they were un-Christian and immoral because of their support of slavery. They delighted in pointing out that nowhere in scripture is slavery condemned, and they even suggested that slavery was a form of evangelism without which the poor ignorant heirs of Africa would never have heard of the gospel and thus would be unable to know the joys of heaven.

Christianity stands against everything which is represented in a culture that makes peace with oppression on this subject there can be neither apology nor compromise.

With new found wealth purchased his freedom, a controversial more objected to by certain of the abolitionist who regarded the purchase of liberty as recognition of the legitimacy of bondage.

The term of the slave code: a piece of property, a beast of burden, chattel personal.

Slavery was a poor school for the human intellect and heart.

By the slave code, they are adjudged to be as incompetent to testify against a white man, as though they were indeed apart of the brute creation. There is no legal protection in fact, whatever there may be in form, for the slave population; and any amount of cruelty may be inflicted on them with impunity.

Those slaveholders have ordained, and by law established, that the children of slave woman shall in all cases follow the condition their mothers.

One great statesman of the south predicted the downfall of slavery by inevitable laws of population. This prophecy is ever fulfilled or not, it is nevertheless plain that or a very looking different class of people are springing up at the south, and are now held in slavery, from those originally brought to this country from Africa, and if their increase will do no other good, it will do away the face of the argument that God cursed ham, and therefore American slavery is right. If the lineal descendants of ham are alone to be scripturally enslaved, it is certain that slavery at the south must soon become unscriptural; for thousands are ushered into the world, annually, who, like myself over their existence to white fathers and those fathers mot frequently their own masters.

Going to live as Baltimore laid the foundation and opened the gateway, to all my subsequent prosperity. The entertainment of a deep conviction that slavery would not always be able to hold me with its foul embrace.

Mrs. Auld very kindly commenced to teach me the A, B, C. After I had learned this she assisted me in learning to spell words of three or four letters. Point of progress Mr. Auld forbade Mrs. Auld to instruct me further it was unlawful, as well as unsafe, to teach a slave to read. A nigger should know nothing but to obey his master to do as he is told to do. Learning will spoil the best nigger in the world. It world forever unfit him to be a slave. Unmanageable, no value to his master. Could do him no good but a great deal of harm. Make him discontented and unhappy. To wit, the white man power to enslave the black man is to understand the pathway from slavery to freedom to learn how to read. Learning to read it is an inspiration a desire and determination to learn.

Succeeding in learning to read and write. Depravity and mental darkness, that education and slavery incompatible. Learning to read had been a curse rather than a blessing opened to horrible it. The silver trump of freedom had roused my soul to eternal wakefulness. Freedom now appeared, to disappear no more forever.

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

The battle with Mr. conveys 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. It recalled the departed self-confidence, and inspired me again with a determination to be free. A glorious resurrection, from the tomb of slavery, to the heaven of freedom.

The duty of a master occasionally to whip a slave, to remind him of his master's authority. Such was his theory, and such his practice. Ability to manage slaves, to whip, alarm their fears a strike terror. Look word motion mistake accident want of powers all matters for which a slave may be whipped at anytime.

Minds had been starved by their cruel masters. Been shut up in mental darkness.

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 deceases to be a man.

The motto which I adopted when I started from slavery was this trusts no man. I saw in every white man an enemy and in almost every colored man cause for distrust.

Douglass changed his surname to conceal his identity after escaping slavery in 1838.

Life in the city was a turning point in Douglass life. It was there he learned how to read. Douglass later wrote that literacy