This paper examines the early life of Frederick Douglass, born Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey in 1818, tracing his formative experiences under slavery on the Lloyd Plantation. It covers his harsh upbringing under slave master Aaron Anthony, his witnessing of brutal violence against enslaved people, and the pivotal role that literacy played in shaping his determination to seek freedom. The paper also discusses his confrontation with the slave breaker Edward Covey, his failed escape attempt, and his ultimate successful escape to New York in 1838, where he married Anna Murray and launched his career as an abolitionist.
Frederick Douglass was actually born with the name Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey on February 14, 1818. The son of an unknown white man and an enslaved mother, Frederick spent the first few years of his life being raised by his grandmother. Betsey Bailey took care of all of Harriet's children until they were old enough to be put to work. The cabin in which Frederick grew up with Betsey and the other children was several miles from Holmes Hill Farm, and his mother was rarely able to visit. Because of this, Douglass had only indistinct and incomplete memories of his mother. He remembered his grandmother far more vividly, but not always fondly — at the age of six, without any explanation of what was happening, his grandmother took him to a nearby plantation and left him with his siblings who were already there, then disappeared without saying goodbye. This was Frederick Bailey's real introduction to slavery, and his lifelong struggle against the system that permitted the enslavement of human beings — even children — had begun.
Douglass himself noted that the life of a slave child is not as horrific as it might sound, mainly because children are ignorant that there is more to life, and also because slave masters had little reason to be abusive toward children who posed no threat. As long as the slave child was powerless, the master had nothing to worry about. Yet when Douglass looked back on these days as an adult, he was able to appreciate the horrors to which he had been subjected in a way that his child's mind — probably for very good reasons — simply could not grasp at the time.
While at the Lloyd Plantation with his brothers and sisters, Frederick was forced to eat corn mush out of a trough, and he and his siblings fought over every last bite. This, however, was not the worst of his troubles as a slave under Aaron Anthony, the slave master of the Lloyd Plantation. Anthony beat slaves simply for taking too long to obey orders — something which Frederick experienced himself several times. One of his earliest encounters with the brutal treatment of enslaved people came when he forced himself to watch his aunt, Hester Bailey, receive a whipping — frightened both by the sight of the whip and lash marks and by his aunt's screams. The Lloyd Plantation became a formative site of trauma and awakening for the young Douglass.
Growing up in such conditions, it is no wonder that Frederick Bailey believed he would be a slave forever — in his youth, he did not really understand any other way of existing. But as he grew older and became wiser about the world, his attitude underwent a radical change. At one point, Frederick witnessed a slave on the Lloyd Plantation shot dead simply for refusing to submit to a flogging, which sent a "thrill of horror" through his soul and awakened him fully to the realities of enslaved life.
"Learning to read and recognizing slavery's injustice"
"Fighting back, escaping slavery, and becoming an abolitionist"
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