The Narrative of Frederick Douglass: Slavery and Freedom

Introduction: Slavery and the Human Spirit

Slavery is perhaps one of the most pervasive forms of human injustice in the history of the world. Although the phenomenon has existed for centuries across many cultures, a particularly brutal form was perpetrated in the United States before its abolition. It is, however, a testament to the human spirit that some individuals — like Frederick Douglass — possessed the inner will and drive to escape the overwhelming odds that would have kept them enslaved for life. In his book Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, the former slave recounts not only the ways in which he worked to escape the slavery into which he was born, but also the brutal and literally bloody conditions routinely suffered by enslaved people.

It is little wonder that Douglass wanted to escape these inhuman conditions, and that he recognized the dehumanizing effect of slavery on both the enslaved and their masters. To be free meant not only physical liberation, but intellectual freedom — the freedom to grow, evolve, and create a better life for oneself and one's family.

Dehumanizing Effects on Enslaved People

For Douglass, slavery had an ultimately dehumanizing effect on both the enslaved and their masters. The dehumanizing effects on enslaved people are clear. First, the physical conditions under which slaves were forced to labor were not even fit for animals. Receiving only sparse rations of food, children who were not yet old enough to work did not receive sufficient clothing to cover themselves. Up to the age of ten, many children were forced to go without clothing for the majority of the year. Enslaved people did not receive bedding beyond a single coarse blanket each. They slept in communal buildings after days filled with labor and hardship.

The dehumanizing effect of these conditions is that enslaved people were not regarded as sufficiently human to deserve dignity — neither in terms of adequate clothing nor in terms of being properly fed and rested. None of the basic human needs that people assume as their right today were met by their masters.

A further dehumanizing effect on enslaved people was their harsh treatment at the hands of masters. While Douglass acknowledges that some masters were not as cruel as others, the treatment of enslaved people branded them as property. They were bought and sold as property, brutally beaten for disobeying the most arbitrary of rules, and even punished simply for falling in love. Without any hope for freedom, enslaved people went through the routine of each day suffering extreme brutality. Such treatment inevitably has a dehumanizing effect over the long term, leaving no hope or expectation beyond the daily cycle of labor, punishment, and exhaustion. This was even worse for those, like Douglass, who were born into slavery, since they knew no other life and had no awareness of the possibility of a different one.

Dehumanizing Effects on Slaveholders

What is striking is that slavery and slave ownership also had a dehumanizing effect on masters. Most of the masters Douglass describes were extremely cruel, taking evident pleasure in punishing enslaved people brutally for the slightest transgression, both real and imagined. Douglass even describes occasions on which enslaved people would be whipped if a horse was not bearing itself in the required manner.

Another way in which slave owners were dehumanized was through siring children with enslaved women. A slave owner might, for example, commit adultery with a female slave and father one or more children with her. The nature of the relationship between enslaved people and their owners, however, dictated that these children be treated the same as — or even worse than — other enslaved people, regardless of their parentage. Furthermore, the white wives who were insulted by such arrangements seldom harbored goodwill toward these illegitimate children, who were consequently treated even more harshly than other enslaved people. Out of deference to his wife, the slave owner would then sell these children to other slaveholders.

Douglass notes that, although this appears profoundly inhuman, it was often a misguided form of humanity that drove these fathers to sell their own children. Without the family connection, the children would at least receive treatment comparable to that in other households, whereas in the family home, the wife's hostility caused them to suffer even greater cruelty. Ironically, the personal human feelings involved in these adulterous relationships — and the children they produced — generated further inhumanity and cruelty among slaveholders. As scholars of American slavery have long noted, the institution corrupted every human relationship it touched.