Douglass demonstrates how slavery hardens people, teaching them to hate and harm rather than to love and respect others. For example, he writes of one of his master's overseers,
Mr. Plummer was a miserable drunkard, a profane swearer, and a savage monster. He went armed with a cowskin and a heavy cudgel. I have known him to cut and slash the women's heads so horribly (ch. 1) . . .
But the slave's overseers were not the only people toughened by slavery. Slave masters, also, learned to be comfortable with cruelty and mistreatment. Douglass describes his first master's manners toward slaves:
Master, however, was not a humane slaveholder. It required extraordinary barbarity on the part of an overseer to affect him. He was a cruel man, hardened by a long life of slaveholding. He would at times seem to take great pleasure in whipping a slave (ch. 1).
These common displays of abuse forced even the slaves to become desensitized to mistreatment. Douglass remembers hearing his aunt being abused by this same master:
I have often been awakened at the dawn of day by the most heart-rending shrieks of an own aunt of mine, whom he used to tie up to a joist, and whip upon her naked back till she was literally covered with blood. No words, no tears, no prayers, from his gory victim, seemed to move his iron heart from its bloody purpose (ch. 1).
Douglass shows how slavery forces everyone (masters, slaves, and bystanders) to become desensitized to abuse and mistreatment.
Douglass also shows how slavery destroys family structure, dividing loved ones from those who care most about them. For instance, Douglass discusses how his grandmother raised him and "the children of the younger women" on the "outskirts of the plantation" (ch. 1). When Douglass gets old enough to labor for his master, he is ripped from his grandmother's company and forced to work.
Another example of this is seen when Douglass is required to move away from his birth home.
The ties that ordinarily bind children to their homes were all suspended . . . I found no severe trial in my departure. My home was charmless . . . My mother was dead, my grandmother lived far off, so that I seldom saw her (ch. 5).
Douglass is not sad that he has to leave his birth home. The place does not feel like home to him, because he does not feel connected to his grandmother anymore. He's not even sad to leave his siblings:
I had two sisters and one brother, that lived in the same house with me; but the early separation of us from our mother had well nigh blotted the fact of our relationship from our memories (ch. 5).
Slavery destroyed slaves' families, disconnecting individuals from the connectedness and warmth of family life.
He also shows how slavery has a dehumanizing effect on slaves. Enslaved people, in other words, began to be treated and expected to behave like animals:
To those songs [slave songs] I trace my first glimmering conception of the dehumanizing character of slavery (ch. 2).
This dehumanization is also seen in the lack of consequences for murdering slaves:
killing a slave, or any colored person, in Talbot county Maryland, is not treated as a crime, either by the courts or the community (ch. 4).
Thirdly, this dehumanization is seen in the lack of clothing given to slaves.
In hottest summer and coldest winter, I was kept almost naked—no shoes, no stockings, no jacket, no trousers, nothing but a coarse linen shirt, reaching to my knees (ch. 4).
Douglass presents examples that show how slavery stole the joy from slaves and made them nearly incapable of happiness:
I have often sung to drown my sorrow, but seldom to express my happiness. Crying for joy, and singing for joy, were alike uncommon to me while in the jaws of slavery (ch. 2).
Slavery ultimately corrupts people, causing them to become desensitized to abuse and mistreatment. It also disconnects slaves from their family members. It leaves slaves feeling alone and steals their joy. It is impossible to overstate the negative effects of this evil institution.
One of the major themes of the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass is the corrupting influence of slavery on masters. Douglass uses the example of Sophia Auld to illustrate this point. He describes this woman, the wife of his owner, as astonishing in her "goodness" and says that "none left without feeling better for having seen her." As an example of her kindness, Auld commenced to teach Douglass how to read and write. But over time, through her exposure to slavery, something changed in Auld. Her "tender heart turned to stone," Douglass writes, and she became even more opposed to teaching reading and writing to slaves, and to treating them with dignity in general, than her husband had been. In the end, Douglass concludes, "slavery proved as injurious to her as it did to me."
Douglass also adds that slavery destroys families. He begins his story by explaining that he was separated from his mother "before I knew her as my mother." He adds that "it is a common custom . . . to part children from their mothers at a very early age." Of his mother, he vaguely remembers that when he was a child she would sneak away from her plantation to lie with him at night but would be gone in the morning. This is a particularly heartbreaking example of the lengths that enslaved people would go to in order to maintain some semblance of a family life in the face of slaveholders' attempts to tear it apart.
Finally, Douglass shows, slavery makes hypocrites out of Christians. The brutal slavebreaker Covey is a Christian, as is the Reverend Daniel Weeden, a Methodist minister who owns slaves on a plantation near where Douglass lived. He beat his slaves relentlessly, causing Douglass to comment on the disconnect between his religious beliefs and his cruelty, noting that "religious slaveholders are the worst":
I assert most unhesitatingly, that the religion of the south is a mere covering for the most horrid crimes,—a justifier of the most appalling barbarity,—a sanctifier of the most hateful frauds,—and a dark shelter under which the darkest, foulest, grossest, and most infernal deeds of slaveholders find the strongest protection.
In short, slavery corrupts slaveholders, it destroys the families of enslaved people, and it makes a mockery out of Christianity. Douglass illustrates, in other words, that slavery is an unmitigated evil.
https://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/douglass/douglass.html
No comments:
Post a Comment