Narrative of Frederick Douglass Essay

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Narrative of Frederick Douglass

Slavery is perhaps one of the most common forms of human justice in the history of the world. Although the phenomenon has existed for centuries, across many cultures, a particularly brutal form of the phenomenon was perpetrated in the United States before its abolition. It is, however, a testament to the human spirit that some, like Frederick Douglass, had the inner will and drive to escape overwhelming odds that would keep him a slave for life. In his book The Narrative 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 often suffered by slaves. It is little wonder that Douglass did not only want to escape these inhuman conditions, but also that he recognized the dehumanizing effect of slavery on both slaves and their masters. To be free meant not only to be physically free, but also to be intellectually free to grow, evolve, and create a better life for oneself and one's family.

For Douglass, slavery had an ultimately dehumanizing effect on both slaves and their masters. The dehumanizing effects on slaves are clear. First, the physical conditions under which the slaves were forced to labor were not even fit for animals. Receiving only sparse rations of food, slaves who were not yet old enough to work did not receive sufficient clothing to cover themselves. Up to 10 years old, many children were forced to go without clothing for the majority of the year. The slaves did not receive bedding beyond a single coarse blanket for each. They slept in communal buildings after a day filled with labor and hardship. The dehumanizing effect of these conditions is that slaves were not seen as sufficiently human to expect any claim to dignity in terms of being clothed well or well-being in terms of being fed and rested well. None of the basic human needs people assume to be their right today were being filled by their masters.

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A further dehumanizing effect on the slaves was their harsh treatment at the hands of masters. While Douglass acknowledges that some masters were not as cruel as others, the treatment of slaves branded them as property. They were bought and sold as property, brutally beaten for disobeying the most ridiculous of rules and even for simply falling in love. Without any hope for freedom, the slaves simply went through the routine of each day and suffered the extreme brutality of their masters. Such treatment in the long-term certainly does have a dehumanizing effect, where there is no hope or expectation beyond the day-to-day routine of labor, punishment and exhaustion. This was even worse for those who, like Douglass, were born into slavery, since they knew no other life or even the possibility of another life.

What is interesting is that slavery and slave ownership also had a dehumanizing effect on masters. Most of the masters Douglass describes were extremely cruel, enjoying the action of punishing slaves brutally for the slightest transgression, both real and imagined. Douglass even describes an occasion on which slaves would be whipped if a horse was not carrying itself in the required way.

Another way in which slave owners were dehumanized is by siring children among the slaves. A slave owner would, for example, commit adultery with a female slave and then have one or even a number of children with one or several of his slaves. The nature of the relationship between slaves and their owners, however, dictated that these children be treated the same, or even worse, than the other slaves, despite their parentage. Furthermore, the white wives who were insulted in this way would seldom harbor any goodwill towards these out-of-wedlock children and they would be even more harshly treated than the other slaves. Out of "deference" for the wife, the man would then sell these children to other slave owners. Douglass notes that, although this does seem inhuman, it was often humanity that….....

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