Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass

The autobiography’s first line tells the reader that Douglass was born into slavery. Chapter 1 specifies the location in detail: Douglass explains that Tuckahoe is “near Hillsborough, about twelve miles from Easton, in Talbot country, Maryland” (18). Throughout the autobiography Douglass provides extensive details as a method of adding veracity to his testimony. Details are also something that were denied to enslaved people, and Douglass makes this clear by explaining that he doesn’t know his birthday, which is a source of unhappiness. The deliberate withholding of information was a method of maintaining control and denying enslaved people basic knowledge about their origins. Instead, generalizations are tied to seasons like “planting-time, harvest-time, cherry-time, spring-time, or fall-time” (18), highlighting how plantation life revolved around labor, namely cycles of planting, harvesting, and fruiting.

Douglass also provides specific information about conditions on the plantation. For example, when Douglass describes what enslaved people were fed and how they were clothed, he recalls very specific quantities:

The men and women slaves received, as their monthly allowance of food, eight pounds of pork, or its equivalent in fish, and one bushel of corn meal. Their yearly clothing consisted of two coarse linen shirts, one pair of linen trousers, like the shirts, one jacket, one pair of trousers for winter, made of coarse negro cloth, one pair of stockings, and one pair of shoes (28).

Details function as evidence, or testimony. While biographical details were previously denied to Douglass, they now help protect him against charges of falsehood or dishonesty. His extensive use of detail also represents a reclamation of power: Details were deliberately withheld from him when he was enslaved, which cost him his family history. Now, as a free man, Douglass uses details liberally and purposefully, to record his lived experience and control his own story.

Douglass describes how the forced separation of mothers and children broke down family bonds. Douglass only saw his mother four or five times in his life. To see him, his mother had to travel on foot, overnight, after a full day of work. If she was not back at work by sunrise, she would be whipped. To see her child, then, she had to travel 24 miles overnight. He never saw his mother during the day, and they were unable to truly connect. Douglass suggests that his birth was likely the result of rape by Anthony. Children born into this strange position “owe their existence to white fathers, and those fathers most frequently their own masters” (22), while the enslaver in the “double relations of master and father” (21) was often treated worse by his wife, especially if the enslaver showed any favor to those children. Often, the result was that the children were sold to another plantation.

The overseer on the first plantation Douglass recalls is described as being barbarous, someone who would “cut and slash the women’s heads so horribly” (23). While the overseer was particularly sadistic, Anthony allowed this behavior. Douglass recounts an extended description of his aunt being whipped by Anthony to illustrate the cruelty endured by enslaved people:

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. The louder she screamed, the harder he whipped; and where the blood ran fastest, there he whipped longest. He would whip her to make her scream, and whip her to make her hush; and not until overcome by fatigue, would he cease to swing the blood-clotted cowskin (23).

Such extreme violence was not uncommon on plantations run by the labor of enslaved people. Douglass describes how Anthony was “a cruel man, hardened by a long life of slaveholding” (22). Colonel Lloyd is also described as a particularly cruel man who tolerated no defiance from any enslaved person. Douglass recalls seeing Lloyd whip a naked, weary man with more than 30 lashes in a single incident. These observations confirm what Garrison suggests in the Preface: The institution of slavery degrades everyone involved in it.

Douglass concludes Chapter 2 by arguing that the persistence of song on the plantation was not an expression of joy but one of sadness. He describes being haunted by these songs, which celebrated going to the Great House Farm on Colonel Lloyd’s plantation, where “every tone was a testimony against slavery, and a prayer to God for deliverance from chains” (32). In Chapter 3, he outlines why enslaved people would say that they were content, that their enslavers were kind—because they were punished or sold for expressing dissatisfaction, and spies were often used to gather information about who was unhappy. Douglass adds weight to this claim by saying that he always said Anthony was kind, even though this was false.