61 pages • 2 hours read
Frederick DouglassNarrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 1845A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Chapters 4-7Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 4 Summary
Mr. Hopkins, the more humane overseer, did not last long in the position. Douglass speculates that “he lacked the necessary severity to suit Colonel Lloyd” (41). Austin Gore was hired as his replacement. Gore was proud, ambitious, preserving, cruel, and stubborn. He excelled in the role of overseer. Enslaved people were not allowed to respond or defend themselves against criticism, for even the slightest look or gesture could evoke punishment. If Gore felt an enslaved person had done something wrong, they were punished, even if it wasn’t true. He never smiled or joked, and spoke only in commands. Douglass recounts when Gore shot a disobedient enslaved person yet was not punished, as killing a Black person was not considered murder. He recounts other examples of when enslaved people were killed and their murderers were not punished. He concludes, “It was a common saying, even among little white boys, that it was worth a half-cent to kill a ‘n*****,’ and a half-cent to bury one” (46).
Chapter 5 Summary
Douglass was treated like the other enslaved children on Colonel Lloyd’s plantation. Because he wasn’t old enough to work in the fields, he had a lot of leisure time. His tasks included driving up the cows, keeping birds out of the garden, keeping the yard clean, and running errands for Lucretia, Colonel Lloyd’s daughter. Daniel Lloyd was kind to Douglass, and Douglass spent much of his time helping Daniel find birds after he shot him. Douglass was rarely whipped, but hunger and cold were the worst parts of his life. He had very little clothing, only a coarse linen shirt that reached his knees. He didn’t have a bed, so on the coldest nights, he slept in a bag used to carry corn to the mill. He ate boiled corn meal, called mush, and the children ate at a trough set on the ground, like pigs.
When he was seven or eight years old, Douglass left Colonel Lloyd’s plantation “with joy” (48). His enslaver, Anthony, transferred him to Mr. Hugh Auld in Baltimore, the brother of Captain Thomas Auld. Lucretia gave him a pair of trousers, and he spent much time preparing by cleaning himself. He was excited to see Baltimore. He traveled by sloop and passed by Annapolis, the Maryland capital, which was the first large town he saw. A day later they arrived in Baltimore. He met the Aulds and their son Thomas. Thomas Auld’s wife, Sophia, smiled at him, and he was struck by her warm demeaner. Douglass reflects that leaving Colonel Llyod’s plantation was the most consequential moment of his life, and he may not have become free if he had not been moved to Baltimore.
Chapter 6 Summary
Sophia, the wife of Douglass’s new enslaver, is kindhearted, and he is “astonished at her goodness” (53). Before she married, she was a weaver and had “been in a good degree preserved from the blighting and dehumanizing effects of slavery” (53). Douglass was the first enslaved person she had under control, and she treated him very well. She was unlike the other white women Douglass had known, who were cruel. Enslaved people in the city were treated much better than enslaved people on farms. Douglass describes a sense of shame or decency that prevented outbreaks of “atrocious cruelty” (55), which were common on the plantation. Providing good care and food for enslaved people was a source of prestige in the city, but there were exceptions. For example, Mr. Thomas Hamilton regularly beat two enslaved women: “[T]he head neck and shoulders of Mary were literally cut to pieces” (56). Douglass attests to seeing Mrs. Hamilton beat them.
Mrs. Auld taught Douglass the alphabet, and he started to spell short words. However, Mr. Auld forbade her from teaching him, telling her it was unlawful and unsafe to teach an enslaved person to read. Stating common beliefs of his time, Mr. Auld says that if enslaved people were able to read, they would become unmanageable. This had a strong impact on Douglass, who concluded that his path to freedom involved reading and knowledge. He began to teach himself. Over time, the effects of slavery as an institution changed Sophia, and she became cruel.
Chapter 7 Summary
Douglass spent seven years with Hugh Auld’s family. He taught himself to read and write, though doing so required creativity and strategies. Mrs. Auld blocked his attempts to learn, intervening when he glanced at newspapers, for example. The chapter describes her descent into cruelty and anger, as she enforced the rules against Douglass learning more intensely than her husband. When he ran errands, he brought a book with him and did his errands quickly so he could study as well. Douglass befriended white boys on his street by bringing bread from his house to share with poor white children, who in turn helped him learn to read. The young boys were troubled by Douglass’s stories of enslavement, expressing sympathy for him and consoling him that he might be free.
Around the age of 12, Douglass began to think seriously about freedom. He read a book called “The Columbian Orator” which includes a dialogue between an enslaver and a person they enslaved who ran away three times. The enslaved person dismantles their enslaver’s argument in favor of slavery, and the story ends with the voluntary emancipation of the enslaved person by their enslaver. The same book also features Irish poet Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s speeches in favor of Catholic emancipation, which Douglass interprets as a powerful critique of slavery and a defense of human rights. The more he learned, the more he learned to hate the people who enslaved him. He concludes that Hugh’s prediction that knowledge would undermine slavery as an institution was correct.
Abolition was of particular interest to Douglass. At first, he didn’t know what it meant, but “[if] a slave ran away and succeeded in getting clear, or if a slave killed his master, set fire to a barn, or did anything very wrong in the mind of a slaveholder, it was spoken of as the fruit of abolition” (63). Douglass intuited that abolition was anti-slavery, which was later confirmed by a city paper with petitions for abolition from the North. Shortly after this, Douglass helped two Irishmen unload stone, and they told him to run away to the north. He resolved to run away when he was older and focused on learning how to write in the meantime. He taught himself to write by watching people mark timber in the shipyard and associating the sounds with the letters. Eventually, he learned to write.
Chapters 4-7 Analysis
Douglass’s autobiography functions as testimony. For example, he recounts the murder of enslaved people by overseers and enslavers. Chapter 4 begins with an extended description of Mr. Gore’s cruelty, defined by a “savage barbarity” and “consummate coolness” (43). Douglass recounts when an enslaved person named Demby ran into the water to escape a whipping. Gore told Demby he had until the count of three to come out of the water, or he would be shot. Demby refused, and Gore shot him in the face. Douglass describes Gore’s cool response to the murder as particularly chilling. Douglass suggests that he probably still lives in St. Michael’s and likely has not been punished for murder. Killing an enslaved person or Black person was not a crime in Talbot country in the eyes of either the court or the community, so Gore was not punished or censured.
Douglass recounts another example when Mr. Thomas Lanman, also of St. Michael’s, killed two enslaved people, one of whom was killed with a hatchet. Lanman joked about the murders; Douglass heard these boasts himself. In another example, the wife of Mr. Giles Hicks murdered Douglass’s wife’s cousin. She broke the nose and breastbone of the girl, who was about 16, and who died hours later. A warrant was issued for the woman’s arrest, but she was never punished. By naming these individuals, recounting where they are from, and providing specific details about the murders, Douglass presents his recollections as evidence of cruelty and abuse.
One of the most consequential parts of the memoir, which sets in motion Douglass’s eventual freedom, occurs in Chapter 5. The move from Colonel Lloyd’s plantation to Baltimore is identified as the turning point in Douglass’s life. He received the news three days before his departure, and these “were three of the happiest days [he] ever enjoyed” (48). Douglass feels very little connection to the plantation, writing that while he has three siblings who live in the same house, they have little family ties or affection, as separation from their mother broke that relationship. He was filled with anticipation before the journey, and when he saw Sophia Auld, he was overwhelmed by seeing “what [he] had never seen before; it was a white face beaming with the most kindly emotions,” which caused a “rapture that flashed through [his] soul” (50). That he was chosen, of all the children, felt like divine intervention. He thanks God for giving him the possibility of freeing himself from slavery.
These chapters further exemplify Slavery’s Dehumanization of everyone involved in the system, even Sophia Auld, who was initially kind and good. However, Douglass writes,
The fatal poison of irresponsible power was already in her hands, and soon commenced its infernal work. That cheerful eye, under the influence of slavery, soon became red with rage; that voice, made all of sweet accord, changed to one of harsh and horrid discord; and that angelic face gave place to that of a demon (54).
This passage implies that slavery cannot accommodate human kindness and that the horrors and excesses of the system can’t be only blamed on sadistic individuals. Rather, the structure itself is the problem. Stripping an enslaved person’s humanity away damages one’s psyche. We see Mrs. Auld shift from teaching Douglass to read to actively blocking his attempts to learn. He writes that she had to learn “the depravity indispensable to shutting me up in mental darkness. It was at least necessary for her to have some training in the exercise of irresponsible power, to make her equal to the task of treating me as though I were a brute” (58).
Douglass also examines Knowledge and Ignorance. Mrs. Auld gives him a foundation that he uses to teach himself. The threat this poses is made clear, and Douglass reflects of Mrs. Auld that “nothing seemed to make her more angry than to see me with a newspaper” (60). Further, Douglass does not name the boys who helped him learn because “it might embarrass them; for it is almost an unpardonable offense to teach slaves to read in this Christian country” (61). He learned to read through people who didn’t know any better; Mrs. Auld and the young neighborhood boys were not yet fully indoctrinated by the institution of slavery, and so they did not yet perceive an educated Black person as a threat to the entire system.
Learning how to write required further ingenuity on Douglass’s part. He taught himself the basics by watching people label timber in the shipyard. He supplemented his knowledge by challenging people to writing contests, boasting that he could write better than them. Through this, he learned more words. He also read Thomas’s copy-books when the family was out of the house, as they were roughly the same age. The story about “The Columbian Orator,” in which the enslaver person uses reason to win his freedom, articulates why knowledge was perceived as such a threat. Douglass suggests that the institution is indefensible and that preventing enslaved people from learning is the only way it can sustain itself. Through reasoned discourse, he suggests, enslaved people would be freed by their enslavers. Sheridan’s speeches for Catholic emancipation were another source that shaped Douglass’s emerging criticisms of slavery and showed rhetoric’s power to change people’s minds.
Once Douglass realized the system was corrupt and inhumane, and once he realized that people’s minds could be changed, Douglass was unable to continue existing in his current state. He had to be free, and only the thought of freedom helped him survive. Douglass did everything he could to learn about slavery, listening to every story and hoping to learn something about abolition. He resolved to achieve freedom by running away to the North when he was older, and his first step on that path was learning to read and write.
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