PRIMARY SOURCE ANALYSIS

Primary Source Analysis - Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass



Primary Source Analysis - Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass

Introduction

If being poor is defined as living hand to mouth; having to cope with undernourishment, inferior housing, and scanty, inadequate clothing; enduring chronic or frequent ill health; and holding tenuously to one's means of survival, then the enslaved African Americans qualified as poor. The slave population lived at a minimal subsistence level and struggled continually against hunger, cold, illness, and pain, as did all impoverished Americans. Additionally, the slaves were denied basic freedom, kept in ignorance, forced to labor, and subjected to corporal punishment that was often severe and administered according to whim. This paper will present an analysis of the content of Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave: Written by Himself By Frederick Douglass.

Discussion

The demands of slavery forced most parents to neglect their children. Youngsters typically spent the day in the care of older siblings or aging women who could no longer do agricultural work. On large plantations children ate from communal troughs, using their hands or a seashell to scoop up crumbled corn bread and vegetables that may have been soaked in buttermilk. The children were called to their meals "like so many pigs, and like so many pigs they would come and devour the mush," said Frederick Douglass, who grew up in slavery on a Maryland plantation. "He that ate fastest got most; he that was strongest secured the best place; and few left the trough satisfied." Not all enslaved children had milk to drink, and many who did enjoyed it only in spring and summer, the seasons of peak dairy production. What distinguished antebellum slavery most from its earlier manifestations was its scale. When the United States began, in 1789, there were roughly one million slaves in its population. Seventy-one years later, on the eve of the Civil War, there were four million. Most continued to live in rural settings—only one in ten slaves lived in a city or town—and fifty-eight percent were in the seven Deep South states, most working on large plantations.

Although by definition slaves worked to benefit their owners who controlled rewards and punishments, far too much is made of what was “done unto” enslaved men and women and not nearly enough about what slaves did to affect their own lives and the lives of those who followed them. Recent studies emphasize that the relationship between master and slave was one of constant, if often tacit, negotiations over quality and quantity of work, amounts and kinds of rations, and much more relating to the slaves' daily lives; and slaves were not powerless in the negotiations. Masters or overseers who pushed slaves to work too hard, who whipped too often, or who fed and clothed inadequately encountered sick workers, broken tools, sloppy (and thus costly) work, and even dead animals or burned barns. What resulted was an accommodation between master and slave, which got neither what he nor ...