The life and Times of Frederick Douglass, a Slave

The life and Times of Frederick Douglass, a Slave

Introduction

Frederick Douglass was born in the year of 1818 into slavery as Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey in Talbot County, Maryland. Throughout his youth, he worked as a slave on farms on Maryland's Eastern Shore and in Baltimore. Particularly, in Baltimore, Frederick found relatively more freedom than usually slaves had in the South. After sometime, Frederick started learning how to read and set out having contacts with free educated blacks. At the age of about 20, he eventually escaped from north to New York and got reunited with his fiancée, named Anna Murray, a free black woman from Baltimore. Both of them finally set in New Bedford, Massachusetts. The couple knew about the fugitive status of Douglass; therefore, Frederick changed his from Bailey to Douglass. For the next 3 years, he worked as a manual worker and continued his self study.

Discussion

In the starting years of 1840s, the movement of anti slavery was hitting momentum, particularly in the area of Northeast. When Frederick initially arrived in Massachusetts, he started reading the abolitionist newspaper, the Liberator edited by William Lloyd Garrison. In the year of 1841, Frederick attended an abolitionist meeting in Nantucket, where he encountered with Garrison and was motivated to describe his ordeals of slavery. The delivered account of Frederick was well received that Garrison gave him offer to be the abolitionist speaker for the Antislavery Society of America (Douglass, 1994).

In the years of 1841 to 1845, Frederick took an extensive trip with Garrison to Northern states, and used to speak nearly every day about the brutality and injustice of slavery. Most often, Frederick came across with hostile opposition that he is lying about injustice and cruelty happened with him. The sale and capture of Africans for the slave market of America were lethal and often barbaric. Most of the West African victims died towards the march of Atlantic seacoast where these slaves were sold to European buyers. In the vessel of slaves, they were totally chained in the coffin racks and around one third of these slaves were died at sea.

Black people were primarily sold in the auction of America and the owners of slaves used to punish them harshly. In the Middle Passage, the slaves were loaded below the ship's deck. The men were fastened with iron chains in their legs and hands (Douglass, 1881). They basically packed them like this because young men are strong and they can attack anytime if they get some opportunity. Apart from the number of hardships, these slaves handled to bring a firm cultural identity of themselves (Fearon & Hill, 1995). As a result, the era of civil right act came and changed the lives of this racial group. It is believed by most of the historians that Civil war is the most watershed moment in the historical account of African American. This cruel war cut the era of slaveholding from the period of constitutionally-guaranteed freedom ...