It is a short read, but by no means an easy read as it paints a very vivid picture of the physical horrors of slavery in the pre-civil war era in the US. While it is easy to pick up from films a sense of the physical brutality of slavery- whippings, hunger, violence, I had never thought on the more psychological factors that living under slavery imposes on the slaves, and he describes these very eloquently.
Frederick Douglass was born around 1818. He was taken from his mother early on and he only saw her when she would come long after dark from the neighboring farm and spend a few hours with him. His father was rumored to be his owner but he never knew for sure. The book covers the time from his birth up to 1838 when he escaped at the age of 20 to the North. (The escape is not detailed in the book, published 7 years afterwards, as he did want to put anyone at risk or give ideas to slave-owners about how to stop others). He eventually became a vocal spokesperson for the abolitionist movement.
Things that stood out to me were
1. the horrendous conditions
- Children were never given shoes or coats or trousers. Nothing but a knee length shirt. Also no blanket or bed. Just slept on the ground, winter or summer.
- Depending on the plantation, food rations were more or less scarce. City slaves were better treated because there were others around to see how they were treated.
- People whipped because they were sick, or because the oxen broke free of the cart, or because the hoe broke, or because they were deemed to have the wrong look
- People killed in cold blood with NO inquiry or justice carried out on the perpetrators, mostly because the testimony of slaves was not ever presentable in court. But such cases hardly ever were even investigated.
- The weak, sickly, elderly just turned out into the woods to fend for themselves (starve).
- Children were systematically removed from their parents and shifted around so that close familial ties did not develop.
- Slaves were not allowed to marry and those that were married were frequently raped by their masters or "bred" with other slaves so as to produce more slaves.
- Slaves who, like Douglas, had spirit in them, were sent off to specially cruel overseers who could break their spirit. This took about 6 months for Douglas.
- when his master died, he and all the slaves from the various plantations were lined up to be evaluated and divided up: "horses and men, cattle and women, pigs and children, all holding the same rank in the scale of being, and awere all subject to the same narrow examination." The slaves had no more say in where they went than the "dumb beasts".
Probably the most surprising thing in the book is the tale of Douglas being transferred to a new owner when he was 6 years old. He was taken to Baltimore, to a family that had never had any slaves. He was to care for their son. The lady of the house was "a kind and tenderhearted woman; and in the simplicity of her soul, she commenced, when I first went to live with her, to treat me as she supposed one human being ought to treat another. In entering upon the duties of a slaveholder, she did not seem to perceive that I sustained to her the relation of a mere chattel, and that for her to treat me as a human being was not only wrong, but dangerously so. Slavery proved as injurious to her as it did to me. When I went there, she was a pious, warm, and tender-hearted woman. . . . slavery soon proved its ability to divest her of these heavenly qualities. Under its influence, the tender heart became stone, and the lamblike disposition gave way to one of tiger-like fierceness."2. The Importance of Literacy, and the intentional withholding of learning to keep slaves down.
"For it is almost an unpardonable offense to teach slaves to read in this Christian country."
The story of his kind city mistress above continues with her desire to teach him to read. This progresses a ways until her husband finds out and tells her that this is not only unlawful but as well "unsafe". In his own words: "If you give a n* an inch, he will take an ell. A n* should know nothing but to obey his master - to do as he is told to do. Learning would spoil the best n* in the world. Now, if you teach that n* how to read, there would be no keeping him. It would forever unfit him to be a slave. He would at once become unmanageable. . . It would make him discontented and unhappy."
His mistress then became as vigorous in trying to keep him from learning to read as she had tried to help him. But the seed was sown in his mind an "entirely new train of thought. it was a new and special revelation, explaining dark and mysterious things. . . I now understood what had been to me a most perplexing difficulty - to wit, the white man' s power to enslave the black man. . . From that moment, I understood the pathway from slavery to freedom."
Douglas eventually learned to read from white children in his neighborhood and when he was back on a plantation taught a clandestine literacy class on Sundays. "It was necessary to keep our religious masters . . .unacquainted with the fact, that instead of spending the Sabbath in wrestling, boxing and drinking whiskey, we were trying to learn how to read the will of God." He had about 40 students who came "because they wished to learn. Their minds had been starved by their cruel masters. They had been shut up in mental darkness."
That's a pretty powerful argument for literacy if I ever heard one.
3. Sabbath
In spite of everything, the slaves were given Sunday off. Douglas writes of lying in a "sort of beast-like stupor, under some large tree. At times, I would rise up, a flash of energetic freedom would dart through my soul, accompanied by a faint beam of hope, that flickered for a moment and then vanished."4. Implication and overt complicity of the church in slavery and atrocities
I think most of us would like to believe the apparent myth of the kind, God-fearing slave-owner. But if such people existed, they were far and few between. Most saw no disparity between professing Christianity and personally whipping their slaves for minor offenses, separating them from their families, raping them, etc.
Frederick Douglass had many masters and he came to dislike the most the ones who were the most religious. "I have ever found them the meanest and basest, the most cruel and cowardly, of all others." He documents several slaveholders who were ministers, providing examples of them whipping their slaves so as to keep their backs literally raw for weeks, and taking perverse pleasure in this. One of his owners went off to a revival and was converted and Douglas had a brief hope that he would be better to him, but he was in fact worse, all the while making a big showing of prayers and family devotions and singing.
Douglas closes the book with an afterward in which he feels compelled to indicate a defense of true Christianity over against the false Christianity he had depicted.
"Between the Christianity of this land, and the Christianity of Christ, i recognize the widest possible difference, so wide, that to receive the one as good, pure and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked. To be the friend of the one, is of necessity to be the enemy of the other. I love the pure, peaceable and impartial Christianity of Christ; I therefore hate the corrupt, slave-holding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land. indeed, I can see no reason, but the most deceitful one, for calling the religion of this land Christianity. I look upon it as the climax of all misnomers, the boldest of all frauds, the grossest of all libels."This is a painful part of my heritage as a Southern Baptist. Yes, my ancestor Pardon Tillnghast came to Rhode Island in the 1600s in search of religious liberty and pastored the first Baptist church in America. Presumably some of those Baptists made up part of the northern abolitionists, but I don't know. But my more recent heritage is as a Southern Baptist. They started out okay in the colonial times, made up of common men and planters, and "welcomed African Americans, both slave and free, allowing them to have more active roles in ministry than did other denominations by licensing them as preachers and, in some cases, allowing them to be treated as equals to white members."
The Baptists were a minority compared to the state-controlled Anglican church, which was made up mostly of plantation owners.
After the American Revolution, the Baptists "accommodated themselves to the leadership of southern society. Rather than challenging the gentry on slavery and urging manumission, they began to interpret the Bible as supporting the practice of slavery". [The Church never gains when it accommodates and moves in with "Empire".] "In addition, many Baptist preachers in the South argued in favor of preserving the right of ministers to be slaveholders (which they had earlier prohibited), a class that included prominent Baptist Southerners and planters." Eventually the Baptist convention split, as the Northern Baptists would not allow the Southern ones to send missionaries who were slave holders. (Source for most of this paragraph: wikipedia article)
Douglas' commentary indicates the disparity between sending missionaries while at the same time maintaining the machinery of slavery: "We have men sold to build churches, women sold to support the gospel, and babes sold to purchase Bibles for the POOR HEATHEN! ALL FOR THE GLORY OF GOD AND THE GOOD OF SOULS! The slave auctioneer's bell and the church going bell chime in with each other; and the bitter cries of the heart-broken slave are drowned in the religious shouts of the pious master."
All in all, the book is very compelling and one every American should read. It is a horrifying look at the total depravity of man on one side, and the power of the human spirit, even beaten down, to overcome.
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Afterward on the Southern Baptist Convention from the wikipedia article mentioned above):
In 1995, the Convention voted to adopt a resolution renouncing its racist roots and apologizing for its past defense of slavery, segregation, and white supremacism. This marked the denomination's first formal acknowledgment that racism had a profound role in its early and modern history.(Why did it take so long to do this??)
In the 2012 annual meeting, the Southern Baptist Convention elected Fred Luter Jr. as its first African-American president.
