Inventing Americas: 1800–1865 127Those who spoke out most powerfully against slavery, however, and the violation of
selfhood it involved, were the slaves themselves. Frederick Douglass (1817–1895) was
born into slavery on a plantation in Maryland. Of his birth, Douglass was later to say
that he had “no accurate knowledge” as to the exact date: slaves were not regarded as
important enough as individuals to warrant the recording of such details. Worse still,
all he knew of his father was that he was a white man – although he had a shrewd
suspicion that it was his “master.” And although he knew who his mother was, he saw
little of her. “I never saw my mother, to know her as such, more than four or five times
in my life,” Douglass recalled, “and each of these times was very short in duration, and
at night.” Douglass was sent to Baltimore, when he was seven or eight. He received no
formal education there; in fact, the family he lived with and worked for was adamantly
opposed to his learning to read and write. But Douglass quickly saw the importance
of learning to read, as a road to freedom. So, first, he bribed young white children to
help him; and then, at the age of about 12, he managed to get hold of The Columbian
Orator, an anthology of speeches, poems, dialogues, and plays. “Every opportunity I
got, I used to read this book,” Douglass remembered. Included in it was an imaginary
dialogue between a master and a slave, in which the master rehearsed the traditional
proslavery argument, “all of which was disposed of by the slave.” Not for the first time,
“the thought of being a slave for life began to bear heavily on my heart,” Douglass said
later. “I often found myself regretting my own existence, and wishing myself dead,” he
recalled; “and but for hope of being free, I have no doubt that I should have killed
myself, or done something for which I should have been killed.”
Douglass knew that, as a slave, he was not truly a self, an individual, he was
property. If he ever had any doubts about this, they were abolished when, as happened
from time to time, he was shifted from one master to another, or witnessed the
several members of his family being sold off or simply transferred. When his master
died, for instance, Douglass was sent for, “to be valued with the other property,” as
Douglass sardonically put it. “We were all ranked together at the valuation,” he
recalled. “Men, women, old and young, married and single, were ranked with horses,
sheep and swine.” Douglass, when recollecting his life as a slave, was particularly
fierce in his criticism of those arguments in defense of slavery that saw the slave
plantation as an extended family, or feudal system, where the slaves were cared for by
their “father,” the plantation patriarch. As property, Douglass pointed out, slaves
were denied their rights not only as individuals but as members of a family. At an
auction or valuation, “a single word from the white man was enough – against all
wishes, prayers, and entreaties – to sunder forever the dearest friends, dearest kindred,
and strongest ties known to human beings.” “If any one thing in my experience, more
than another, served to deepen my conviction of the infernal character of slavery,” he
later explained, “and to fill me with unutterable loathing of slaveholders, it was the
base ingratitude to my poor old grandmother.” “She had served my old master
faithfully, from youth to age,” Douglass went on. She had been the source of his
wealth; “she had rocked him in infancy, attended him in childhood, served him
through life, and at his death ... closed his eyes forever.” But she was still a slave and,
being old, of “but little value.” So her new owners, the master’s descendants, simplyGGray_c02.indd 127ray_c 02 .indd 127 8 8/1/2011 7:54:39 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 39 AM