126
YOU HAVE SEEN HOW A
MAN WAS MADE A SLAVE;
YOU SHALL SEE HOW A
SLAVE WAS MADE A MAN
NARRATIVE OF THE LIFE OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS
(1845), FREDERICK DOUGLASS
I
n the decades leading up to
the American Civil War (1861–
65), about four million slaves
were held in the southern states of
the US, while abolitionists in the
North campaigned to bring an end
to the inhuman practice of slavery.
In 1841 Frederick Douglass—a
mixed-race slave who had escaped
north—was invited to address an
Anti-Slavery Society meeting in
Massachusetts, and was found to
be a powerful orator for the cause.
He went on to chronicle his life in a
book that sold 5,000 copies within
four months of its publication in1845 and created the template
for the slave narrative genre in
American literature.
Douglass asked in the book,
“How is a man made a slave?” He
told how he was removed from his
slave mother within a year of his
birth. Always hungry and cold,
he saw overseers whipping male
workers for the smallest excuse.
He witnessed slaves murdered for
disobedience; the young Frederick
became aware that “killing a slave
or a colored person ... is not treated
as a crime, either by the courts
or the community.”Literature as liberation
Published by the Anti-Slavery
Office, and prefaced by two leading
abolitionists, Narrative of the Life
of Frederick Douglass, an American
Slave was crafted in part to suit the
needs of the abolitionist cause. In
eloquent, compelling text laced
with biblical imagery, the fugitive
slave debunked myths peddled by
the South, such as the ineducable
character of blacks and the benign
nature of slave holding. Christianity
in the South, he concluded, was “a
mere covering for the most horrid
crimes, a justifier of the most
appalling barbarity....”IN CONTEXT
FOCUS
Slave narrativesBEFORE
1789 The Interesting Narrative
of the Life of Olaudah Equiano,
or Gustavus Vassa, the African
is published in England; it is
narrated by an enslaved boy
from Benin (now Nigeria).AFTER
1853 Solomon Northup’s
autobiographical Tw e l v e Ye a r s
a Slave contrasts the lives of
free blacks in the American
North and enslaved blacks in
the South.1861 In Incidents in the
Life of a Slave Girl, ex-slave
Harriet Jacobs focuses on the
experiences of slave women.1979 In Octavia E. Butler’s
novel Kindred, a neo-slave
narrative, the main character
time-travels between present-
day California and pre-Civil
War Maryland.It was new, dirty, and hard
work for me; but I went at it
with a glad heart and a
willing hand. I was now
my own master.
Narrative of the Life of
Frederick DouglassUS_126-127_FrederickDouglass.indd 126 08/10/2015 13:05