Frederick Douglass Ethical Issue

The institution of slavery had been in place in the United States long before the country had even been established. By the time a war erupted over the issue, the practice had been in place for nearly 250 years, was deeply ingrained in the country’s economy and social structure, and had strongly influenced the way different regions had developed. Due to this longevity and deep-rootedness in many aspects of the country, many were unwilling to let it die. Opposition to slavery, nevertheless, developed on the basis of moral and ethical ideals. The accounts of former slaves would help to encourage the push towards abolition, as they exposed the cruelties they had experienced firsthand. Perhaps the most notable of these former slaves was a man named

One of the most disturbing of these is of an incident that occurred to a fellow slave on the Maryland plantation where Douglass spent a good deal of his childhood. He describes how the overseer, the unrelenting Mr. Gore, acted with “savage barbarity”, whipping a slave so severely that he fled to a nearby creek and submerged himself to relieve the pain. When this slave refused to leave the water, Gore informed him that he would have three chances to return to land or he would be shot. Douglass describes what followed, saying that Gore, “without consolation or deliberation with any one” shot and killed the man, leaving his body where it lay, “blood and brains” staining the water. Douglass goes on to inform the reader that Gore was not punished for his actions, which the perpetrator justified by saying that “if one slave refused to be corrected, and escaped with his life, the other slaves would follow his example”. This chilling testament explicitly states that those in power relied on violence as a means to send a message to slaves about what would become of them if they refused to toe the line and is, sadly, only one of the innumerable instances of this occurring (Douglass

This could occur because marriages between slaves were not legally recognized and any children mothered by a slave woman automatically became the property of her master. Thus, slaves constantly had the fear of being ripped away from their family looming over their heads in addition to all the other cruelties they faced on a daily basis. The poor conditions slaves lived and worked in kept them exhausted and with no means of comfort, further weakening and demoralizing them, making the chances of escaping even slimmer. These injustices, along with the aforementioned abuses of the same nature, trapped slaves into situations they could not escape without escaping slavery itself, which was near in possible through means other than death (Lectures 2/28 and