Frederick Douglass Mental Abuse

Slavery had been a common trend all over the Eastern part of the world long before the United States began to transfer black African men and women on ships over to the United States for hard working and non-paying labor. Most of the slave owning occurred in the South of the United States, the slave owners were brutal and unforgiving to these slaves, many slave masters used physical tactics such as harsh whippings to the back, yelling, and in some measures, murder. Another strong and effective tactic these owners used on the slaves was emotional and mental abuse, by splitting up their families at a young age and keeping the slaves ignorant to the world, by not letting them read made the slaves easier to control and command. Frederick Douglass explains in his autobiography that he was a witness and a victim to the physical, emotional, and mental abuse by the slave masters. Mental and emotional violence towards the slaves in The Narrative Life of

A nigger should know nothing but to obey his master to do as he is told to do. Learning would spoil the best nigger in the world”(Douglass 34). The masters think that if the slaves can learn just a little, like reading, then the slaves will take even more like learning how to write and how to communicate better. Mental violence towards these helpless slaves was not needed through being uneducated because this made them helpless in their potential to their work they could have done, they were only useful for the easy jobs on the farm and in the house babysitting, when some of these strong slaves had a huge potential of being great, hard workers. Violence by keeping the slaves ignorant to the open world was crueler than the physical whippings the slave masters gave