Frederick Douglas's Narrative

The document Frederick Douglass Narrative, excreted from his 1845 autobiography, is about his life as a child slave on a plantation. Vividly describing his childhood in his opening chapters, readers get the full effect of what not only happened to Douglass, but what was also the norm for most of American slaves. He wrote about his knowledge and experiences as a child slave, and gave readers the true meaning of what slave families went through, in comparison to what was published in the media by whites. One of the main arguments presented in Douglass’s autobiography is the way women are treated and how they live as a family. From a very young age, before he was even a year old, Douglass was separated from his African mother, Harriet Bailey,

Douglass comments on this custom, “For what this separation is done, I do not know, unless it be to hinder the development of the child’s affection toward its mother, and to blunt and destroy the natural affection of the mother for the child.” Illness soon took Bailey’s life when Douglass was just seven. She was gone long

Her physical traits were portrayed as unattractive to justify that white men did not find African American women attractive and that there was no sexual contact between a master and slave. From Douglass’s autobiography and many other sources we know that this was not true and actually happened quite frequently. Commenting on the law about children following in their mothers footsteps, Douglass writes, “This is done too obviously to administer to their own lusts, make a gratification of their wicked desires profitable as well as pleasurable; for by this cunning arrangement, the slaveholder, in cases not a few, sustains to his slaves the double relation of master and father.” The main purpose for her creation was to use as evidence that slave women were content and even happy to be slaves, and thus, that slavery was a humane