Throughout Frederick Douglass’s Narrative, he recalls the inhumane acts that were thrusted upon him as a slave, but overcame the abuse of the common practice. Specifically, Douglass since childhood worked in a plantation as a slave, but from him learning to read and write, he escapes and teaches the people of the North the hardships of slavery, where he faced deprivation through exploitation, discovered there were more opportunities for slaves as he approaches the North, and gains power to change of his life due to his knowledge. For instance, the slaves were put into lower social positions than their masters through social manipulation, in ways of isolation and deprivation, so they would not leave the plantations. To illustrate, in the plantations many of “the white …show more content…
Being that there are basic facts of the slaves that were being withheld from them, they lose the sense of identity from a young age, and now are conditioned to only know what the masters tell them, believing all else is irrelevant. Another way the slaves are mistreated in society is how, “before the child has reached its twelfth month, [the] mother is taken from it”, so family can not grow emotional attachments to one another (48). Learning as a little kid, the slaves are taught to grow up with no sense of relationship to a family member forcing the only loyalty or emotional connections towards the masters, making it easier for them to control. In addition, many of the slave children who were too young to work in the fields did not have “ shoes, stockings, jackets, or trousers” making the only clothes allotted to them for the whole year being “two coarse linen shirts” (54). Having the children be cold and vulnerable throughout the winter months, made the small children realize the low status that is implemented, teaching the children to rely only on the masters. Furthermore, Frederick