American History

Slavery is the hulking monster pushing its way through the narrative of Frederick Douglasss young life. It is neither sentimentalized nor sensationalized, slavery is presented as an institution of violence and hatred that infected the living nightmares that characterized Douglass and many other slaves lives throughout its long tenure in American history. Such a monster, driven, justified, and exercised through physical, mental and sexual violence, cannot pass through an individuals life without taking casualties. Slavery strips and subverts all notions of humanity from the individuals who bear the brunt of its whip, Douglasss escape and ability to tell his own story is both amazing and telling. Though he escaped the brutality and violence at the center of his first eighteen years of life, Douglass carries the scars of the kind of  soul murder  (128) explained by Nell Painter in her essay on the human toll of slavery. Douglasss story shows himself as others as part of this same human toll, sharing and relating the experiences of violence that were routine in his and other slaves lives. In his description of the abuses heaped upon him, both physically and mentally, and others such as his Aunt Hester show the range of justifications and roles violence played in the maintenance of the institution of slavery.

It would be wrong to say that Douglass was broken or spiritually murdered by slavery. On the contrary, his experiences empowered and pushed him to seek a life outside of  the violence of his life as a slave. However, it would be equally wrong to think him untouched. Douglass may have run to freedom but the free man who emerged was not the same man he would have otherwise been had he not encountered the crushing weight  of slavery. The violence he describes, shows a variety of forces at work to produce the same end - to reinforce and justify the notions of slavery in the minds of the slaveholders and their peers while also purposely committing  soul murder  of enslaved blacks. Slaveowners did not want slaves such as Douglass, whose soul is irreparably wounded but still strong. Violence is a way to break people, with Douglass calling it the  soul killing effects of slavery  (Narrative 48). He describes the sound of the slaves singing on the road to the Great House Farm,  they were tones loud, long, and deep they breathed the prayer and complaint of souls boiling over with the bitterest of anguish  (47). The interpretation of this anguish by whites Douglass encountered in the North of this singing as  evidence of their contentment and happiness  (48) is both utterly unimaginable to Douglass while also showing how the manifest affects of violence were misread and misunderstood by blacks who were only ever able to find a voice in song.

The act of singing and Douglass explanation of how it is a vocalization of sorrow rather than happiness, shows that the scars left by the whip and strips of cowhide employed by masters and their wives were not simply skin deep. Nor was it just physical abuse, the violence that played such an integral part in slavery was at a deeper level of mental and social awareness. Viewed as commodities and not people, they were treated in a manner that reinforced this view. Like the Lowell Mill girls who strike due to the increasingly dehumanizing policies of the mill owners (Robinson), slaves were viewed for how they could enrich the wealth and reputation of their master. The ultimate goal of a slaveowner, given Douglasss story would be to produce an uncomplaining and willing herd of cattle from a group of individual humans. Women were for breeding, as Douglass describes when living with Mr. Covey who buys a slave woman for the sole purpose of creating his own herd of slaves (Narrative 76). In Covey and others like hims views, even basic moralities do not apply to slaves because to father the slave woman, Carolines children, Covey hires a married man. Had she been viewed as a human being and woman and not as a way to increase his wealth, or more importantly had she been white, she would not have suffered such violence against her spirit.

However, violence against the woman among the slaves seems harsher and tainted with undertones absent from the violence against men. Men, women, children are all seen as possessions. What drives this view in the case of men is the feeling of increased wealth. For children it is the potential of increased wealth as they grow and are able to take on heavier and heavier tasks. For women, they are both potential and increased wealth in one.  A healthy young woman cannot only work in the fields, she can bear children to work in the fields. Lastly, and as shown in the case of Douglasss Aunt Hester, women could be abused as objects of pleasure. Just as in their roles as workers and breeders, women who were sexually abused were seen as possessions based on their masters desire. That the master is viewed as blameless and within his rights, in the context of his society, is obvious. She is to blame for her sexuality, the masters attraction, and her failure to honor this attraction. As Hurtado notes, perpetrators of rape  often believe that their prey is especially blameworthy  (11). In this case, Aunt Hesters biggest offense isnt disobeying Colonel Lloyd but instead being caught with another man. Strung up and whipped until her blood  came dripping to the floor  (Douglass 43), Aunt Hester is a victim of the full range of physical, mental, and sexual abuse that is seen in pieces throughout the rest of Douglasss story.  Despite the desire she evokes, the anger she creates, Aunt Hester is still a mere possession to Colonel Lloyd. She is not a woman and has been denied all courtesies and customs that are socially allotted to women merely because of her race.

As Soujourner Truth pointedly notes in her 1851 address to the Womens Convention in Akron, Ohio, race subverts the niceties of gender. While her white counterparts are privy to the notion of a womans vulnerability and femininity, as a black woman she receives no such treatment (Truth). The lack of equality in the treatment between races is, of course, not limited to women. As Douglass explained in his later essay  The Meaning of the Fourth of July for a Negro,  moral inconsistencies were rife in the system of slavery. While  seventy-two crimes in the State of Virginia which, if committed by a black man (no matter how ignorant he be), subject him to the punishment of death while only two of the same crimes will subject a white man to the like punishment.  In this, the system of slavery uses their humanity as a tool for the violence enacted upon them. While they are treated as substandard, blacks were held at greater moral responsibility than the whites who did most of the damage.

Though Douglass portrays in brutal detail the physical violence visited upon him and other slaves as part of slavery, he more importantly succeeds in showing how this violence is much deeper than a sole individuals desire for power. Violence in slavery is systematized, affecting not only the slaves but also slave owners and supporters. It becomes part of a culture, that makes men like Mr. Covey with his slave-breaking business legitimate and turns people like Sophia Auld whose personality becomes poisoned by her own involvement. Douglasss narrative shows that the violence of slavery is not merely a raised whip or even murder, but a much deeper offense that becomes part of social norms and individual cultural understanding. Both the slaves and the slave owners identify themselves within this violence, one suffering and in some cases dying from the force of it while another benefits.