Examples Of Slavery In Frederick Douglass

The Corrupt Ideals of Slavery Revealed by Frederick Douglass Frederick Douglass was born in February of 1818. After he escaped slavery in Maryland, he became an abolitionist, writer, statesman and much more. His book depicts his endeavor through enslavement and paints a picture of the corrupt standards of slavery. Douglass discusses his journey as a young boy and the circumstance that surrounded him, leading to his adulthood, he also talks about acquiring knowledge, and opening his mind to the injustices of slavery. Slavery can be described as a corrupt ideal, one that Fredrick Douglass highlights, because, of the brutality that slavery attains, its ability strip humans for there core humanity, and its ability to derive false ideals with …show more content…
As a child growing up in slavery, Douglass reports many horrific events, including a slaveholder by the name of Mr. Plummer, whom he refers to as a “savage monster” (22). He remembers the notorious whippings this man gave to his slaves. The man was a horribly cruel and was said to always carry around a whip. Douglas recalls one memory when his aunt was out after dark and was then needed by Mr. Plummer. When Mr. Plummer realized that she was out with a man, he tied her up naked on a hook and whipped her. Douglas says, “after rolling up his sleeves he commenced to lay on heavy cow skin, and soon the warm red blood (amid heart- rending shrieks from her, and horrid oaths from him) came dripping to the floor” (24). In this ghastly scene, Douglas depicts the corrupt nature of slavery and the intense environment of Douglas’s youth as he experienced de humanizing immorality associated with slavery. By illustrating this scene and exhibiting the true un human like nature of slavery it allows one to see the true essence of slavery, and how it led to the lake of empathy derived from the believed that black slaves where not human or equal to a white …show more content…
The idea that slave songs displayed the gleeful nature of slavery was false because this idea was derived, having no contextualized evidence to support it. Douglass describes the songs the slaves sang as, “representing the sorrow of his heart” (30). Slaves sang the historic songs when they were complaining from their souls about the affects slavery had on them. The songs represented their cries for help because of the terrible things they endured. The idea of ignorant northerners believing the enslaved blacks could be happy and content based on this, is not only senseless, but ignorant. These ideas were fabricated in hopes of verification that slavery was in fact civilized and moral, showing the corrupt nature its rudiments relied