The narrative of slavery by Fredrick Douglass: Oppression and Resistance
Slavery, in a nutshell, can be described as the state where a person is a chattel of another person who has an overbearing influence and who acts as a master to them. In most cases, one is either bought into slavery or born into it like Fredrick Douglass. This was viewed as addition of wealth and property. Fredrick, a black American, explains how slaves were treated since, although born into slavery, he got lucky since he was able to escape to another state where he got enlightened on the necessity of liberating other slaves. He brings out that ill-treatment by the masters took various forms, which included mental, emotional, and physical abuse. One of the masters (Mr. Severe) would wipe his servants, causing blood to flow half an hour at the time. The slaves’ rights to knowledge were stripped of as someone found reading anything would be wiped mercilessly. There was the denial of knowing their age since even Fredrick overheard that he was born in 1818 form his master. Children were separated from their parents at birth to break the creation of a bond between them. The slaves also were denied basic needs like clothing and proper housing. The masters would even rape the women servants and enslave the children born out of it, thus dehumanizing both the black American mother and the child born from the act.
Nevertheless, the slaves resisted slavery in various ways, which included; day to day resistances, the example of the small plantation rebellions of stealing from their owner, damaging farm machinery, or even slow working to waste time. Women carrying the pregnancies would also terminate them to avoid the children from being born to slavery. Other slaves would run from the farms though they were hunted with dogs or even their names published in the newspapers. Major resistances included campaigns example of the Abolitionist pamphlet campaign of 1835, where the growing movement of abolishment attempted to influence the public opinion in the slave states by mailing thousands of anti-slavery pamphlets to addresses in the south. The material irritated southerners who broke into posting offices, and took bags of mails and burned them in the streets as the crowd cheered. William still an abolitionist also came up with the underground railroad, which was a term used to describe a loose network of activists, which helped escaped slaves from South America find freedom in northern states or across the international border in Canada. Women abolitionists movement also was done by the women and which was considered scandalous since women were not known to rebel, so their presence wreaked havoc. This because masters thought women as inferior and those who are meant to do just the domestic work.
Fredricks’ narrative on how other slaves resisted slavery is quite analytical, and he authoritatively narrates the whole occurrence from both the slave point of view he underwent and also as a liberated person who now is a great advocate against it. He tries to show that the whole process of slavery affected both the slaves and the slave-holder who demeaned themselves by sleeping with the maid-servants and disowning their flesh and blood. The brutality that came in with the master-slave relationship did not end there as Fredrick narrates that the captain would come home, strip his auntie to the waste, and whip her until she bled notwithstanding that he had feelings for her and she was not a slave. He concludes that slavery only acts to dehumanize one person by another, which is against morality and the wellbeing of human nature.