The difference, Douglass wrote, "between these favored few, and the sorrow and hunger-smitten multitudes of the quarter and the field, was immense." By elevating them, the slave owner was playing the old divide-and-rule trick, and it worked. These glossy servants constituted "a sort of black aristocracy," wrote Douglass. Waiting at the "glittering table of the great house" – a table loaded with the choicest meats, the bounty of the Chesapeake Bay, platters of fruit, asparagus, celery and cauliflower, cheese, butter, cream and the finest wines and brandies from France – was a group of black servants chosen for their loyalty and comely looks. Not all the enslaved, however, were so ill-fed.
In truth, rations consisted of a monthly allowance of a bushel of third-rate corn, pickled pork (which was "often tainted") and "poorest quality herrings" – barely enough to sustain grown men and women through their backbreaking labors in the field. His childhood was marked by hunger and cold, and his teen years passed in one long stretch of hard labor, coma-like fatigue, routine floggings, hunger, and other commonplace tortures from the slavery handbook.ĭouglass makes it a point to nail the boastful lie put out by slaveholders – one that persists to this day – that "their slaves enjoy more of the physical comforts of life than the peasantry of any country in the world." He was parceled out to serve different members of the family. But the spotlight on one of America's great moral heroes is a welcome one.ĭouglass was born on a plantation in Eastern Maryland in 1817 or 1818 – he did not know his birthday, much less have a long-form birth certificate – to a black mother (from whom he was separated as a boy) and a white father (whom he never knew and who was likely the "master" of the house). President Trump recently described Frederick Douglass as "an example of somebody who's done an amazing job and is being recognized more and more, I notice." The president's muddled tense – it came out sounding as if the 19th-century abolitionist were alive with a galloping Twitter following – provoked some mirth on social media. He made sure to document his life in not one but three autobiographies. Douglass was acutely conscious of being a literary witness to the inhumane institution of slavery he had escaped as a young man. American writer, abolitionist and orator Frederick Douglass edits a journal at his desk, late 1870s.
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