Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass

“Frederick Douglass, as a slave, was not a peculiar one; his lot was not especially a hard one; his case may be regarded as a very fair specimen of the treatment of slaves in Maryland, in which State it is conceded that they are better fed and less cruelly treated than in Georgia, Alabama, or Louisiana. Many have suffered incomparably more, while very few on the plantations have suffered less, than himself.”

The Preface, written by prominent abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, introduces Douglass’s autobiography. Garrison points out a few specific moments of brutality that Douglass describes, and then notes that this is not an exaggerated or unusual case. In doing so, he argues that Douglass’s account is representative of slavery as an institution.

“There is one circumstance which makes your recollections peculiarly valuable, and renders your early insight the more remarkable. You come from that part of the country where we are told slavery appears with its fairest features. Let us hear, then, what it is at its best estate—gaze on its bright side, if it has one; and then imagination may task her powers to add dark lines to the picture, as she travels southward to that (for the colored man) Valley of the Shadow of Death, where the Mississippi sweeps along.”

Wendell Phillips makes a similar point to Garrison, though he states it more directly. He tells Douglass that readers will have to imagine the horrors experienced in the Deep South, evoking the biblical Valley of the Shadow of Death.

“The whisper that my master was my father, may or may not be true; and, true or false, it is of but little consequence to my purpose whilst the fact remains, in all its glaring odiousness, that slaveholders have ordained, and by law established, that the children of slave women shall in all cases follow the condition of their mothers; and this is done too obviously to administer to their own lusts, and make a gratification of their wicked desires profitable as well as pleasurable; for by this cunning arrangement, the slaveholder, in cases not a few, sustains to his slaves the double relation of master and father.”

Douglass underscores the immorality of slavery by highlighting how many enslaved people were born to enslaved mothers and white fathers, drawing attention to the perversion of the dual relation of enslaver and father. Douglass was white and Black, and it was believed that his father was his enslaver. Through rape, then, enslavers increased their chattel, as their own children became their property.