Many colored individuals were forced into slavery and each and everyone of the slaves had a different experience with their master. The slaves were treated as if they were nothing, a piece of property that the white people owned. They were not allowed to learn how to read or write; only needed to know how to do their chores and understand what their master was saying. They were just an extra hand in the house that had no say or existed in the white people world. The slaves’ job was to obey their master or mistress at all times, do their chores and take the beating if given one. In many occasions, the woman house slaves were treated more cruelty than any other slaves the master owned. Reading four different stories from four different people …show more content…
The master had slaves in the field and slaves in the house. Being a house slave was more crucial than being a field slave. Fredrick Douglass got to experience working in both enviroments. Douglass grew up to working as a house slave and as he got older moved to working as a field slave. At a certain time in the morning, a horn would go off in colonel Lloyd’s farm and all the slaves had to be up and ready to work, if not Mr. Severe, the overseer had a stick to whip them.(Douglass, 346-347) Even though being a field slave was hard but it was harder for Fredrick to work outside with no shoes nor pants nor socks, pratically naked. He only had a long shirt that was up to his knees. Also, did not have anywhere else to sleep but a empty bag of corn that he had to crawl inside.(Douglass, 359) It was so bad having to sleep in a bag of corn in the middle of winter where the nights are the coldest. On page 359 Douglass states, “My feet have been so cracked with the frost, that the pen with which I am writing might be laid in the gashes.” With this quote, Douglass describes the many nights he had to deal with and suffer from because of the lack of clothing and shelter he was provided
When Douglass was a child on Lloyd’s farm, he was not yet subjected to hard labor like the older slaves, and he even made friends with his master’s son, which gave him small benefits. Despite this, he was still subject to the cold and hunger, as slaves were not given proper meals or clothing. Children on the plantations were given cornmeal mush as food, and the linen clothing he was given was useless against the cold. In order to stay somewhat warm at night, Douglass stole a small back from the mill and slept with his head and upper body inside of it. When he was around seven or eight, Douglass was moved from Lloyd’s plantation to Mr. Hugh Auld, who lived in Baltimore.
Douglass arrives at Covey’s farm on January 1, 1833, and he is forced to work in the fields for the first time. For his first task he had to fix an oven. Douglass failed fixing the oven so, Covey orders him to take off his clothes and receive punishment. Covey often works in the fields with his slaves. Douglass recalls that he spent his hardest times as a slave during his first six months rented to Covey.
Frederick Douglas paints a vivid picture in Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglas of the daily struggles that slaves went through in antebellum times such as working extremely long hours, being whipped for any reason their master demeaned necessary, and the constant threat of being separated from their families. Firstly, Slaves were expected to work as long as their master’s wanted them to work. They ordinarily worked sun up to sun down, but during the harvesting season they would often have to work long into the night and still have to be up at sunrise the next morning to work. For instance, according to Douglass, “We were often in the field from the first approach of day till its last lingering ray had left us” (972). Another hardship
The treatment of slaves was based on which owner possessed them. Some slaves were sold to fair slave-owners. Many were not so fortunate. As punishment slaves were often beaten, whipped, or imprisoned.
Dating back to 1619, slavery plays a significant role in American history. Brutal oppression and violations have persisted among millions of enslaved African Americans for centuries, as expressed in many autobiographical slave narratives. Compared to male slaves, who were more likely to endure physical violence, slave women were more likely to undergo sexual violations from their male slave owners. In Harriet Jacobs’ narrative Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, she described her experience as an enslaved black woman and provided insights into the difference in womanhood between black and white women. Although both races share a unified female identity, they were differentiated by the hierarchy of race, which entitled white women to have
These Indentured servants, who were European, were treated much better, even though it was harsh for them also, but compared to the slaves who can be tossed around without any rights for them. (Servitude In New England) Being a slave was a lifelong, involuntary, and forced job in which one’s master gets to whip and abuse you every single day, rather than working for them for 7 years and getting the benefits at the end of one’s contract and moving on with their life like that of the servants. (Our Plantation is Very Weak) Additionally, there were even practices of slave breeding going on at this time not just at Douglass’s plantation.
This is how Douglass and other slaves destroyed the American slave system. First, along the long road to freedom Douglass and other slaves experienced a lot of physical harm done to them. The text states, “She was a field hand, and a whipping is the penalty of not being in the field at sunrise.” This means that the owners thought it was ok to beat their slaves when they are doing most to all their work. Also, the book says, “I was not so terrified and horror-stricken at the sight, that I had myself in a closet.”
Douglass gives us a critique of slavery by describing the mistreatments of slavery he was forced to endure. Throughout the book Douglass describes the physical abuse he endured while a slave but to more accurately capture the atmosphere of slavery he explained the mental abuse he sustained as well. At a certain point in the narrative he talks about how he was eventually allowed to work at a ship yard as a caulker. While he worked there he received a weekly wage but at the end of the week he was obligated to give all of his earnings to his master. This ritual was accompanied with the idea that if a slave is deprived of his earnings he will not desire them at all but sometimes Douglass’ owner would give him some money to encourage him to keep working but instead, “[I]t had the opposite effect.
His year with Covey was a life changing experience. Under Covey, Douglass worked the land day and night in all weathers. For the first six months he was constantly beaten and severely punished to increase his productivity. He was whipped with sticks or cow skin. Douglass experienced an “epoch in my humble history,” and explains to readers that “You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man.”
Douglass encountered multiple harsh realities of being enslaved. For example, the ex-slave was practically starved to death by his masters on multiple occasions. In fact, “[He was] allowed less than a half of a bushel of corn-meal per week, and very little else... It was not enough for [him] to subsist upon... A great many times [he had] been nearly perishing with hunger” (pg 31).
The times of slavery had only brought sadness and despair for all African-Americans in the United States during the times of the Civil War. People were treated as property, denied a proper education, and overall treated as expendable and inconsequential pieces of trash. The one thing that was done so that we could understand the pain that these slaves had gone through was the slaves explaining their experiences through writing to be studied throughout history. However, there are very distinct differences between the writings in how they are made and written.
(Yetman 32). This shows how some slaves were viewed as family because after being freed their former owners came looking for them telling them to come back home and live with them and some were very happy to go back. This also gives insight on how whites treated their slaves and how African Americans viewed their owners. Though this shows a more or less “bright” outcome there are many dark outcomes as to be expected from slavery. Overall VOICES FROM SLAVERY shows how not all African Americans hated slavery but they greatly depended on the owner.
In the 1800’s slavery was a major issue in the United States which was dealt with on a daily basis in the South. The “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass” Fedrick Douglass himself expresses the differences in the lives of black people in the North and in the South. The South was known to have some of the wealthiest white people in the states, that wealth and power they had was due to the many slaves they had working in their plantations. In the other hand, the North had black people getting paid for their labor, their black people were free. They were treated like human beings and even though they might still encounter problems with some of the whites these problems where nothing compared to the retched life blacks had in the South.
This shows that the way a Master behaves around a slave can be very influential, and Douglass explains that he was compelled to give all his hard-earned money to Master Hugh because the influence the Master had on him was to give him everything he worked hard for. Next, on page 10 of his Narrative, Douglass proclaims, “They never knew when they were safe from punishment. They were frequently whipped when least deserving, and escaped whipping when most deserving it. Every thing depended upon the looks of the horses,
My mother was dead; my grandmother lived far off, so that I seldom saw her. I had two sisters and one brother that lived in the same house with me; but the early separation of us from our mother had well-nigh blotted the fact of our relationship from our memories. I looked for home elsewhere, and was confident of finding none which I should relish less than the one which I was leaving. If, however, I found in my new home hardship, hunger, whipping, and nakedness, I had the consolation that I should not have escaped any one of them by staying.” (5.6), Douglass didn’t really feel anything when he left his home, because his home wasn’t the same when his mother