How Did Frederick Douglass End Slavery?

Frederick Douglass was born in a time where slavery was thriving and he was in the midst of it all. In his biography he tells of his life in slavery and how he become an abolitionist. He spent many years after seeking to improve colored people’s lives and end slavery. The book helps us understand Frederick’s character and what a slave what normally have to go through.

To start briefly, we begin the story when Frederick is still a young child working as a simple barn-hand in his master’s plantation. Later on he’s sent to live with his master’s relative, Hugh Auld, in Baltimore, where his new-found want of freedom is born. It is in Baltimore we he begins to educate himself in preparation of leaving one day. Unfortunately, when his master dies and his children as well, Frederick is sent back to live on the plantation where he hasn’t been since a child. His new master believing the city life has ruined him sends him to be reformed by a

Hopkins remained but a short time in the office of overseer. Why his career was so short, I do not know, but suppose he lacked the necessary severity to suit Colonel Lloyd.”(Douglass 32). Aunt Hester, a slave Frederick’s master owned, was stripped naked from neck to waist and beaten with a whip until she bled. Whipping is such as not getting up early or not doing your work fast enough, but other times it was just seen as a form of enjoyment. In many cases slave-owners, o even overseers, were not concerned with a slave’s wellbeing. The death of a colored man is described as unimportant and easy to settle with money, sometimes just an excuse, “… that killing a slave, or any other colored person, in Talbot county, Maryland, is not treated as a crime, either by the courts or the community.”(Douglass 34). It’s a striking fact that helps us understand the author’s undeterred determination to escape slavery and abolish it later in his