The little boy had been given a peek into the transformative world of words and was desperate to learn. But when her husband forbade her to continue – teaching slaves to read and write was a crime – she immediately stopped his lessons. The mistress of the house gave him the most precious gift in his life – she taught him the alphabet. When he was about 8 years old, Douglass was sent to Baltimore, which proved to be a turning point. If you didn't take it, you were considered ungrateful. 'Slaves were also given intoxicated drinks, so they would have little time to think of escaping. 'It was a form of bread and circus,' says Opie. It was deemed a disgrace not to get drunk at Christmas.' To encourage whiskey benders, the 'masters' took bets to see who could drink the most whiskey, thus 'getting whole multitudes to drink to excess.'ĭouglass sounds even angrier at these obligatory orgies – he calls them 'part and parcel of the gross fraud, wrong, and inhumanity of slavery' – than at other, more direct forms of cruelty. During those six days, the enslaved could do what they chose, and while a few spent time with distant family or hunting or working on their homes, most were happy to engage in playing sports, 'fiddling, dancing, and drinking whiskey and this latter mode of spending the time was by far the most agreeable to the feelings of our masters. Anyone whose body bore the merest trace of tar was brutally whipped by the chief gardener.īut if deprivation was one form of control, a far more insidious and malicious one was the annual Christmas holidays, where gluttony and binge drinking was almost mandatory. When even this proved futile, a tar fence was erected around the forbidden fruit. 'In their moral universe, they felt, 'You stole me, you mistreated me, therefore to steal from you is quite normal.' ' If caught, say, eating an orange from the owner's abundant fruit garden, the punishment was flogging.

'They did this by hunting, fishing, growing their own vegetables – or stealing,' says Frederick Douglass Opie, professor of history and foodways at Babson College, who, of course, is named after the activist. The 'hunger-smitten multitudes' did what they could to supplement their scanty diets. 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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