O’Brien1

Aidan O’Brien

Dr. Jacob Lee

History 442

March 28 2018

Frederick Douglass, Slavery, Pig Troughs, and Pants

Over the course of the life of Frederick Douglas, he witnessed the brutality, cruelty, and

fundamentally oppressive nature of slavery up close and personal. The slaveholders of the early

19th century went to extraordinary lengths to dehumanize and humiliate their slaves to keep them

in line. In his own words, Douglass writes, “I have found, to make a contented slave, it is

necessary to make a thoughtless one… He must be made to feel that slavery is right; and he can

be brought to that only when he ceases to be a man.”1 Though through the eyes of Douglass we

see these attempts to oppress to and dehumanize slaves by their slaveholders take many forms,

most notably through of the deprivation of education to slaves, through harsh and inhumane

living conditions, and through psychological abuse designed to convince slaves that they

themselves were incapable of thinking in the way that their masters did. In this way, slaveholders

took control not only over what their slaves were physically doing, but also over how they

thought about the world, leading to the ‘ceasing’ of being a man as Douglass would describe it.

Or at least, how they attempted to, because over the course for Frederick Douglass’ life, he also

showed plenty of ways to resist this control as well. Specifically, when Douglass was told that

reading would make him unfit to be a slave, he responded by learning to read and write and

1
Douglass, Frederick, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Bedford St. Martin’s, 2003,
103
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become educated in secret. When he was starved, whipped, and beaten by white men, Douglass

kept himself going with ideals of freedom, and when his masters attempted to break him

psychologically by hiring him to ‘Nigger-Breaker’ Edward Covey, Douglass resisted by finally

coming to the conclusion that it would be better to die attempting to be free, then to cease to be a

man.

The first and most important aspect of oppression necessary for this transformation was

making sure slaves could not receive the education necessary to learn about their true condition.

For Frederick Douglass and many other slaves, this manifested particularly in the form of

learning to read. Should a slave learn to read, all of a sudden, doors could become open to him.

His world would expand well beyond the plantations he had likely lived on for the entirety of his

life, and he, unfortunately, would learn how pitiful and deprived his existence was, be it through

newspapers or perhaps even natural rights literature of the time. Depriving the slave of this

knowledge meant, of course, that the slave was then forced to receive all knowledge of the

outside world at the mercy of the master’s discretion. Education would free a slave’s mind, and

because of this, slaveholders felt that their bodies would follow. For Frederick Douglass, this

manifests itself in the form of Hugh Auld, when he when he found his wife teaching Douglass to

read, saying “If you teach that nigger how to read… It would forever unfit him to be a slave”2.

As for Douglass, he felt the same as Master Auld, so naturally he began learning to read and

write in secret. Not only that, but Douglass also began to help liberate the shackles on other

slaves’ minds and teach them to read themselves in his own school.3 If he could help it, no

slave’s mind would remain unliberated.

2
Douglass, Frederick, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, 73
3
Douglass, Frederick, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, 93
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But this is not the only form of oppression Douglass encountered in his life. Throughout his

existence, although primarily while he was living on a plantation as a young boy, Douglass

encountered the countless inhumane and physically abusive aspects of slavery first hand. In one

passage, Douglass mentions children eating their food from a trough similar to a pig’s. 4In

another, he says that slaves were permitted but two coarse shirts a year, no pants for those too

young to work, and only one blanket per adult.5 This is without even getting into how Douglass

mentions specific instances of slave owners not feeding their slaves well, particularly in the case

of when he lived with Thomas Auld and described himself as ‘nearly perishing from hunger’.6

And this is without even mentioning the countless physical beatings slaves received at the hands

of whites. Clearly, it was the goal of slave owners to, exactly as Douglass mentions in the initial

paragraph, reduce their slaves to the same status as animals. Douglass resisted all these tactics in

a few ways, but they all shared a common theme: survival. Douglass admits to stealing when he

was hungry7, and for the most part he just stands back and takes any punishment he received

from slave masters. Since his goal was escape, his resistance primarily entailed him surviving to

do this, but his stealing did lead to one final, and more terrible type of oppression he

encountered.

After being declared careless by Master Thomas after eating to not starve, Douglass is rented

“to be broken”, to Mr. Covey,8 the famed “Nigger-Breaker”, who plays new kinds of tricks on

Douglass and the other slaves by way of the mind. Covey would never let the slaves know when

he was in their midst, even going as far as to crawl into their midst while they were working to

4
Douglass, Frederick, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, 58
5
Douglass, Frederick, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, 58
6
Douglass, Frederick, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, 76
7
Douglass, Frederick, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, 77
8
Douglass, Frederick, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, 77
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surprise them so they never knew when he was or wasn’t watching.9 This kind of a mind game is

cruel, as the slaves know well enough what should happen if Covey or any slave holder catches

them slacking, but these types of mind games were, as Douglass describes, all too common

among slaveholders at the time. This is meant to, in Douglass’ words, “Disgust the slave with

freedom”. 10Designed to essentially bully the slave into thinking his master knows best, this kind

of tactic was both effective and quite common. Douglass himself fell victim to Covey’s cruelty,

having openly acknowledged that he at one point had become the beast he wanted so badly to

eradicate. To become a man again for Douglass required him to, after a near death experience,

fight Mr. Covey. 11After a standoff of two hours, Douglass emerged having drawn Covey’s

blood with no consequence. In doing this, he told himself that the next white man who attempted

to beat him would have to kill him, and that freedom, now, was more important to him than ever.

Over the course of Frederick Douglass’ life, the oppression he both suffers and observes

others suffering at the hands of slavery is nothing short of horrific, and his ability to resist, even

when appearing to be totally broken, is truly extraordinary. His referral of broken slaves as

‘brutes’12 akin to livestock goes to even convey the reality of their treatment at the hands of

slaveholders. The extremely inhumane day to day living conditions slaves suffered were meant

to produce exactly that. In his effort to escape, Douglass inadvertently found the road to escape

through education. Learning to read and write was not only ultimately the key to what eventually

lead to his wholehearted hatred of slavery and escape, but also the key to something more. In his

account, Douglass describes himself not just a slave waiting for escape, but also as a teacher

9
Douglass, Frederick, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, 80
10
Douglass, Frederick, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, 89
11
Douglass, Frederick, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, 86
12
Douglass, Frederick, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, 70
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seeking to open the minds of other slaves, and this is possibly his greatest contribution. With the

ability to read, any one of Douglass’ 40 students could have their eyes opened as Douglass’

were. They could be given, for the first time in their lives, a choice. They could accept the

shackles that bound them into slavery, as Douglass did, decide that to risk it all for freedom.