Blog Post 2, response to Frederick Douglass, Chapter 1

Frederick Douglass reveals three important elements required to turn a human into a slave. 1) On the very first page, Douglass begins by stating “A want of information concerning my own was a source of unhappiness to me even during childhood.” He further reveals that he nor most slaves, to his knowledge, know their exact age. These confessions begin to form a clear picture of a human being who has been stripped of an identity. Frederick Douglass describes a man who could barely say he had a mother, whose father is the same man that enslaves him, a man who has no history and no future. Douglass’ situation is not peculiar, slaveholders created these situations in order to keep slaves social networks in disarray. These tactics not only made it harder for slaves to organize, but as Douglass point out, cause one to feel unhappy.

Frederick Douglass makes another strong statement revealing the second key element into creating a slave. 2) Law. “Slaveholders have ordained, and by law established, that the children of slave women shall in all cases follow the condition of their mothers.” This quote reveals exactly how crucial the law is in determining an individual as a slave. With slaves gaining lighter complexions from their sexually deviant masters, we can clearly see that people didn’t need Christianity’s Curse of Ham or a dark skin pigmentation to be labeled a slave. The law of the people deems a slave so.

The third and most despicable of the elements described by Douglass is violence. 3) There is almost nothing as catastrophic to the growth of an individual, a child in specific, as the presence of violence. In Douglass’s and millions of others case, violence was used as a way to both punish those thought to deserve it and create an atmosphere of fear among slaves. “I expected it to be my turn next.” This is the reality that Douglass faced, and as a result he was forced to live life with the fear of a beating or whipping lurking in the distant future. Nobody wants violence to be inflicted upon themselves or the ones you love. Violence was used as a way to show that nobody was safe and that the consequence of breaking the “rules” was severe pain. This and the other two elements laid out build a strong idea of how white people in the United States turned human beings into slaves.