Narrative of the Life of Frede

He was able to control a crowd with his magnificent oratory skills, leaving crowds of mixed-race audiences compelled to his thoughts of equality and antislavery. Even though most of the slave-children were of mulatto decent from their white fathers, sparing a child from the loss of its mother was not considered and highly deemed as showing favoritism towards the slaves. The white children could tell their ages. This lack of motherly affection is another effect of the oppression slavery has caused on the mental perceptions of slave-children. This action was done to further oppress the masses of slaves through example and to hinder the child under oppression from their first earliest memory. “They seldom came nearer to it than planting-time, harvest-time, cherry-time, spring-time, or fall time” (970). “For what this separation is done, I do now know, unless it be to hinder the development of the child’s affection toward its mother, and to blunt and destroy the natural affection of the mother for the child. Douglass gives comments to the fact that he, and other slaves, was not allowed to know such information about themselves. d given himself, was not an actual written account, but a verbal comment that his master made when Douglass was about age seventeen. “I never saw my mother, to know her as such, more than four or five times in my life; and each of these times was very short in duration, and at night. To live one’s life with this act of cruelty hanging above one’s head would create a sense of suppression towards any hope of freedom or emancipation.

Another action taken by the white masters was the act of making their female salves their personal concubines and then robbing the slave-mothers of their newly born children. Plummer are atrocious, but deemed as necessary by the white man to control the acts and wants of the slaves. Douglass talks about a man who was in charge of disciplining the slaves on the plantation.