Life and Times of Frederick Douglass

Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 1881

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Part 1, Chapters 1-4Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 1: “Life as a Slave”

Part 1, Chapter 1 Summary: “Author’s Birth”

This brief opening chapter describes Douglass’s earliest memories and closest familial relations. Born a slave in Talbot County on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, young Frederick lives until the age of seven or eight with his grandparents, Betsey (who is a slave) and Isaac Bailey (Frederick did not assume the surname “Douglass” until after his escape from slavery in 1838). Talbot County, at least the part Douglass remembers, is “remarkable” for little more than the “general dilapidation of its farms and fences” and the “indigent and spiritless character of its inhabitants” (9). Douglass has more pleasant memories of his grandparents, in particular his grandmother, who “was held in high esteem, far higher than was the lot of most colored persons in that region” (10).

Of his parents, young Frederick knows little, and for different reasons. His mother, a slave, has been “hired out” by her owner and thus rarely sees her son but for “a few hasty visits made in the night on foot,” after which she is compelled to return “in time to respond to the driver’s call to the field in the early morning” (10). As a boy, therefore, Frederick only ever catches “little glimpses” of his mother. The identity of his father—likely a white man, perhaps his mother’s owner—remains forever a mystery.

Part 1, Chapter 2 Summary: “Removal from Grandmother’s”

Douglass fondly remembers both his grandmother and her cabin, which, to the young boy, has the “attractions of a palace” (12). Less fond are his recollections of learning that he was a slave, the property of Captain Aaron Anthony, whom his grandmother called “Old Master.” Captain Anthony owns not only Frederick’s grandmother but her cabin and the surrounding farms. Anthony himself, however, resides on the sprawling plantation of Colonel Edward Lloyd, one of the richest men in slaveholding Maryland.

A devastated young Frederick also learns that he will be forced to leave his grandparents’ cabin. “Old Master” Anthony allows the Bailey children to stay at the cabin only while they are very small. When they grow older, they are sent to live on the Lloyd plantation. His grandmother keeps from young Frederick the much-feared date of departure. When the day comes, she carries him part of the way on her shoulder. At the conclusion of this mournful journey, Frederick meets some of the Lloyd plantation’s many children, including his brother Perry and his sisters Sarah and Eliza. After convincing Frederick to go to the back of the house and play with the other children, his grandmother quietly slips away without telling him. It is the boy’s “first introduction to the realities of the slave system” (15)

Part 1, Chapter 3 Summary: “The Troubles of Childhood”

Aunt Katy, a fellow slave to “Old Master,” exercises a great deal of control over the slave children who live on Captain Anthony’s portion of Colonel Lloyd’s great plantation. To young Frederick, much of that control seems merciless and arbitrary. An excellent cook, and a favorite of Captain Anthony’s, Aunt Katy runs the kitchen with an iron fist, eager to earn her master’s approval. She alone decides how much food the children receive; "ill-tempered and cruel by nature,” she often leaves young Frederick “pinched with hunger” (16).

One evening, after Aunt Katy has promised to starve him, Frederick’s mother appears. When she learns what the kitchen tyrant has done to her son, she evinces “a fiery indignation” and gives Aunt Katy “a lecture which was never forgotten” (17). In that moment, young Frederick discovers that he “was not only a child, but somebody’s child” (17). It is, as far as he can recall, the last time he ever sees his mother.

Part 1, Chapter 4 Summary: “A General Survey of the Slave Plantation”

Slavery in parts of Maryland, notwithstanding its proximity to the free state of Pennsylvania, could be as brutal as anything experienced in the Deep South. The more secluded the area, the more its wealthy and powerful inhabitants could unleash violent passions with impunity. Colonel Lloyd’s enormous estate—he owned more than 1,000 slaves—together with a half-dozen or so adjacent plantations, constitutes a world unto itself. The “whole public was made up of and divided into three classes, slaveholders, slaves, and overseers” (21).

Since the white working class is nearly non-existent in Colonel Lloyd’s isolated fiefdom, the skilled artisans are all slaves. So, too, is the medical “doctor,” “Uncle” Isaac Copper, who doubles as a “doctor” of divinity and, in that latter capacity, is known to use a hickory switch on the backs of unruly slave children who do not give the Lord’s Prayer its due attention, for in those days “[e]verybody in the South seemed to want the privilege of whipping somebody else” (25).

Part 1, Chapters 1-4 Analysis

Chattel slavery, the system by which human beings were reduced to moveable property, did not acknowledge the slave as a member of a family. A slaveholder’s whim could sever the strongest of human connections by separating mothers from children. Furthermore, the mother’s legal status as a slave for life, no matter the father’s identity, imparted the same condition on her offspring.

This is Frederick’s experience. He sees his mother only occasionally. If he ever knew her name, he does not reveal it in this book. His memories of her, gleaned from brief encounters and tiny bits of knowledge, constitute the most powerful passages in these early chapters.

Slavery existed in a kind of symbiotic relationship with the surrounding physical environment. As the institution took root, it left its human victims either too corrupted by power or too degraded by submission to consider improving the world around them. As that world languished, so did the minds of those who lived in it. Talbot County on the Eastern Shore of Maryland did not have the same death-trap reputation as the rice swamps of Lowcountry South Carolina or the cotton fields of Alabama and Mississippi, but it was dark and isolated nonetheless. Slavery fostered brutality everywhere. Aunt Katy and “Uncle” Isaac Copper, two older slaves, treat slave children with cruelty. As subsequent chapters make clear, the problem was not Aunt Katy, “Uncle” Isaac, the overseers, or the masters. The problem was, and always had been, slavery itself.