Word: slaving
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NARRATIVE OF THE LIFE OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS, AN AMERICAN SLAVE (124 pp.) - Frederick Douglass-Dolphin...
Beating by Scripture. The "fatal poison of irresponsible power" made brutes of most slaveholders, writes Douglass. Even in the border state of Maryland, where Douglass lived, slaves were regularly flogged by masters who were fond of paraphrasing Scripture. "He that knoweth his master's will, and doeth it not, shall be beaten with many stripes." Douglass knew of a white overseer who shot down a slave for refusing to obey. He tells of a 15-year-old girl who was beaten to death for letting a white baby cry. The slaves were helpless, since their testimony was not accepted...
...hunch that his master was his father. At about the age of seven, he was loaned to his master's relatives in Baltimore, where his new mistress started to teach him to read until her husband grumbled that literacy would make the boy "unfit to be a slave." Douglass snitched books from the house and bribed little white boys to help him with the hard words. He scrawled letters on any available walls. Eventually he mastered the language and held classes to teach his fellow slaves. "Those," he recalled, "were great days to my soul...
...Republican. Douglass ended his youthful autobiography just when he was becoming famous. He joined the fiery William Lloyd Garrison's band of abolitionists. A powerfully built man with a great shock of hair and a sonorous voice, he was the best orator of the lot. When the Fugitive Slave Law was passed, enabling slaveowners to recover their runaways, Douglass thundered: "The only way to make the law a dead letter is to make half a dozen or more dead kidnapers." His lecture tour of Britain was cred ited with helping to keep Britain from recognizing the Confederacy during...
...feel it. He is agonized by not feeling it, tormented by the paralysis of being in which the heart's purpose is blunted by the mind's doubts. He self-consciously flogs his will to take the place of his instincts ("Oh, what a rogue and peasant slave am I!") His delay intensifies his guilt; his guilt mounts to anguish, and his anguish drives him to the far edge of sanity. The moment-to-moment danger, tension and exhilaration of the play is not that Hamlet will kill the king, but that he will lose his reason...