Books: The Black Abolitionist

NARRATIVE OF THE LIFE OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS, AN AMERICAN SLAVE (124 pp.) — Frederick Douglass—Dolphin (95¢)

Though he was the greatest American Negro of the last century, Frederick Douglass was all but forgotten after his death in 1895. The nation was weary of the Negro problem, and Douglass, a Negro militant well in advance of the N.A.A.C.P. and CORE, did not suit the national temper. His reputation was eclipsed by the more accommodating Booker T. Washington, who supported segregation. U.S. historians have heaped praise on Washington while ignoring Douglass and, in one case, misspelling his name.

But the new attack on segregation has revived interest in Douglass. His early autobiography, published in 1845, has now been reissued. Written when Douglass was 27 or 28 (he was never certain of his age, since the births of slaves were rarely recorded), it is a classic of abolitionist literature without the steamy rhetoric of much abolitionist writing.

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 in court. Most had to work from sunrise to sunset, and often longer. They ate from a common trough like pigs.

Douglass was better treated than most. A mulatto, he had a 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."

Douglass' Baltimore idyl came to an end. He was sent back to rural Maryland and farmed out to a cracker named Edward Covey, who enjoyed a reputation as a "nigger breaker." Covey very nearly broke Douglass. Called "the Snake" because he was always sneaking up on the slaves at work, Covey ruled by terror. "My natural elasticity was crushed," writes Douglass, "the disposition to read departed, the dark night of slavery closed in upon me." But Covey flogged Douglass once too often. In a fit of rage, Douglass grabbed Covey by the neck and beat him up. Covey never called the police, Douglass reasoned, because he was afraid of tarnishing his "nigger-breaker" reputation. Douglass recovered his spirit from the fight and made a hair-raising escape North in 1838.