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Above, a National Portrait Gallery image of Frederick Douglass in the 1840s
By James C. Johnston Jr.
Perhaps the greatest lesson of history is that we must never ignore “history” or alter it to fit the prejudice of the day. The fact is that this nation, the “Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave,” was founded with the institution of human slavery as an intrinsic part of our national reality. That fact is something that our children must know from the time that they can understand that owning a human being like property is a very immoral and wrong-headed concept. Our children must learn that we Americans practiced slavery from 1619, when the Dutch sold the first Black Men and Women in Jamestown, to the first English settlers in North America to form a successful colonial enterprise, until slavery was truly ended in the whole country by the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865.
Slavery became the great fact of life in America in our first permanent colony of Virginia, and it dominated our national thinking until it became the greatest “Cause of Conscious” culminating in the great cataclysm of the American Civil War. By the 19th Century, it became horribly obvious that this awful stain of slavery could only be purged by the living sacrifice of blood. Slavery was the great “Original Sin” of our nation. In the South, slavery of Black Americans was seen as a unique necessity to the economic life of the Cotton and Tobacco Empires of that region. In fact, Southerners called it their “Peculiar Institution.”
A huge part of the wealth of the Southern aristocracy was invested in slaves. The fecundity of slave women was in many instances a plantation’s greatest asset. Slave babies had a value of two hundred dollars at birth. Gifts were given to new slave mothers to encourage fecundity. To pretend that system had an ethical base is a horrible example of delusional thinking.
It is amazing to me that in spite of the best efforts of the slaveholding class of America, the real genius of Black America grew and burst forth most especially in the fine art of “Human Survival”. Slavery was a system that imposed horrible physical and psychological torture on a whole people who had the ability to muster the super-human strength to survive. I could never imagine myself as strong as that. Obviously not everyone survived, but the majority of Black Americans did. They showed fortitude and a degree of courage that most of us living today could never comprehend or hope to match.
Reading the brilliant works of Frederick Douglass, I am inspired as a man, an historian, and as a writer. Here is Frederick Douglass, a young man born into slavery in Maryland about 1817 or 1818, who had no expectation of opportunity for either freedom or personal achievenebt at birth to accomplish anything of great importance, but he enjoyed some good luck and a chance to grow into something like his full human potential. How do I know this? I read two of his autobiographies!
Even though Frederick Douglass was imprisoned in slavery in a part of the country where it was punishable under the law to teach a slave, or even a freedman in some instances to read or write, Douglass survived and arose above his lowly prospects to become a writer, a leader, a diplomat representing this country abroad, and an example of unparalleled courage. Teaching a person of color to read and write was even punishable in some places in the “Old South” by death!
Yet, young Fredrick Douglass found a way. He learned to read and write, and he got the chance to prove that a Black man could write as well or even significantly better than his fellow contemporary authors some of whom happened to have been educated in this nation’s highest academic temples of learning. Douglass’ prose is beautiful, clear, and totally comprehensible. It is direct, frequently poetic, yet uncluttered by the Victorian fustian that frustrates modern readers today even when reading the likes of the great Charles Dickins.
Consider the life of Frederick Douglass who was born into a system that denied his humanity, denied his human dignity, and denied his intrinsic intellectual worth all at the same time while also separating him from his mother’s care. As he grew into young manhood, Douglass dared not only to read and write, but he also taught others of his race this vital art which had the potential to open doors on opportunities of something like equality at some distant time. Douglass once said that he prayed for freedom, but used his legs to get it.
As a teenager, not-quite satisfied with his lot in life, Frederick Douglass was sent off to a man whose job and profession it was to “Break Slaves”. This process was used to break a slave’s will to resist his master’s authority. Douglass’ reaction to this threat of painful treatment was to beat the Hell out of the man who would have tried to beat him into submission. After thrashing the Slave-Breaker, Douglass calmed down and reasoned with the shocked man.
When the Slave-Breaker said that he would bring the law down on Douglass and see him hanged for what he had done, Douglass replied that calling on the law for help would be a poor advertisement for his business. After all, wouldn’t it be a disgrace for his clients to find out that he had been thrashed by a fifteen-year-old-slave who he was supposed to be reeducating? Would it not demonstrate that as a Slave-Breaker, he was a failure in installing the virtue of docility in the “uppity-boy’’ by his total inability to turn his subject into a proper and respectful servant?
After all, there had even been a witness to this shameful incident, namely a slave who had been loaned out by one of the Slave-Breaker’s neighbors for the purpose of doing some incidental farm work. When the Slave-Breaker had called out to this borrowed man for help in subduing the “Uppity-Boy”, this borrowed slave was emboldened enough to reply that it was not his job to attack another slave, and if he himself were to be physically punished later by the Breaker-of-Slaves, his own master would be furious, because his valuable property might have been damaged.
The Breaker-of-Slaves, seeing that he was clearly defeated by both the physical force and the intellectual quality of the rational arguments of this amazing young man-of-color, the Slave-Breaker agreed that silence was best under the circumstance, and therefore he left the two young Black men to their work and walked away out into the farm yard.
Even though Frederick Douglass was but fifteen years of age, he never again could ever be considered to be just “A Boy”. He had arrived at full manhood in this moment of triumph over this bully by correctly sizing-up the situation, showing courage, using his strength, and intellectual ability.
Frederick Douglass used his legs, and more importantly his intellect, to gain his freedom. He used the power of his pen and his mighty voice to fight the great and good fight for human freedom and dignity. He clearly saw the importance of education and the nurturing of the child as a powerful weapon in the arsenal of freedom. Frederick Douglass famously said, “It is easier to build strong children than to repair a broken child.”
This should be a supreme article of faith and a foundational principal in the educating all American children who would forever be free in an independent nation.
James C. Johnston Jr. is a former Franklin selectman, Franklin High School history teacher, and author. Article copyright James C. Johnston, Jr. 2023, used with permission
