nce and civil rights appeals approached. From a young age, Douglass fought for the freedom, and later rights, of his fellow blacks, and never saw the desired equality between races. Frederick Douglass’s background deserves recognition, because his background served as the basis for his autobiographies. The material contained in them represents the time in which he lived, and also his reactions and observations of the period. To understand why Douglass’s autobiographies merit reading, we need to examine his life and crusade against slavery in history, not just prose. Born in 1818, Douglass’s grandmother care for him until he reached working age. Then began one of the worst experiences of his life. The woman in charge of him at Colonel Lloyd’s plantation, Aunt Katy, starved the small child, beat him, and verbally abused him. He very rarely saw his mother, who lived on another farm, and records omit the name of his father—possibly because his master was his father. His mother died in late 1825 or early 1826, and he hardly developed enough of a bond with his mother to miss her. The same year, Colonel Lloyd sent him to a more lenient household as a present to one of his relatives. Douglass grew into adolescence in Baltimore, and soon grew to hate slavery, because of his further education in the evils of the institution. Douglass read The Colombian Orator, a collection of anti-slavery speeches, and found them remarkably similar to his line of thought. After discovering in late 1831 that a group of white people, called abolitionists, shared his views, he resolved to escape. After catching Douglass reading, his new master demanded to know how taught him. Not only did educating a slave “unfit him to be a slave” (Autobiographies, 37) said his new master, the act also broke the law. Master Auld sent Douglass to a Negro breaker to quell his rebellious spirit. However, Douglass emerged from the transaction p...
