The Narrative of Frederick Douglass: Chapter 1 Summary & Analysis

Douglass was born in Tuckahoe, Maryland. Like most slaves, he does not know when he was born, because masters usually try to keep their slaves from knowing their own ages.

Douglass’s mother is named Harriet Bailey, and his father is an unknown white man rumored to be Douglass’s own master. When Douglass was only an infant, he was separated from his mother, as is commonly done to destroy the bond enslaved children feel towards their mothers. Douglass was only able to see his mother four or five times, when she journeyed over from her plantation to his and spent the night with him. When Douglass is only about seven years old, his mother dies, and he reacted to “the tidings of her death with much the same emotions [he] should have probably felt at the death of a stranger.”

Because of his separation from his mother, and her untimely death, Douglass has no idea who his father is. Ultimately, this fact makes little difference, since slaveholders have prescribed that children of mixed parentage always follow the status of their mothers. This allows slave owners to take advantage of their female slaves sexually without reducing their workforce. The mixed-race “mulatto” offspring are frequently abused because the slave owner’s white family resents their existence. To avoid these tensions, a master will often sell his own children to a trader.

If this mulatto population keeps growing, Douglass observes that slavery will no longer be able to persist under its so-called biblical justification, which states that all descendants of Ham are cursed and deserve enslavement.

Douglass has had two masters. The first was a sailor from the Chesapeake named Captain Anthony. Anthony was not a rich slaveholder, and only owned thirty slaves for his handful of farms. Anthony was a barbarous slave owner, and had a still more barbarous overseer named Plummer. Douglass cannot forget witnessing Anthony brutally whip one of Douglass’s aunts, Hester. Seeing the master draw blood and screams until he is too tired to continue is, to Douglass, “the first of a long series of such outrages, of which I was doomed to be a witness and a participant.” In other words, this is Douglass’s first encounter with the abominable nature of slavery. He cannot describe the horror it evoked in him, writing only that “I wish I could commit to paper the feelings with which I beheld it.”

Aunt Hester was being whipped by Anthony for spending time with a slave from a nearby plantation, named Ned. Douglass remembers that Hester was very attractive. Anthony seems to be jealous of her spending time with men, and calls her a string of misogynistic names as he whips her.

Fearful that he may be next, the young Douglass hides in a closet after witnessing the whipping. This was his first real glimpse of the horror of slavery, as he lived with his grandmother on the outskirts of the plantation.