Overcoming Obstacles In Frederick Douglas's Life

It was once said that with great power comes great responsibility. It gives one great power to overcome great obstacles. Frederick Douglass adulthood was full of these great accomplishments because he thrived on his intellect, but it wasn't without hardcore struggles as a slave that fueled his passion to accomplish. The purpose of this essay is to directly pull events in Frederick Douglass' youth and times in slavery to his political ideologies, because we ultimately know that overcoming obstacles builds character. Douglass' political standpoints are formed on the ideological bases of legalism, moralism, and also accommodation. So to fully understand his beliefs, we must look at his traumatic enslaved childhood.
Thomas Auld, the master of
Frederick Douglass in Baltimore, said a nigger should know nothing but to obey his master-to do as he is told to do. (pg. 57) He was referring to the wrongfulness of his wife's attempt to educate Frederick Douglass, this was the view held by most whites toward African Americans. But it is Douglass who was diligent in his quest to learn to read and gain an education. As McCartney lays out in his book, if being an accommodationist means the attempt to arrive at a non confrontational modus Vivendi or way of living with the status quo and promising an education system that promotes that, then Douglass is also an accommodationist. So I derive from Douglass' struggles from trying to read under the Auld's house is where his spirit of accommodationism comes from. Douglass had many, many battles with learning, from his food for an education from a white boy to him starting an illegal school for blacks, but having that basic hunger for knowledge; Frederick was determined to teach himself to read. This is one of the most amazing aspects of Frederick Douglass, that someone, especially a young slave, could teach himself to read. His resentment for slavery grew with the knowledge he gained from reading more and more. For Frederick Douglass, it was clear that his way of fighting the power was to become educated so that he may better understand his predicament and the wrongfulness of slavery. However, he described that knowing that with the pathway from slavery to freedom. (pg. 58) …Reading… enabled me to utter my thoughts, and to meet the arguments brought forward to sustain slavery; but while relieved me of one difficulty, brought on another even more painful than the one of which I was relieved. The more I read the more I was led to abhor and detest my enslavers. (pg. 61) The knowledge which Frederick Douglass gained, did not free him from this situation, but rather raised his unhappiness of being a slave.
One might argue that it was from the realm of primary beliefs, derived from the horrible experiences of slavery that provided African Americans the strength necessary to hold their heads high and look beyond their immediate condition. According to McCartney, Douglass often used his personal experiences to demonstrate the existence of a moral universe in the Christian sense. Instead they developed beliefs that they were not inferior, but were created equally in the eyes of God, and thus deserved equality. Their new religion stressed fellowship, brotherly love, equality, and salvation from slavery. The true religion was practiced at night, often secretly, and was led by black preachers. In my opinion, Douglass gained his roots in the Christian community when he met and became the spiritual son of Preacher Charles Lawson, who took Douglass under his wing. Slave religion was highly emotional that usually consisted of singing, shouting, and dancing. For Frederick Douglass and all other slaves, the singing of songs and religion were more of an affirmation of the joy in life rather than a rejection of worldly pleasures and temptations. They spoke out against the perils of bondage and asserted their right to be free According to Douglass, the songs told a tale of sorrow which was then altogether beyond my feeble comprehension; they were tones loud, long, and deep; they breathed the prayer and complaint of souls boiling over with the bitterest anguish. Every tone was a testimony against slavery, and a prayer to God for deliverance from chains. (pg. 47)
Douglass began to realize that there were alternatives to the physical deprivations, injustices, and dehumanizing effects of slavery.
No longer bound to his master's world, he started to gain his own opinions on issues and became much more independent. Despite the success of African Americans to develop a subculture, which gave them an escape from their hardcore reality, pain and they struggle that they went through. McCartney states that the legalist strains in Douglass' thought stem from his almost divine belief in the American creed and its promise. I think that as it pertains to Douglass' story, with the many struggles he endured with Covey. Covey of course is the slave breaker that the Auld's sent Douglass to when they felt that he was too unruly of a slave and after many troubles with Covey Douglass had begun to feel broken. This feeling would continue until Frederick Douglass physically fought with Covey one year after he was sent to him as his new master. I feel that this uprising is synonymous with Douglass' ideology of legalism. I also think that Douglass gained a lot of his legalist influence from the East Baltimore Mental Improvement Society which was a free blacks association where he learned to debate. It was after that when he went back to Hugh Auld and used his negotiation skills to make an arrangement with Hugh Auld, to hire-out of
slavery.
Around this time adjectives such as lazy and irresponsible were used by whites to describe the African Americans. This didn't sit well with Frederick Douglass referring. Of course the main goal as seen by Douglass, of the whites was to suppress any notion of African American individuality. Furthermore, it stole the African American sense of independence and created the false image of black childlike dependence on their white masters. That combined with the fact that most African Americans were born into slavery disallowed them any experience of freedom. This takes us back to the problem to what extent African Americans were able to retain a sense of individuality. In the accounts of Frederick Douglass and other slaves it is obvious that there was indeed evidence of individuality. This included the religious culture developed by African Americans (which of course derived from the white religious culture), and the fact that Frederick Douglass as well as other slaves had planned to escape slavery. It was written in the Declaration of Independence and the Bible that humans were created equally and had the right to pursue happiness. The notion of human equality existed in theory but not in practice. People like Frederick Douglass who preached abolition of slavery, only had to nurture the already existing spirit within slaves to strive for freedom.
It was out of Douglass' accommodationist, moralist, and legalist views given to him from his experiences as a slave that he had the desire, the arguments to justify his freedom, and movements to give him hope. Douglass believed that the universe we live in is a moral one. He compared the struggle between slavery and freedom to similar conflicts that occur in nature. Douglass said it was a slave's moral right to overthrown their oppressors. Douglass accomplished many feats worth noting, but he also went through many struggles on his way up. He was one of the most influential of all the black leaders throughout the mid 19th century, but we attribute this to his slave background. From the time he boarded a train Maryland in his escape route out, his has put his best foot forward to help other blacks do the same.