After a year with Covey, Douglass is sent to live with William Freeland. Douglass stands up to Covey and stops receiving whippings. Another slave, Sandy Jenkins, gives Douglass a mystical root to protect himself. Douglass’s spirits are broken by the work, and he goes to Thomas Auld to protest his treatment, but is sent back to Covey’s farm. He and Douglass do not get along, and Douglass is sent to work for Edward Covey, a farmer who has a reputation for breaking the spirits of difficult slaves.ĭouglass spends six hellish months working for the malevolent Mr. Thomas is a cruel master and a religious hypocrite. Douglass is inherited by Lucretia Auld and sent back to Baltimore, and Douglass is sent to live with Thomas and his new wife in the town of St. He resolves to attempt an escape.Ĭaptain Anthony dies, and Douglass is sent back to Lloyd’s plantation to be humiliatingly evaluated alongside Anthony’s livestock. Douglass reads books that present arguments against slavery, and he begins to lose hope as he realizes the extent of his powerlessness.

Douglass lives with the Aulds for seven years, and in this time he teaches himself to read. She becomes mean-spirited and works to thwart Douglass’s attempts to become literate. Sophia is warped by the power that owning slaves gives her. Hugh’s intervention only makes Douglass more determined to learn how to read, viewing education as a path to freedom. However, Hugh emphatically puts a stop to Douglass’s education. Hugh’s wife, Sophia Auld, is at first a kind and loving mistress who begins teaching Douglass to read. Hugh Auld, brother of Captain Thomas Auld. To Douglass’s delight, he is moved to Baltimore at age seven or eight to work for Mr. His killing of a slave named Demby, which goes unpunished, illustrates that killing or harming a black person is not treated as a crime. Austin Gore, is a particularly cruel disciplinarian. Lloyd is an unkind master, and, like other slaveholders, he will discipline the slaves if they speak honestly about the discomfort of their circumstances. Lloyd himself lives in the middle of his plantation on a property called the Great House Farm, which is so majestic that some slaves feel honored to work there. Captain Anthony is employed by Colonel Edward Lloyd, and Anthony lives in a house on Lloyd’s sprawling property with his sons, Andrew and Richard his daughter, Lucretia and Lucretia’s husband, Captain Thomas Auld. Douglass encounters slavery’s brutality at an early age when he witnesses his first master, Captain Anthony, give a brutal whipping to Douglass’s Aunt Hester. His mother is a slave named Harriet Bailey, and his father is an unknown white man who may be his master. In approximately 1817, Frederick Douglass is born into slavery in Tuckahoe, Maryland.

The Heroic Slave by Frederick Douglass