Frederick Douglas
... Lloyd plantation. They came upon children playing. His grandmother Betsy told him that three of them were his siblings and told him to go play. The next thing he knew she was gone and he never saw her again. This was Douglass❜s first reality of slavery. His experiences on the plantation from then on weren❜t pleasant. He and the other children would eat from troughs full of cornmeal that he later wrote ❝was like so many pigs❞ and they used their homemade oyster spoons. Their only clothing was one linen shirt that hung to their knees. They had no beds or blankets so they huddled together in the kitchen of the Anthony house at night to keep themselves warm. One night he was awakened by a woman❜s screams which happened to be hid aunts. He peeked through a crack on the wall only to see her being lashed with a whip on her bare back. He learned that Anthony brutally beat his slaves if they did not obey orders quickly enough. As for his mother, he rarely saw her but a few time in his life. She died three months after he last saw her at age seven but didn❜t know that she had died until many years later. Because Douglass had a natural charm that many people found engaging, his master made him the companion of Daniel Lloyd, the youngest son of the plantation owner. Fredericks protector was Lucretia Auld . Anthony❜s daughter who had just recently married Thomas Auld. Then one day, he was sent to Baltimore to live with her husband❜s brother, Hugh Auld, who owned a ship building firm. He was so excited to escape the life of a field hand. Upon his arrival at the Auld farm, his only duties were to run errands and care for their infant son, Tommy Auld. Hugh❜s wife Sophia would often read aloud from the bible and when Frederick asked her if she would teach him how to read the bible, she did so right away. He soon learned the alphabet and a few words. She was so excited about his progress that she told Hugh. Well, Hugh was furious and said that a slave that could read and write was unfit and a threat to them. He told her to stop immediately. This outburst made Frederick realize that knowing how to read and write could very well be his path to freedom and this then became his goal. He would run errands for his master and on the way would get white children to teach him some things and bought copies of the Columbian Orator. It was a collection of speeches and essays dealing with liberty, democracy and courage. He began to learn about abolitionist at age thirteen. These new ideas inspired him and he began to detest slavery. His dreams of emancipation were encouraged by the examples of other blacks in Baltimore most of them were free. Douglass was sent back to the Anthony estate when Aaron Anthony died. But Lucretia Auld then sent him back to Baltimore. Within a year Lucretia died and her husband demanded her property be returned to him which included Douglass. Frederick did not was to leave Baltimore because he had recently become a teacher to a group of other young blacks. Also a preacher named Charles Lawson had taken him under his wing and adopted him as his spiritual son. Thomas Auld had a new farm that was a few miles away from the Lloyd plantation. He would starve his slaves and they had to steal food to survive. Auld would constantly beat Frederick and the other slaves. He hated it. He started a Sunday religious service which was stopped by Thomas Auld and so Auld sent him away to have someone tame his unruly slave. He was sent to work for a man named covey for about a year who would beat the hell out of him just because he could. Then he was sent to work for William freeland who was a kind master. At this point Frederick did not care if his master was kind or not, he was just sick of having a master. All he wanted was his freedom. He worked on an escape plan with five other slaves for a year. When the time came one of them had ratted on them all and they all were sent to ...