Ch. 10
 Mr. Covey & FD’s experience there
 Covey = poor farmer, one slave (Caroline), “breaks” FD
 Ships on the Chesapeake Bay
 “ … how a slave was made a man” & Sandy Jenkins and the
magical root
 Holiday season – Christmas to New Year’s Day
 “The holidays are part and parcel of the gross fraud, wrong,
and inhumanity of slavery …”
 More religious slaveholders
 “For all slaveholders with whom I have ever met, religious
slaveholders are the worst. I have ever found them the
meanest and basest, the most cruel and cowardly, of all
others.”
 Mr. Covey, Rev. Hopkins, and Mr. Weeden – different
degrees of cruelty
 Mr. Freeland
 Better life = more thoughts of freedom; worried about
his life = less thoughts about freedom
 Escape & Sandy Jenkins
 Education
 Back in Baltimore
 Shipyard
 Money and pirates
Ch. 11 & Appendix
 For what two reasons does Douglass
tell us that he cannot relate the means
of his escape?
 He doesn’t want the people involved
to get into trouble
 He doesn’t want slaveholders to
increase their vigilance as a result of
his escape to the point where others
couldn’t escape
 What are his thoughts of the “underground
railroad”?
 He doesn’t like how openly declared it is to the
point it should be referred to as the
“upperground railroad”
 He “honors those good men and women for
their daring, and applaud them for willingly
subjecting themselves to bloody persecution”
 He feels the open declarations of the
underground railroad do nothing towards
enlightening the slave, whilst they do much
towards enlightening the master
 What is the significance of his motto, “Trust no
man”?
 Douglass couldn’t trust anyone around him
when he first escaped because he may encounter
an individual (both white or black) who may be
trying to make some money by returning
runaway slaves
 Discuss the significance of changing his name
 His birth name (from his mother) was Frederick
Augustus Washington Bailey – he dispensed with the
two middle names long before he left Maryland
 When in Baltimore he bore the name “Stanley”
 When he got to New York, he became Frederick
Johnson
 When he got to New Bedford he had to change his
name because there were so many Johnsons there
 He let Nathan Johnson (abolitionist with his wife in
New Bedford) choose his name with the one stipulation
of keeping Frederick – Nathan Johnson went with
Douglass (inspired by a poem titled “Lady of the Lake”)
 What are his impressions of New Bedford”
 Different from what he expected
 He couldn’t imagine a world as luxurious as the
South because the North didn’t have any slaves
 (137) “I had somehow imbibed the opinion that, in
the absence of slaves, there could be no wealth,
and very little refinement. And upon coming to
the north, I expected to meet with a rough, hardhanded and uncultivated population, living in the
most Spartan-like simplicity, knowing nothing of
the ease, luxury, pomp, and grandeur of southern
slaveholders.”
 What is the significance of the Appendix?
 To clarify his views of religion:
 “What I have said respecting and against religion, I
mean strictly to apply to the slaveholding religion of this
land, and with no possible reference to Christianity
proper …”
 Christianity of Christ – true Christianity; “… the pure,
peaceable, and impartial Christianity of the Christ …”
 Christianity of the land – “… the corrupt, slaveholding,
women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and
hypocritical Christianity of this land.”
 Douglass points to many ironies in how slaveholding
Christians practice their religion. Discuss these
ironies.
 Reread the parody Douglass “copies”. What is his
intent of using it in his narrative? Why is the word
“union” used throughout it? In this parody is he only
criticizing the Christians of the South or is he also
criticizing the Christians of the North?