While there, Douglass began teaching a group of enslaved men how to read until, one day, three slave masters appeared and broke up the meeting while accusing Douglass of being another Nat Turner. While Thomas and Hugh quarreled over who should take a disfigured slave named Henny, Thomas revoked Douglass’s services in spite and installed the young man on his own plantation in St. Though Douglass had been working for Hugh and Sophia, he remained the slave of Thomas Auld and Auld’s new wife, Rowena. Douglass had learned enough to want to learn more and continued to look for opportunities to read. While there, Sophia began teaching Douglass to read, though her husband quickly discouraged this activity after he learned about it. During his youth, Douglass made his first observations of slavery’s innumerable cruelties, including seeing one of his aunts, Esther, whipped by Captain Anthony.ĭouglass later went to Baltimore to work for Thomas’s brother Hugh Auld, who lived with his wife Sophia and their son Little Tommy. He then became the slave of Colonel Lloyd’s chief butler, Captain Aaron Anthony and, like the other enslaved children, they placed him in the care of Aunt Katy-a mean kitchen slave. He lived, at first, with his grandparents in their cabin, which was a short distance from the plantation. He spent the first seven or eight years of his life on the plantation of Colonel Edward Lloyd. He saw his mother sporadically while growing up.

His use of the possessive pronoun “my” expresses his ownership of both experiences, even the enslavement imposed upon him.ĭouglass assumes that he was born in 1817 to an enslaved woman named Harriet. Douglass divides the book into two periods-his life as a slave, and his life as a free man.

Diary of frederick douglass