Douglass takes on Fitzhugh

One reason contributing to my enjoyment in reading the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass is because I found it to be a great counter piece to George Fitzhugh’s Southern Thought. While the latter work approached slavery from primarily an economic standpoint and explained the functionality and advantages of the slave system, the former is a much more personal account of the life of an actual slave. Without many exterior sources in citation or an ostentatious vocabulary, Douglass manages to work up great emotion among readers against slavery with his detailed portrayal of the brutality with which slaves were treated. Both writers provide necessary points of view for us to understand the South during the 1800s, but I preferred Douglass’ stance because it coincides with accepted morality of today.

The Narrative also counters Southern Thought by dispelling many notions created in George Fitzhugh’s Southern Thought. For example, at the end of Douglass’ story, he finally makes his way to freedom and is very surprised by what he sees in the North. The North is full of many examples of wealth, such as beautiful ships and well-crafted houses. The reason that these images surprise Douglass must be that all he knew of the North came from what he had heard Southerners say about that region. Douglass reveals his line of thinking. “I had very strangely supposed, while in slavery, that few of the comforts…of life were enjoyed at the north, compared with what were enjoyed by the slaveholders of the south. I probably came to this conclusion from the fact that northern people owned no slaves. I supposed that they were upon a level with the non-slaveholding population of the south. I knew they were exceedingly poor” (217-218). Thus, the presence of Southerners who thought like Fitzhugh has been absorbed even by their slaves, but is shown to be wrong by Douglass’ actual description of the North’s wealth. In other words, Fitzhugh’s claim of Southern superiority from its slave system is dismissed by Douglass’ portrayal of at least equal Northern wealth without the use of slave labor.

While I would very much like to agree that a society functioning on the labor of men working for themselves can become more wealthy than or at least as wealthy as a society run by slaves working for masters, I think that Douglass’ account of the North must be regarded with a bit of skepticism. Do you think that his depiction of the North as “clean, new and beautiful” (218) is completely genuine or a product of him just having arrived in this land of freedom? He did write this account years later, so was his excitement calmed and his writing fair or is he still a biased source like Fitzhugh whose work’s accuracy must be regarded with some doubt? I think his description of the North at least shows that he was beginning to relax and feel secure about not being recaptured because at first he was so nervous that he does not describe his surroundings. Only after reaching New Bedford does he begin to notice the beauty in the free states where there is “no whipping of men” (218).