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Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave
"You are loosed from your moorings, and are free; I am fast in my chains, and am a slave! You move merrily before the gentle gale, and I sadly before the bloody whip! You are freedom's swift-winged angels, that fly round the world; I am confined in bands of iron! O that I were free! (p. 75)"
Frederick Douglass was born a slave in Tuckahoe, Maryland. He was bound by the shackles of slavery until he was in his mid-twenties when he escaped to the North where he was to use what skills he had learned while in bondage to live the rest of his life as a freeman. Although Frederick Douglass lived the large majority of his life as a freeman, through his insightful narrative he is able to paint a vivid portrait as to the overwhelmingly negative affects of the institution of slavery for both the whites and blacks of both the North and the South. Even though the consequences of slavery are made evidently clear throughout Douglass' narrative, none is shown so clearly as those incurred by the Southern Blacks.
From a very young age, it is made blindingly obvious by Douglass that slaves are voided of the simplest civil liberties that any human-being justly deserves. "It is a common custom, in the part of Maryland from which I ran away, to part children from their mothers at a very early age. (p. 40)"...