Frederick Douglas and American Slavery: Ideas on Natal Alienation, Symbolic Practice, and Total Domination

In his 1845 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglas, Frederick Douglas, as the greatest diplomat-spokesman of our Race in American history, leverages his first-hand experiences with American slavery to explain the process of dehumanization, or “social death,” fundamental to the development of Western civilization. Through Douglas’ experiences we intend to assert the idea of slavery as more than a mere physical bondage, or economic mode of production. Rather, we assert it as a praxis of “social death” as articulated by Orlando Patterson; the latter being far more complex and less deterministic with regard to the overall framing of our (Afrikan) great ordeal. Moreover, this paper intends to isolate the particular aspects of the American slaveocracy’s concentration on natal alienation of the enslaved, symbolic cultural practices that reinforce civilizational value-constellations, and the denial of independent social bonds of the enslaved marked by the absolute domination of the master over the enslaved, in order to help the reader to understand the particularity of the savagery and sophistication of the “peculiar institution” as it developed in the United States as well as providing context for the U.S’ basis as a world power and thus where her decline will lead.

Douglas illustrates the aspect of natal alienation that begins with Douglas’ own birth – being a product of rape – and extends to the systematic obscuration of his own mother. Patterson describes natal alienation as the pillar of dehumanization, or “social death” that incorporates an enslaved person being severed from their ancestors, family ties, and the ability to pass on a heritage to their children – eventually rendered as a “nonbeing.” (p. 38) Patterson says that the slaves were “denied all claims on, and obligations to, his parents and living blood relations” as well as “his more remote ancestors” until the slave became a "genealogical isolate.” (p.5)

Thus, the slave had no claims to any social strata that would ensure his safety from the parasitic moorings of other groups. Further, and more devastating, the slave had no cultural heritage by which he could resist the perennial psychological onslaught of the master-class. As a result of being disconnected from parents, and ancestry, and henceforth any heritage, or culture that is independent of the master-class, the slave had no matrix for the development of a self-consciousness by which he could distinguish his own self (interest, goals, and motivations) from that of his master’s. Within traditional Afrikan deep thought, the belief is held that one becomes a person after a deep relationship through other people, those people primarily being one’s family. Orlando Patterson begins to describe the utility of natal alienation within the master-slave dialectic, or relation of domination, as enabling the enslaved to be used “in ways not possible with even the most, dominated by nonslave subordinates with natal claims.” To put it differently, the centrality of alienating the enslaved from any sense of identity outside of their submissive and subordinate relationship to their master and the master-class is fundamental in the maintenance of a system of slavery. Such a process serves to confuse the slaves as to a sense of collectivity and thus confounds any movement for preservation and defense of such a collective. Patterson goes on to explain the process of natal alienation being accomplished “by exploiting the female slaves' reproductive,” which Douglas places a heavy emphasis on. Douglas begins with himself. One can only imagine the dishonor Douglas felt upon hearing the speculation from his fellow bondsmen that his father was not only a white man, but his, and their, master. The same master he witnessed torture Aunt Hester.

Douglas clearly demonstrates the exploitation of the female slaves’ reproductive capacity as he builds the reader’s understanding of his own relationship with his mother and grandmother as well as referencing the plight of other enslaved women in his book. The focus on the son-mother, and grandson-maternal grandmother relationships are incredibly important because 1) in the matriarchal system of lineage and descent of traditional African societies the mother’s family typically assumes responsibility over the offspring of a union of two clans – sometimes, like in the case of the Serere it is the maternal uncles who assume fatherhood over the offspring instead of the biological father – and 2) the system of American slavery evolved to legally transmit the social predicament of a person from mother to offspring. In both examples the identity and social consciousness of the offspring are shaped by their relationship to the mother. Douglas’ ends his analysis of the destruction of the mother-son relationship by speculating the intentions of the master-class rather accurately. The first thing Douglas does is begin his dialogue with the reader by delineating his rather scarce knowledge of his lineage. This is evidence for the idea that for all of Douglas’ trauma and pain, for all the whippings, torture, starvation and otherwise, his relationship to his own understanding of trauma, his relationship to his own understanding of being-a-slave, is fundamentally tied to the mysteries and pain of his parentage and lineage. What bewilders him more than anything he has endured is not being sure about his age, not being sure about the identity of his father, and not having a relationship with his own mother. His identity, or sense of being, in rebellion against the dehumanization process, must have, at a core, generated questions of his ancestry and lineage, as his consciousness became awakened to his “somebodiness” upon receiving the ability to read. In fact, Douglas matter-of-factly contextualizes his relationship with his mother by informing the reader of the “common custom,” that existed in “the part of Maryland from which I ran away,” which called for children “to part … from their mothers at a very early age.” He goes on to state that “before the child has reached its twelfth month, its mother is taken from it, and hired out on some farm a considerable distance off, and the child is placed under the care of an old woman, too old for field labor.”

The idea held by the master-class was simple: if the child’s connection to its parents, specifically the mother, can be destroyed, then the identity of the child can never fully form, which is all the better for the creation of a mindless worker. Furthermore, in Chapter 10, Douglas also briefly mentions how Covey, described “as a poor man,” was only able to acquire one slave. A woman named Caroline. He describes Caroline as “a large, able-bodied woman, about twenty years old” who Covey acquired for the expressed purposes of a breeder, that is, having children. This decision was strategic. A healthy young slave-woman would surely, through the master’s abuse and domination of her loins, increase the wealth of her master, especially since legally the offspring of a slave couple belonged to the owner of the mother. To make this happen Douglas explains that Covey hired a married man named Samuel Harrison to impregnate her. The end result of which was that Caroline gave birth to twins, and Covey wealth increased. It is here that we see the diabolical, yet crucial pillar of natal alienation at work in the system of American slavery: the denial of personhood of the enslaved Afrikan through the denial of family. It is this denial of a sense of family, community, and ancestry through the most savage means that the master-class systematically deprived the development and maturation of the self-consciousness of their slaves.

The second aspect of “social death” illustrated in Douglas’ Narratives as fundamental to the unique expression of American slavery as an institution at the core of Western civilization are the “symbolic practices” inherent within the society that serve to indoctrinate and reinforce the fundamental ideas and values upon which the civilization is erected to both master and slave. First, Douglas is confronted with a fundamental question: Where does one derive the authority to enslave, or enact a process of dehumanization, on someone else ? In an attempt to answer this, Patterson begins by summarizing Weber’s theory of authority deriving from “tradition,” or the “total complex of norms, values, ideas, and patterned behavior we call culture,” and ends by citing British anthropologists who assert “symbols… constitute a major instrument of power when used directly or indirectly.” Patterson asserts that those who wield power must first frame their “right” for doing so, which initially begins with controlling “appropriate symbolic instruments … by exploiting already existing symbols, or they may create new ones relevant to their needs.” For example, the nwst-bty of Ancient Kemet held the Heb-Sed Festival where the ruler was tasked to show, by ritual, that he was still physically able to govern the nation. Since the ancients believed the vitality of the ruler symbolized the vitality of the nation, this ceremony held critical importance.

Initially, Douglas points to holidays as the symbolic practice the master-class manipulates to legitimize their “right” to rule over the enslaved as they demonstrated by orchestrating and encouraging the drunkenness, overindulgence and debauchery of the slaves during those days off from work . In Chapter 10 of his Narrative, Douglas gives a revealing analysis of the master-class’ use of holidays like Christmas and New Years’.These holidays were symbolically crucial to the maintenance of the system of slavery. Douglas writes “From what I know of the effect of these holidays upon the slave, I believe them to be among the most effective means in the hands of the slaveholder in keeping down the spirit of insurrection.” Under those circumstances, the master-class simultaneously reinforced their own paternalistic claims that served to assuage their consciences from the evil of slavery and to reinforce the docility and contentment of the enslaved under the parentage and domination of the master-class by highlighting their own infirm ability to mind themselves and make productive use of the time given to them by their benevolent masters. Moreover, Douglas explains that a slave who abstained from getting drunk “was regarded as one who rejected the favor of his master.” Douglas supports his initial claim of the centrality of the holidays for maintaining the master-class’ control by stating that “were the slaveholders [to] abandon this practice, I have not the slightest doubt it would lead to an immediate insurrection among the slaves.” Douglas characterizes the holidays as “safety-valves,” intended “to carry off the rebellious spirit of enslaved humanity.” Douglas analyzes that without these holidays “the slave would be forced up to the wildest desperation.” Douglas demonstrates the slaveholders understood that without a break the slaves would rebel, and the masters “will adopt various plans to make him drunk.” In other words, the masters would give the slaves a semblance of freedom from their drudgery but only to allow them to engage in nonsense – of which they sanctioned. By the time the holidays were over the masters had succeeded in convincing the slaves that they would not know what to do with freedom, which served to reinforce the traditional rights of the masters to dominate them. Douglas states more succinctly and specifically that the strategy of the slaveholders was to “disgust the slave with freedom, by allowing him to see only the abuse of it.” The use of holidays which Douglass contends “are part and parcel of the gross fraud, wrong, and inhumanity of slavery” are but one example of the symbolic practices used to reinforce the psycho-social fabric of the slaveholding society. More can be said (and Douglas does say) about the use of the lash, whiteness, rape, religion and the lynching-ritual as symbolic practices but this section will focus on the use of holidays because it demonstrates the pervasiveness and breadth of power wielded by the master-class. Thereupon, Patterson contends that “slavery … is a highly symbolized domain of human experience.” He goes on to contend that “mythic and ritual processes” that stand “within a given cultural domain … [act as] a key ritual act” and “stand out as pivotal.” In other words, ritual and ceremony buttress the value constellation that gives the civilization – in the Douglass’ case, the West – its ethos, its utamaroho (energy source), and stand as key institutions in the socialization of the people to identify with and uphold the social norms, despite their being either master or slave. Both parties need indoctrination if the system is to work. This process of indoctrination by symbolic practice can be said to work optimally when the slave, in the words of Patterson is “violently uprooted from his milieu,” and “desocialized and depersonalized” into a “nonbeing.” This explains, Patterson goes on to assert “the importance of law, custom, and ideology” which all serve to represent the “right” of the master-class “in the representation of the slave relation.”

Finally, Douglass sketches the master-class’ imposition of domination over all facets of the social-cultural life of the enslaved in order to show the comprehensive nature of the praxis of social death, rendering the enslaved essentially as a nonbeing. Thus, serving to deny the enslaved any social bonds independent of the will of the master-class, and ultimately expressing itself in marriage and sexual relations, as well as the constant threat of separation from family, and the alienation of a sense of “home.” Douglas consistently shows that the union of male and female slaves held no bearing before the lust of a master. He shows this with his portrayal of Aunt Hester's demise. Douglas illustrates with the death of Demby at the hands of Mr. Gore that life itself was expendable once he became "unmanageable" and began setting a bad tone for the other slaves.

Douglas also demonstrates, with Mr. Auld’s soliloquy, the desires of the master-class to control the breadth of expression of the human soul of the slave in limiting at all cost their ability to learn, think, and know out of the fear that “if you teach that nigger how to read … it would forever unfit him to be a slave.” Ultimately, the slave is privy to no social-political institution that would support his social relevancy. For the slave, the privilege to know one’s ancestry and heritage is destroyed, the family as the most basic social unit and key to any socio-political power is destroyed, marriage is defiled at the behest of the master’s desires, and life itself is held within the palm of his hand. For the slave, any institution decisive in the organizing of a human community that plays a key role in the socialization/becoming of a person is wiped out. The more comprehensive the process, the deadlier the system. For example, in the 18th century Caribbean islands, no such human institutions existed because the life expectancy of a slave was about 4-7 years.

With this in mind, Patterson asks the question “If the slave no longer belonged to a community, if he had no social existence outside of his master, then what was he?” He answers his own question initially by asserting that traditionally “in slaveholding societies … the slave was a socially dead person.” He later develops that point by asserting “the slave was ritually incorporated as the permanent enemy on the inside - the ‘Domestic enemy.’” No matter how stringent and comprehensive the process of dehumanization, the master-class can not get rid of the otherness of the enslaved. For it is precisely this otherness that enables their enslavement, and serves the productive ends of the slave-society. Thus, the constant threat of the slave to the master-class warrants a complete intrusion into the affairs of the slave. Something similar to this paradox is represented in Hegel’s Lord-Bondsman Dialectic where the bondsman, or servant, is dependent on the lord. Because he is aware that the lord sees him as an object rather than as a subject (i.e., as a thing, rather than as a thinking, self-aware being), the lord frustrates his desire to assert his pure self-consciousness. The enslaved is essentially stuck in a position of reflecting on his otherness. The independent lord, on the other end, is able to negate the otherness that he finds reflected through the subordinate bondsman, since the bondsman does not appear as a conscious subject to him. Thus, as the independent and dominant partner in this relationship, his otherness does not bear down on him. In the second and final phase of this process of social negation “the introduction of the slave into the community of his master … involves the paradox of introducing him as a nonbeing.” In his social nonbeingness the slave, frightened and alone, without an identity independent of the abusive and parasitic master-slave relationship begins to identify with his master. For instance, Douglas expounds on the “quarrels” that he says “ would almost always end in a fight between the parties [of slaves] as they debated amongst themselves the “ relative goodness of their masters, each contending for the superior goodness of his own over that of the others.” Douglas wrote “When Colonel Lloyd’s slaves met the slaves of Jacob Jepson, they seldom parted without a quarrel about their masters; Colonel Lloyd’s slaves contending that he was the richest, and Mr. Jepson’s slaves that he was the smartest, and most of a man. Colonel Lloyd’s slaves would boast his ability to buy and sell Jacob Jepson. Mr. Jepson’s slaves would boast his ability to whip Colonel Lloyd.”

As shown above, Douglas, through a gory and unimaginable first-hand account, endeavors to explain the reality of slavery as more than mere economic exploitation, and beyond the scope of a phase of society inevitably spurned along by antagonistic class relations. Through Douglass experiences he intends for the reader to begin to picture the social death articulated by Orlando Patterson and Hegel. We intend to expand these ideas and bring them into relevance in the problems we are dealing with concerning our youth in the 21st-century.