Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845)

AUTHOR: Douglass, Frederick

SUMMARY (Aïcha Bouchelaghem, edited Deborah Madsen)

While Douglass does not discuss veg*nism or animal welfare, the narrative shares with veg*n discourses the moral elevation of frugality, including in diet. Douglass flags rich meats as symptoms of the gluttony and appetite for luxury that permeate his characterizations of enslavers.

Douglass makes an implicit parallel between his enslaved condition of objectification and the object-status of nonhuman flesh. After he is physically assaulted by a group of white co-workers at a Baltimore ship-building workshop, Douglass’s mistress, Sophia Auld, nurses his wounded eye with a piece of meat. “She took a chair by me, washed the blood from my face, and, with a mother's tenderness, bound up my head, covering the wounded eye with a lean piece of fresh beef” (97). The care Douglass receives recalls his own status as a commodity. The implicit parallel between the meat and Douglass’s own flesh-status speaks to the exploitation of nonhuman animals.

Douglass equates expensive meats with luxury, gluttony and greed, sins which to him characterize the moral apathy of the individuals involved in the slave trade or who are reluctant to commit to the Abolitionist cause. In the parodic song that closes the narrative, he claims:

A roaring, ranting, sleek man-thief,
Who lived on mutton, veal, and beef,
Yet never would afford relief
To needy, sable sons of grief,
Was big with heavenly union (124).

Throughout the narrative, Douglass draws parallels between his enslavement and the experience of farmed animals like horses and oxen. The narrative draws attention to the fact that farmed animals, too, are kept in a condition that is unnatural to them. Their resistance to their own enslavement either creates opportunities for Douglass or worsen his situation. “One of my greatest faults,” Douglass says ironically of his owner’s irritation with him, “was that of letting his horse run away, and go down to his father-in-law's farm, which was about five miles from St. Michael's. I would then have to go after it. My reason for this kind of carelessness, or carefulness, was, that I could always get something to eat when I went there” (56). While Douglass is at times able to manipulate farmed animals’ instincts for freedom to his advantage, in one case he notoriously struggles against the agency of a team of oxen: “I had never driven oxen before, and of course I was very awkward. … I had got a very few rods into the woods, when the oxen took fright, and started full tilt, carrying the cart against trees, and over stumps, in the most frightful manner. I expected every moment that my brains would be dashed out against the trees” (58). If the narration offers no explicit critique of animal farming, it refers to this practice to support its anti-slavery argument. Both the scenes featuring the horse and the oxen are elaborated in Douglass’s subsequent autobiographies: My Bondage and My Freedom (1857)  and Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1892).