Frederick Douglas was born in Maryland to Harriet Bailey and believed his father was his owner, a white man. Not being afforded the opportunity to have a relationship with his mother must have had an impacted him mentally. As a child he was allowed to be with his mother for the first year and then was placed under the care of an older woman who could no longer work in the field. He only saw his mother four times and was not allowed to be by her side during her death. As he grew he saw owners and overseers taking pride and joy in beating another human being, and some of the slaves were their own children. As an owner/overseer you couldn’t show …show more content…
The dictionary was no help and he couldn’t ask his master what it meant. After a while he got the city paper that had petitions for the abolition of slavery, and from this he understood abolition and abolitionist. While on the docks he helped two Irishmen unloading a scow of stone. After a short conversation the two men said he should run away to the North where he could find friends. Fredrick thought the two men were trying to set him up, so he acted like he wasn’t paying them any attention, but this planted the seed in Fredrick’s mind to escape. Fredrick was persistent in learning to write, he used many avenues to learn to write the ship yard, little Thomas books, and even a little trickery of other boys; he continued this for years until he succeeded in learning to