Bondage and Freedom

Frederick Douglass's statement from My Bondage and My Freedom sheds light on why a fugitive slave would voluntarily return to slavery:

A freeman cannot understand why the slavemaster's shadow is bigger, to the slave, than the might and majesty of a free state; but when he reflects that the slave knows about the slavery of the master than he does of the might and majesty of the free state, he has the explanation (Douglass 339).

On the surface, this statement seems unrelated to Edmund S. Morgan's historical analysis of the origin of European Americans in The Challenge of the American Revolution and Herman Melville's description of Ishmael in the opening pages of the novel Moby-Dick. However, this study will argue that the three perspectives are indeed related, and will help to suggest ways to overcome the effects of the past in the public arena.

Douglass's statement is in part meant be an

apology for the few slaves who have, after making good their escape, turned back to slavery, preferring the actual rule of their masters, to the life of loneliness, apprehension, hunger, and anxiety, which meets them on their first arrival in a free state. . . A man, homeless, shelterless, breadless, friendless, and moneyless, is not in a condition to assume a very proud or joyous tone (Douglass 339-340).

The few fugitive slaves who returned to slavery voluntarily, in a sense, possessed less as freed slaves than they had possessed as slaves. They had some form of security as slaves, but no

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t Rome or modern Britain, was an unexamined article of faith among eighteenth-century republicans (Morgan 147). Thus there developed the two conflicting trends together--toward those with property and those without, and toward those who were free and independent and those who were see as incapable of such independence and therefore a threat to those who possessed both property and independence. "Independence" meant "economic independence," and the most wealthy and politically powerful white men in charge of the nation's founding, who had such independence, did not trust those who did not. Morgan traces this class division to England: As the mass of idle rogues and beggars grew and increasingly threatened the peace of England, the efforts to cope with them increasingly threatened the liberties of Englishmen [who] prided themselves on a "gentle government". . . . But there was nothing gentle about the government's treatment of the poor (Morgan 153). Thus, the European Americans carried with them into the New World a number of conflicting views. They respected government, for a government was an expression of God's desire to have order in the world of men. On the other hand, when that government crossed the line from insuring or

Category: Psychology - B