Fredrick Douglass

In chapter ten of Fredrick Douglass’s book, he offers his opinion on Christian slaveholders with no hesitation. Douglass believes that Christian slaveholders are worst ones any slave could possibly have, however as he writes the chapter, he creates a counter narrative. He creates this counter narrative by writing about what his Christian slaveholder was like. Even though he states that Christian ones are the worst, his story about his own experience doesn’t resemble that. Throughout several paragraphs Douglass talks about how his Christian slaveholder was like, and how he was nothing like the other ones. He stated this his slaveholder was very kind by giving them plenty of food and a lot of time to eat all their food, unlike others. Another positive he stated was that he only made his slaves work from sunrise to sunset and not a second before or after. One thing that Douglass said the slaveholders did was whip their slaves every chance they got no matter how big or small the reason was. In Douglass case, he never got whipped once out of the whole year he was there, and none of Douglass’s fellow slaves did either. It was interesting how Douglass was so persistent on Christian slaveholders being the worst, but his wasn’t anywhere near what he thought.

Another important thing in this chapter is the moral center. Towards the end there started to become more parts that would help the reader keep hope, but the main one was how is Christian slaveholder treated him. Most of Douglass’s holders before this one wasn’t very nice to him and didn’t care one bit about their slaves, but this one was different. It showed the audience that not every slaveholder was very rude, and that they could be a positive future for Douglass. This one section in the whole chapter changed the audience perspective on whether there was hope or not for the slaves.