Theme Of Power Hungry In Frederick Douglass

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Throughout the first half of the book I continuously noticed that the slaveholders were power hungry. Now this may be a very obvious observation, but it has major psychological implications about how the slaveholders may have thought. In the book it seems as though the slaveholders attempted optimize their superiority over their slaves. They wanted the slaves to be able function well enough for them to be able to work, but not as well as white people. This is evident when Douglas’s Baltimore master stated on page 29 that learning to read and write would ruin slave. The Baltimore master essentially saying that a slave who did learn to read and write would become less of a beast. Douglas states on page 33 that after he learned to read he wished he could return to the simplicity of his former life and even states he wished he could be a beast again. …show more content…

Slaveholders want power and to do that they kept slaves weak emotionally and physically. By keeping someone weak emotionally and physically you limit the chance of them rebelling. Slaveholders understood this with their power hungry minds and strategically whipped people in front of other slaves to set an example. They were essentially dictators of their own small nations. No court would try them in court and no slave would attempt to stand up against them because of the fear of being sent off to a worst plantation. However, the problem of holding uncontrolled power is that you start to become paranoid of what could happen to you. It happened with many totalitarian leaders, like Hitler and Stalin. This paranoia could be one of the many reasons why slaveholders were cruel, enjoyed their cruelty, and repeated their cruelties often. Having too much power is an awful thing and the slaveholders had too much

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