After reading over Fredrick Douglass’ Narrative Of the Life of Fredrick Douglass, I can’t help but think of the Code of Honor. Pre-Civil War, the white men of the South followed a rigorous Code of Honor which dictated the way that they behaved. The most important aspect of this Code of Honor was (as one could infer from the name of it,) honor, and the defending of said honor.
However, as righteous as a Code of Honor sounds, it was, in fact, far from that. This is due to the fact that what we consider honor in 2019 is vastly different than that of the 1800s. Image was very important, and a man’s honor was tied to that image. An honorable man would be masculine, powerful, strong and aggressive. The more masculine and powerful a man, the more honorable he was considered. Additionally, those who were dependent upon a man reflected his honor– be it his wife, his children, or his slaves. Therefor, if a man were to be considered honorable, he would need to establish complete dominance over those who depended on him. He did this by ensuring that his dependents would be submissive, cooperative, and obedient by means of brute force. A man’s honor was everything, and so he had to defend his honor at all costs– even if those costs involved incredible violence and pain.
In reading Douglass’ narrative, I can’t help but feel incredibly angry at this system of honor that was instilled within Southern white men since birth. I feel as though it was this system that pushed slave owners to treat their slaves with such cruelty and lack of regard for their well being. The beatings that Douglass experienced and witnessed were not mere pats on the cheek for wrongdoings (or even lack thereof). They were gory bloodbaths in which “the most heart-rendering shrieks” (Douglass, 14) ensued– regardless of the age or sex of the victim. That wasn’t honor. That wasn’t honor, unless being honorable means that you are a bloodthirsty tyrant, determined to pain as many people as possible, determined to scar anyone that disobeys even slightly, or looks at you wrong. That was an assertion of dominance, done to ensure that a slave would never dare disobey his master. That was done to ensure that every time a slave even consider going against a master’s words, he would think of the beatings that he felt or witnessed, and decide against it.
Yet in the South, that was honorable.
In the beginning of Douglass’ narrative, he speaks about how slave owners often raped their slaves, and then, when the child was born, tore him/her from their mother and sold them to a different master. Douglass believed that this was done because a man wouldn’t be able to mercilessly whip his own child, wouldn’t be able to watch the son that he isn’t ashamed of tie up the son that he is. While that may have been the case, I believe that the reason he did this was to (once again,) assert his dominance and defend his honor. To show the poor woman that he impregnated (against her will,) that even something that came from within her is more his than hers. Something as important as a child, meant to be shared with not one parent but two, was completely his, simply because he was master, and she a slave. Thus, the child was his. His to do with as he pleased, his to sell to a cotton farmer states away, and then forget about just as quickly.
The stories which Fredrick Douglass recounts of the unjust actions inflicted upon slaves turns my stomach. As if it was not enough that people were forced to serve others based on a factor as unimportant as the color of their skin. As if that was not enough, they were beaten horrendously, made to sleep on the floor, given minimal food and provisions to help them get through a day of backbreaking labor. Children, given nothing but a shirt to wear, regardless of the season. All of that, to establish dominance. All of that to live up to a meaningless code, to defend an image so skewed, an honor so false.
