Page:Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1892).djvu/127

Rh when I went to Col. Lloyd’s place, was swept away during the first five years’ time of my residence at Master Hugh Auld’s in Baltimore.

No especial alteration took place in the condition of the slaves, in consequence of these deaths, yet I could not help the feeling that I was less secure now that Mrs. Lucretia was gone. While she lived, I felt that I had a strong friend to plead for me in any emergency.

In a little book which I published six years after my escape from slavery, entitled, "Narrative of Frederick Douglass,"—when the distance between the past then described and the present was not so great as it is now—speaking of these changes in my master’s family, and their results, I used this language: "Now all the property of my old master, slaves included, was in the hands of strangers—strangers who had had nothing to do in its accumulation. Not a slave was left free. All remained slaves, from the youngest to the oldest. If any one thing more than another in my experience has served to deepen my conviction of the infernal character of slavery and fill me with unutterable loathing of slaveholders, it is their base ingratitude to my poor old grandmother. She had served my old master faithfully from youth to old age. She had been the source of all his wealth; she had peopled his plantation with slaves; she had become a great-grandmother in his service. She had rocked him in his infancy, attended him in his childhood, served him through life, and at his death wiped from his icy brow the cold death-sweat, and closed his eyes forever. She was nevertheless a slave—a slave for life—a slave in the hands of strangers; and in their hands she saw her children, her grandchildren, and her great-grandchildren, divided like so many sheep; and this without being gratified with the small privilege of a single word as to their or her own destiny. And to cap the climax of their base ingratitude,