Chapter 2 Summary

In Chapter 2 of his narrative, Douglass turns his attention toward a detailed description of his first masters and the farms where he lived and worked during two years of his childhood. This was where he witnessed the atrocities described in Chapter 1. There were more than twenty farms which were all owned by the slaveholder, Colonel Edward Lloyd. He lived on the main farm, referred to by the slaves as the Great House Farm, which supplied all of the other farms. Each farm had an overseer, and there was a main overseer at the Great House Farm, Captain Anthony, who supervised all of the other overseers, and who was Douglass's first master. The place was on the Miles River, about twelve miles north of Easton, Maryland, where the slaves produced tobacco, corn and wheat which was taken to market in Baltimore on boats owned...