important, brilliant, inspiring, incredible figure, unparalleled figure in american history, because of what we know he is capable of, because of what we know what his mind was capable of and what he did for his country in his life, when he recounts what happened to him at the hands of edward covey, it is the most dispiriting and desolate and miserable thing that douglass writes about. he said, i shall never be able to narrate the mental experience through which it was my lot to pass during my stay. i was completely wrecked, changed, and bewildered, goaded almost to madness at one time and at another, reconciling myself to my researched condition. i suffered bodily as well as mentally, he says. the overwork and brutal chastises of which i was the victim, combined with that ever gnawing and soul-devouring thought, i am a slave, a slave for life, it rendered me a living embodiment of mental and physical wretchedness. that was frederick