Frederick Douglass vs. Moses Roper

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Moses Roper was a mulatto slave who wrote one of the major early books about life as a slave in the United States — Narrative of the Adventures and Escape of Moses Roper from American Slavery. Moses was born around 1815 in Caswell County, North Carolina. His father, Henry Roper,a farmer of English ancestry, was also his master. Nancy, his mother, was a slave of African-American and American Indian descent whose mistress was Henry Roper's new wife. Mrs. Roper sent a relative of Nancy’s to discover if her husband had been unfaithful to her and was informed of the result of Mr. Roper's interaction with her slave —a quite-white little boy who resembled Henry Roper. Upon hearing this information, the mistress was so enraged that she nearly killed Nancy with a knife, but was thwarted at the last minute by the intervention of Nancy's mother. Moses grew up with his mother and was trained as a domestic slave until he was about seven years old when his father exchanged Moses and his mother for other slaves. Mother and son were separated; not to meet again for many years to come. In his book, Roper mentions that he was a particularly difficult slave for traders to sell because of his almost-white complexion and reminisced that his fair skin tone could have been the cause of the terribly severe torture he endured from his masters. Because he had only worked as a domestic servant, Roper struggled tremendously when he was put to work in the fields and forests of the South—receiving harsher treatment for his inefficiency from his overseers and masters. Roper was passed from one master to another and led throughout the Southern states by slave traders—changing hands 17 or more times. Throughout his time in slavery, he attempted escape on at least 16 occasions, most of them while under his cruelest master, Mr. Gooch. The merciless master made certain to punish Roper with increasing
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