Immediately prior to his own quotation from this scene in the autobiography, William McFeely writes “Frederick Douglass was too young when he lived at Wye House to generalize as he would later about the nature of the slave system, but he was precisely the right age for individual acts of physical brutality to become indelibly recorded in his memory.” McFeely contends that the whip was typically used not to promote work but, instead, as a means for white people to express emotions like “anger, frustration” and “jealousy” (17).