In addition to sarcasm that is evident here, with Douglass’s reference to the fact that “a very different-looking class of people” has resulted from the sexual assault of enslaved black women by white men, his allusion to the “lineal descendants of Ham” recalls the idea that black people were supposedly condemned to slavery by God. A more biblically-accurate reading of African-American slavery than the one Douglass is mocking would question whether or not bondage indicates that black people are derived from Ham, or if they’re actually derived from Shem, whose descendants–the Israelites–were warned that they’d be transported to slavery on wooden ships if they broke their covenant with the Heavenly Father.
Douglass’s reference to black people as the children of Ham wasn’t formerly as peculiar in black texts as it might seem now. In a passage that features other biblical language, like the use of the word “Ethiopian” to characterize any black person, George Schuyler describes a fictional town in Black No More called Happy Hill, Mississippi, in which black people–or “The Sons or Daughters of Ham,” as they are called–are “either hung or shot and then broiled” in order to “lighten the dullness of the place.”
With regard to the blending of ethnicities that resulted from the sexual assault of black women, during slavery, Harriet Jacobs makes a similar statement in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, writing “Who can measure the amount of Anglo-Saxon blood coursing in the veins of American slaves?” Furthermore, Jacobs makes this point to counter the idea that black people were condemned to slavery by God. As Douglass mentioned, American enslavement was supposedly evidence of the fact that black people are the cursed descendants of Noah’s son, Ham. Some argue instead that black peoples’ enslavement is evidence of the fact that they are descended from one of Noah’s other sons, Shem.
MacKethan suggests that Douglass emphasizes the power of words by juxtaposing his description of acts of violence with the aggressive use of words. She writes “What he takes particular care to note is a use of physical force almost always accompanied by a manipulative language strategy. The overseer Mr. Severe, for instance, was not only a ‘cruel’ man but a ‘profane swearer’ who used words in the same manner and to the same effect that he used his whip” (59).
The scenario described, in which a master would feel “compelled” to send his own child away “out of deference to the feelings of his…wife” echoes the story of Abraham and his wife Sarah. In Genesis 21, Sarah sends her handmaid, Hagar, away when she is mocked by the son Hagar bears for Abraham. Likewise, a master might have been compelled to send his child away if a slave mistress felt like the child of her husband and an enslaved black woman made a mockery of her marriage.