Frederick Douglass’s ”Letter to My Old Master” offers a glimpse into his life as a slave in Maryland in the early years of the nineteenth century. With the publication of his Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845), he had already laid bare the cruelties and barbarities of slavery. In his letter, written in 1848 on the tenth anniversary of his escape and published in his own antislavery newspaper, the North Star, he continues his attack on the system of slavery with a focus on his master, Thomas Auld. “I shall make use of you” he states, “as a means of bringing this guilty nation with yourself to repentance.” Context