My Bondage and My Freedom

Douglass describes life as a slave under the management of the cold, cruel, and calculating overseer, Austin Gore. Of all the horrors Douglass observed under this overseer’s rule, the most shocking was his murder of a slave named Bill Demby, or Demby, for the latter’s refusal to emerge from a creek after Gore called him three times. Demby fled to the creek to escape from Gore’s whip. There, Gore shot and killed him. Douglass and the other slaves saw the young man’s body sink into the creek, beneath a pool of blood. Gore remained calm in the aftermath, though both Captain Anthony and Colonel Lloyd were outraged. In response, Gore argued that Demby “had become unmanageable” and “set a dangerous example to the other slaves” (129). If he didn’t shoot the young man, Gore insisted, disorder would have erupted on the plantation. Colonel Lloyd was satisfied with this defense and kept Gore in his office. Gore quickly became a famous overseer. There was no judicial investigation into the matter because people considered neither the murder of a slave nor a free black person a crime in Talbot County, and there were numerous other cases of slave masters killing slaves with no consequences.