American Slave Myth

In the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Douglass reveals the true depiction behind slavery and its evils. Before the narrative was published and distributed, slavery was seen to be a norm that was necessary to the productivity of America and its economy. In reality, the slave owners of the south were blinded by a myth that had been imbedded into American society. In fact, slavery was logically not necessary to America’s society or economy at all. The institution of slavery only brought detriment to the characters of the American people. This caused aspiring abolitionists like Frederick Douglass to pursue the debunking of this myth and to reveal to society that it was far from the truth. The first way that Douglass disproves this

One way he does this is through his ability to learn how to read and write. When Mrs. Auld offers to teach him the ABC’s, Douglass quickly takes the opportunity until Mr. Auld intervenes, revealing the “white man’s power to enslave the black man” (page 47). Through his intervention, Douglass discovers that literacy was the key to having power against the white-dominated society. His quick learning of the English language disproved the commonly accepted idea that African American slaves were not as intellectually able as the whites. Likewise slaves like Sandy Jenkins also proved their great intellectual capacity. When he gives Douglass the root to protect him from the abuse of Mr. Covey, it shows that he relies on his racial pride to protect himself from the cruelty of the slave owners. When Douglass takes the root into his possession, he also gains a sense of power from it in which he “[began] to think there was something in the root Sandy gave [him]” (page 79). Slaves were able to hold onto the traditional folk beliefs and magic. This proves he is capable of having a sense of authority unknown to the white farmers. Therefore, slaves may have been stripped of every basic right, but they still had the ability to make them intellectually equal to the

The slaves were always living in a constant state of fear in which they could not risk speaking their own mind. Even while abused by their slaveholders, they only spoke words of appraisal in cautious effort to avoid a whipping. According to Douglass, the owners believed that the slaves “must be able to detect no inconsistencies in slavery; [they] must be made to feel that slavery is right; and [they] can be brought to that only when [they cease] to be a man.” (page 102). They were, in a sense, brainwashed to believe slavery was acceptable, and that it was simply their own fate. Slavery was not just a labor institution that was used for the benefit of the cotton industry, but it was a monstrous evil that took over America. Even as Douglass tries to escape the chains of slavery, he is betrayed by a fellow slave. This is because many slaves believed that their prospects as slaves were better than any other opportunity that they could have had. Defenders of slavery liked to claim that “an American sailor, who was cast away on the short of Africa… was… found to be imbruted and stultified...[losing] all reasoning power” (page 7). They made it seem that life in Africa was so primitive and savage that it was not worth living, and that the slaves were blessed to have come to America. Not only was the institution of slavery, cruel but it was also