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Essay about frederick douglass biography
Freedom in the life of Frederick Douglass
Narrative of the life of frederick douglass special publications
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Frederick Douglass once wrote, “You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man.” In, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Douglass provides an autobiography of his rise from the oppression of his slave’s birth to become an internationally famous writer and orator, along with his denouncement of slavery. His narrative opens the eyes of his audience to the horrors of slavery. The stories he provides, such as the treatment of female slave, the abuse of slaves from their masters, and the dehumanization of both slave and master, made audiences sympathize with slaves and support the fight for abolition. Through out Douglass's experiences as both a slave and free man he goes through several critical turning …show more content…
points in his life that shape his views on slavery. The first major turning point Douglass undergoes occurs at the young age of seven, when he sees Captain Anthony, Douglass’s master, strip his Aunt Hester to the waist, ties her, and whips until her blood drips on the floor.
Young Douglass is so terrified by the scene that he hides in the close hoping he will not be whipped next. Douglass believes this specific whipping transpired when Hester went out with another slave, against captain’s orders. Hester’s scars are a result of Captain Anthony’s jealous rage. Douglass associates his witnessing of Captain Anthony whipping Aunt Hester with his mental initiation into the horror of slavery. He later goes on to describe that it may be painful to watch his aunt being whipped, it is even more painful to not be able to do anything. Douglass emphasizes these mentally traumatizing effects of slavery as much as the physical …show more content…
effects. Aunt Hester was just one of the many women who experienced such brutal injustices. Later in the narrative Douglass tells the tale of The Hamiltons, neighbors of Douglass’s while he served in Baltimore. The Hamiltons mistreated their two young slaves, Henrietta and Mary. The women’s bodies were starved and mangled from Mrs. Hamilton’s regular beatings. Douglass himself witnesses Mrs. Hamilton’s brutal treatment of the girls. Douglass uses the bodies of these young women to portray slavery as an intuition to be opposed by using vivid descriptions of the abuse of female slaves to depict the brutality of slave owners. Captain Anthony who has gone through several overseers, those who watch over and punish slaves, over the time Douglass has served under him. Captain Anthony eventually hires Mr. Gore, whom is proud, ambitious, cruel, and his domination over the slaves is total. When describing the career of the cruel overseer Mr. Gore, Douglass uses an increasingly sarcastic tone. When Douglass says that Mr. Gore is “what is called a first‑rate overseer,” he implies that Mr. Gore is a good overseer only to those with no sense of justice. Douglass implies that reasonable people recognize that Mr. Gore is a cruel man. Douglass’s second major turning point occurs when he is transferred from Maryland with Captain Anthony to Baltimore to serve Captain Anthony’s son-in-law’s brother, Hugh Auld. Douglass is not sad to leave the plantation, because he has no sense of home or family at the plantation. Upon his arrival at Baltimore he is greeted by Mrs. Sophia Auld, her husband, Hugh Auld, and their son, Thomas Auld, who is to be Douglass’s new master. Originally, Douglass is surprised by the kindness of his new mistress, Sophia Auld. In the past Sophia has never owned a slave and yet to be affected by the consuming evils of slavery. Her kindness eventually devolves to cruelty. Originally, Mrs. Auld even started to educate Douglass by teaching him the alphabet and some small words. When Hugh Auld discovers what Sophia has been doing he immediately intervenes and orders her to stop, stating that education ruins slaves. When Douglass overhears this he almost reaches his own personal enlightenment. He now understands that education is his key to freedom. What Hugh Auld loves, Douglass must hate. About nine years later, Thomas Auld has a falling out with his brother, Hugh, and out of spite Thomas reclaims Douglass.
Life under Thomas Auld is particularly difficult because he does not give the slaves a sufficient amount of food. Thomas Auld has no redeeming qualities. His cruelty is in accord with the fact that he was not born a slave owner, but had acquired them through marriage, similar to Sophia Auld. Douglass reports that adoptive slaveholders are the worst to serve under because they are inconsistent in discipline and are cowardly in cruelty. This is when Douglass identifies Thomas Auld with false Christianity. Like many slaveholders, Auld, create an image of himself as an upstanding Christian. This image was used to justify his actions towards his slaves. The church then benefits from slave owner’s wealth. Several of people of Auld’s church community are truly religious people who are against slavery. This is when Douglass creates a separation of “true” and false”
Christianity. Auld’s adoptive slave owner tendencies cause several of his slaves to act out of desperation, including Douglass. When he was assigned to tend to the horses, he would occasionally allow the horses to run away to a nearby farm. When Douglass went to fetch the horse he would eat a full meal at a nearby farm. After several occurrences, Auld decides to rent Douglass to Edward Covey, whom is famous for successfully taming problem slaves. Thus igniting Douglass’s third major turning point. He recalls his hardest times as a slave being the first six months rented to Covey. Douglass becomes deadened by work, exhaustion, and Covey’s repeated punishments. This is when he loses his spark, his intellect, and his desire to learn. He even contemplates killing himself. Douglass traces his renaissance after a particularly brutal beating by Covey. After retreating back to Auld for help, he is denied, and retreats to a nearby forest for the night. When he returns to Covey’s he is attacked but escapes back to the forest, where he runs into a fellow slave, Sandy Jenkins. Sandy advises Douglass to carry a magical root that would protect him from the white man’s beatings. Although Douglass is skeptical he does so. When he returns to Covey’s the following Sunday morning he greets him with kind words. Douglass begins to think the root had worked. However, the next day Covey finds Douglass in the stables and attempts to whip him. Suddenly, Douglass decides to retaliate. After the two fight for what seems like hours, Douglass explains he will not be treated like an animal no longer. Covey never touches Douglass again. This dispute is what provided a catalyst for Douglass to obtain back his hope. Although the narrative treats knowledge as the means to freedom, Douglass presents his transition from a slave to a free man as an act of violence.
Frederick Douglass, an African American social reformer who escaped from slavery, in his autobiography “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself,” denotes the perilous life of a slave in the South. Through syntax, Douglass is able to persuade his readers to support the abolitionist movement as his writing transitions from shifting sentence lengths to parallel structure and finally to varying uses of punctuation. Douglass begins his memoir with a combination of long and short sentences that serve to effectively depict life his life as a slave. This depiction is significant because it illustrates the treatment of slaves in the south allows his audience to despise the horrors of slavery. In addition, this
In sum, all of these key arguments exist in “The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass” because of the institution of slavery and its resulting lack of freedom that was used to defend it. This text’s arguments could all be gathered together under the common element of inequality and how it affected the practical, social, and even spiritual lives of the slaves.
For example, Douglass recalls watching Aunt Hester being whipped by the slaveholder: I remember the first time I ever witnessed this horrible exhibition. I was quite a child, but I remember well.
Frederick Douglass was brought from Africa as a baby to the U.S. to become a slave during the 17th century. In his narrative book “Narrative of The Life of Frederick Douglass,” he used rhetoric to provoke reader’s emotions, and inspiration of hope when everything isn’t good. Douglass used the rhetoric appeal pathos to show people how horrible he was treated as a slave, and how he kept up his motivation about becoming free from slavery. In addition, he also used pathos so effective that readers can see his experiences in front of themselves.
In, “The Narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass”, readers get a first person perspective on slavery in the South before the Civil War. The author, Frederick Douglass, taught himself how to read and write, and was able to share his story to show the evils of slavery, not only in regard to the slaves, but with regard to masters, as well. Throughout Douglass’ autobiography, he shares his disgust with how slavery would corrupt people and change their whole entire persona. He uses ethos, logos, and pathos to help establish his credibility, and enlighten his readers about what changes needed to be made.
Like most southern slave owners Thomas Auld was a cruel master who always disciplined his slaves for their wrong doings. He was a cowardly man because he didn’t have the ability or courage to properly hold slaves, but “he found himself incapable of managing his slaves either by force, fear, or fraud” (pg. 380). Auld was a merciless man that worked the slaves to the limit and barely gave them enough to eat. Douglass mentioned how often slaves stole food in order to survive and to prevent from becoming ill. “We were therefore reduced to the wretched necessity of living at the expense of out neighbors. This is what we did by begging or stealing […]” (pg. 379). Most slave owners were unsympathetic towards their slaves; however, Douglass found from experience that “adopted slaveholders are the worst”. Since adopted slave owners were married into slave owning and weren’t raised among slavery, Douglass believed that they didn’t know how to tr...
In this narrative, Douglass describes his life as a slave in ways that is brutalizing and dehumanizing. He wants his readers to understand that concept. By doing this, Douglass writes, “I was seized with a violent aching of the head, attended with extreme dizziness; I trembled in every limb” (416). Douglass uses diction such as seized, aching, extreme dizziness, and trembled to help create a picture of the pain he had felt during his experiences of being a slave for Mr. Covey. Another example is when he writes, “I told him as well as I could, for I scarce had strength to speak. He then gave me a savage kick in the side, and told me to get up I tried to do so, but fell back in the attempt. He gave me another kick, and again told me to rise. I again tried, and succeeded in gaining my feet; but stooping to get the tub with which I was feeding the fan, I again staggered and fell” (416-17). Words like scarce, savage, and staggered place imagery into the reader’s minds of what he went through as a slave. One other way that Douglass shows how his words emphasize the message is when he writes, “The blood was yet oozing from the wound on my head. For a time I thought I should bleed to death; and think now that I should have done so, but that the blood so matted my hair as to stop the w...
However, through rhetorical devices, Douglass demonstrates how slavery also had a degrading influence on slaveholders and thus shows its corrupting nature. Specifically, he contrasts the shift in Sophia Auld’s character through antithesis and metaphor after being exposed to slavery. Before Mrs. Auld’s corruption, Douglass described his master by claiming, “Her face was made of heavenly smiles, and her voice of tranquil music” (32). Through metaphor, Douglass makes her sound like an angel with “heavenly smiles.” Angels are commonly associated with pureness and therefore by making this metaphor Douglass associates Mrs. Auld as originally being pure. However, he then juxtaposes this idea when he claims she has received the “fatal poison of irresponsible power”(32) also known to him as being a slave master. He explains her new characteristics by stating, “That cheerful eye, under the influence of slavery, soon became red with rage; that voice, made of all sweet accord, changed to one of harsh and horrid discord; and that angelic face gave place to that of a demon”(32-33). Through metaphor and antithesis, Douglass shows how she shifts from being an angel to a demon. The metaphor associates Mrs. Auld with satan and the antithesis makes her list of changing features appear extensive. Through these rhetorical devices, Douglass is able to emphasize the abruptness of her change in character due to her experience around slavery. By explaining this personal experience in his narrative, Douglass shows to his audience the unexpected negatives of slavery and how it not only dehumanizes slaves, but masters as well. This most likely would have given Northern abolitionists stronger reasons to push for Douglass’s goal of
According to Douglass, the treatment of a slave was worse than an animal. Not only was he valued as an animal but also a slave was reduced to an animal when he was as much a man as his keeper. The mental faculty a slave had was diminished through the forbidden nature of reading and learning, as well as the constant drunkenness imposed on the slaves during holidays.
The tone established in the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass is unusual in that from the beginning to the end the focus has been shifted. In the beginning of the narrative Douglass seems to fulfill every stereotypical slavery theme. He is a young black slave who at first cannot read and is very naïve in understanding his situation. As a child put into slavery Douglass does not have the knowledge to know about his surroundings and the world outside of slavery. In Douglass’ narrative the tone is first set as that of an observer, however finishing with his own personal accounts.
When Douglass moves to Baltimore, he becomes the property of Hugh Auld. There he is cared for by Hugh’s wife, Sophia. The reader’s first impressions of Sophia are favorable; she is a warm, gentle woman who wishes to teach Douglass to read and write. Douglass himself is surprised at how kind she is at first, and he mentions that Sophia Auld has never owned slaves before, and therefore has not been affected by the evils of slavery. Douglass notes that she does not wish to punish him just to keep him subservient like his former masters did, and she does not beat him or even mind at all when Douglass looks her in the eyes. Sophia also teaches Douglass the alphabet and several words. However, her husband Hugh, who has already undergone the transformation that slavery causes, immediately orders her to stop when he hears of this. Here, we see the contrast of two distinctly different people with regards to the institution of slavery. Sophia Auld is pure, innocent, untouched by the evils of slavery. Hugh Auld, on the other hand, has experience with the system of slavery and knows that in order to keep slaves obedient, they must also be kept ignorant and fearful.
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, brings to light many of the social injustices that colored men, women, and children all were forced to endure throughout the nineteenth century under Southern slavery laws. Douglass's life-story is presented in a way that creates a compelling argument against the justification of slavery. His argument is reinforced though a variety of anecdotes, many of which detailed strikingly bloody, horrific scenes and inhumane cruelty on the part of the slaveholders. Yet, while Douglas’s narrative describes in vivid detail his experiences of life as a slave, what Douglass intends for his readers to grasp after reading his narrative is something much more profound. Aside from all the physical burdens of slavery that he faced on a daily basis, it was the psychological effects that caused him the greatest amount of detriment during his twenty-year enslavement. In the same regard, Douglass is able to profess that it was not only the slaves who incurred the damaging effects of slavery, but also the slaveholders. Slavery, in essence, is a destructive force that collectively corrupts the minds of slaveholders and weakens slaves’ intellects.
The reader is first introduced to the idea of Douglass’s formation of identity outside the constraints of slavery before he or she even begins reading the narrative. By viewing the title page and reading the words “The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, written by himself” the reader sees the advancement Douglass made from a dependent slave to an independent author (Stone 134). As a slave, he was forbidden a voice with which he might speak out against slavery. Furthermore, the traditional roles of slavery would have had him uneducated—unable to read and incapable of writing. However, by examining the full meaning of the title page, the reader is introduced to Douglass’s refusal to adhere to the slave role of uneducated and voiceless. Thus, even before reading the work, the reader knows that Douglass will show “how a slave was made a man” through “speaking out—the symbolic act of self-definition” (Stone 135).
Frederick Douglass’ landmark narrative describes the dehumanization of African-American slaves, while simultaneously humanizing them through his moving prose. Douglass shows the dehumanization of slaves through depictions of violence, deindividuation, and the broken justice system. However, Douglass’ pursuit of an education, moving rhetoric, and critique of his own masters demonstrates to the reader that African-Americans are just as intelligent as white people, thus proving their humanity.
Douglass also disproves Mr. Auld’s by claiming that it is ironic. He mentions that this whole scenario has not only dehumanized him, but it has also dehumanized his masters. He claims that Mr. Auld has always been a demon, but that it demonized Mrs. Auld so much that she fell from her angel-like status and fell to be a demon, being even worse than her husband. He also talks about how Mr. Auld believes that poor white kids that are worse off than the well-kept