Compare And Contrast Douglass And Jacobs

Both equality and liberty are important qualities for a nation to rise to prosperity and peace in any country. In Alexis De Tocqueville’s Democracy in America and Fredrick Douglass’s Fourth of July speech, the importance of voicing one’s concern is central to improving society. Alexis De Tocqueville shows that the quality of condition is more important than liberty in our American Democracy. While on the other hand, Douglass notes that our known 4th of July is a time to consider those who are inferior, and that liberty is just as important as equality in American society.

Thomas Jefferson a founding father of our nation has many values we American’s view as good ones. His ideas and ways influence our lives every day, like with the constitution. It has many views within it that have changed our world and shaped it into the world it is today. We can’t help but think of our world without these amendments or how we might be without them. If we didn’t have some of the amendment in that constitution, our lives could be dramatically different. A lot of Jefferson ideas, are similar to those of Frederick Douglass. A former slave and now a free man. Douglass as born into slavery and when he died, he was free. When Jefferson said “all men are created equal” that’s what Douglass took as his own ideas. These two men have

Harriet Jacobs and Frederick Douglass were both slaves that wrote about their struggles and pain during their years of slavery. Both stories were the same but also very different. Both Jacobs and Douglass were born into slavery. The stories were written by authors that finally gained their freedom from slavery. Jacob’s wrote “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl” and Frederick Douglass wrote, “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave”. Jacob’s wrote it in a woman point of view and gave us a look at how the women that were slaves experienced life; whereas Douglass wrote as a male slave and the brutality.

In the Narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass: an American Slave, written by himself, the author argues that slaves are treated no better than, sometimes worse, than livestock. Douglass supports his claim by demonstrating how the slaves were forced to eat out of a trough like pigs and second, shows how hard they were working, like animals. The author’s purpose is to show the lifestyle of an American slave in order to appeal to people’s emotions to show people, from a slave’s perspective, what slavery is really like. Based on the harsh descriptions of his life, Douglass is writing to abolitionist and other people that would sympathize and abolish slavery.

In the Narrative of the Life and the Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs both use detailed descriptions to convey the harsh brutalities of slavery and cause a sense of urgency to the problem. In Harriet’s narrative she describes her love for a young, free, black man. She is worried to tell Dr. Flint, her owner, because she knows that he is too wilful and arbitrary to consent to the marriage. Even so, she speaks with Dr. Flint about her proposal and he strongly disapproves. Harriet describes that for the rest of the night Dr. Flint ignored her. He was angry that she thought of marrying a black man instead of being with him. However, “his lips disdained to address me (her), his eyes were very loquacious.

A comparison of the narrative of Douglass and the narrative of Jacobs was very interesting to me because, they vividly establishes the full range of burdens and conditions many slaves experience. I couldn’t help when I read the first half of these narratives to notice the similarities they both share and make the connection between them, as I relived their experiences through the lenses of a mixed male and a black female slaves with a white lover; that was also raped by her white master. Mr. Douglass was born in Talbot County, Maryland, and he expresses is frustration for not knowing or not being allow to know his age. The show this when he stated in his narrative by saying; “A want of information concerning my own was a source of unhappiness to me even doing childhood. The white children could tell their ages. I could not tell why I ought to be deprived on the same privilege.”(pg. 17) Douglass explain this is the fate of many slave of this time, they were not told or had any ideas of where and when they were born.

Sometimes, things that seem opposites at first glance turn out to be more similar after a second look. This is the case for the poems London, 1802 by William Wordsworth, and Douglass by Paul Laurence Dunbar. The major differences in these poems combine with the similarities to show the timeless need for revolutionary authors.

Slaves didn’t know their mothers or birthdays.  Assess the impact on their mental  well  being ?

America, a land with shimmering soil where golden dust flew and a days rain of money could last you through eternity. Come, You Will make it in America. That was the common theme of those who would remove to America. It is the common hymn, the classic American rags-to-riches myth, and writers such as Benjamin Franklin and Frederick Douglass had successfully embraced it in their works.Franklin and Douglass are two writers who have quite symmetrical styles and imitative chronology of events in their life narratives.

Jacobs's narrative signals several significant departures from the literary and social conventions of the slave narrative, a genre that enjoyed widespread popularity in the United States during the 1840s and 1850s. Slave narratives written by men characteristically focused on the heroic struggles of individuals, lone figures struggling against the injustices of the slave system. Issues of family and community were often subsumed

Frederick Douglass and Harriet Ann Jacobs account for major portions of their lives through their slave narratives. They both use these narratives to expose the cruelty of slavery and by all means end it. However, these two particular authors cling to the general understanding of what manhood and womanhood really are. Frederick Douglass mentions and adheres to the idea of manhood. This concept is very important to him because he as a former slave truly believed that manhood was very dependent on freedom.

Throughout the course of American history, there had been many brilliant minds and leaders who re-wrote the history, and during the Civil War era there existed many factions seeking to dramatically change America. Amazing speakers and thinkers spread their ideas throughout history. These thinkers had many obstacles that they had to overcome to the point that they changed history. Fredrick Douglass for an example, An African American, who fought for black civil rights using speeches like “What to the slave is the Fourth of July”, talking about the terror of the slavery, On the other hand, Abraham Lincoln an optimistic speaker who went through hardship and learning obstacles from a point when he didn’t even could read or write to a point where he became a president of the united stated of America. Both leaders went throw hell to obtain an

During the final years of legal slave ownership in the United States, the slave narrative became a popular way for literate enslaved people to express their anti-slavery stance through their own testimony. Two of the most influential writers on the slave narrative topic were the autobiographical authors Fredrick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs. Since Douglas and Jacobs were both born in a similar time period, there are many similarities found in their works. Douglass’s Narrative of the life of Fredrick Douglass, an American Slave is closely comparable to Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl when analyzing how they represented their enslavement in their autobiographies. The two authors have similar ideas when portraying their struggles with forced ignorance. Their writing also contains parallels with the corrupting power of slavery for the slave owners, as well as the parallels in pointing out the hypocrisies of using the bible to defend slavery. These similarities can be explained in part due to Douglass and Jacobs following the same basic slave narrative outline to maintain the shared goal of abolishing slavery in the United States.

The experiences, memories and treatment in any situation are viewed upon differently between a man and a woman. Obvious in the case of slavery, the two sexes were treated differently and so therefore their recollections of such events were-different. In the following short essay, we look closely at the perspective of the female slave, Harriet Jacobs in “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl”, and respectfully compared to that of a man slave, Frederick Douglass in “The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass”. Although both experienced their freedoms despite facing great

numerous types of themes. Much of the work concentrates on the underlining ideas beneath the stories. In the narratives, fugitives and ex-slaves appealed to the humanity they shared with their readers during these times, men being lynched and marked all over and women being the subject of grueling rapes. "The slave narrative of Frederick Douglas" and "Harriet Jacobs: Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl" themes come from the existence of the slaves morality that they are forced compromise to live. Both narrators show slave narratives in the point of view of both "men and women slaves that had to deal with physical, mental, and moral abuse during the times of slavery."