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Douglas vs Stowe

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Experience Prevail Over Fiction Before the Civil War, America was plagued with a complicated social quandary that incorporated individual, societal, political, economic, and religious principles. Its authorship includes Frederick Douglass and Harriet Beecher Stowe who dually challenges the legitimacy of slavery in their literature. While both Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” and Frederick Douglas’s “Narrative of the Life of an American Slave,” offer impelling accounts, regarding the historical slavery era throughout the 1800s, the two authors write from distinctive experiences. Stowe’s Uncle Tom, a fictional character, attracts his audience through his profound Christian faith, which gives him an unbreakable spirit that …show more content…

Douglass’s primary target audiences are those from the North, in favor of convincing the abolitionists to produce a change. Stowe’s intention is to convince her northern audience that slavery was evil and could no longer be acceptable. The importance of deconstructing both of these anti-slavery acclamations is that they should make the reader think passionately while learning about the difficult struggles all black people had to endure during this unruly period in history. Although Frederick Douglass’s disposition against slavery is expected of him since he is a former slave, he backs up his statements with convincing explanations. A prime example of Douglass’s bitterness towards slavery is the fact that as a boy, he experienced no love or affections; that is until his master sent him to Baltimore to live among relatives. On page 1195, Douglas shares his experience with his new mistress, “And here I saw what I had never seen before; it was a white face beaming with the most kindly emotions; it was the face of my new mistress, Sophia Auld. I wish I could describe the rapture that flashed through my soul as I beheld it.” What Douglass believes is the opportunity to be finally treated with goodness and affections by a motherly figure, backfires on him in a short matter of time. Here the author describes how powerful “the influence of slavery” quickly takes over the conscious of first time slave owners, “But, alas! This kind heart had

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