Slavery Experienced By Frederick Douglass Analysis

Frederick Douglass the most successful abolitionist who changed America’s views of slavery through his writings and actions. Frederick Douglass had many achievements throughout his life. His Life as a slave had a great impact on his writings. His great oratory skills left the largest impact on Civil War time period literature. All in all he was the best black speaker and writer ever.

In Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Douglass explains, in great detail, how slave master would use a variety of methods to dehumanize slaves located on their plantation. These methods involved both severe physical and psychological trauma. Nevertheless, Douglass remains diligent and finds a way to resist the harsh reality of being a slave. Because of his immovable desire to acquire knowledge to his fighting encounter with Mr. Covey, these experiences help shape Douglass to be the archetype of what it means to go from slavery to freedom. This essay will highlight the physical and psychological tactics used on slaves. In addition, the aspect of how Douglass resists the

Slavery is a humongous topic involving both slaves and former slaves. The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave Story is one such story. Douglass suffered punishments, and watching others get punished, he uses those experiences to make his argument against slavery.Douglass’ tone in the narrative is sarcastic and dark. Frederick Douglass successfully uses vast quantities of rhetorical devices, illuminating the horror and viciousness of slavery, including the need to eliminate it.

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.

The brutality that slaves endured form their masters and from the institution of slavery caused slaves to be denied their god given rights. In the "Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass," Douglass has the ability to show the psychological battle between the white slave holders and their black slaves, which is shown by Douglass' own intellectual struggles against his white slave holders. I will focus my attention on how education allowed Douglass to understand how slavery was wrong, and how the Americans saw the blacks as not equal, and only suitable for slave work. I will also contrast how Douglass' view was very similar to that of the women in antebellum America, and the role that Christianity played in his life as a slave and then

Douglass not only describes slaves as animals, but he describes slave treatment as if they were animals to further describe the horrendous lives of slaves. Slaves were fed food in troughs (36). By choosing the word “trough”, Douglass emphasizes the poor treatment of slaves; slaves were not good enough to be fed from bowls or plates, they were no better than animals. Douglass also compares women on the plantations to breeding animals. Women were expected to reproduce in order to increase their masters’ wealth, not to create a family. Women and children were separated before the child was a year old so they would not form familial bonds with one another. When Douglass’ own mother died, he compared it to a stranger dying because he had no connection with her (18). Slaves were not only thought of animals, but also fostered as animals. Douglass describes Mr. Covey as a “nigger-breaker”, Douglass was broken in “body, soul, and spirit” by

In the 1800’s, slavery was a huge part of America. Slavery helped boost the economy and was heavily dependent upon by Americans. Slaves were treated as if they were not humans, but property. Slaves natural right of freedom was taken away by the white Americans. This oppression occurred in America, while they claimed that their nation was the nation of freedom and liberty. One of the slaves that would help change history was named Frederick Douglass, and he had a lot to say about American hypocrisy. Frederick Douglass was a former slave. He taught himself to read and write at a young age, and years later he started his own newspaper called “The North Star”, and ended up writing and editing most of the articles himself. Another thing he

Slaves suffered but weren’t the victims of slave holders. They suffered from slavery. Frederick Douglass wrote a narrative of his position in slavery and as clearly as the sun in the sky, is against it, bringing together those who were too scared to voice their opinion and those who were willing to change. In his narrative he wanted to spread awareness about the American slave system and that it corrupts slave holders as well as harming slaves with his personal experience.

“If there is no struggle, there is no progress.” This famous quote is from a speech given by one of America’s most influential abolitionist speakers, Frederick Douglass. Born into slavery, this great American leader led a life many of us would find impossible to bear. After gaining his freedom from slavery, Douglass shared his stories through impressive speeches and vivid autobiographies, which helped America move forward as a country liberated from racial inequality. Although Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave allows readers to understand what life was like for slaves in antebellum America, the most important and relevant lesson to take away from this narrative today is the importance of perseverance. Douglass’s courage to resist and learn paired with his determination to keep his faith and ultimately find himself, is something to which people from every culture and time period can relate.

In Frederick Douglass’ Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Mr. Douglass gives many examples of cruelty towards slaves as he shows many reasons that could have been used to abolish slavery. Throughout the well-written narrative, Douglass uses examples from the severe whippings that took place constantly to a form of brainwashing by the slaveholders over the slaves describing the terrible conditions that the slaves were faced with in the south in the first half of the 1800’s. The purpose of this narrative was most likely to give others not affiliated with slaves an explicit view of what actually happened to the slaves physically, mentally, and emotionally to show the explicit importance of knowledge to the liberation

During the eighteenth century, slavery was already well-established section of the American labor system. As the amount of slaves grew in size, they did not receive rights, and were mostly separated from their families. They were mostly needed for agricultural labors and had to work mostly from dusk to dawn. Frederick Douglass’s experiences as a slave was different than that other colonial labor because of the strict treatment he received from his masters, the inferiority to other humans that he felt, and the harsh conditions he lived in.

The Heroic Slave a novella written by Frederick Douglass is loosely based on The Creole Revolt of the only documented successful African – American Slaves eighteen who revolt gain their freedom including one hundred ten other slaves, who were set free in Nassau, Bahamas in 1841. (Eschner) Whereas, in The Heroic Slave, Frederick Douglass alters the actual account to introduce ideas to illicit whites to assist in abolition for slavery. (Douglas) In his novel based his story on Madison Washington one of the four slaves who is noted as prominent leader in the revolt.

Douglass’s own personal experiences reveals just how quickly slavery can change a life. On January 1, 1833, Douglass was reassigned to Mr. Covey, a sadistic man who enjoyed catching slaves doing something wrong off guard. In just six months, Douglass was forced to work under all circumstances. He proclaims that “it was never too hot or too cold; it could never rain, blow, hail, or snow, too hard for us to work in the field” (pg 37). The results of this treatment were devastating. Deprived of time to rest and stripped of his dignity, Douglass was “broken in body, soul, and spirit” (pg 38). Eventually, it appears as if Douglass becomes depressed as his “intellect languished”, his “disposition to read departed”, and “the cheerful spark that lingered about his eyes died” (pg 38). From Douglass’s personal experience, readers can see how just minimal exposure to slavery can dehumanize a man into depression. Additionally, Douglass literally says that he was “a man transformed into a brute!” (pg 38). Through Douglass’s experiences, readers can certainly see that slavery dismantles the lives of its poor

Douglass also carves the vivid picture of dehumanization into the reader's minds when he writes about the whippings slaves endure. When Douglass is a young boy, he witnesses for the first time a slave getting whipped, "he took her into the kitchen, and stripped her from neck to waist, leaving her neck, shoulders, and back entirely naked. He made her get upon the stool, and tied her hands to the hook." Douglass hides in a closet, thinking that he would be the next victim. This is Douglass's first encounter with the extreme cruelty of slaveholders. "She now stood fair for his infernal purpose...after soon rolling up his sleeves, he commenced to lay on the heavy cowskin, and soon the warm, red blood (amid heart-rending shrieks from her, and horrid oaths from him) came dripping to the floor" (Douglass 42). As it turns out, the slave

To support this, Douglass uses animal comparisons to help the audience picture the bestial conditions in which the children are “fed”. He writes: “Our food was coarse cornmeal boiled. This was called mush. It was put into a large wooden tray or trough, and set down upon the ground. The children were then called, like so many pigs, and like so many pigs they would come and devour the mush; some with oyster shells, others with pieces of shingle, some with naked hands, and none with spoons.”(Douglass 16) As if this early indoctrination isn’t bad enough, at ten years old the children are sent to the fields, where they experience the full wrath and cruelty of the overseers, the whips, shouts and insults. From birth, they are kept in ignorance and misinformation because “a content slave [is] a thoughtless one.”(Douglass 58) In fact, slaves are kept in such arduous perpetual labor and hunger that the slave is too worried about his survival to think like a human. Drawing the parallels between this state and the primitive, non-cognizant state of animals, one can see in full the reduction of humans to beasts. But inducing this state takes cruelty, deliberate dispensation of injustice and extreme disregard for the value of life, equality and freedom, which are the values that slaveholders came to exemplify the longer they held slaves. The more slaveholders dehumanized and primitivized their slaves, the more they reduced their own humanity.