How Does Frederick Douglass Use His Power

The author’s diction illustrates Douglass view of the world around him and his feelings about a community created by fear and injustices. “The wretchedness of slavery” provoked Douglass to “trust no man”, which gave him the sense of feeling “perfectly helpless.” Being imprisoned in slavery for so long caused Douglass to witness the evils of man and experienced the cruelty of being alone. Even more when the “ferocious beats” showed their “greediness to swallow” it left Douglass “toil-worn and whip-scarred.” As time passed by Douglass’ desire for freedom has grown. However, when he does escape he puts himself in his own state of slavery that is run by fear. Douglass’ desires has not even freed him, but it also allowed him to live in life without

Frederick Douglass, the author of the book “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass”, said “I saw more clearly than ever the brutalizing effects of slavery upon both slave and slaveholder” (Douglass, p.71). Modern people can fairly and easily understand the negative effects of slavery upon slave. People have the idea of slaves that they are not allow to learn which makes them unable to read and write and also they don’t have enough time to take a rest and recover their injuries. However, the negative effects upon slaveholder are less obvious to modern people. People usually think about the positive effects of slavery upon slaveholder, such as getting inexpensive labor. In the book “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass”, Douglass

For the most part, masters made young, single slaves the objects of their sexual pursuits. They did on occasion rape married women. The inability of the slave husband to protect his wife from such violation points to another fundamental aspect of the relationship between enslaved

Slavery is an institution that repetitively separates family members and close friends from each other, without any regard to those people. This aids in disrupting the heteronormative nuclear family relationship greatly. Frederick Douglass said that “My mother and I were separated when I was but an infant…” and that “It is a common custom…to part children from their mothers at a very early age.”(pg. 1). This showing that most children that were born into slavery would grow up having no relationship at all with their own mothers. Also, a lot of slaves were born into slavery by the fact that “children of slave women shall in all cases follow the condition of their mothers,” (pg. 2) and the slaveholder now holds the title of father and master. With being torn from their mother at a young age and having your own father be your master, completely takes away the chance of a child that is born into slavery from having the “normal” nuclear family relationship.

After the American Revolution, slavery became a more significant component in the American economy. As a result of many slave owners being materialistic, slaves were overworked and treated callously. One such slave was Frederick Douglass. Through most of his life, Douglass was trapped in a typical slave environment. However, Douglass taught himself to read and eventually escaped the desolate life of a slave. After his freedom, Douglass wrote his autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, which chronicled his life story. In his book, Douglass details his slave upbringing and how it affected him. His autobiography was incredibly comprehensive which is one reason

Slaveholders took the responsibility for the physical and moral well-being of their dependent which was their spouse, children, and slaves. Paternalism, which is Latin for “Father,” narrowed the cultural gap between the master and the slave because it became deeply embedded after the closing of the African slave trade in 1808. The paternalism disguised and gave a reason for brutal reality of slavery. “[Paternalism] enabled slave-owners to think of themselves as kind, responsible masters even as they bought and sold their human property—a practice at odds with the claim that places formed part of the master’s “family”” (Foner 413).

In this book, Fredrick Douglass gives his own perspective of slavery and how it was being a slave. He describes different circumstances that involve social, economical, cultural and religious impacts due to slavery.

“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.

“Frequently, before the child has reached its twelfth month, its mother is taken from it, and hired out on some farm a considerable distance off, and the child is placed under the care of an old woman, too old for field labor. For what this separation is done, I do not know, unless it be to hinder the development of the child’s affection toward its mother, and to blunt and destroy the natural affection of the mother for the child. This is the inevitable result.” This is done so the mother can get right to work on the field while women who are too old to do such labor are taking care of the kids and household. A child is taken away before the age of 1 for the fact that they are so young so they can’t remember or feel any attachment to their mother just yet. The slave owners also made sure when they took the child they would sell them off to a farther farm from which the mother would be working. For the reason to make sure the mother wouldn’t be able to easily see the child and try to corrupt anything that they are trying to play in them. This process is unavoidable like Frederick says, this prevents any connection with emotions between the slaves. The end result can be

In the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave written by himself, the author asserts that justice for slaves and all men of color is different from justice for whites. Douglass supports his claim through examples by demonstrating how white men get away with killing slaves. Douglass’s purpose is to incite anger and compassion in the hearts of the people in order to abolish slavery and grant slaves the justice they deserve. Based on his provocative use of diction, Douglass is writing to the country’s leaders who have the power to pass legislation that will end slavery. Frederick Douglass, a former slave, received no justice and was denied the basic right to hold a trial and testify before court for the violent crimes he witnessed.

Most importantly, slave owners used overwhelming, deadly force at the slightest provocation. Such a drastic contrast in power was prominent in Frederick Douglass’ The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. Throughout the autobiography,

The first African slaves arrived in North America around 1619 and settled in present day state of Virginia. Their main purpose was to aid in the production of profitable crops such as cotton and tobacco, along with cooking, washing clothes, and harvesting other crops. When the slaves made a forced journey from Africa to North America their captors treated them in the most inhumane way possible. Packed liked sardines into a boat for a journey across the Atlantic Ocean, the slaves arrived in North America where plantation owners purchased them and put them to work for ridiculous hours and even beat them as a punishment. Gender status had an important role in the treatment of slaves and the tasks slave masters forced them to do. Explored in the following books: Celia a Slave, The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, and The American Promise Volume 1, male and female slaves were similar yet had different experiences. Plantation owners purchased them for different reasons, forced them to complete different tasks, made them suffer similar punishments, and whites considered slaves as the inferior race.

Fittingly, they treated the slaves as if their family bonds were completely worthless – something they would never have imagined doing to a white man. This is illustrated through Douglass's relationship with his own mother, Harriet Bailey, whom he was separated from as an infant. As Douglass reminisced, "very little communication ever took place between us…I was not allowed to be present during her illness, at her death, or burial…I received the tidings of her death with much the same emotions I should have probably felt at the death of a stranger" (26). This passage depicts how the slaveholders became so convinced of the worthlessness of the slaves that they saw no reason to respect the vital bond between a mother and child. Consequently, the slaves' view of family fell askew. Although Douglass appeared to know that his mother was important and desired a relationship with her, her passing clearly did not ever sadden him. He also showed no affection for his brother and sisters, as he lacked the necessary interactions with them needed to form familial bondage. Additionally, slaveholders expressed extreme animosity towards the slave families by raping slave women, impregnating them, and then encouraging their white children to whip their half-black siblings. As a result of the dehumanizing behavior that slavery presents, slaves not only suffered and lost all of their freedoms, but also lost their entire family lives, which the slaveholders deemed necessary to

The power and authority given to overseers on plantations in the Antebellum South often led to a misuse of power, particularly in regards to enslaved young women. Overseers were slaves chosen by the master to control the fields on bigger plantations to keep the slaves in line and on task. However, sometimes this power led to abuse. An unnamed slave told of a young girl he knew who caught the eye of one of the overseers on the plantation she worked on. Her mother told her to stay away from him because she knew what he would do to her if she did not. In the field he

Prior to the publication of any slave narrative, African Americans had been represented by early historians’ interpretations of their race, culture, and situation along with contemporary authors’ fictionalized depictions. Their persona was often “characterized as infantile, incompetent, and...incapable of achievement” (Hunter-Willis 11) while the actions of slaveholders were justified with the arguments that slavery would maintain a cheap labor force and a guarantee that their suffering did not differ to the toils of the rest of the “struggling world” (Hunter-Willis 12). The emergence of the slave narratives created a new voice that discredited all former allegations of inferiority and produced a new perception of resilience and ingenuity.