Frederick Douglass Rhetoric

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America is said to be the land of freedom, a country where all of mankind are created equal. Yet, that standard inscribed in the Constitution had not been met. Fellow women and men have been unfairly treated and fail to hold the most minimal human right—which is the simple label of a fully human status. Mary Wollstonecraft, the mother of the feminist movement, and Frederick Douglass, a brave slave and acclaimed abolitionist, reveal the unfair treatment perpetrated by American society through brilliant writing. Although they both fight for similar human rights, they utilize opposing rhetorical strategies, which do more than successfully convince their audience. While both Wollstonecraft and Douglass fight to be accorded full human status, Wollstonecraft…show more content…
His objective is to prove that slaves are human. What better way to prove that than to reveal the true, intense human emotion salves regularly express? This choice is primarily effective due to the audience Douglass addresses. Radical Democrats inhabiting the South wouldn’t bother reading the horrors of slavery or what appears to them as a beneficial system; however, Northern Radical Republicans, generally abolitionists, would. In fact, those are the citizens who fill in the front row of Douglass’s audience. His gruesome yet moving descriptions of the torture they faced, such as, being “severely whipped”(239) by cruel slaveholders like Mr. Severe who whipped a woman “causing the blood to run half an hour at the time,”(240) and the frequent traumatizing separation between mother and child, along with the other unthinkable deprivations, deepens abolitionists’ views on slavery. Such emphasis on mother-child separation and Douglass’s own heart-breaking separation when he was “but an infant—before [he] knew her as [his] mother,”(234) unquestionably strikes and connects the many women in his audience. However, not only are women experiencing such a reaction to his piece. Sudden deepness in the whole anti-slavery movement is evidenced in the narrative’s preface before the reader enters the horrid world of
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