Frederick Douglass Rhetorical Analysis

840 Words4 Pages
Frederick Douglass was born in Talbot County, Maryland into slavery around 1817 or 1818. Like many slaves of that time he was unaware of his date of birth. It is said that he is separated from his mother soon after he is born. He said that he was unhappy and confused because, the white kids knew their ages but he couldn’t know his. Douglass’ Father would have most likely been is master his mother’s master, Captain Anthony. It wasn’t uncommon for slave owners to have sexual relations with the slaves. Frederick received terrible news when he was seven years old. He had been told that his Mother passed away, the news crushed him. The first paragraph of Douglass’s Narrative demonstrates the work as both a personal account and a public argument.…show more content…
This Narrative exposes slavery and reveals its brutality and wrongness. To many people who were not abolitionists, slavery appeared an entirely natural practice. To them, religious and economic arguments had demonstrated that blacks were inferior to whites and belonged as an enslaved labor force. Douglass makes a clear case that slavery is sustained not through the natural superiority of whites, but through many concrete and contrived strategies of gaining and holding power over blacks. For example, Douglass shows how slave owners make slaves vulnerable by taking them from their mothers. Blacks are not subhuman to begin with, but are dehumanized only by such cruel practices of…show more content…
Douglass is still the character holding together his scenes, as he either witnessed or heard about each of them. His depictions include novelistic detail, as when old Barney removes his hat to reveal his bald head before being whipped Douglass also uses the stories of other slaves to make an argument about the inhumanity of slavery. After Douglass recounts Mr. Gore’s murder of Demby, he includes several similar stories, such as Mrs. Hick killing her female servant and Beal Bondly killing one of Colonel Lloyd’s elderly slaves. These additional scenes serve to support Douglass’s claims about slavery. Douglass is attempting to convince white Northerners that the events he witnessed—such as a white man killing a black man and suffering no legal consequences—are the normative practice. Supplementary scenarios reinforce this sense of
Open Document