The Source of Frederick Douglass’s Power Frederick Douglass was a Maryland slave who escaped to freedom in 1838. He began working as a lecturer for the American Anti-Slavery Society and later wrote an autobiography detailing his experiences in bondage. He was an important asset to the abolitionist movement because of his personal experiences, his intellectual capabilities, and his willingness to divulge specific details of his prior circumstances. Douglass’s personal experiences allowed him to
the Life of Frederick Douglass, written by Douglass, himself, is a memoir complete with the grueling details of his enslavement and his journey to freedom. Without literacy, Douglass would have never liberated himself to become a free man. Through Sophia Auld, reading The Columbian Orator, and copying little Master Thomas’s school books, Frederick Douglass empowered himself to escape from the wretched bonds of slavery. Sophia Auld was the premier literary influence in Douglass’s life as a slave
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
have become moral and intelligent” and that slaves “love their master and his family, and the attachment is reciprocated” (Fitzhugh, 386). This idea of a mutually beneficial relationship is Fitzhugh’s way of showing the North that slavery is not just the practice of capturing humans for labor, but also developing them into better people. He justifies this idea by adding that slaves are part of a slave owner’s family, and they promote the happiness in one another and “good treatment and proper discipline
war effected the soldiers and nation as a whole. The authors claim to take away from is how “between 1861 and 1865 and into the decades that followed Americans undertook a kind of work that history has not adequately understood or recognized.”(p.xv) What Faust thesis is that during the time period of the Civil War death has transformed the nation and created a “republic of suffering.” “Death had created the modern American Union, not just by ensuring national survival, but by shaping enduring national