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Example research essay topic: Abolition Of Slavery Frederick Douglass - 2,285 words

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Frederick Douglass was born into slavery sometime in 1817; like many slaves, he is unsure of his date of birth. His mother was owned by a white man named Captain Anthony, who likely was Douglass father. Captain Anthony was a clerk for a rich man named Colonel Lloyd. For slaves, life on Lloyds plantation was brutal: they received little food, almost no clothes, no beds, and were constantly overworked and exhausted. Slaves who broke rules, willfully or not, were often beaten or whipped, sometimes even shopped.

When Douglass was seven, he was shipped off to Baltimore to work for Hugh Auld, a relative of the family. Sophia Auld, Hugh's wife, was not accustomed to the role of slave owner. At first, she was disturbed by Douglass servility. She even began to teach him to read.

Her husband became upset at this and forced her to stop. Eventually, Sophia began to treat Douglass with the usual harshness. Still, in general, slaves were treated more civilly in Baltimore than in the deeper south. He secretly taught himself to read, and he learned about abolitionists from newspapers.

He became determined to escape to the north. Because of a series of deaths within Captain Anthony's family, including that of Anthony himself, resulting in a series of property disputes, Douglass was shifted back and forth between Baltimore and the South. He ended up in the service of Thomas Auld, who in turn sent him to a noted slave breaker, Edward Covey. Douglass barely survived the experience, but his desire to escape further hardened. He and a few other slaves hatched an escape plan, but were betrayed; Thomas Auld, fearing that Douglass would be killed with no value to himself, sent Douglass back to Hugh and Sophia Auld in Baltimore.

Douglass received permission from Hugh Auld to hire out his extra time. He saved money bit by bit, and eventually made his escape to New York. The details of that escape he does not describe, in order not to close the way to future slaves who attempt the journey. A free man, Douglass feared recapture. He changed his name from the original Bailey to Douglass. Soon after, he married Anna Murray, a free woman he had met while in Baltimore.

Eventually, he became deeply engaged in the abolitionist movement as both a writer and an orator. Slave owners and their sympathizers described blacks in terms of negative stereotypes to justify treating them as property. These stereotypes provided the foundation for the idyllic mythology of the plantation. Slave owners liked to think of themselves as the paternalistic masters of a class of inferior, childlike people who simply could not survive without the kindly guidance of their white superiors. According to the masters mythology, slaves sang out grateful praise for their bondage.

From the great big house of the plantation owner all the way down to the fields where the slaves toiled, all was good and right in heaven and on earth. How did these carefully edited tales about slavery prevail in the face of the enormous evidence to the contrary? It all depends on who is telling the story. These myths were made by white slave owners, who brutally policed the speech of their slaves in order to crush narratives that challenged this official version. Any show of discontent incurred the masters wrath and punishment. Because slaves were classified as inferior and not quite human, the legal system judged them as less credible than their masters.

In the courts, the testimony of a black witness was never equal to that of a white witness. The slaves law began and ended with his oppressor. No beating was unfair or too severe unless the master said so. No coerced sexual activity was rape unless the master said so. No killing was murder unless the master said so.

Even if the master decided in the victims favor, he treated such incidents as crimes against his property rather than violations of the slaves rights. It was illegal to educate slaves. The enforced institution of illiteracy did the double service of robbing the victim of his voice and of his access to alternative ideas regarding his condition. The slave owner did not want his slaves to know that many Americans saw their bondage as a moral outrage. Nor did he want his slaves to provide first-hand evidence against his prettified picture of slavery, which would give the abolitionists more rhetorical ammunition against him. He wanted to be the center and origin of the truth about slavery, both for slaves and for non-slave-owning whites.

In light of these concerns, it is no surprise that the quest for identity is a prevalent theme in the work of Afro-American writers. Racist myth-makers seek to silence their victims by naming them in negative terms. Former slaves struggled hard to reclaim the right to define their own identities and the echoes of this struggle persist. To name oneself is a weighty act, carrying with it the assertion of the right to tell ones own story. Therefore, establishing ones identity on ones own terms is far more than an abstract, intellectual matter. For Frederick Douglass, establishing his identity on his own terms was crucial to both his career as an abolitionist and his own claim to freedom.

In 1845, the year he published his Narrative, Douglass was already a respected abolitionist orator. As a fugitive slave, he was considered by many to be an authentic source for the truth about slavery. However, others found it hard to believe that such an intelligent, articulate man could ever have been a slave. To answer these doubts, he wrote his Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. To make his point even stronger, he added Written by Himself as a subtitle. Douglass presented his book as the slaves side of the story.

Douglass was still a fugitive slave and in danger of being recaptured. When Douglass first settled in New Bedford, Massachusetts, he changed his name to avoid being caught. But his autobiography contained enough details to identify him. By deciding to publish such a detailed account of his life, Douglass was taking an enormous risk.

The risk was necessary for him to assert his right to define his identity on his own terms and to authenticate his Narrative as a first-hand account of the reality of slavery. Douglass wanted to impress the evils of slavery strongly upon the American consciousness. Therefore, he did not use the florid style popular in his day. Instead, he wrote with a powerful, matter-of-fact voice about the threats of bloody beatings, starvation, and murder that slaves faced every day. Douglass direct style gives him an air of great credibility, implying that he did not exaggerate the suffering he describes. He employs classic American literary motifs to tell his story.

His autobiography is a story of self-discovery; he details how his growing awareness of his condition, through his self-acquired education, propelled him to re-imagine himself. For Douglass, this carried more risk and more reward than for the white Americans of his day. He had to learn to think of himself as a human being rather than as a beast of burden, as a free man rather than as a slave. This required him to educate himself at the risk of brutal punishment and then to take the even greater risk of an escape attempt. After one failed try that could easily have cost him his life, he succeeded the second time. Douglass story is one of self-reliance, a popular theme in nineteenth-century American literature.

Thus, he made the experiences of the least privileged resonate with the values of the wealthiest and best-educated Americans. Summary William Lloyd Garrisons preface states that slavery can degrade anyone. He once met a white man who had been kept as a slave in Africa and whose power of speech was reduced to an unintelligible gibberish. Garrison expresses admiration for the numberless American slaves like Frederick Douglass who survived and overcame the brutalization of an institution that does all it can to cripple their intellectual and moral capacities. Garrison states that many people will not want to believe the catalogue of horrors in Douglass Narrative, but that he has faith that no one will be able to disprove the veracity of its testimony. Garrison closes his preface by reiterating that there is no legal authority that protects slaves from the brutality of their masters and by denouncing supporters of slavery who call themselves Christians as felon[s] of the highest grade and foe[s] of God and man.

Wendell Phillips letter to Douglass illustrates the predicament of slaves with the fable of the man and the lion. The lion declares that he would not be misrepresented if lions wrote history. The case of slaves whose own narratives were repressed in favor of those of their masters is similar. Phillips expresses admiration for Douglass brave decision to tell his story despite the danger of recapture as a fugitive slave. He states that if he were in the same situation, he would have burned the manuscript rather than run the risks of publicity. Phillips expresses regret that the abolition of slavery in the British colonies did not bring more converts to the cause of abolition in America.

Those who held off on their judgment of American slavery to wait for the results of British abolition were thinking in terms of economic, rather than human, costs and benefits. Commentary Garrisons preface explains how, when, and where he met Douglass. In essence, he provides corroborating testimony that Douglass is indeed a fugitive slave with astonishing oratorical abilities. Moreover, the preface places Douglass book in the context of abolitionist politics. Garrison attacks the moral, religious, and legal justifications for slavery and asserts that black people are no more suited to slavery than white people.

To support this, he includes an anecdote that shows how slavery can easily reduce a white man to a dumb beast. His strategy positions slavery as a brutal attack upon humanity itself. Garrison declares that slaves are kept down by an institutionalized prejudice that runs squarely against American traditions of democracy and equality. He attacks the notion that slaves are the born inferiors of their masters and explains that they have been made to appear so by a combination of legal discrimination and brutality designed to reduce them intellectually to the level of beasts. Pro-slavery advocates then take advantage of their victims enforced ignorance to spread their myths about the nature and purpose of slavery and attempt to justify their wrongdoing by perverting Christian values and American tradition.

Garrison compares Douglass demand for the abolition of slavery to Patrick Henrys demand for liberty from British tyranny. Thus, Garrison places Douglass text and the cause of abolition in the tradition of American values, appealing to the sympathies of the public. He wishes to rouse them to condemn slavery as a betrayal of their traditional values and of the very identity of their nation. Likewise, Garrison tries to arouse the moral and religious outrage of a reading public that liked to think of itself as devoutly Christian by showing how slavery perverts the tenets of Christianity.

Phillips private letter to Douglass addresses the authenticity of Douglass Narrative on several levels. The inclusion of his letter further corroborates that the book was indeed written by a fugitive slave. He also addresses the relevance of authenticity itself by his allusion to the fable of the man and the lion, which shows how the powerful misrepresent the powerless. This is the mechanism by which slave owners produced and spread their self-serving ideas about slavery. According to their version of the story, slavery is a benevolent institution rather than a horrendous depravity.

To stifle challenges to their myths, masters kept their slaves in perpetual ignorance and illiteracy. Phillips also speaks of the very real risks that fugitive slaves faced in making their experiences public. As first-hand witnesses of the brutality of slavery, they are the best means to challenge the slave owners idyllic myths. However, fugitive slaves lived in perpetual fear of recapture. They could not depend on the law to protect them from slave owners seeking to recover their property. Thus, the institution of slavery also silenced those slaves lucky enough to escape to the North.

Phillips expresses admiration for Douglass decision to publish his autobiography despite these dangers. Phillips letter challenges the racist stereotype of the ignorant, cowardly slave by portraying Douglass as a courageous revolutionary. Phillips criticizes slave owners who defend slavery as crucial to the economic health of the country. When England abolished slavery in its colonies, the economy did not collapse. However, Phillips states that considering abolition in economic terms ignores the more important issue of human rights.

He considers slavery an affront to American values: the first English colonists came to Massachusetts fleeing religious persecution, and so the United States should protect victims of racial oppression as well. Anyone who views slavery as a matter of pure economics is guilty of the same perversion of American values as those who actually own slaves. Like Garrison, Phillips attacks slavery as a perversion of Christian values. He challenges the descendants of those who landed at Plymouth to rise again to protect their religious values.

The preface and the letter both provide documentation of the authenticity of Douglass text and challenge readers to consider the meaning of authenticity. Those who write history can and often do misrepresent marginalized groups. Therefore, any text, especially one written by individuals in power, should be questioned. Douglass had a lot to lose by choosing to publish his Narrative. Therefore, the preface and the letter ask reluctant readers to keep an open mind.

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Free research essays on topics related to: hugh auld, fugitive slave, abolition of slavery, douglass narrative, frederick douglass

Research essay sample on Abolition Of Slavery Frederick Douglass

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