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Appeal To The Christian Women By Fredrick Douglas And Harriet Jacobs

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In 1619, the first group of African slaves was brought to the New World. This was just the beginning of a vast, prevailing slave economy in which slaves were brought in by the thousands, separated from their families, and forced to do their masters work under extremely harsh conditions; they were not given substantial victuals, had to work long hours without rest, and were treated as less than human. This cruel treatment and fickle system eventually sparked a new movement called the abolitionist movement. Fighting for the rights of slaves as well as the eventual complete abolition of slavery, many abolitionist writers like Fredrick Douglas and Harriet Jacobs told powerful stories of their struggles in slavery and gave strong imagery of this …show more content…

Angelina Grimke was another one who was known for supporting both movements. In her article, Appeal to the Christian Women, Angelina Grimke discussed why and how slavery should be ended. “Above all, try and persuade your husband, father, and sons, that slavery is a crime against God and man, and that it is a great sin to keep human beings in such abject ignorance; to deny them the privilege of learning to read and write” (Pg. 800). Grimke logically reasoned that the way that men treated slaves was wrong to the point of being sinful. She said that slavery is “contrary to the example and precepts of our holy redeemer” (Pg. 798) and that nowhere in the bible does it say that it is okay to support such a system of oppression. “Read the Bible then, it contains the words of Jesus, and they are spirit and life. Judge for yourself whether he sanctioned such a system of oppression and crime” (Pg. 799). Harriet Jacobs, another abolitionist writer, also expresses this religious argument through her experience with her various masters as a slave girl; “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself…..But I was her slave, and I suppose she did not recognize me as her neighbor” (Pg. 924). In quoting straight from the Bible and presenting the incongruence between one of God’s teachings and how she was being treated, she was, like Grimke, implying that this treatment …show more content…

At one point in her work The Great Lawsuit, Fuller expressed how women also were not being treated as equal to man: “Though the national independence be blurred by the servility of individuals… ‘All men are born free and equal’” (Pg. 748). Fuller uses the same argument to support feminism that “all men are created equal” that Garrison used to support abolition. She points out that it supports the idea that all men are created equal without taking into account the equality that women should have with men. Women were completely left out of the Declaration of Independence and Constitution and many feminists, even though they may not have mentioned it in their writings, believed that women should have the same rights that men did under the Constitution. “Yet then, and only then, will human beings be ripe for this, when inward and outward freedom for women, as much as for man, shall be acknowledged as a right, not yielded as a concession.” (Pg. 752). Similarly, abolitionists believed that slaves should have the same rights that men did under the Constitution as can be seen in the arguments mentioned

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