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Frederick Douglass: Abolishing Slavery

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Frederick Douglass was born as Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey around the year 1818 in Tuckahoe, Maryland; he states in his autobiography “I have no accurate knowledge of my age, never having seen any authentic record containing it. By far the larger part of the slaves know as little of their ages as horses know of theirs, and it is the wish of most masters within my knowledge to keep their slaves thus ignorant. I do not remember to have ever met a slave who could tell of his birthday… A want of information concerning my own was a source of unhappiness to me even during childhood. The white children could tell their ages.” Douglass did attempt to find out his age because he could not understand why he was deprived of the same privilege …show more content…

The narrative was an instant success and this was not because it was the first time a slave had described his experiences in the system but because of the questions he posed to Americans at that time. He speaks of how slavery not only demeans African Americans but also makes the white man a worse person in whole using one of his mistresses as a prime example writing “Slavery proved as injurious to her as it did to me. When I went there, she was a pious, warm, and tender-hearted woman. There was no sorrow or suffering for which she had not a tear. She had bread for the hungry, clothes for the naked, and comfort for every mourner that came within her reach. Slavery soon proved its ability to divest her of these heavenly qualities. Under its influence, the tender heart became stone, and the lamblike disposition gave way to one of tiger-like fierceness.” He wonders why the ‘land of the free’ is only free for white people and what it takes for the ‘human spirit’ to truly be free. Douglass uses his narrative as a means to show us that he won his freedom, he made himself free but as long as anyone else is still enslaved, he is not a free man. I believe the provocative questions posed by Frederick Douglass along with the experiences he suffered in slavery work together to make his narrative a hit and this why it sold many copies in the United States of America and Europe also. However it is highly ironic that Douglass required the services of William Lloyd Garrison, a white man, to ensure the masses he, a black man, was the true writer of the thoughtful piece of

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