Frederick Douglass After reading the excerpt about Frederick Douglass, I learned about how he felt about slaves and enslavers. I understand the important event that happened Douglass. Also, why he thought of enslavers as criminals. Lastly, why Frederick Douglass wanted to be an animal instead of a human. Douglass had many thoughts about slavery after learning how to read.
Frederick Douglass is one of the most significant African-American ex-slaves of the nineteenth century because he frees himself from slavery, and becomes a great emancipator and abolitionist in America. Many people call him the Self-made man because when he was a child he recognizes that literacy is the bath to his liberty. As a result, he educates himself secretly at time where literacy was something forbidden for slaves. After he escapes from slavery, on the 3rd of September 1838, he creates the stereotypical picture of the African American slave, and he becomes an exceptional brilliant thinker, writer and orator. He starts publishing republishes his own autobiographies three times during his life.
Frederick Douglass was born as a slave on a plantation in Maryland. When he was just Seven his mother died in his arms. Fourteen years later he escaped slavery, with the help of his friends’ free papers. Imagine yourself at just twenty-one on the train when you could get caught at any moment. As he once said that when you are fighting for something, “ Agitate!
The things that I 'm really catching onto and just feeling the utmost horror for is the simple things that we 're all aware of but Douglass doesn 't seem to have the slightest clue. Obvious things such as our birthdays... I can tell you mine without even thinking whether you just want the number of the month or the actual month. I can narrow it down to a time frame and tell you what day of the week I was born on, but Frederick Douglass ' guess was as good as the next guy 's. "I have now reached a period of my life when I can give dates" (Douglass 45). When I read that I had to stop and think.
Slaves usually felt deprived of their necessary human rights. Frederick Douglass a slave himself wrote an autobiography stating the things he has went through and the life experiences he had being a slave in 19th century America. Douglass was born in Talbot County, Maryland, the year of his birth is not known due to the fact that slaves were not allowed to know their age nor ask of how old they were. He accounts for overhearing his master saying that he was born in or around 1818. Douglass was separated from his mother a short while after he was born, this was a common occurrence that happened to slaves.
“I often found myself regretting my own existence, and wishing myself dead,” were the agonizing words of Frederick Douglass as he reflects on his feelings towards his life; a life as a slave. As he describes in section 7, Douglass was in a time in his life when he saw no way out of slavery except death. However, instead of giving up, he held onto every little bit of hope that he had. Douglass says, “I consoled myself with hope that I should one day find a good chance.” With that hope, he becomes determined to learn to write in hopes that it will help him to change his fate of being a slave for life.
Douglass began to view reading as a curse more than a blessing; a way in which he felt more imprisoned by the slave state he was in. Thus, the more he read the more he began to detest enslavers; which nonetheless in his mind would be nothing but thieves whom robbed slave’s homes. For it was not only reading but his ceaseless mind getting the best of him; such reading would create endless thoughts which haunted him and made him wish that he would remain an ignorant slave. Nonetheless, during Douglass’s thoughts, Douglass began to learn to
Douglass encountered multiple harsh realities of being enslaved. For example, the ex-slave was practically starved to death by his masters on multiple occasions. In fact, “[He was] allowed less than a half of a bushel of corn-meal per week, and very little else... It was not enough for [him] to subsist upon... A great many times [he had] been nearly perishing with hunger” (pg 31).
In “The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass”, Douglass narrates in detail the oppressions he went through as a slave before winning his freedom. In the narrative, Douglass gives a picture about the humiliation, brutality, and pain that slaves go through. We can evidently see that Douglass does not want to describe only his life, but he uses his personal experiences and life story as a tool to rise against slavery. He uses his personal life story to argue against common myths that were used to justify the act of slavery. Douglass invalidated common justification for slavery like religion, economic argument and color with his life story through his experiences torture, separation, and illiteracy, and he urged for the end of slavery.
His beatings and lack of food were only part of his miserable daily life. Eventually Douglass was able to successfully escape this life and vowed to forever actively support the equality of all
It did not lead him to consider his weaknesses as a creature affected by temperature.” (London 65). He is trekking through cold snow with limited resources and no one nearby to help. Frederick Douglass is born in Maryland where he is forced into slavery and must deal with white men treating him poorly. His first owner is harsh and repeatedly abuses Douglass.
Annotated bibliography Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. New York: Dover Publications, 1995. Print.
Douglass states: “The more I read, the more I was led to abhor and detest my enslavers. I could regard them in no other light than a band of successful robbers, who had left their homes, and gone to Africa, and stolen us from our homes, and in a strange land reduced us to slavery” (Douglass 51). Reading and writing opened Frederick Douglass’s eyes to the cause of the abolitionist. He became knowledgeable about a topic that white slave owners tried to keep hidden from their slaves. Literacy would eventually impact his life in more ways than what he could see while he was a young slave under Master Hugh’s
With all the knowledge he was gaining, he began to comprehend everything around him. The things he was learning fascinated him, but the “more [he] read, the more [he] was led to abhor and detest [his] enslavers”(Douglass 35); however, that should not be viewed as a negative affect but a positive one. No one should want to be deceived for their entire life. This hatred that he built up motivated him to continue to further educate himself. As a result, he later motivated other slaves to earn an education by having “[availed] themselves to [an] opportunity to learn to read” (Douglass 69) by Douglass teaching them every Sunday.
What common themes bond together the literary works of the 1800’s? Frederick Douglass and Kate Chopin both realized that people were not being treated fairly and thus it influenced their writing. Through personal experiences and observations Frederick Douglass conveyed how African Americans in My Bondage and My Freedom were treated unfairly. Kate Chopin used the plot to show how women were treated unfairly in “The Story of an Hour”. My Bondage and My Freedom by Frederick Douglass tells of some of the experiences he went through as a slave.
