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Frederick Douglass Escape From Slavery To Freedom Analysis

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Douglass begins his narrative so: "I WAS born in Tuckahoe, near Hillsborough, and about twelve miles from Easton, in Talbot county, Maryland. I have no accurate knowledge of my age, never having seen any authentic record containing it. "The importance of beginning the narrative the way he did is he is saying I am an American, I was born in America. He uses the conventions of the time- telling where he is from, however in the second sentence, he veers from the convention, namely, after telling the reader where he is from, he is supposed to tell us his age, but he doesn 't know his age. Douglass compares slaves to horses: "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 …show more content…

However, Douglass says that he didn 't start as a slave, he was born free. He makes that important psychological distinction between being a slave politically to consider yourself a slave physiologically. Douglass doesn 't tell the reader the story of the escape from slavery to freedom, and that 's because the physical escape doesn 't matter because you are born with freedom (Kramer.) Further in the narrative, Douglass has a new mistress who is very different than other masters that he had: She had never had a slave under her control previously to myself, and prior to her marriage she had been dependent upon her own industry for a living. She was by trade a weaver; and by constant application to her business, she had been in a good degree preserved from the blighting and dehumanizing effects of slavery… Very soon after I went to live with Mr. and Mrs. Auld, she very kindly commenced to teach me the A, B, C. After I had learned this, she assisted me in learning to spell words of three or four letters… He describes her as kind, she never had a slave before him, and she is a woman who worked to earn a living before she got married. She even taught him how to read. But his master found out that she was teaching him how to

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