Slavery Chapter Summaries

His “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave”, (Document G) makes emotional reading (lurid descriptions like "bitterest dregs of slavery" or "broken in body, mind, and soul" elicited reactions of disgust and dejection, which is the what abolitionists were hoping for) and showed that ultimately a slave, long thought to be a possession and less than human, was very much a person with reason and intellect. It provides unsurmountable proof that like any man, a slave deserved a life of dignity and liberty. His work shed light on the constant hard-working and abusive lifestyle that slaves

The Narrative of Frederick Douglass is a very great perspective for people of today to understand what it was like to be a slave in the 1800’s. It tells the story of the slave Frederick Douglass and how he began as an uneducated slave and was moved around from many different types of owners, cruel or nice, and how his and other slaves presences changed the owners, and also how he educated himself and realized that he shouldn’t be treated so poorly It was at the point later in the book that I realized how some slaves might have felt during slavery in the 1800’s. When Douglass is sent away to Mr.Covey he is treated pretty badly but eventually he stands up to Mr.Covey and demands that he stopped being treated like an animal.

PAGE 2 In the Narrative Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass by Frederick Douglass, he uses this text to explain his purpose in “throwing light on the American slave system”, or show it for what it really is, as well as show his position on how he strongly believes slavery is an issue that needs to be addressed and how it differs from those who defended slavery, with experiences from his own life to support his argument. Douglass uses experience from his early days as a young slave to throw light on the aspect of physical abuse. According to his narrative, Douglass states, “Master, however, was not a humane slaveholder.

The book I am reading is Not for sale by David Batstone; a journalist who seemed highly fascinated with human trafficking and slavery. David is co founder and president of Not for sale, furthermore he was a civil rights activist with the plan to inform others how to avoid the global slave trade. One major reason for the writing of this book was due to the fact he was an anti-slavery activist wanting to explain how to be aware of human trafficking. David wanted to write the book knowing abolitionist and others are struggling to end this appalling epidemic which he thought would be strenuous. Batstone believed all people should be free to live which he looked upon as a major reason for the book as a remedy; for the lacerate ones who’ve lost it all David batstone is identical

The Douglass’s Narrative reveals very many things about the lives of the American slaves. The lives of the slaves were very hard. They were treated unfairly treated. American slave women were used for giving birth and having kids against their will. As soon as the slave child was born, they would sell the slave child.

The conditions of the ships the slaves were on and the minds of the slaves are detailed most effectively in this first person documentary. Sharing the story of the enslavement and subsequent freedom of the brothers and their probable return to the slave trade gives a better insight into the journey of slavery from the eyes of the enslaved and those doing the enslavement. Sparks story helps the reader understand that the same Africans that were sold as slaves, were also involved in the selling of slaves. He also defends the brothers decision to enslave others explaining that since this was part of their culture, they didn’t know anything else or how to live any other way than to enslave others as they once were

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).

Douglass tells about his own childhood and how his father might have been a slaveholder. He explains

In his letter he described his life as an indentured servant as one where he has nothing to comfort him but sickness and death. The life that he was living in colonial Virginia was one where you couldn’t escape or else you will be captured. Attempting it could of cause him to die, therefore he hoped his parents brought his escape but with his parents being poor there was no way of escaping the life of an indentured servant. Having no escape as an indentured servant, he wrote to his parents a letter asking that his parents bought out the indenture. In his letter, he wrote that he was trapped in a place filled of diseases that can make any body weak and leave you with lack of comfort and rattled with guilt.

Douglass reiterates multiple times throughout the narrative how he is starved, deprived of clothing and beaten in his time as a slave. As a child, Douglass describes

This chapter goes on to talk about how this is a hard subject to write on and how Dew still gets sad when he reads about it even though he has done years and years of research about the subject. Chapter one is about “Slavery, States’ rights,

With this, Douglass is addressing the topic of slavery and whether to abolish it or not. And goes about telling the hardships he went through.

He uses these experiences to show just how unjust the treatment towards slaves was. As a child, he was not allowed to learn like many of the white children were, they wanted to keep the slaves ignorant

• A. Hook: Slavery is the most horrible thing to do to a child. Slavery is people making kids do what they want them to do no matter what. Slavery started when they brought the first american colony to the united states. Slavery was practiced through the american colonies in the 17th and 18th centuries. Slavery means to get bullied and bossed around about somebody.

Not only their but also the stories of all the other slaves that were not able to tell their story themselves, about the suffering that the faced day in and day out at the hands of their oppressors. It also said to the nation that they should be ashamed of how they were treating these people, demanded that they do something about the injustice that black people faced and to remember this as a part of history. As Frederick Douglass warned in an 1884 speech, “It is not well to forget the past. The past is…the mirror in which we may discern the dim outlines of the future and by which we make them more symmetrical. ”(Blight, pg. 9).