'Sacrificing Truth at the Altar of Greed': Frederick Douglass' Narrative
Anyone who would deign to support chattel slavery on the grounds that its benefits outweigh its
disadvantages undoubtedly argues from an uninformed position. The alleged gains made by global
society at the expense of enslaved Africans in no way justify the irreparable damage done to humanity
due to the Transatlantic slave trade. While this should be, on moral grounds, a foregone conclusion by
now, it is not merely a question of whether or not trafficking, raping and murdering people under
conditions of forced labor is ethically sound. Beyond this, as a political, economic and social system,
slavery serves to enforce the dehumanization of the enslaved
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What's more, the total potential of humanity is diminished as
intentionally limits the capacities of some and unintentionally diminishes the capacities of many others.
The institution of slavery is antithetical to the attainment of truth, attached as it is to cowardice,
ignorance and deception.
The promotion of ignorance is essential to the maintenance of slavery. While this certainly
applies as regards the enslaved population, an anti-intellectual atmosphere pervades the entire
community when slaveholding regimes rely on shielding its horrid realities from view. This
obscurantist policy results in the general misrecognition of society's actual conditions. Douglass
speaks to this as he recounts memories of the haunting odes to the 'Great House Farm' sung on the
plantation where he grew up: "I have often been utterly astonished, since I came to the north, to find
persons who could speak of the singing, among slaves, as evidence of their contentment and
happiness." (242) He goes on to compare the songs to those of stranded castaways, as to emphasize the
extreme folly of misinterpreting these expressions of the enslaved so. Whether out of sheer
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Whereas much of the ignorance promulgated by slaveholding society as regards the unenslaved
white population occurs through indirect means, the ignorance of the enslaved is brutally and directly
enforced. His resistance to such barriers to learning represents one of the major themes of Douglass'
Narrative. As William Lloyd Garrison asserts in his preface, lamenting the enslaved Africans'
condition, 'Nothing has been left undone to cripple their intellects, darken their minds, debase their
moral nature, obliterate all traces of their relationship to mankind.' (6 Preface) This view is supported
by Douglass entire journey from slavery to empancipation, particularly from the time that he is exposed
for the first time to lessons in reading after being sold to the Auld family. The anti-intellectual stance
of the slaveholders in relation to the enslaved is voiced succinctly by Mr Auld on discovering that his
wife had been teaching Douglass how to spell: "A nigger should know nothing but to obey his master--
-to do as he is told to do.[...]if you teach that nigger (speaking of myself) how to read, there would
Literacy plays an important part in helping Douglass achieve his freedom. Learning to read and write enlightened his mind to the injustice of slavery; it kindled in his heart longings for liberty. Douglass’s skills proved instrumental in his attempts to escape and afterwards in his mission as a spokesman against slavery. Douglass was motivated to learn how to read by hearing his master condemn the education of slaves. Mr. Auld declared that education would “spoil” him and “forever unfit him to be a slave” (2054).
The irony in this lies in the slaveholder’s intentions: they themselves are motivated by fear. They fear a society in which they no longer serve to benefit from slave labor, and so they fear rebellion, they fear objection, they fear events like the Nat Turner Insurrection. The system the slaveholders strive so ardently to protect begins to affect even them, those in power, negatively. They begin to cope with their fear the only way they know how, by projecting it upon the slaves. When the slaveholders transfer this fear by corrupting something even they revere, religion, slavery’s perversive power is shown in horrifying clarity. The slaveholders will stop at nothing, they will leave nothing untouched and unsoiled if it means the preservation of slavery. Slavery isn’t just a physical and mental burden upon the slaves it imprisons; it is a moral burden on the entire society in which it
In Douglass’s early teens he was no longer under the direct control of the Aulds. He was sent to a slave breaker named Covey. Under Covey’s cruel whip it was expected that Frederick Douglass would lose his “rebellious streak”. It was unnecessary to send him to Convey, but Thomas Auld was an incompetent master who had a bad eye for bad behaviour. Douglass told us that “Captain Auld [Thomas] was not born a slaveholder. He had been a poor man, master only of a Bay craft.” (65); this was a likely mistake for him to make.
Walker, Barrington. “Slavery and Anti-slavery in the Age of the American Revolution.” Lecture 10, Queen's University, Kingston, February 3, 2014.
As a former slave, bereft of any free will, written words were all but unavailable to Frederick Douglass. Slaves were unable to tell their stories, to expose the dehumanization that their enslavement caused on both sides of the racial rift; so it was necessary for Douglass to fight tooth and nail to obtain the right to learn, and ultimately to narrate his own life story. Amongst the narration, multiple rhetorical strategies are integrated into the text in order to uncover the dehumanizing effect their mistreatment had on slaves during this time. His primary purpose is to educate those who are ignorant of the horrible conditions that slaves lived in and the cruelty that they suffer. He does this through the use of rhetorical devices such as anecdotes, irony and by further connecting to his audience with pathos and ethos. By using his own personal experiences as the subject of his argument, Douglass is able to make a strong and compelling case against slavery; at a time when it was socially unacceptable to do so.
...ing the general public to view their fellow men, as less than what they truly are, their equals. The institution of slavery has blinded the clergy and churches of America, causing them to sit idly by as an injustice is being brought upon God’s people, a god that all men share. Christianity has become a tool in which the separation of whom receives liberties and whom does not becomes its clearest. As Douglass says “ At the very moment that they are thanking God for the enjoyment of civil and religious liberty […] they are utterly silent in respect to a law which robs religion of its chief significance, and makes it utterly useless to a world lying in wickedness.” Christianity has become a tool of oppression for the elite; used to deny unalienable rights to their fellow man, the same rights their own fathers had fought so valiantly for during the founding of America.
In his “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass” Douglass recounts the struggles he personally experienced as a black male born into slavery. While the narrative clearly critiques the American institution of race-based slavery, it at moments goes even further to critique other American institutions that ‘enslave’ its participants. In one specific moment of his narrative, during the second chapter, Douglass engages in a particularly fascinating rhetorical move which simultaneously denies that race is the only basis for slavery, and implicates white society as slaves themselves merely operating under a different institutional ideology. Douglass acutely observes how the oppression of slaves within the institution of American slavery mirrors the oppression of free thought within the institution of American politics. In this moment, instead of permitting slavery to be understood as a ‘black’ problem that white culture is not negatively impacted by, Douglass points out how ideological oppression is a problem in society at large, in a variety of institutions, and thus everyone is negatively impacted so long as these institutions are sustained. The institution of slavery is linked to the institution of politics, and both are acknowledged as social constructs that are in need of revision.
Douglass was able to overcome his destiny of being a slave for life; believing that if a white man can achieve something great, why cant a slave. He showed the world how even a slave can talk intellectually and can comprehend everything they know. Even when Douglass felt his soul desolating his body he was able to keep just a little faith that there is still a light at the end of the tunnel for him to reach and that if he strive for what he though was right he to can become extraordinary and sensational; which is what he did. Believing you are just as equal as the person beside you, you will be able to live more freely.
Through his discussions of religion that are interspersed throughout The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, the reader gets the sense that slavery and true Christianity are opposing forces and one cannot be present while the other exists. Not only is the simultaneous existence of the true version Christianity with slavery impossible, it appears that even if real Christianity does exist in a pure form, the introduction of slavery corrupts it inevitably and completely.
In order for Douglass to reach his goal of becoming a free man he thought the only way out was education. He needed to learn how to read, write, and think for himself about what slavery was. Since literacy and education were so powerful to Frederick he persevered to get himself the education he wanted. …. Douglass knew it wouldn’t be easy, but that didn’t stop him. Douglass realized the “ conscious of the difficulty of learning without a teacher, I set out with a high hope, and
Without being educated, slavers endure dehumanization and the control of their slaveholders. As a result, Douglass is motivated to get literate with ingenious strategies. He constantly bribes the “little white boys” and the “poor white children” who live closely with him to teach him reading with extra bread (Douglass 62). His writing lessons are from the boys who can compete with him in writing letters, Master Thomas’s book, and ship-yard. Along with his reading’s improvement, he comprehends the injustice between slaves and slaveholders from the books. A book “The Columbian Orator”, which provokes him the critical thinking about slavery and freedom. Through reading the Sheridan’s speeches that are from the same book, he claims, “[w]hat I got from Sheridan was a bold denunciation of slavery, and a powerful vindication of human rights” (Douglass 62). Sometimes he listens the discussion of abolition even though he does not really understands it. Until he gets a city paper that allows him to pray for “the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia” (Douglass 63), he understands the meaning of abolition. Being literate helps him understand the extensive knowledge, which is ready for
...y afraid at first but finds out that there are many ex-slaves willing to take a stand and risk their lives to help their own. Douglass realizes that with the help from the ex-slaves he could also help his fellow slaves.
In Douglass' narrative, he strongly believes in the power of education. Within his autobiography, he states, "Knowledge makes a man unfit to be a slave." (Douglass' 10) Douglass understood that the way to gain freedom was through knowledge. Many do not and have not educated themselves on the former issues as it relates to slavery and the black community. In today's society, many blacks still suffer from oppression because they do not seek knowledge. Once one has begun on a quest to understand and learn about their history it will become impossible for someone else to define them. Blacks struggle with caving into the idea of binary opposition, due to a lack of knowledge. In the article entitled "Keys to Freedom: Lessons from Frederick Douglass” by Leticia A. Fitts says that knowledge is the key to freedom, and that it gives one the ability and motivation to think, act and behave for themselves. One cannot be confined or defined once one has developed a deeper understanding. Not only does the power of education or the lack thereof control and play a large role in the way one's mentality is formed and their particular behavior patterns but religiously does as
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, brings to light many of the social injustices that colored men, women, and children all were forced to endure throughout the nineteenth century under Southern slavery laws. Douglass's life-story is presented in a way that creates a compelling argument against the justification of slavery. His argument is reinforced though a variety of anecdotes, many of which detailed strikingly bloody, horrific scenes and inhumane cruelty on the part of the slaveholders. Yet, while Douglas’s narrative describes in vivid detail his experiences of life as a slave, what Douglass intends for his readers to grasp after reading his narrative is something much more profound. Aside from all the physical burdens of slavery that he faced on a daily basis, it was the psychological effects that caused him the greatest amount of detriment during his twenty-year enslavement. In the same regard, Douglass is able to profess that it was not only the slaves who incurred the damaging effects of slavery, but also the slaveholders. Slavery, in essence, is a destructive force that collectively corrupts the minds of slaveholders and weakens slaves’ intellects.
Auld, he was introduced to education which gives him a sense of humanity back. Mrs. Auld taught Douglass the alphabet and how to spell small words. However, Mr. Auld found out and disapprovingly said “ if you teach that n- - - - - how to read… it would forever unfit him to be a slave” which Douglass took note of to (250). Douglass realized the importance of his master being scared of him reading and spelling and noticed the value in having and education. Having an education and realizing the importance of that was a major building block in forming Frederick Douglass’s identity.