Frederick Douglas Life essays

Frederick Douglas' Life essays Any anti slavery book published in 1845 was considered radical and daring, but for a black man and a fugitive slave, at that, to have done it was near suicide. Luckily, Frederick Douglass, the author of The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, was able to flee America by way of Great Britain after the book was released so that the United States could have time to embrace it. It was a story all too common in the United States at the time, but nearly unknown except by those to whom were involved, and even then, only the slaves knew the full story. Frederick Douglass knew his escape would have been in vain if he could not make others aware of the atrocities taking place in the south at the time. So, with utter disregard for the consequences of his actions, he revealed to the world the horror that was slavery. Douglass spends much of the novel addressing the most obvious aspect of slavery, which is the cruelty. The novel opens with Douglass talking of being sold from his mother at a young age and then several years later, after hearing of her death, being utterly unmoved as though it had been a total stranger. Although done subtlety, this part of the book hits very hard to the reader, because a reaction like that of Frederick to the death of one's parent is almost unimaginable. He says that his master may have been his biological father (a common occurrence on slave farms) and, the same as in his case, slaveholders sold away children from their mothers "too obviously to administer to their own lusts, and make a gratification of their wicked desires profitable as well as pleasurable." (Pg. 21) By this act many slaveholders had the "double relation of master and father."(Pg. 21) The story is saturated with accounts of severe beatings too numerous to site. Douglass goes from hearing the beating late at night as a small boy, to experiencing the whippings first hand as a young man. The "discipline ...