The Narrative of the life of Frederick Douglas

Introduction

Frederick Douglass was the leading spokesman of African-Americans in the 1800s. He became a well-known reformer, author, and speaker. Frederick Douglass spoke about the situation that African Americans had to deal with everyday. His powerful speeches influenced many people, including President Abraham Lincoln. Frederick Augustus Washington Baily was believed to be born in 1818 in Tuckahoe, Maryland. He was born as a slave. When Frederick was eight, he was sent to one of his master's relatives to work. He now lived in Baltimore, Maryland. Frederick educated himself there with the help of his new master's wife.

Narrative of the life of Frederick Douglas

The main theme of Douglas in writing a narrative of his life was to compel people to join him in the fight against the ravages of slavery. Other issue discussed in the book is that of education. The book actually comprises of incidents and the way he lived his life along with some issues like slavery and education. He successfully drew attention through his very florid, rhetorical style and delivery—not primarily through the logic of his philosophy. This attention usually came either in forms of violent reaction against or supportive accolades for his cause. He won this notice through various elements and devices of his jeremiads, the three versions of his autobiography. Namely, Douglass' ethos, plus the pathetic nature of his style and delivery were the driving forces of his triumphs, which, by the way, equated for him to the traditional views of invention and arrangement. Ethos and pathos were his invention and arrangement.

He implicitly admits that this was the case for most of his life before being asked to give a well-thought-out and arranged speech at Western Reserve College. Born into slavery on Maryland's Eastern Shore (c. 1817), Douglass fled north to freedom in 1838, becoming within a few years a powerful and popular speaker on the antislavery lecture circuit. His oratory was soon so accomplished that audiences began to doubt his (Huggins Handlin 34-45)claimed slave origin and fugitive status.

How could such a magnificent intellect, bodied forth in such commanding language, have arisen out of the soul-destroying institution of slavery? Precisely to avoid these sorts of suspicions and puzzlements, Douglass's white abolitionist mentors had advised him to stick to simple narration and, they cautioned, "better have a little of the plantation manner ... 'tis not best that you seem too learned." Douglass, however, could not tamp himself down: "I must speak just the word that seemed to me the word to be spoken by me" (Douglass, 19).

This book reveals names and places of his former life. It established him as the genuine article, but also left him dangerously exposed to recapture. (He accordingly spent the next two years lecturing throughout the United Kingdom, returning only after English friends purchased his freedom.) The Narrative, though a mere 87 pages, did much more than name names. With intense economy, it documented the horrors of slavery in the supposedly mild ...