Depictions of Violence in Douglass's Narrative of the Life

Introduction

Frederick Douglass was a slave turned statesman whose speeches and writings played a significant role in the fight against slavery in the United States. Although Douglass was not a student of philosophy in the scholarly sense, his considerable influence on American political thought is evident in the writings of W. E. B. Du Bois and other later thinkers on race. Initially heavily influenced by Garrison's view of the U.S. Constitution as a proslavery document, Douglass published his first autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, in 1845; it is widely regarded as the finest example of its genre. Douglass articulately expounded on the horrors of slavery in the United States. Fearful that publicity generated by the success of the book might lead to his being recaptured and returned to slavery. The aim of this paper is to answer the question “does Frederick Douglass text advocate violence as a means of transforming an evil system?”

Discussion

Frederick Douglass's Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, illustrates how the idea of race is created and maintained by white southerners on plantations worked by slaves. Southern whites regard Africans as subhumans. Blacks are treated as "mere chattel," nothing more and nothing less, because there is nothing less at the time. According to the rationalization for slavery, the thousands of blacks taken from Africa were best used as slaves, toiling as domestic and field labor on plantations (Foner 228). They were treated as animals and were physically, spiritually, socially, and psychologically "broken," as Douglass describes, witnesses, and experiences for himself. Ideas about race within southern plantations limited Douglass's and his fellow slaves' ability to become fully realized human beings with authentic family heritages, individual liberty, and choices and responsibilities (Lawson & Kirkland 155).

Douglass experiences the effects of being born and raised black in a racist environment. He knows he was born about 1835, in Tuckahoe, Maryland, but because he is black he does not, as white children do, know the date of his birth. Douglass resents having "no accurate knowledge of his age" or the ability to obtain such knowledge because of his slave status. Such (forbidden) knowledge or the lack thereof becomes a major source of frustration and "unhappiness" for Douglass the slave (Chesebrough 129). Douglass's status as a slave also prevents him from knowing his biological father. He suspects that his father is also his childhood master, but by law he is not allowed to investigate his suspicion. Furthermore, it is important to note that because Douglass suspects that he might be a mulatto (i.e., born of mixed racial parentage), he understands that public knowledge of his biracial status would undermine how race was viewed on southern plantations. People of mixed race were most threatening to a slave system so firmly based on factors meant to sharply divide blacks and whites. Race during slavery, then, is predicated on white purity and superiority in general; anything less is black. Douglass's race, ...