Frederick Douglass Played a Remarkable Role in the Civil War: An Argumentative Essay



Frederick Douglass Played a Remarkable Role in the Civil War: An Argumentative Essay

Introduction

Douglass, a powerful and persuasive orator, drew his influences from a number sources, including his childhood experiences, the Bible, classical oratory, the oratorical tradition of the AMEZ Church, antislavery tracts and newspapers, itinerant preachers, and a variety of contemporary writers and speakers. An especially important influence was The Columbian Orator (1797) by Caleb Bingham (Bacon, 2002). This popular oratorical guide, published in many editions in Douglass's lifetime, contained both classic and original political speeches as well as instructions for public speaking. This paper argues that Frederick Douglass played a remarkable role in the Civil War.

Frederick Douglass Played a Remarkable Role in the Civil War

Soon after publishing the Narrative, Douglass began an extended speaking tour in Great Britain, where he lectured not only on slavery but also on other contemporary political topics, such as Irish home rule and Temperance, both of which he supported. Because Douglass's growing fame had made his return home to the United States dangerous, British supporters purchased his freedom for him in 1847. Upon gaining his freedom, Douglass returned to the United States (Bacon, 2002).

On July 5, 1852, in Rochester, New York, Douglass gave what is perhaps his most famous speech, “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” Echoing the Appeal (1829), the radical abolitionist tract by David Walker, Douglass criticized the hypocrisy of the United States, using its rhetoric of democracy to show that the nation was undemocratic in its treatment of black Americans.

Throughout the 1850s, Douglass continued to agitate for abolition and black civil rights. In 1855, he published his second autobiographical work, My Bondage and My Freedom, in which he acknowledged racism and discrimination in the North and detailed his break with the Garrisonians. A somewhat more pessimistic work than the Narrative, it continued Douglass's theme of trying to reconcile his self-identity as an individual with his dual roles as both a black American and an American—an experience that civil rights leader W. E. B. Du Bois would later aptly call “double consciousness” (Alcott, 1997).

In 1859, Douglass's decade-long friendship with the radical abolitionist John Brown led to his briefly fleeing the country after Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry (Moses, 1996).

But he returned in 1860 and began campaigning in support of Abraham Lincoln's bid for the presidency of the ...