Frederick Douglass
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Frederick Douglass was one of the most important leaders not only of the 19th-century anti-slavery movement but of human rights in general during his time. Both his oratorical and his literary skills - as well as his personal convictions - pushed him into the center of the anti-slavery movement, one of the most important elements of American public life during the 19th century. And yet, despite the eloquence and force of his story, what his words tell us about the nature of slavery in the United States is a limited one, for he could speak only from his experiences as a black man - albeit one who did not ignore the importance of gender in shaping experience. This paper examines the role that he played in helping to bring about the end of slavery in the United States and his work during Reconstruction in the cause of both the rights of freed slaves and for women's rights.Douglass was of mixed-race heritage - although within the racial politics of the mid-nineteenth century the fact that his mother was black and a slave defined his racial identity in a way that the fact that his father was white and free did not. His own experiences as a child and as a young man certainly influenced his later beliefs and writings, making him aware not only of the injustices that all slaves had faced but of the continuing injustices that all women faced in a country that still refused to give to them the franchise. As was true of many slaves, Douglass never knew his father. More unusual (altho
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Few of his new allies had actually expected a former slave to be so naturally eloquent - for indeed while those in the abolitionist movement believed that slavery was wrong this did not in any way mean that they were entirely free of racism, and it is probable that many of them were surprised that any black man could speak so well.
Douglass was often jeered when he spoke, and even many of those in the anti-slavery movement doubted whether this well-spoken gentleman could ever actually have been a slave. The doubts of others, however, never seemed to cause Douglass to doubt himself and indeed only seemed to make him become more committed to the cause (Douglass 60). It was to silence these critics (or at least to answer them) that Douglass wrote his autobiography in 1845, which he revised and completed in 1882 as Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, which remains one of the most important sources about slavery from an enslaved person's perspective.
As Ruuth (1996) relates the important events of his life, Douglass ran his own antislavery newspaper from 1847 to 1860 in Rochester, and the reports in this paper were one of the forces that began to convince New Yorkers that ending slavery would require - and was deserving of - the lo
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Approximate Word count = 1294
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page)
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