What makes frederick douglass interesting

While participating in an lecture tour through the Midwest, Douglass was chased and beaten by an angry mob before being rescued by a local Quaker family. Following the publication of his first autobiography in , Douglass traveled overseas to evade recapture. He set sail for Liverpool on August 16, , and eventually arrived in Ireland as the Potato Famine was beginning.

He remained in Ireland and Britain for two years, speaking to large crowds on the evils of slavery. In , the famed writer and orator returned to the United States a free man. In New Bedford, Massachusetts, Douglass joined a Black church and regularly attended abolitionist meetings. He also subscribed to Garrison's The Liberator. At the urging of Garrison, Douglass wrote and published his first autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave , in The book was a bestseller in the United States and was translated into several European languages.

Although the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass garnered Douglass many fans, some critics expressed doubt that a former enslaved person with no formal education could have produced such elegant prose. Douglass published three versions of his autobiography during his lifetime, revising and expanding on his work each time. My Bondage and My Freedom appeared in In , he was the only African American to attend the Seneca Falls convention on women's rights. Elizabeth Cady Stanton asked the assembly to pass a resolution stating the goal of women's suffrage.

Many attendees opposed the idea. Douglass, however, stood and spoke eloquently in favor, arguing that he could not accept the right to vote as a Black man if women could not also claim that right. The resolution passed. By the time of the Civil War , Douglass was one of the most famous Black men in the country.

He used his status to influence the role of African Americans in the war and their status in the country. In , Douglass conferred with President Abraham Lincoln regarding the treatment of Black soldiers, and later with President Andrew Johnson on the subject of Black suffrage. President Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation , which took effect on January 1, , declared the freedom of enslaved people in Confederate territory.

Despite this victory, Douglass supported John C. Slavery everywhere in the United States was subsequently outlawed by the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment to the U. Douglass was appointed to several political positions following the war. After two years, he resigned from his ambassadorship over objections to the particulars of U. He was later appointed minister-resident and consul-general to the Republic of Haiti, a post he held between and In , Douglass visited one of his former owners, Thomas Auld.

Life and Times did not sell well. Life and Times was published in England in with an introductian by the well-known John Bright. A year later a French edition was brought out by the house of E. Plon and Company, and in at Stockholm a Swedish edition was issued.

The last named had many advantages over its successors. As its title suggests, it was more storytelling in tone. It was cohesive whereas the others were not. Moreover, the Narrative was confined to slavery experiences, and lent itself very well to abolitionist propaganda. A closer look at this slim volume may suggest the sources of its influence. Slave narratives enjoyed a great popularity in the ante-bellum North.

Most of the narratives were overdrawn in incident and bitterly indignant in tone, but these very excesses made for greater sales. The Narrative has a freshness and a forcefulness that come only when a document written in the first person has in fact been written by that person. A paperback HUP edition of the Narrative from Except for the length of a few sentences and paragraphs, the Douglass autobiography would come out well in any modern readability analysis.

The details are always concrete, an element of style established in the opening line. The Narrative is absorbing in its sensitive descriptions of persons and places; even an unsympathetic reader must be stirred by its vividness if he is unmoved by its passion. It is not easy to make real people come to life, and the Narrative is too brief and episodic to develop any character in the round.

But it presents a series of sharply etched portraits, and in slave-breaker Edward Covey we have one of the more believable prototypes of Simon Legree. Contributing to the literary effectiveness of the Narrative is its pathos. Douglass scorned pity, but his pages are evocative of sympathy, as he meant them to be. He writes as a partisan, but his indignation is always under control.

One of the most moving passages in the book is that in which he tells about the slaves who were selected to go to the home plantation to get the monthly food allowance for the slaves on their farm. Its central theme is struggle. The Narrative marked its author as the personification not only of struggle but of performance. Yet three years later this unschooled person had penned his autobiography. Such an achievement furnished an object lesson; it hinted at the infinite potentialities of man in whatever station of life, suggesting powers to be elicited.

The Narrative stamped Douglass as the foremost Negro in American reform. With the publication of this autobiographical work he became the first colored man who could command an audience that extended beyond local boundaries or racial ties. From the day his volume saw print Douglass became a folk hero, a figure in whom Negroes had pride. His writings took on a scriptural significance as his accomplishments came to be shared imaginatively by his fellows. The point is worth stressing. But if Douglass emerged as the leading Negro among Negroes, this is not to say that the man was himself a racist, or that he glorified all things black.

Never given to blinking unpleasant facts, Douglass did not hesitate to mention the frailties of the Negroes, as in the case of the quarrels between the slaves of Colonel Lloyd and those of Jacob Jepson over the importance of their respective masters.

For Douglass addressed his appeal less to Negroes than to whites—it was the latter he sought to influence. He did not propose to speak to Negroes exclusively; he wanted all America, if not all the world, for his sounding board. A product of its age, the Narrative is an American book in theme, in tone, and in spirit. In the front rank of these programs for human betterment stood the abolitionist cause. During the middle decades of the nineteenth century, antislavery sentiment was widespread in the Western world, but in the United States more distinctively than anywhere else the abolitionists took the role of championing civil liberties.

Thus they identified themselves with the great American tradition of freedom which they proposed to translate into a universal American birthright. It was destined to overshadow all other contemporary crusades, halting their progress almost completely for four years while the American people engaged in a civil war caused in large part by sectional animosities involving slavery.

The Narrative swept Douglass into the mainstream of the antislavery movement. It was a noteworthy addition to the campaign literature of abolitionism; a forceful book by an ex-slave was a weapon of no small caliber.

Naturally the Narrative was a bitter indictment of slavery. The abolitionists did not think much of the technique of friendly persuasion; it was not light that was needed, said Douglass on one occasion, but fire. Naturally the Narrative does not bother to take up the difficulties inherent in abolishing slavery. These Douglass would have dismissed with a wave of the hand. Similarly the Narrative recognizes no claim other than that of the slave.

He simply refused to discuss these matters. His mother was of Native American ancestry and his father was of African and European descent. After he was separated from his mother as an infant, Douglass lived for a time with his maternal grandmother, Betty Bailey.

However, at the age of six, he was moved away from her to live and work on the Wye House plantation in Maryland. From there, he taught himself to read and write. By the time he was hired out to work under William Freeland, he was teaching other enslaved people to read using the Bible. As word spread of his efforts to educate fellow enslaved people, Thomas Auld took him back and transferred him to Edward Covey, a farmer who was known for his brutal treatment of the enslaved people in his charge.

Roughly 16 at this time, Douglass was regularly whipped by Covey. From there he traveled through Delaware , another slave state, before arriving in New York and the safe house of abolitionist David Ruggles. She joined him, and the two were married in September They would have five children together. In New Bedford, Douglass began attending meetings of the abolitionist movement. During these meetings, he was exposed to the writings of abolitionist and journalist William Lloyd Garrison.

The two men eventually met when both were asked to speak at an abolitionist meeting, during which Douglass shared his story of slavery and escape. It was Garrison who encouraged Douglass to become a speaker and leader in the abolitionist movement. Douglass was physically assaulted several times during the tour by those opposed to the abolitionist movement.

The injuries never fully healed, and he never regained full use of his hand. Two years later, Douglass published the first and most famous of his autobiographies, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. Later that same year, Douglass would travel to Ireland and Great Britain. At the time, the former country was just entering the early stages of the Irish Potato Famine , or the Great Hunger. While overseas, he was impressed by the relative freedom he had as a man of color, compared to what he had experienced in the United States.

When he returned to the United States in , Douglass began publishing his own abolitionist newsletter, the North Star. I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy — a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages.

For the 24th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation , in , Douglass delivered a rousing address in Washington, D.