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Appeal To The Christian Women By Fredrick Douglas And Harriet Jacobs

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In 1619, the first group of African slaves was brought to the New World. This was just the beginning of a vast, prevailing slave economy in which slaves were brought in by the thousands, separated from their families, and forced to do their masters work under extremely harsh conditions; they were not given substantial victuals, had to work long hours without rest, and were treated as less than human. This cruel treatment and fickle system eventually sparked a new movement called the abolitionist movement. Fighting for the rights of slaves as well as the eventual complete abolition of slavery, many abolitionist writers like Fredrick Douglas and Harriet Jacobs told powerful stories of their struggles in slavery and gave strong imagery of this …show more content…

Angelina Grimke was another one who was known for supporting both movements. In her article, Appeal to the Christian Women, Angelina Grimke discussed why and how slavery should be ended. “Above all, try and persuade your husband, father, and sons, that slavery is a crime against God and man, and that it is a great sin to keep human beings in such abject ignorance; to deny them the privilege of learning to read and write” (Pg. 800). Grimke logically reasoned that the way that men treated slaves was wrong to the point of being sinful. She said that slavery is “contrary to the example and precepts of our holy redeemer” (Pg. 798) and that nowhere in the bible does it say that it is okay to support such a system of oppression. “Read the Bible then, it contains the words of Jesus, and they are spirit and life. Judge for yourself whether he sanctioned such a system of oppression and crime” (Pg. 799). Harriet Jacobs, another abolitionist writer, also expresses this religious argument through her experience with her various masters as a slave girl; “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself…..But I was her slave, and I suppose she did not recognize me as her neighbor” (Pg. 924). In quoting straight from the Bible and presenting the incongruence between one of God’s teachings and how she was being treated, she was, like Grimke, implying that this treatment …show more content…

At one point in her work The Great Lawsuit, Fuller expressed how women also were not being treated as equal to man: “Though the national independence be blurred by the servility of individuals… ‘All men are born free and equal’” (Pg. 748). Fuller uses the same argument to support feminism that “all men are created equal” that Garrison used to support abolition. She points out that it supports the idea that all men are created equal without taking into account the equality that women should have with men. Women were completely left out of the Declaration of Independence and Constitution and many feminists, even though they may not have mentioned it in their writings, believed that women should have the same rights that men did under the Constitution. “Yet then, and only then, will human beings be ripe for this, when inward and outward freedom for women, as much as for man, shall be acknowledged as a right, not yielded as a concession.” (Pg. 752). Similarly, abolitionists believed that slaves should have the same rights that men did under the Constitution as can be seen in the arguments mentioned

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and by those too, who profess religion?”(Apess, 6). In this way, Apess argues by pointing out the hypocrisy found in the Christian ideology of the time, insisting that the ideas held on racial superiority and slavery, while not explicitly condemned in the Bible, go against the ideas of the teachings of Jesus. Apess also uses an appeal to authority, to Jesus nonetheless, in order to shame those who would argue for slavery by mentioning that their savior would be discriminated against in American society. Another voice against slavery, Frederick Douglass, not only uses his religion as an argument against slavery, but also condemns the branches of Christianity which supported it over the course of his 1845 “Narrative”. In his appendix, Douglass states “I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ: I therefore hate the corrupt,

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Douglass has shown how religious slaveholders are the worst especially when entertainment comes into play. The first being from one of his slaveholders Master Thomas, he whipped a young woman while reading a quote from the scripture to explain his reason for whipping her. The next example was with his other Master Mr.Covey, he would go to church and preach the word but come back beating slaves and going against the almighty God. The last example that is shown is again shown with Mr.Covey, he was guilty of compelling his woman slave to commit the sin of adultery. All of the examples illustrate that religious slaveholders are worst than non-religious slaveholders.

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The abolition movement can be traced back to early colonial times. One of the earliest to protest the slave trade was the religious group, the Quakers. The Quakers fought hard to abolish slavery because it went against their religious belief in equality. In 1868, a group of Quakers ventured to Germantown, Pennsylvania to petition “the traffick of men-body.” The Quakers also played a

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Slave narratives played an immense role in the motives of abolitionists to end slavery. The narratives were not only influential because they came from slaves themselves, but they also gave an inside look into the life of a slave through their own eyes and not the eyes of an outsider or a slave owner. Slavery was instituted over hundreds of years ago as a means to have workers in America to help the land prosper and flourish. In the early periods many abolitionists wrote solely from their own knowledge of slavery, some of which even owned slaves themselves. In the late 1700s, however, slaves began voicing their own opinions about being enslaved in slave narratives and other forms of literature.

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We all know that women didn 't have as many rights as men, and they still don 't. Women can now do more than they used to, but they still aren 't equal with men. They have had to fight for so many things like the right to vote and to be equal to men. The 19th amendment, the one that gave women the right to vote, brought us a big step closer. The Equal Rights Movement also gave us the chance to have as many rights as men. Women have always stayed home, cleaned the house, and didn 't even get an education.

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