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Argumentative Essay: The Life Of Frederick Douglass

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Life of Frederick Douglass
“The white man’s happiness cannot be purchased by the black man’s misery”. People think they can have fun at the expense of somebody else. Well somebody sought to speak up, but during this time it was unusual for a person of this ethnicity to say the thing he was saying. Black people were slaves to the white people around this time though its sounds harsh it was, but this person found a way out. The man would get sold at an auction as if they were a piece of meat. Families got broken up because slave owner wouldn’t buy all of them he/she would buy the family member then leave out of state separating them from the rest of their family. Back then they would whip, kill, and/ or rape black people for any reason they felt …show more content…

She gives birth to the baby Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey, but everybody knows him as Frederick Douglass. He was separated from his mother early and of course him having a white father he never got to know. Augustus lived with his grandparents, Betsey and Isaac Bailey on a plantation until he was the age of 8 years old he was a servant and a field worker, but still had time along the way to learn how to read and write. Frederick said “my only recollections of my own mother are of a few hasty visits made in the night on foot, after the daily tasks were over… Of my father I know nothing. Slavery had no recognition of father, as none of families.”In the year of 1824 his grandmother Betsy left him at the Wye House. During his time there Douglass found out the struggles of the slave system. He noticed how the owners lived in luxury of their immense wealth while the slave lives with poverty and servitude. Douglass also said, “Learning would spoil the best black man in the world. Now, ‘said he, ‘if you teach that black man (speaking of myself) how to read, there would be no keeping him. It would be unfit for him to be a slave.” After Frederick learning how to read opened more opportunities for him, but him couldn’t let the white man find

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Frederick Douglass was born into slavery during the 1800s. It was when he lived in the Hugh’s residence, he learned how to read and write. Hugh’s wife

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While working on the plantation, Douglass was taught how to read by his slave master’s wife. However, the lessons stopped per the request of his slave master, yet, that did not stop him from continuing to learn how to read. At the age of sixteen, he was sold to a “slave breaker,” named Edward Covey, who was a very harsh slave master. After spending less than a year under Covey’s control, he tried to escape with a group of slaves, but was later caught by authorities and was

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In his article "Learning to Read and Write" Frederick Douglass portrays how he figured out how to read and write furthermore the difficulties he needed to manage in his state of being a slave since youth. We find that Douglass was in hand by the Hugh family for a long time. it's inside this day and age that he figured out how to read and write. At the beginning, Douglass was told to read by Mrs. Hugh, notwithstanding, a little while later she took identical approach towards slavery as her significant other and normally much more dreadful. Where as once she would support Douglass' learning, she immediately attempted to end it at any expense.

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In “The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass”, Douglass narrates in detail the oppressions he went through as a slave before winning his freedom. In the narrative, Douglass gives a picture about the humiliation, brutality, and pain that slaves go through. We can evidently see that Douglass does not want to describe only his life, but he uses his personal experiences and life story as a tool to rise against slavery. He uses his personal life story to argue against common myths that were used to justify the act of slavery. Douglass invalidated common justification for slavery like religion, economic argument and color with his life story through his experiences torture, separation, and illiteracy, and he urged for the end of slavery.

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In page 33 he described slavery as “horrible pit, but to no ladder upon which to get out.” Douglass viewed his world differently after he became an educated man. His intelligence made him depressed as he understood what it meant to be a slave. He was denied the most basic human rights that even the poorest white man enjoyed daily. As described in his narrative, he felt like slavery was for a lifetime and once you are a slave, you are a slave for your lifetime.

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Douglass began to view reading as a curse more than a blessing; a way in which he felt more imprisoned by the slave state he was in. Thus, the more he read the more he began to detest enslavers; which nonetheless in his mind would be nothing but thieves whom robbed slave’s homes. For it was not only reading but his ceaseless mind getting the best of him; such reading would create endless thoughts which haunted him and made him wish that he would remain an ignorant slave. Nonetheless, during Douglass’s thoughts, Douglass began to learn to

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Frederick Douglass knew that the war would not be fought by only white men as soon as the Confederate cannons fired on Fort Sumter. At the beginning the white soldiers were reluctant to Blacks fight the war, but after the death toll became too much they finally caved in. When this happened many free blacks went and joined the Union army. This made Douglass happy since he saw justice in fighting the confederacy with free blacks.

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On January 1, 1834, Douglass is sent to live with Mr. Freeland. Douglass is grateful that Mr. Freeland is not a hypocritically religious man. Many men in the community profess to be religious, but merely use their religion as justification for their cruelty to their slaves. Douglass succeeded in getting some of his fellow slaves interested in learning how to read. This is a dangerous risk, since educating slaves is forbidden.

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Douglass tells about his own childhood and how his father might have been a slaveholder. He explains

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This in the long run would hurt her more and benefited him. Douglass learned, “From that moment on [and] understood the pathway from slavery to freedom” (Douglass, 20). Slaves were not allowed to read and/or write, but some

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According to Mistress Hugh, “education and slavery were incompatible with each other” (Douglass, 33). Although Mistress Hugh had stopped teaching Douglass how to read, the seed of knowledge had already been planted. In the years that followed, his hunger for knowledge did not dissipate. Douglass devised various methods to learn to read and write in very clever ways.

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After being separated from his mother at a young age, Frederick Douglass fights back against slavery and human rights. In Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, the author, Frederick Douglass, uses powerful rhetoric to disprove the Pragmatic and the Scientific pro-slavery arguments of Pre-Civil War America. The Pragmatic Argument is about how many people believe that if all black slaves were to be freed, then this would result in convulsions which would then lead to extermination of the one or other race. Many people also believed that black slavery was necessary for American history.

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Frederick Douglass Essay Three events that FD includes to persuades his audicnce that slavery is wrong are him getting whoop them ,not teaching or helping him with his education , and they didn’t feed them good they gave them little of food . One events that FD includes to persuades his audicnce that slavery is wrong are him getting whoop.they was whoop not only just him but it was many more people .”D----D B----H After crossing her hands , calling her at the same time a D----D B---H.”(21) lavery is wrong because it like you being controll by somebody and it was like every time they did something wrong or they didn’t do what they was told they got a whooping .Whooping

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Douglass states: “The more I read, the more I was led to abhor and detest my enslavers. I could regard them in no other light than a band of successful robbers, who had left their homes, and gone to Africa, and stolen us from our homes, and in a strange land reduced us to slavery” (Douglass 51). Reading and writing opened Frederick Douglass’s eyes to the cause of the abolitionist. He became knowledgeable about a topic that white slave owners tried to keep hidden from their slaves. Literacy would eventually impact his life in more ways than what he could see while he was a young slave under Master Hugh’s

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Because of this, he successfully creates a contrast between what the slave owners think of and treat the slaves and how they are. Douglass says that slave’s minds were “starved by their cruel masters”(Douglass, 48) and that “they had been shut up in mental darkness” (Douglass, 48) and through education, something that they were deprived of, Frederick Douglass is able to open their minds and allow them to flourish into the complex people that they are. By showing a willingness to learn to read and write, the slaves prove that they were much more than what was forced upon them by their masters.

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