“We were both victims to the same overshadowing evil- she, as mistress, I, as slave.” Frederick Douglass said this in his narrative when he was describing how slavery changed his mistress in Baltimore and how it affects many blacks and whites. We see many examples between him and his mistress from the argument that education and truth produces a free man. Webster’s dictionary says freedom is the power or right to act, speak, or think as one wants without hindrance or restraint; the absence of subjection to foreign domination or despotic government; the state of not being imprisoned or enslaved. Frederick Douglass wanted to analyze the institution of slavery and show how and why it affected the nation as a whole. His analysis exposes the brutality and wrongness of slavery.
There were two big political parties
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Douglass realizes in the narrative that he must educate himself in order to gain his freedom from the outside oppression and from his inside thoughts. The idea that education is the means to freedom is a major theme in this Narrative. Contrarily, later in his story, Douglass’s unhappiness shows that education does not directly bring freedom because his new consciousness of injustice has setbacks; he realizes that intellectual freedom is not the same as physical freedom. Though the Narrative treats knowledge as the means to freedom, Douglass realizes his transformation from slave to free man in his major acts of violence. Douglass regains his internal spirit, desire to learn, and conviction to be free by physically fighting against his oppressor and slave-owner, Covey. Although Douglass’s violence takes its form in a controlled setting, he does not advocate revenge, but rather a more controlled form of confrontation such as self-defense. Through this contained aggression, Douglass asserts himself and achieves a very important goal—to end physical violence between Covey and