Frederick Douglass Imperialism

Mahatma Gandhi noted, “The moment the slave resolves that he will no longer be a slave, his fetters fall. Freedom and slavery are mental states.” He spoke in the context of imperialism, but this quote captures the sentiments of Frederick Douglass, a slave who considered himself freed by the attainment of literacy. Born into slavery on a plantation in Maryland, Frederick Douglass overcame many adversities on his path to freedom. Once liberated, he soon became a renowned civil-rights activist; his sharp intelligence and eloquent orations were assets to both the abolitionist and women’s rights movements. Douglass wrote three autobiographies depicting his life as a slave and his struggles against the codified inequities of nineteenth century America; The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, ostensibly his most famous work, is rife with depictions of the unnatural, cruel, immoral, and

In the Preface of the Narrative, William Lloyd Garrison, a fervent and influential abolitionist, recounts the effects of slavery on a white American sailor who was stranded in Africa for three years. Under the dehumanizing yoke of slavery, the white man lost his supposedly superior faculties of reason and morality; these traits, which were thought to be inherent to the white man, were stunted and skewed by his loss of self-determination. From this anecdote, it is evident that the unscrupulous pressures of slavery distort the natural characters of men. Slaves of African descent are unfairly made to be less than free white men through the debilitating forces of slavery. In addition to brutalizing the slave, slavery brutalizes the slaveholder. Take, for instance, Douglass’s experience with Sophia Auld: When Douglass first came to her, she was compassionate and innocent. As she grew accustomed to the power of slaveholding, she became brutish and cold. Slavery caused her moral