Frederick Douglass Propaganda Essay

Frederick Douglass was an African American social reformer, orator, and writer. He became the leader of the abolitionist movement after escaping from slavery. He published his autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. His narrative had showed anti-slavery white sympathizers of how slaves are brutalized by the slave holding system, the powerful allegation of how brutalized slavery could be and how slavery affected slave holders. Propaganda is an information or idea that spread widely to help or harm group, movement, institution, or a nation. Douglass used his slave narrative as a propaganda tool to show the injustices of slavery. Douglass showed the readers that the slave holding system separated families such as the slave

To clarify this, the whipping of his aunt Hester was one of the scene that portrayed the brutality of slave owners. The whipping of slaves was a method that slave owners used to control the slaves; the number of being whipped depended on the seriousness of the offense. He also wrote “It was the first of a long series of such outrage, of which I was doomed to be a witness and a participant. It struck me with awful force. It was the blood- stained gate, the entrance to the hell of slavery, through which I was about to pass” (Douglass 318-319). Slave whipping was new to him and had never seen such brutality as he was at a young age. He’d had always lived with his grandmother on the outskirts of the plantation. He conveyed that he was going to experienced it soon as he expected that it would be his turn; he felt that slavery is hell because of the brutality that the slaves are experiencing.
Slavery is not only harmful to slaves but can dehumanized slave holders as well; slavery corrupted slave holders to treat the slaves with cruelty. Douglass’s experienced the transformation of his mistress named Sophia Auld though the effect of slavery when he goes to Baltimore to live with the Auld’s. He

She had never had a slave under her control previously to myself, and prior to her marriage she had been dependent upon her industry for a living. She was a trade weaver; and by constant application to her business, she had been in a good degree preserved from the blighting and dehumanizing effects of slavery” (Douglass 337). Sophia Auld had never owned a slave therefore she’d lacked the awareness of the cruelty of slavery; she begun to treat Douglass with kindness as well as teaching him the alphabet. Sophia’s husband, Mr. Auld found that Douglass was taught the alphabet, he demanded his wife to stopped teaching Douglass since it was unlawful for a slave to read and write. As a result of Mr. Auld’s persuasion, Sophia begun to treat him as a slave as a slave holder would. In addition, he emphasized on how enslavement changed his kind mistress as he states, “That cheerful eye, under the influence of slavery, soon became red with rage; that voice, made of sweet accord, change to one of harsh and horrid discord; and that angelic face gave place that of a demon” (Douglass 338). Douglass emphasized on the impact of his kind mistress personality change; he apprehended on the institution of slavery as she changed her cheerful eye to being with rage additionally with her angel-like face to a demon. As a result of losing her humanity, she was