How Did Frederick Douglass Contribute To Freedom

Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey, who was later referred to as Frederick Douglass, was born into slavery around 1818 in Maryland. He believed that he was the product of a slave mother and a slave owner father. After spending 20 years in slavery, Frederick managed to escape slavery and spent the rest of his life as an abolitionist and supported many reforms including women’s rights, capital punishment, and people’s equality. Frederick Douglass fought for his own freedom, as well as the freedom of all enslaved people. His contributions toward equality have made him one of the most influential people of his century. Slavery was considered an economic necessity in the nineteenth century. Plantation owners were able to make greater profits

A slave was not allowed to be educated, and a person who helped to educate a slave was considered to have committed a crime. There was no point in educating a slave because they had no rights and were just working for their owners. Keeping slaves ignorant about simple things like their birthday or their father, caused them to lose their identity, thus making them another body and not an individual. Black literacy was thought to threaten slavery because with education comes power and opportunity, two things white slave owners did not want their slaves to have. Slave owners feared that slaves would be more likely to resist slavery if they were educated. In 1853, while fighting for the rights of African Americans’ education, Frederick Douglass wrote the following to Harriet Beecher Stowe: "I assert then that poverty, ignorance, and degradation are the combined evils; or in other words, these constitute the social disease of the free colored people of the United States. To deliver them from this triple malady, is to improve and elevate them.” Frederick’s first experience with learning came from his master Hugh Auld’s wife, Sophia. She began by simply teaching him the alphabet one day. After some time, her husband scolded her and told her to not teach Frederick anything else, and she obeyed him, ending all teachings with Frederick. Even though it was now more

There were many passages in the Bible that condoned slavery. The Bible represented the mind and will of God, and biblical stories such as “The Curse of Ham” defended the inferiority of African people. Slavery was actually considered moral, not only justified. The words of the Bible were thought of as true principles of Christianity, and following the words of the Bible meant that a person was carrying out God’s will. Paternalism, or limiting freedom from someone based on the idea that they know what is best for them, was an attitude that was common among slave owners. With the belief that African Americans were inferior and needed this “fatherly” guidance by their white masters, slavery was justified. Because of these skewed views and following what they believed was God’s will, slaves were under the complete control and authority of their owners. There were also beliefs that Africans were savages, and that messages of the Bible that were believed to support slavery would control the sinful, barbaric African Americans; they would be transformed into obedient people. Slavery was argued to be the Christian way of life, and it was wrong to argue or call slavery anti-Christian and contradict its teachings. It never mattered what slaves thought since they had no voices; they had to just live within these immoral