Friday, March 27, 2015

What three events in Frederick Douglass's life had a great influence on him and led him to gain his freedom?

While many events happen in Frederick Douglass' Narrative of the Life, three of them stand out as formative events both biographically and rhetorically.  First, he recounts how his relationship to slave songs both distanced him and brought him closer to the slave community in which he was born:



they would sing, as a chorus, to words which to many would seem unmeaning jargon, but which, nevertheless, were full of meaning to themselves.  I have sometimes thought that the mere hearing of those songs would do more to impress some minds with the horrible character of slavery, than the reading of whole volumes of philosophy on the subject could do.



After this introduction to Douglass' life as a slave, he tells of his fight with his cruel "slavebreaker" master Mr. Covey in which he realized his own humanity.  After being threatened with beating, Douglass



resolved to fight; and suiting my action to the resolution, I seized Covey hard by the throat; and as I did so, I rose.  He held on to me, and I to him....  I seized him with both hands by his collar, and brought him by a sudden snatch to the ground....



This encounter makes Douglass resolve to be free and escape his slavery.  Finally, after escaping--which he does not narrate--he encounters racism from white working men while trying to find work at the shipyard in Baltimore:



Many of the black carpenters were freemen.  Things seemed to be going on very well.  All at once, the white carpenters knocked off, and said they would not work with free colored workmen.  Their reason for this, as alleged, was, that if free colored carpenters were encouraged, they would soon take the trade into their own hands, and poor white men would be thrown out of employment.



These three events demonstrate slave ideology, self-determined manumission, and white racism against freed slaves respectively and stand as crucial turning points in Douglass' Narrative.

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