Essay about Frederick Douglass and Slavery

Fredrick Douglass was one of the only former slaves to write a memoir about his life as a slave while slavery was still legal in the United States. Fredrick was an American slave in the 1830s who struggles to both escape slavery and to convince others to try to end it. Fredrick Douglass uses ethos, logos, and pathos to convince the reader of why he is pro abolition and why the reader should also be pro abolition 

Fredrick Douglass uses Ethos in his narrative to convince the reader that slavery is a moral wrong. Ethos is an argument in which you use your own and other's credibility on a subject to convince an audience that you are correct. Fredrick uses both his exercises as a slave to tell about the horrors of slavery but also what he has been told by other slaves when he was back on the plantation. By using these firsthand accounts Fredrick can show that he is telling the truth when he talks about slavery. One common argument for slavery at the time was many slave owners were kind to their slaves and gave them food and clothes in excess, however, Fredrick can personally debunk these arguments and confirm that he is telling the truth by his experience as a former slave. Douglass uses vibrant word choice to illustrate both his position as a slave and the pain of his enslavement along with the pain of many others who were enslaved. “My natural elasticity was crushed, my intellect languished, the disposition to read departed, the cheerful spark that lingered about my eye died; the night of slavery closed in upon me; and behold a man transformed into a brute!” this gives an example of how slavery dehumanized slaves in two ways. One to themselves, Fredrick in this quote said that he turned into a brute. This is the system of slavery convincing Fredrick of what he was being told, that he was not more than an animal. After being treated like an animal for so long Douglass started to believe that he was one. Secondly, the system of slavery turns the masters into heartless people after abusing a group of people for so long the masters often lose their sense of morality. Fredrick shows the readers what he thinks of slavery, he also makes a point to say that he remembers his time as a slave well. "I remember the first time I ever witnessed this horrible exhibition. I was quite a child, but I well remember it. I never shall forget it whilst I remember anything. It was the first of a long series of such outrages, 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.” By Douglass saying that he well remembers it he is building his argument against slavery using Ethos. He is showing how he is a credible source for the topic of slavery 

Fredrick Douglass uses logos in his narrative to convince the reader that slavery is a moral wrong. Logos is an argument in which you use logic and reason to argue your point. Fredrick Douglass’s novel was especially benefited by this because it is hard to justify logically the enslavement of another person. By exposing this fact Douglass can make a convincing argument for why slavery is wrong and needs to be abolished. Douglass uses Logos to argue that one cannot be both religious and a slaveholder at the same time. “For of all slaveholders with whom I have ever met, religious slaveholders are the worst. I have ever found them the meanest and basest, the cruelest and cowardly, of all others.” Douglass’s argument here is that it is not logical to use the bible to support slavery. Fredrick confronts the audience of the time with a hard truth, that if you support the bible and Christianity it is a sin to hold slaves. “We have men sold to build churches, women sold to support the gospel, and babes sold to purchase Bibles for the poor heathen, all for the glory of God and the good of souls. The slave auctioneer's bell and the church-going bell chime in with each other, and the bitter cries of the heart-broken slave are drowned in the religious shouts of his pious master. Revivals of religion and revivals in the slave-trade go hand in hand.” By pointing out the hypocrisy of the religious people of the time Douglass is giving them a choice between their religion or their slaves. Fredrick knows that logically you cannot have both slaves and Christianity at the same time

Fredrick Douglass uses pathos in his narrative to convince the reader that slavery is a moral wrong. Pathos is a persuasion tactic in which you use the emotional response of the audience to convince them of your point. by evoking an emotional response in the audience you can be more confident that they will take your side, by using Pathos you can paint a picture of suffering, or happiness to convince them of a point. Fredrick Douglass uses Pathos in many parts of his novel to paint a terrifying picture of slavery to the mostly white audience. “The white man's happiness cannot be purchased by the black man's misery.” This quote shows Fredrick using ideas of conflicting emotions to evoke a reader’s attention. By calling out the happiness of the white population and the misery of the black population Fredrick both humanizes the black population and brings them to a white person’s level. This would have been a crazy idea at the time but if the reader agrees that white people are happy and agrees with this statement then they also humanize the black community. Fredrick also evokes emotion, thereby using Pathos in an argument by many of the things that he is happy about. For example, Whilst I was saddened by the thought of losing the aid of my kind mistress, I was gladdened by the invaluable instruction which, by the merest accident, I had gained from my master”. Fredrick says that he was gladdened by the instruction he got from his former master. This same master kept him in captivity and withheld freedom and education from Fredrick. However, the most basic form of human kindness surprised Fredrick and made him sad to leave him. This shows how bad slave's perception of kindness was.

By using Ethos, Logos, and pathos Fredrick Douglass can convince the audience that the institution of slavery is wrong and should be ended. Fredrick in his memoir is credible, uses emotion and logic to argue that slavery is wrong and should be stopped. Fredrick Douglass having been through slavery and risking his life to escape it makes a concise and powerful argument about the abolition of slavery.