Douglass, Frederick, 1817-1895. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave - Assignment Example

Instruction: Task: Fredrick Douglass. In the 1800s and early 1900s, slavery was booming in the southern part of the Americas and slave trade was an active form of economic activity. It is during this time that Fredrick Douglass escaped the inhumane activity and set out to fight it in any way he could. One of his focal means of fighting slavery was through writing and giving mind-changing oratory drives. In the course of experiencing servitude, Douglass moves from one slave master to another and in between these traversals, he tries to obtain some form of knowledge in the form of knowing how to read and write.

Eventually he gets some basic skills and he narrates that this helped him to enroll a group of about 40 slaves whom he took through some Sunday classes (Dawson et al 144). Moreover, this knowledge helped him later on when he succeeds to get out of slavery and gets some form of employment in calking. Fredrick’s writing helped in increasing the zeal already in the north that aimed at the abolition of slavery. What’s more, it proved that the slaves had intellectual capacity and not irrational as proponents of slavery argued their case (Dawson et al 173).

Following his writing, and the buzz it created thereafter, Fredrick got the motivation to go on with his enlightenment on the evils of slavery, as he did not anticipate that his writing could form a starting point for the struggle. This is shown by the respect and recognition he gets following his writing. In Douglass narrative, religion is brought up as the issue that some slave owners hid in the pretext that they are Christians at the same time slave owners. Douglass loathes this idea and harshly condemns this by stating that one cannot be a slave owner at the same time a true Christian (Dawson et al 186).

The slave owners as brought out in the narrative used religion as a fraud. Douglass harsh sentiments on religion are based on how the slave owners wrongfully used religion against the slaves. Works CitedDawson, Nancy et al. The Frederick Douglass Encyclopedia. California, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2009. Print.