Frederick Douglas, from slavery to freedom

br The Nineteenth century was a very tumultuous time in American History There was a war going on , political strife was at hand and nation was purely divided . The division was over the biggest commodity at the time , slaves . During this time slavery was rampant in the South and some parts of the Midwest as more states were entering the union . Slaves who managed to escape their masters were making their way to the North but in many states there were no laws protecting slaves that had escaped . The United States was one

of last countries that was continuing the use of slaves . By the middle of the nineteenth century the importation of slaves from Africa had become illegal but the buying and selling domestically was at an all time high . The dehumanization of these people had hit in all time low when procreation was forced in for plantation owners to have more slaves . They were known through the nation as chattel and that is exactly how they have been treated since the beginning of the slave trade

The issue of slavery was on everyone 's mind and the abolitionists movement was formed . One of the pillars of this movement was indeed Frederick Douglass . Douglass drew from his own experiences as a former slave to impact a nation . Having been born into slavery himself Douglass knew first hand the day to day strife of a slave in the South He vividly describes his life as a slave and the atrocities that he witnessed as child and as a man . 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 any thing . 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 (Douglass 1 ) His very early years in a plantation in Maryland laid the foundation for his work

Douglass was able , however , to escape the harshness of his potential future as field hand by being sent to Baltimore to work in the house of his second master . There he learned to read and write and gave him an advantage , education . It was a new and special revelation explaining dark and mysterious things , with which my youthful understanding had struggled , but struggled in vain . I now understood what had been to me a most perplexing difficulty -- to wit , the white man 's power to enslave the black man . It was a grand achievement , and I prized it highly . From that moment , I understood the pathway from slavery to freedom (Douglass 2 ) He felt that through education there was no stopping a black man from being free . This became a major turning point in his life . His master has given him a lesson he would never forget , how the white man was keeping the black man down . "If you give a nigger...