Frederick Douglass

I was surprised when reading The Narrative of Frederick Douglass to find that it is just as much of a public argument as it is a private account. Douglass introduces the reader to his own situation—his birthplace and the fact that he does not know his own age, then generalizes from his own experience, explaining that almost no slaves know their true ages. Next, Douglass takes this detail of his experience and analyzes it. He points out that slave owners deliberately keep their slaves ignorant, and that this is a tactic whites use to gain power over slaves. This structure recurs throughout his Narrative: he presents his personal experience as a typical slave experience, and then usually makes an analytical point about the experience and what it tells us about how slavery works and why it is wrong. The main tactic of Douglass’s antislavery argument is to analyze the institution of slavery and show how and why it works. The analysis would then demystify slavery and reveal its brutality and wrongness, leaving the readers with no choice but to want to remove the institution. This seems to be an excellent tactic of argumentation, stating facts and analyses that no one can really doubt, and then planting seeds of thought in their mind on how wrong the other side is.