Humanity

I viewed the video, "Slavery and Freedom", which reviewed the impact that the writings of Fredrick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, and Harriet Beecher Stowe had on the abolition of slavery. It first brought up the problem that the economic success of America was dependent on slavery. A nation founded on freedom was now dependent on the oppression and captivity of another people. And out of this in congruency came the slave narrative as a literary movement on behalf of political change. Such narratives became the new American auto-biography and claimed authority from the Bible, comparing themselves with the archetype of a chosen people being tried and then delivered by the Lord.

First the writings of Douglass were discussed. His title page states that the narrative was "written by himself" as an advertisement that he is human and literate. He also uses the phrase "I was born" frequently to instill the fact that he is indeed a human being just like his intended audience. Douglass captured what Franklin advocated - that of the self-made man - and recast it to fit the slave condition. His account of fighting back to the well-known slave-breaker, Covey, was a call to his readers to rise up and overthrow your oppressor and was a revolutionary moment. With his narrative Douglass became the symbol of black achievement in the last half of the 1800's.

Harriet Jacobs' narrative was that of the black slave woman, a completely different world than even that of the black slave man. Her novel touched on the sentiments of other women with her narrative of the orphaned woman fighting off the vile aggressor and triumphing. She confronted openly those issues that were most scandalous while at the same time maintaining her status as a worthy, virtuous female. This was different than that of the story of fiction that Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote in "Uncle Tom's Cabin", which Stowe combined the stories