Narrative Of The Life Of Frederick Douglass

African slavery began at the sixteenth century and ended in the nineteenth century. Slave life was the most merciless and affronted period of America. When Africans first stepped foot on the slave ships coming to America things were terrible. The white man beat, assaulted, and treated the black men like creatures. Life on the estate was not any better. The slaves did not work for a paycheck, they worked for their lives. The black man experienced difficulties adjusting to the environment, learning another language, and being a monogamous. Frederick Douglass's Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave and Harriet Jacobs' Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl are two personal autobiographies, composed by two former slaves,
The accounts tell equally of wickedness and ugliness though they are distinctive perspectives of the same rotten foundation. Douglass says this: “You have seen how a man was mad a slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man.” This uncovers two important things about his story. To begin with, it is told from a man's viewpoint, and second, he is the hero of his own story. His slave encounter certainly exhibits emotional parts of his life, but it primarily describes physical fights and triumphs. As a field slave, he was abused and beaten until he decided to stand up against his master who in the end sent him to Covey, a man whose occupation is to "break" slaves. "During the first six months, of that year, scarce a week passed without his whipping me." Douglass eventually stands up to himself and refuses to be broken, and that is the point at when his adventure to freedom truly starts. Douglass's voice is much more polished than Jacobs's, as he was a productive speaker about his own particular story before he ever composed his narrative. He has been engaged by his experience. Jacobs, on the other hand, composes this: "Slavery is terrible for a man, however it is far more terrible for women." Harriet Jacobs narrative, then, is composed from a woman's point of view, and she is not particularity a heroic figure. Her story is an admission: “I was struggling alone in the powerful grasp of the demon Slavery; and the monster proved too strong for me.” In fact, she basically moves from being a domestic slave in the South to being a former domestic slave in the North. While she certainly endures physical abuse, her story is primarily a passionate one; because of the story she want to tell, she appeals more to women. Jacobs is embarrassed about herself when she wrote about the compromise she needed to make for the sake of her children and about her life as a sexual slave; then again, she, in the