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Narrative Of The Life Of Frederick Douglass Controversy Essay

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Narrative Of The Life Of Frederick Douglass Controversy Essay
I am so glad that I finally have the chance to write you again. Unfortunately, I have been really busy with this new book I am reading. Well, calling it new may be a bit inaccurate. The book is called Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. It is an autobiography by Frederick Douglass that was published in 1845, which makes it over 170 years old. Going into reading this book, I expected it to narrate the atrocities that occurred in the Antebellum Period, but I could not prepare myself for the level of detail that Douglass used. He described rural slave culture on his former home in Talbot County, Maryland as cruel and ruthless, with detailed descriptions of beatings, murder, and even sexual abuse (Douglass 1). He recounts, for instance, how one overseer named Mr. Gore murdered a slave named Demby for not listening to his warning about getting out of a creek. Even after moving to Baltimore, Douglass still encountered abuse in the city. The only difference was that the cruelty was better hidden and rarer. The worst abuse that Douglass ever saw, in fact, victimized two slaves named Henrietta and Mary in Baltimore. Throughout the book, Douglass established a disparity between the treatment …show more content…
Abuse was present in both societies, due to the overall American cultural norms during the Antebellum Period. Mr. Gore got off scot-free despite his cold-blooded murder and Mr. and Mrs. Hamilton were free to abuse Henrietta and Mary. Through the rich, vivid details included in the book, Douglass paints a picture of separate yet simultaneous cultures of abuse, cruelty, and pain, although one tries to hide from the reality while the other embraces
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