The Dehumanizing Effects of Slavery as seen in The autobiography of Frederick Douglass.

American history is marked with discrimination against minorities, both in the law, and in everyday life. Slavery is a historically telling exercising of a government sanctioned oppression and torture by condemning victimization through racism. The indoctrination of thraldom among the American deal made for a general environment of barbaric and inhuman behavior that would affect both slaves and slave owners. The behavior did not come about by accident however; as the South purposely went to great lengths to dehumanize their slaves in revisal to keep the caste system of the south intact. Frederick Douglass chronicles this experience, through his forward autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave. He recounts painful and inhumane episodes of violence inflicted upon him and others by slaveholders. As a young man, Douglass is send to Baltimore, an event that would change his life permanently, apart from freeing him from the uncouth conditions of the plantation. While in Baltimore, he teaches himself to read and write and begins his transit towards mental freedom. While his narrative focuses primarily on the evils of slavery and its dehumanizing make on Black people, he also uniquely acknowledges the moral and mental damage that enforcing this social system has on the slave owners themselves.



Using imagery, Douglass is eloquently able to illustrate the dehumanizing effects the institution of slavery imposes on both slaves and slaveholders.

The degradation routine of slaves results from a deliberate attempt among slaveholders to deny slaves familial bonds, education, and fundamental liberties in an effort to ?darken his moral and mental resourcefulness? (Douglass 415). Beginning with a slave?s birth, this cruel accomplish leads to a continuous cycle of abuse, neglect, and inhumane treatment. To begin, Douglass uses imagery to separate the experience of a slave child on a plantation. His first paragraph...

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