Literary Analysis Essay on Fredrick Douglass

Introduction

The book review is about a black American Fredrick Douglass who was a significant leader in America during the nineteenth century. Douglass is said to have had an initial name as Fredrick Bailey and he grew up in slavery. In 1838, Fredrick Bailey escaped from slavery at the age of 20 and even sought to change his name as a means of reinventing himself. He settled at Fredrick Douglass, this action was observed as a complete Southern choice and an acknowledgment to the culture he had escaped from. His new name illustrated a rejection of his name as a slave, it denoted presence and not absence. The selected name engraved him in a cultural custom that he was forced to remake and inherit (DeLombard, 2018).

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With Douglass, everything was present and in its opposite. That is, he became a militant truth prophet who never compromised with slavery and became the pragmatic politics' central pillar during the time of the postwar. Blight the reviewer of Douglass's story reveals that Douglas wrote about his life experience three times that is in the "Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave" produced in 1845, "Life and Times of Frederick Douglass," in 1881 and in 1855 "My Bondage and My Freedom,". The text style presented in the three journals written by Douglass varied due to the transforming agenda's pressure that is the first was urgent and pained, the second memoir was more considered and subtler and the last was outward and orotund (Williams, 2018). Douglass is said to have been spared from the worst slavery when he was passed from the first master who was brutal to the son-in-law, Thomas Auld, who was kinder. Douglass's life-changing occurrences happen when he arrived in Baltimore at eight years old. Since he was a child he was treated just like an equal friend of the son to his first master, he was even taught how to write and read. However, the teaching did not continue for a long time as the masters felt insecure about his learning speed and they thought they might lose him once he became literate. Therefore, Douglass started to tread bread for secret lessons of reading (DeLombard, 2018).

Douglass treasured Baltimore, however, he was pulled out of the place at 15 and sent to the backwoods by Edward Covey. Therefore, Douglass made his mind to attack Covey which made Covey back off. He was shipped to the Deep South's plantations where he was rescued from by Auld and taken back to Baltimore. This is when Douglass acknowledged his great redemption. In 1848 he wrote to Auld explaining that he was not Auld's slave but a fellow-man (DeLombard, 2018). Douglass fell in love with Anna Murray, a black woman who encouraged him to flee to freedom. Blight reveals that, in 1841, Douglass transformed history when he made an impromptu speech at an abolitionist conference in Nantucket. He was the first ex-slave to be heard speaking about his slavery experience with great eloquence and precision. This is when his relationship with Lloyd Garrison a white abolitionist started and he was made to be the speaker of the abolition group (Williams, 2018).

In his review, Blight discloses that Douglass raised from slavery to celebrity within a year and maintained the state to the time he died. Douglass made a list of individuals that were to be seen as the face of the movement, the list comprised of Gloria Steinem, who was a very significant feminist during the time. Blight writes that the personal charisma of Douglass also consisted of an unapologetic sexual presence. Douglass's slave narratives were extraordinarily frank when it came to the terrible slavery erotic relations and the white-black race relationships. However, his narrative openness was not tolerable in the progressive race discussions until in the 1960s (DeLombard, 2018).

Blight demonstrates that Douglass underwent four relationships that shaped his mature mind and life. Three of the relations were with American white men and one with a woman who was European. Douglass had an adversarial and tutelary association with Garrison, an allergic and admiring relationship with John Brown and a politician-and-prophet relation with Abraham Lincoln. He then had a romantic affair with Ottilie Assing (Williams, 2018).

The tale of Garrison's association with Douglass created significant stories in the political history of America. They started as friends in 1841 at the abolitionist meeting in Nantucket where Garrison and his followers made Douglass as the group's speaker. However, in less than a decade they separated bitterly. The aspect that Douglass was not used to being placed on display rose some of the resentment. Their separation was as a result of an influential intellectual difference that is the black ex-slave seemed to be more moderate while the white campaigner was predictably radical (Williams, 2018). Garrison was a moral secessionist and a pacifist at the same time, he held that the American Constitution was greatly mixed up in slavery and rescuing it was challenging. However, Douglass believed that the American Constitution was an upright document that had gone wrong thus it needed amendments for restoration back to its primary purposes (DeLombard, 2018).

Blight discusses that the constitutional matter was and is still epic. Therefore, all of the liberalism in America is still at risk in the choice as it is the one that separates Cornel West together with the other critics from Obama. According to Garrison, liberal constitutionalism failure in the achievement of the expected goal was the reason to leave it. However, according to Douglass the liberal constitutionalism failure in attaining the required goal was the reason to reform the aim in a more inclusive and forceful manner (Williams, 2018).

Blight relates that in the 1850s Douglass was attracted by the courage of John Brown during the question at Kansas. The query of if slavery could be spread to new regions. However, Douglass was deterred by Brown's extremism, Brown was ethically clear-eyed when it came to the slavery subject. After the Harper's Ferry disaster Douglass escaped to Canada then to Great Britain as some of the New York officials wanted to arrest him for conspiracy. Blight discusses that slavery was believed to be the primary cause of war during the time. Upon the appointment of President Lincoln, he campaigned for the abolishment of slavery in the country as he saw it as an evil act (DeLombard, 2018).

During the time of the war, Douglass spent an extraordinary amount of rational power in opposing the plan of resettling the ex-slaves in Africa or Central America. Blight claims that Douglass observed civilization and culture as Eurocentric terms that is why he saw war as a way of acquiring freedom. It was during this time the two worked together, Douglass as a prophet while Lincoln as a politician. Douglass had a forth romantic relationship with Ottilie Assing a German intellectual who interviewed Douglass and later on fell in love with him. Blight seems to be unsupportive to this act he claims that it was unfair to Anna Douglass who had taken threatening risks to enable him to escape slavery. However, Assing committed suicide on going back to Germany a step Blight thinks it was due to loneliness (Williams, 2018).

In 1877 Douglass looked for Auld to pardon him. However, from the communication the two had, Blight claims that it is unclear to the readers to understand whether Auld was the living symbol of slavery. The forgives aspect illustrates the power of Christianity that Douglass associated himself with for his entire life. The gesture indicates that the slaves engrossed and imagined their oppressors' religion in their personal and morally original ideas. Therefore, the black church raised to be the principal source of social capitalism, that molded various lives like that of Douglass (DeLombard, 2018).

Conclusion

The life of Douglass ranged from being an abolitionist during the early eighteen-forties to his battle on the segregation of Jim Crow in the eighteen-nineties. He was an influential black ex-slave who achieved a worldwide prominence as a speaker. Despite his fame, Douglass did not lose his sense of connection to the South, he frequently considered Maryland as the place of his own native soil. At his elderly age, he spent time going for victory tours. He became an American voice and symbol of social justice and humanism in America (DeLombard, 2018).

Reference

DeLombard, J. M. (2018). The Lives of Frederick Douglass by Robert S. Levine. Biography, 41(1), 155-159.

Williams, F. J. (2018). Look at Lincoln: Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom. Civil War Book Review, 20(4), 2.