Frederick Douglass and Slavery Essay Example

In his argument against slavery, Douglass masterfully uses the rhetorical strategy of pathos to evoke pity into the reader for him and the other slaves while exposing the unimaginable treatment of slaves and to give examples of the mental and emotional anguish of not having family in the life as a slave. 

First, Douglass utilizes his encounters as a slave to explain how gruesome their treatment was by their masters. Douglass writes about his undertaking at Mr. Covey’s plantation and how he was persistent with the terrible treatment and attempts to break him mentally to the point of giving up. In January of 1834, Douglass was sent to Mr. Covey to be broken due to his disobedience and incompliance. He writes about his endeavor at the plantation, “[He] lived with Mr. Covey one year. During the first six months, of that year, scarce a week passed without his whipping me”(Douglass 60). Mr. Covey was true to his sinister reputation and truly was a terrible man, he had no regard for the life and well being of the slaves he was breaking and was the embodiment of my claim of the unimaginable treatment of slaves. In his narrative, Douglass instills pity into the reader by exposing the cruel nature of slave owners by expressing his experiences that the reader could not grasp nor handle, creating this sense of pity. Douglass utilizes his treatment as a young slave to expose the mindset of the slave owners and to exhibit how they don’t care for them whatsoever. Douglass writes about the cold nights,“[He] was kept almost naked — no shoes, no stockings, no jacket, no trousers, nothing on but a coarse tow linen shirt, reaching only to my knees. I had no bed. I must have perished with cold, but that, the coldest nights, I used to steal a bag which was used for carrying corn to the mill. I would crawl into this bag, and there sleep on the cold, damp, clay floor, with my head in and feet out”(Douglass 36). Douglass uses pathos in this quote to trigger pity into the reader while displaying the hardships he faced, especially as a young boy. The detail in this quote suspends my claim that the slaveholders were brutal and possessed disdain towards the slaves that were so influential to turning the owner into a wealthy individual. 

In addition to exposing the gruesome treatment of slaves and to evoke pity he also writes about the mental anguish and torture the slaves had to face as they were beaten and disregarded for a majority of their lives. Family and having someone to love you is one of the pillars of our lives as humans and for these slaves, they had none of that. Their only family was ripped from them before even meeting them, in Douglass’s case, he never got to meet his father, and having that family there to help you cope with the terrible hand that was dealt to them could’ve helped the slaves immensely mentally. Douglass illustrates how the only family he had was taken away and that it was a common procedure across Maryland. He writes about his mother’s departure at a young age, “My mother and I were separated when I was an infant-before I knew her as my mother. It is a common custom, in the part of Maryland from which I ran away, to part children from their mothers at a very young age”(Douglass 17). This routine would be unimaginably difficult for people to handle now due to the high impact mothers have in your life, they love and care for you and above all know what is best for you. Losing this lasting bond before even creating one must have been extremely difficult. Douglass explains why he thinks this process was to dismantle the mother’s natural affection for the child and to keep the young slave from ever meeting his or her mother and creating that bond. He continues about his mother to continue to try to pull our heart strings to obtain an emotional response. After never meeting his mother to get the chance to have a relationship with her to have somebody she truly left, “Death soon ended what little we could have while she lived, and with it her hardships and suffering. She died when I was about seven years old, on one of my master's farms, near Lee's Mill”(Douglass 18). Even though Douglass never got the chance to meet his mother, he knew she was alive and well, as much as you could be as a slave, until this point. It impacted him greatly emotionally because that was his only family that he truly knew of, and losing them would create an unfathomable cavity in his heart as well as his mind because he must live the rest of his life as a slave with no family that he knew of. Douglass’s readers, mainly students, can now understand the emotional and physical trauma the slaves faced through his words and emotional imagery.