Published in 1845, Frederick Douglass’s Narrative is an enlightening and incendiary text. Born in Talbot County, Maryland around the year 1818, Douglass mother, Harriet Bailey, whom he never had the chance to meet, was also a slave. Douglass endured beatings from his masters, watched as his family members were murdered by overseers and watched the daily brutality of slaves being beaten for not obeying their master’s order. Born into slavery, Frederick Douglass became the well-known spokesman for the treatment of “indentured servants” also known as slaves were being treated, throughout his life on the plantation in the South. Frederick Douglass’s, The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, goes into great detail about…The two questions at hand are: (1) In what ways is Douglass’s narrative a work of abolitionist propaganda?, and (2) In what ways is it a historical source on the nature and arguments of the abolitionists movement in antebellum America?
When answering the first question, I looked up the definition of “propaganda” in the dictionary. According to Webster’s II New College Dictionary, propaganda is, “the methodical propagation of a particular doctrine or of allegations reflecting its views and interests.” The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, when published was something white people in the North who had always heard about slavery but when this narrative was published this gave them an up-close and personal view through Douglass’s eyes on how blacks were treated in the South. For example on page twenty-one of his narrative, he talks about his Aunt Hester who disobeyed the orders of Mr. Plummer who was the overseer of Captain Anthony’s slaves on his plantation. Aunt Hester was ordered not to go out in the evenings to be in the presence of a young man named, Ned Roberts, also called “Lloyd’s Ned.” After being caught with him, Mr. Plummer punished Aunt Hester in the cruelest way ever. Mr. Plummer stripped Aunt Hester from her shoulders to...