Frederick Douglass And Slavery

Freedom and race have always been highly controversial topics within the United States. From the very beginning of our nation, our founding fathers wrote and fought in able to gain their freedom from England. Possibly the most influential of them being Thomas Jefferson after he wrote The Declaration of Independence. Jefferson was a wealthy land owner from Virginia, and he worked diligently to earn freedom for himself and his fellow countrymen. On the opposite side of the spectrum, you have a man named Frederick Douglass. Douglass was born into slavery in 1817 but eventually became a free man as well as a famous author. One of the things that separated Douglass from other slaves was his ability to read and write. His writings quickly became …show more content…
But its statements about men’s natural liberties would be very important to him. Jefferson wrote very moving and beautiful words in his works of The Declaration of Independence. In the second paragraph, he began talking about men and their natural rights given by God. He said that all men, “are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” (Jefferson). This statement would be highly influential to Douglass due to the fact that as a young child, he was denied many of these inalienable rights. Most of Jefferson’s philosophies when writing The Declaration of Independence came from a man named John Locke. Locke was an English philosopher who was one of the first to speak of natural inalienable rights. In the International Journal of Philosophical Studies, Gerard Casey wrote a review of Locke’s work and tried to explain some of its ideas to readers. “A standard thought experiment among political philosophers is to try to conceive of how things were before men come together to form political associations” (Casey). In regards to Douglass, this would be highly important. Before many political associations, no one man was higher than others unless they gave him the power to be. With this state of mind, no man should be a slave to another man. Jefferson’s words …show more content…
Even though Jefferson may not have followed his own ideas, they doesn’t mean they shouldn’t apply. The first sentence of the second paragraph in Declaration of Independence states, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal” (Jacobus). Douglass waited his entire life for a day when all men were treated equal. Sadly, that day never came during his lifetime. Gurminder Bhambra wrote an article called “The Political Thought of Frederick Douglass” in an academic journal called, Ethnic & Racial Studies. This article was on interpretations of Douglass’s thoughts on African American slavery. “One of the distinguishing characteristics of African-American conceptions of emancipation is the expansive understanding: from the narrow sense of being a counterfoil to slavery in terms of simple liberation from enslavement, to being regarded as the necessary condition fort the fulfilment of one’s capacities as a human being” (Bhambra). And their lives were so difficult, many believed that the only way out was to end their own life. Simon Stow wrote in the American Political Science Preview about the lives of those who lived under slavery and segregation. “It is a perspective further suggested by significantly higher suicide rates among African Americans, especially among black males. Both Frederick