Narrative Of The Life Of Frederick Douglass Ethos Essay

Words: 518
Pages: 3

“Don't base your decisions on the advice of those who don’t have to deal with the results”. This quote directly dealt with the problems faced in the book Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. Throughout the book doulas dealt with a lot in all the situations he went through. The book had started out with douglas being a slave. The majority of the book though consisted of him dealing with the struggles of slavery, and finally him fighting and getting his freedom. In Douglass Narrative, he refutes some of the false notions of slavery by using pathos in his socio-economic counter argument, and by using ethos in his scientific counter argument.
George Fitzhugh gave a socio-economic argument that slavery must be championed
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While abolitionists argued that blacks had never been educated, pro-slavery advocates maintained that blacks were incapable of the, even with proper training. Douglas had talked about the time when he was in Baltimore and had finally learned how to read and write. “I lived in MAster Hugh’s family about seven years. DUring this time, I succeeded in learning to read and write…. I had no regular teacher.”(p.43). Douglas himself was able to completely disown the claim that blacks were naturally inferior to whites. His use of ethos in this part of the book was a key in getting across the point. His own personal fight with this problem shows that everyone is equal, no matter color.
In Douglass Narrative, he refutes some of the false notions of slavery by using pathos in his socio-economic counter argument, and by using ethos in his scientific counter argument. Throughout the book in many other situations Douglas really shows the truth about a lot of things that happened in slavery. In doing this he was able to shed light on how terrible slavery