The usage of these repetitive contrasts between slave’s and whites basic human rights are used to really show just how ignorant and dehumanized the slaves were kept.
The hypocrisy of Christianity within the slaveholders is another rhetorical device used by Douglass in his narrative. Throughout the narrative Douglass describes how southern slave owners would defend the idea of slavery by claiming that they were introducing Christianity to the slaves, and Douglass being a Christian, realized that it was not true. Douglass wrote in the appendix, “the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ: I therefore hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land.” What he means by this statement is that the slave owner’s actions in which the slaves are improperly overworked without enough food and rest, beaten and murdered are a hypocritical practice of