In antebellum America, the abolitionist movement was magnified by the efforts of escaped slave Frederick Douglass. In one of his most famous works, the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Douglass spends ample time providing evidence of the physical and emotional abuse endured by slaves along with evidence of how the slaveholders themselves are negatively affected by the dehumanizing nature of slavery. However, Douglass situates these descriptions of horror within artful prose, proving his own passionate and intellectual nature, and thus proving the humanity of himself and other African Americans. This complex narrative served abolitionists by both presenting and countering slavery’s dehumanizing nature in an accessible
