Frederick Douglass Essay The three-fifths Compromise of the Federal Constitution aptly described the American attitude in the post Revolutionary War period toward the group that constituted over 19% of the early United States, African Americans. After the Revolutionary War, fifty-five delegates were called together to revise the Articles of Confederation. The Southern states desperate not to be deprived of increased political representation, called for slaves to be declared citizens, thereby significantly increasing the number of representatives for each state. The smaller Northern States argued that as slaves were not considered citizens by the states, the Northern states might as logically demand additional representation based on its number
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The three-fifths Compromise declared that a slave only counted for three-fifths of a person. For the sake of preserving the unsteady national unity of the states, the fifty-five delegates of the Constitutional Congress sacrificed the ideologies “that all men were created equal” the Founding Fathers had established and even carefully avoided the word “slave“ altogether in the final signed draft of the American Constitution. Influenced by medieval European ideologies, African slaves were similarly dismissed by the majority of post-revolutionary society as inferior humans, and as such were unrepresented, and held no rights that white …show more content…
Born a slave in Tuckahoe, Maryland Frederick received no education and grew up neither knowing any basic schooling, the date of his birth, nor even the identity of his own father. Douglass’s early childhood was spent on the plantation he was born on, wearing either a single linen shirt or nothing at all, driving cows, herding fowl, running errands for his mistress, avoiding the lash of the overseers and suffering from hunger and cold. At an early age he would wake up to the “heart-rending shrieks of an own aunt of mine...tie[d] up to a joist, and whip[ed] upon her naked back till she was literally covered in blood. No words, no tears, no prayers, from his gory victim, seemed to move his iron heart from its bloody purpose.” (7) . These scenes of utter disregard for human life would be repeated endlessly through all of Douglass early life upon the plantation. Douglass writes how children were ripped from their mother and sent away to prevent a mother’s attachment, of how a master’s wife beat a young girl to death for falling asleep, of how a man was killed for running from a beating, of deathly cold nights survived in nothing but a small cloth corn bag, of children forced to eat like wild animals from a mush filled trough, and of how all slaves were beaten for the slightest inattention. Around the age of seven Douglass was sent to
The three-fifths Compromise declared that a slave only counted for three-fifths of a person. For the sake of preserving the unsteady national unity of the states, the fifty-five delegates of the Constitutional Congress sacrificed the ideologies “that all men were created equal” the Founding Fathers had established and even carefully avoided the word “slave“ altogether in the final signed draft of the American Constitution. Influenced by medieval European ideologies, African slaves were similarly dismissed by the majority of post-revolutionary society as inferior humans, and as such were unrepresented, and held no rights that white …show more content…
Born a slave in Tuckahoe, Maryland Frederick received no education and grew up neither knowing any basic schooling, the date of his birth, nor even the identity of his own father. Douglass’s early childhood was spent on the plantation he was born on, wearing either a single linen shirt or nothing at all, driving cows, herding fowl, running errands for his mistress, avoiding the lash of the overseers and suffering from hunger and cold. At an early age he would wake up to the “heart-rending shrieks of an own aunt of mine...tie[d] up to a joist, and whip[ed] upon her naked back till she was literally covered in blood. No words, no tears, no prayers, from his gory victim, seemed to move his iron heart from its bloody purpose.” (7) . These scenes of utter disregard for human life would be repeated endlessly through all of Douglass early life upon the plantation. Douglass writes how children were ripped from their mother and sent away to prevent a mother’s attachment, of how a master’s wife beat a young girl to death for falling asleep, of how a man was killed for running from a beating, of deathly cold nights survived in nothing but a small cloth corn bag, of children forced to eat like wild animals from a mush filled trough, and of how all slaves were beaten for the slightest inattention. Around the age of seven Douglass was sent to