The first step taken towards abolition was simply the idea that enslavement anywhere in the world was a wrong thing that needed to be made right, and slave narrative was an important means of fighting this war. When Frederick Douglass and Elizabeth Keckley reclaimed their past and described their reunions with their enslavers, they showed their intent on renewing the slave narrative as an element still relevant to the postbellum era. Some people may wonder if this is a deviation from reality, but the truth is this kind of revisionism is in itself a historical truth, something emerging in something the writer is living at the moment. If we can read African-American literature and appreciate its constantly renewing revisionism, then we can get
