The North Of Slavery Frederick Douglass Analysis

Wow, this chapter was a big eye opener and not at all what I expected. Like many of my peers one of the things I found the most interesting and shocking was the North and what it was really like to live there. Seeing the header “North of Slavery” had me thinking that this chapter was going to be about the North trying to help the slaves, but I was so wrong. This was the title because this was how historian Leon Litwack described the situation African Americans were in. He described it as “North of Slavery” because no matter where they went they experienced racism and segregation. In all my other U.S. history classes the North was perceived as the a “safe haven” for the slaves because slavery had been abolished. Well slavery may have been abolished but the North still was full of …show more content…
One quote from the chapter that really stood out to me and put this whole thing in perspective was “The North for blacks was not the promise land. Although they were not slaves, they were hardly free”.

Another thing I thought was really interesting was Fredrick Douglass’s story. I’ve heard about him many times before but, it was always just a brief overview of his roll in history, never in depth like in this book. It was interesting to read about a slave who didn’t live an absolutely awful life. Even Douglass himself talked about how he didn't see why people were so angry about being slaves but, he was also still very young at that time and didn’t know what was really going on. He was one of the more fortunate slaves we’ve read about because he had a Sophia Auld( his masters wife)and she saw him as just a child, not a future slave. She would let him play with her own child, made sure he had a bed, had clean clothes, had