Similarities Between Frederick Douglass And Tocqueville

Slavery was practiced in the United States from the time it was brought over in the 1600s until its abolishment in the mid 1800s. Many were in favor of slavery for a variety of reasons such as kept houses, childcare, yard work, and so forth. Although there were many in favor of the practice, there were also others who were opposed to it because the practice was inhumane. Three particular theorists expressed their feelings about slavery through compelling writings exclaiming that the practice should cease to exist because it violates human rights. The three theorists are Frederick Douglass, Thomas Jefferson, and Alexis Tocqueville. Although all three theorists had similar ideas and concepts about slavery, their lifespans overlapped one another. …show more content…
Douglass was born into slavery and lived on multiple plantations. It is speculated that he was fathered by one of the slave owners whose plantation, he stayed on, but it has never been proven. Douglass was raised by his slave grandmother who had an “unusual” autonomy. Being that Douglass was a slave, he was not provided with the means to become articulate compared to his white counterparts. He was taught how to read by Sophia Auld. After gaining the tools to articulate the hardships he faced as a slave, Douglass became the symbol of anti slavery. Douglass delivered countless speeches and his two autobiographies provided a first hand retelling of the daily life of a slave. In his speech, My Slave Experience in Maryland (1845), he stresses to the audience that he came to the venue to give input into what his life as a slave was. In the county where Douglass was a slave, it was not a crime to kill a slave because they were property. In his speech, he exclaimed that slave masters feared that slaves would rise up and in turn make the slave owners into slaves. “Slavery makes it necessary for the slaveholder to commit all conceivable outrages upon the miserable slave. It is impossible to hold the slaves in bondage without this.”(182). Douglass professed …show more content…
His upbringing compared to the others was different being that he was not born in the U.S. Between 1831 to 1832, Tocqueville travelled from France to the United States for nine months. His trip America inspired Tocqueville to write the first part of Democracy in America. It was revered as one of the most important dissections of American culture. His writings allowed him to gain wealth and allowed him to become involved in politics. His life in politics was not long lived due to him being stripped of power after refusing to bow to the new emperor Louis Napoléon. With hopes of reclaiming his political power, Tocqueville wrote The Old Regime and the Revolution. In his writing, The Three Races in the United States, Tocqueville observed that blacks and whites coexisted together or separately. He expressed that he felt like slavery was a dishonor and that intolerance was extremely prevalent. “No African has ever voluntarily emigrated to the shores of the New World, whence it follows that all the blacks who are now found there are either slaves or freedmen.” (175) Tocqueville addressed that Africans in the New World did not freely decide to come over but instead were forced and were still slaves or recently freed slaves. “The modern slave differs from his master not only in his condition but in his origin.” (176) He wrote about how slaves differ in where they came from compared to their slave master but also in how they are