Harriet Jacobs and Frederick Douglass Essay

From the narratives written by Harriet Jacobs and Frederick Douglass, it can be concluded that the two of them had much in common. Both Jacobs and Douglass were slaves at one time who wished and dreamed for a better life. They were not ignorant to the fact that they were mistreated as humans, and it posed a serious issue to both of their lives. Both of their narratives use pathos as a rhetorical device to attempt to get the reader to understand his/her point of view.
“Why does the slave ever love?” (Chapter 7, Jacobs). The first sentence from Harriet Jacobs’ narrative is a rhetorical question that grabs the reader’s attention. Jacobs tries to achieve pathos by making the reader feel sorry for her situation. Love, something that may come quite easily to someone who is free, is not so easy to deal with when you’re a slave. Something that many people take for granted is not promised to this woman, simply because she is a slave. She wants the reader to sympathize with her and consider what she was forced to go through. “The white children could tell their ages. I could not tell why I ought to be deprived of the same privilege” (Chapter 1, Douglass). Frederick Douglass, too, is attempting to touch the reader’s emotions. A privilege for all whites isn’t a privilege for him, just because he is black. He thinks that this is an injustice and makes it a point to let the reader know his feelings. This is establishing pathos because it makes the reader feel sorry for him because he was mistreated in that particular instance.
Caucasian authors vouched for these African American slave writers. L. Maria Child has an introduction to Harriet Jacobs’ narrative, and Wendell Phillips and William Lloyd Garrison have prefaces in Frederick Douglass’ narrative. This is most likely because they wanted to prove that what the two slave writers were saying was actually correct and that you didn’t have to be African American to have a sense of what’s moral. This establishes the ethos of the text because an outsider’s opinion is coming from well known people, and these people are very strongly supporting the accuracy of the slave writers. The authors’ primary audience, then, is the general public. By having someone from another race vouch for them, they are letting the reader know that not only African Americans believe in what he does, and if someone from the offending race is agreeing, so should everyone else. They are writing to the public so that they will have the knowledge and so that history doesn’t repeat itself.