Question

Both men and women had enormous influence on the debate over slavery that took place during the antebellum period. Choose one man and one woman from the list below, and describe how he or she influenced the debate over slavery. Be sure to include in your descriptions at least one piece of writing (or one speech) by each person that you choose to discuss.
William Lloyd Garrison
Frederick Douglass
Harriet Beecher Stowe
Sojourner Truth
Angelina Grimke

Answer 1

On the one hand, Frederick Douglass was born into slavery in Maryland. He was writer and abolitionist. He escaped from slavery and after that, he started to become a national leader of the abolitionist movement. He was asked to speak about his own story at abolitionist meeting. In his speech “What to the slave is the fourth of July?”, which he gave on July 5th, 1852, Douglass made a difference about Independence between people who are oppressed and who are not:

“What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are, to Him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy-a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States, at this very hour.

Go where you may, search where you will, roam through all the monarchies and despotisms of the Old World, travel through South America, search out every abuse, and when you have found the last, lay your facts by the side of the everyday practices of this nation, and you will say with me, that, for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival.”

On the other hand, Harriet Beecher Stowe was an abolitionist in the 1850s, she was a great influence for African-Americans to have the same rights as any other citizen and to be treated as slaves.

Stowe became aware of the reality he was living when he moved with his family to the city of Cincinnati, Ohio in 1832, whose city had the abolitionist foundations that were decisive for her; becoming aware of slavery. His voice was heard through the written word with the release of the book "Uncle Tom's Cabin", published in 1851, whose book had great success in those years since the hero of the novel was an Afro-American. This book was at the center of public opinion in which the supporters of African-Americans and the opponents of Abolitionism were increasingly confronted that later led to a civil conflict.

On the part of Abraham Lincoln, in a meeting with the novelist in 1862, he assured that she had been the one who wrote the book that unleashed the war.

• "-George, your mood is terrible! -Indeed. But look at me well! Am I not a man like any other? Do not I have face, arms, legs and brain like the others? Why should they treat me so cruelly? Why? I have suffered so much in my life! I have seen my mother and my seven brothers sold. I have seen my master buy one of my sisters, which filled me with joy at the thought that I would have a loved one by my side. But that joy became a great pain when I saw that, at the slightest fault, they ground it to death and I could not do anything to defend it. Then they sold it to other slaves and I never heard from her or the rest of my people. I have suffered beatings, hunger, humiliations. "

Answer 2

Frederick Douglass (1818-1895) influenced the debate over slavery with his abolitionist positions, his rhetoric and his writings. He was born a slave in Maryland and later in his life he became a free man after escaping to New York. He was taught the alphabet by Sofia, the wife of his master Hugh Auld and then he continued studying and learning by himself. During his life he joined several abolitionists societies and his writings, specially A Narrative of The Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, gave him national and international notoriety.

Angelina Grimke's (1805-1879) influence on the debate over slavery consists mainly of her appeal to white women to petition to authorities to end slavery. Her stance on this topic combined abolitionism positions with Christianity. This can be seen in her essay An Appeal to the Christian Women of the South which was published in the American Anti-Slavery Society.