I will be posting here on my blog throughout (I hope!) our reading of
The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. I want you to keep up with these posts, as I think they will aid your understanding of the finer points of Douglass's text.
First of all, I want to "back-up" a bit and point out something about the reading you have been doing over the past ten days ...
You have been reading
primary source documents in my class, at least insofar as you completed the
"Representing Slavery Project." The "document sets" you read from the Rochester Libraries are all
primary sources -- that is they are original historical documents, written by people who experienced the events firsthand. F. Douglass's
Narrative is a primary source too. By contrast, for instance,
your history textbook is, mostly, a secondary source -- that is one that is written by experts discussing events after the fact. When you study history, these distinctions are important to your full understanding of the readings. I have a feeling that your U.S. history teachers will be talking more and more about this.
Just as an interesting example of the power of
primary sources and the wealth of their scope, consider one of the questions we have before us: how did Southern politicians and "statesmen" (to use F. Douglass's word) justify slavery? We have discussed this briefly in class (see again end note 15 in our edition of the
Narrative), and we will continue to look at the question, yes. But
here's an interesting
primary source (published in 1856) that presents justification for enslaving African Americans. If you skim just the first few pages, you will recognize the Biblical argument, erroneously founded on Genesis. Hard to believe, right?
Just to reiterate from our discussion on Friday, Southern slaveholders believed that, based on
Genesis 9:18-27 , Caanan and
all of the children of Caanan as well as (by extension for some reason) his nieces and nephews were
rightfully enslaved. We will continue to discuss this Southern "argument" for the next few days and weeks ...
I want to also remind you about our "learning target" for last Friday: "I can recognize a common inductive pattern (of F. Douglass's)." So, to remind you, Douglass begins his narrative (identically like all "slave narratives") with a short discussion of his origins, insofar as he knows them. Soon, he shares some difficult revelations about himself -- namely that his mother was black but his father was white. Then, he goes on to explain how he is the kind of child/person, one of mixed race heritage, who could bring down slavery. Douglass clarifies that Southerns could not possibly continue support the enslavement of Caanan's progeny, especially since so many now are mixed with generations of white blood. I tried to illustrate Douglass's "inductive pattern"
with a diagram on the white board. Keep in mind that "inductive" means to reason from the
specific to the
general -- that is from something small to something very large. (In fairness, yes, inductive reasoning can also be deeply flawed, especially in the case of stereotyping.)
