The Ethical Voice of a Slave

Slavery is probably the gloomiest page in human history,full of the nonhuman actions of white slaveholders and the misery of African Americans.After escaping from slavery successfully,Frederick Douglass present the inhumanity of such a world in"Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass."The work is generally held as one of the most famous narratives of former slaves during the same period.Basing on a close discussion of the work,this paper would try to figure out what strategies Douglass has used to build the authenticity of his narration.     

The plain style in early anti-slavery discourse: Reassessing the rhetorical beginnings of Quaker and Puritan advocacy

The two earliest public protests against slavery in British North America—the Germantown Quakers’ petition and Samuel Sewall’s The Selling of Joseph—are primarily discussed as rhetorical failures and have been largely reduced to entries on an anti-slavery timeline. The texts are further diminished for their lack of intensity compared with later abolitionist discourses. This essay reassesses these germinal protests as dynamic texts that engage and challenge two distinct conceptualizations of the plain style. In so doing, the texts and the plain style are both given renewed significance in the rhetorical history of the anti-slavery movement.