African American History term paper

A hot problem of social life was touched in the literature of the United States in the XIX century, an issue of slavery. Not by chance that literature called abolitionist was so extensive and emotionally incandescent and had such a powerful impact on the minds of Americans.
The authors of works about slaves and slave-owners almost never raised the issue of the material, domestic shortcomings of slave system. They were interested in the moral foundations of human consciousness: the first time they declared loudly about the corrupting influence of legalized slavery, and slaves, and slaveholders. Sale of Negroes and the disintegration of their families did not contribute to strengthening the morality, complete dependence on the hosts created a breeding ground for lies and hypocrisy. At the same time, the permissibility of the use of physical punishment has developed a slave-owner a sense of cruelty, they had unlimited power over a black owned and were entitled to dispose of the lives of their slaves.
This idea dominated in the Poetry of John Greenleaf Whittier 1833-1860 period (“Songs of Labor”, “languished in the chains our brothers”, etc), the prose of Richard Hildreth (“The White Slave, or Memoirs of a fugitive,” 1852), Harriet Beecher Stowe (“Uncle Tom’s Cabin”, 1952, “Dred, a story about the cursed bog”, 1856) and many other works. Also autobiographies of Phillips, G. Wilson, U. Brown, F. Douglass have a special place that were written in the genre of “slave narrative”, that developed in the first half of the XIX century in the African-American literature.
At the root of the genre was a book by O. Equiano “The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African. Written by himself “published in 1789. Equiano in his two-volume book went to his predecessors B. Hammon (1760), John A. Yu Gronoso (1772), J. Marranta (1785), O. Kyugoano (1787), absorbed their traditions, especially their prose , developed and reinterpreted them,
connected with the poetics of African mythology and folklore.
In this book – the very early work written in a slave narrative genre – Equiano tells about his birthplace, the horrors and cruelties of their captivity, and slavery in the West Indies. Converted to Christianity, Equiano laments the cruel “non-Christian” treatment of him – this motiv was in the centre of the whole works of African-American authors.
In the opening “narration” addressed to the British Parliament, which was supposed to debate on the slave trade (To the Lords Spiritual and Temporal, and the Commons of the Parlament of Great Britain), Equiano formulates the main purpose of the book – “to arouse a sense of compassion for disasters that brought the slave to my compatriots, “to help my fellow sufferers”. (Equiano, 2002)
Confessions of a former slave has very important factual, documentary material, revealing the lives of slaves: the shocking details of travel on the slave ship across the Atlantic to America and lived through eleven adolescents; the sale of slaves at auction, the inhumane treatment of slaves on a plantation in Virginia, work on sugar plantations in the West Indies, the powerlessness of slaves – men, women and children. Equiano recalls its own decade of experience of life in bondage to something that was a witness (“I remember,” I’ve seen, “I know, much less – “I was told”), introduces a set of tragic episodes from the life of slaves, indicating real names of victims and their tormentors, c accurate indication of time and place where these events occurred, denounced the legislation, which serves the slave system.
“A fascinating story about life Olauda Equiano…”, has become a part of an extremely important historical, geographical, sociological and cultural phenomenon “The Black Atlantic.” (Gilroy 1993)
Also important works devoted to the life of slaves, and relations in slave society were works of William Wells Brown and Frederick Douglass. In 1845 year was published a brilliant book “The Story of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American slave” and the voice of F. Douglass for a long time – until the beginning of XX century – has remained almost the only distinctly African-American voice in literature of the country. (Peabody 1991)