Essay on African American History

“The story about the life of Frederick Douglass, an American slave” was published the year before as the author, a runaway slave Frederick Bailey, was bought by his admirers, and for ten years before the abolition of slavery in the country. The books style was traditional for the African-American literature of the XIX century, and the complex of thoughts, language and style in which the idea was expressed, overturned the overall opinion about the thoughts and feelings of black slaves, their attitudes to the hosts and all the whites, on the institution itself slavery. 125 pages of narration are artless and objective, but full of internal energy and a passionate protest against the slave status of the human person in the American States – all this made the book more than just an autobiography. It was a sermon on how slavery corrupts the human spirit and denies freedom and slave and slave owner. It was F. Douglass who first expressed the idea, then taken up by the whole abolitionist literature.
Another very similar story of the life and relations of slaves was a book of Harriet Jacob, who’s story of life is also an example of life and treatment of slaves in society. Harriet Jacob was born as a slave in North Carolina, her mistress taught Harriet to read and write, and after her death, Jacob was sold to the white master. She ran away and fled in terror at the thought that she might be caught, punished and again turn into slavery, she spent nearly 7 years in the city of his master, sitting cooped up in a tiny room in the attic of her grandmother. Jacob later became friends with Amy Post, abolitionist and feminist, who persuaded her to write a story about her life. Thus was written the book “Incidents in the life of a slave girl” which was published under the pseudonym “Linda Brent” in 1861. It candidly described and condemned the sexual exploitation of black slaves. (Andrews 2004)
Book of Jacob, also as the book of Douglas, have begun a special genre of the stories about the life of black slaves, rising to creativity of Olaudaha Equiano in the colonial period.
All these works prove the claim that the life of slaves was very hard, show the horror of slavery, the cruelty of slave-owners.

Works cited
Andrews, W. “Harriet A. Jacobs: A biography”. http://docsouth.unc.edu
Equiano, O. “The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African. Written by Himself”. The Classic Slave Narratives. New York, 2002. Pp. 15 – 247.
Gilroy, P. “The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness”. London & New York: Verso, 1993.
Peabody, E. “Narratives of Fugitive Slaves”. Critical Essays on Frederick Douglass. ed. by W. L. Andrews. Boston, Mass., 1991. Pp. 24–27.