rm of many campaigners who previously attacked the slaveowners as barbaric. Eager to hear his ideas, many crowds endured standing room only crowds when Douglass read from his first autobiography at meetings. Douglass deserves credit for the massive change in the public movement from fighting other humans to fighting an institution’s corruption. Five years after the publication of Narrative of the Life, Harriet Beecher Stowe—a good friend of Douglass—also blamed the evils of the institution in her fictional book, Uncle Tom’s Cabin. An event remarkably similar to one which Douglass describes in his autobiography happens to the title character. Douglass and Uncle Tom’s usually kind owners become so desperate for money, they sell both men down river, to places where the oppression worsens every day. “…I was made to drink the bitterest dregs of slavery” (Autobiographies 58). Douglass recounts how his master could not keep him any longer. Both events happen because of slavery’s corrupting qualities. Also, both books emphasize the inevitability of such corruption occurring. Douglass and St. Clare, a slaveowner in the novel, speak out against “the thing itself” (“Stowe”). Although Stowe’s work drew much more attention from the general public, the ideas she expressed came directly from Frederick Douglass’s first autobiography. His creative take on the psychological effects of slavery also influenced other writers. After publishing Narrative of the Life, the parents of the Mark Twain’s wife, Livy Langdon, approached him. The book’s ideas appealed to them, and the wealthy Langdons helped fund Douglass’s trip abroad. Upon returning, Douglass and Twain became acquaintances, and for the next three decades, shared ideas. During this time, Twain wrote The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, his most famous work. The book expressed Twain’s reluc...
