zed this complex work, Donald B. Gibson wrote about Douglass’s dual focus in his writing about how he had a public and social focus and a personal focus and private. The public and social focus was to correct the moral and political ills that slavery brought. While the personal and private focused on Douglass’s own thoughts, feelings, reactions, and emotions. The social focus was what presented the first twenty-one years of Douglass’s life in a way that allowed it to serve as a weapon for abolitionism. William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips recognized the public perspective, both of which wrote prefatory material to the Narrative. In their prefatory material they both wrote about how brave Douglass was for coming forward and telling his story and its affect on the fight to end slavery.# The autobiography was written before Douglass’s break with Garrison and his followers the Garrisonians so he did have some influcence on Douglass’s style. That influence can be seen in some of Douglass’s positions on churches in America, the U.S. Constitution, political parties, and personal complicity with slaveholding. Since Douglass did write the book himself the influence is no where near as strong as it was with the narratives that were “ghostwritten”. Garrison said, “I am confident that it is essentially true in all its statements; that nothing has been set down in malice, nothing exaggerated, nothing drawn from the imagination; that comes short of the reality, rather than overstates a single fact in regard to SLAVERY AS IT IS.”# Some earlier twentieth-century scholars such Vernon Loggins and Benjamin Quarles also commented similarly on the book. Loggins believed that Douglass’s “sole purpose in writing his autobiography was to produce antislavery propaganda.” Quarles addressed whether Douglass’s facts can be trusted, stressed the issue of subjectiv...
