ity and the expression of personal vision: “Douglass’ treatment of slavery in the Narrative may be almost as much the revelation of a personality as it is the description of an institution.” Frederick Douglass had the political perspective in mind when in the final paragraph he wrote, “From that time [the time of his first major oration] until now; I have been engaged in pleading the cause of my brethren.” Gibson did not believe that it was not a surprise that the public dimension should call attention to itself since every word of the Narrative related to it.# Douglass was heavily engaged in the fight to end slavery; the abolitionist crusade endowed Douglass with moral justification similar to that which evangelicals had previously used.#The private dimension of the Narrative contained Douglass’s specific and personal response to and perceptions of his experiences. Douglass, like every other human being, is a unique person he was an unusually intelligent and talented man who related to experiences in his own way. For example, lots of slaves were separated from their mothers at an early age, but that it happened specifically to Douglass and its meaning was made clear to the audience by his articulation of that fact. Throughout the autobiography personal experiences of slavery were used to lend authority to whatever observations or judgments were being made about the abstraction “slavery”. Douglass used personal experiences even when it was not clear whether he witnessed an event or heard of it. Two examples were his wife’s cousin’s killing or the old man who was killed while fishing for oysters. The fact that Douglass perceived them as actual lends them the weight of fact. Most of the events in the Narrative are shown as direct experienced. That opened the door for debate about how factual the work is however the two focuses work together to deal with the problem. &#...
