Crux: Frances Smith Foster

In Witnessing Slavery, Frances Smith Foster writes “Moses Grandy attributed the lack of permanent recognition of a slave’s birth to the attitude of the master who considers slaves as chattel and to the denial to slaves of the information with which they could calculate the anniversaries of their existence.”

With regard to the Columbian Orator, Frances Smith Foster indicates that Douglass’s study of this text influenced his development and informed his experience as a public speaker so that “When he wrote his narrative, it was heavily influenced by his training in rhetoric” (56).