In light of his description of the manner in which Sophia Auld is corrupted by her role as a slave mistress, one might ask if Douglass’s rhetorical purpose is to reach other black people with his account of slavery or appeal to a white person who might have been able to imagine herself in the place of Sophia. Passages like this one make it seem evident that Douglass is trying to present the horror of slavery not just to those who could relate to captive black people, but also, to those who could relate to the enslavers, and were in a position to abolish the peculiar institution.
Harriet Jacobs describes a man who, upon gaining control of his new wife’s possessions, wastes the money, impregnates one of her slaves twice, separates the black family members from each other and dies after a night of debauchery. With her comment in response to this situation, Jacobs seems to be making an appeal to white readers, much like Douglass did, about the ways in which they were degraded by slavery. She writes “Had it not been for slavery, he would have been a better man, and his wife a happier woman.”
Of Garrison, Stepto writes, “His ‘Preface’ ends, not with a reference to Douglass or his tale, but with an apostrophe very much like one he would use to exhort and arouse an antislavery assembly. With the following cry Garrison hardly guarantees Douglass’s tale, but enters and reenacts his own abolitionist career instead.” (18)
Stepto notes that in light of the tension that developed between Douglass and Garrison in later years, one might be inclined to perceive a battle for authorial control between Douglass’s narrative and this prefatory letter. Yet, with reference to the passage that begins “This Narrative contains many affecting incidents,” Stepto asserts that Garrison “acknowledges the tale’s singular rhetorical power” and “remains a member of Douglass’s audience far more than he assumes the posture of a competing or superior voice” (19).
With regard to this homophones “Freeland” and “free land,” Robert Stepto says “Douglass seems to fashion these passages for both his readership and himself” (20). This suggests that if the original purpose for black writers was to prove their humanity to white people, Douglass transcends this goal, writing for his own purposes instead of just to confront the preconceptions of a skeptical white audience.
Robert Stepto writes that the internal rhyming of “‘saddened’ and ‘gladdened'” “is persuasive because it is pleasant, and because it offers the illusion of a reasoned conclusion” (21).
About this final passage, Stepto writes, “having traveled with Douglass through his account of his life, we arrive in Nantucket in 1841 to hear him speak. We become, along with Mr. Garrison, his audience” (25). Stepto asserts that this last rhetorical move supplants Garrison, reasserting Douglass’s control of his own story.
In light of the fact that Douglass ends his narrative by introducing a poem written by a white minister, Stepto writes, “The tables are clearly reversed: Douglass has not only controlled his personal history, but also” provided authentication for “what is conventionally a white Northerner’s validating text” (26). Lucinda H. MacKethan offers support for Stepto’s point with her own characterization, writing “Here the American slave appropriates the function and strategies of his white guarantor, authenticating the truth and the tone of a poem written by a “northern Methodist preacher” which he then inserts into the text.” Douglass supplants the white people who vouched for him before the start of his narrative by vouching for a white person at the end of his narrative. In both form and content, this literary reversal is a good example of the chiasmus that Henry Louis Gates, Jr. writes about, the “reversal of the master’s attempt to transform a human being into a commodity” (140).
Winifred Morgan writes “As the youthful Douglass realizes when he reads, rereads, and mulls over his copy of The Columbian Orator, the American rhetorical tradition speaks in terms of universal freedom and the rights of all men” (79). Because the passage involves a black man who persuades a white man to emancipate him from slavery, it also emphasizes the connection between writing and speaking, or rhetoric, and a black person’s ability to persuade someone that they’re worthy of human rights.
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).