Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth: Voices for Freedom

Introduction

Sojourner Truth is perhaps best known as one of the key figures of the Underground Railroad and the Abolitionist movement, but she was also an important participant in the Union Army's food preparation for soldier units during the Civil War, and she holds a prominent place in the history of the women's rights movement. On the day she delivered her famous speech at a Women's Rights Convention in Ohio in 1851 — about ten years before the Civil War — there were those in the audience who would rather she had not spoken. Because she was so strongly identified with the movement to free the enslaved, some feared she would dilute the conference's central themes: women's rights, women's suffrage, and other issues relating to a woman's place in nineteenth-century America.

Sojourner Truth was tall, had a deep voice, and was a commanding presence. She never for a moment doubted herself, her mission, or her ability to move others in the direction she wished them to go. In her speech — one she had likely delivered more than once or twice during her career — she made several pointed remarks at the expense of a previous speaker who had argued that women are the weaker sex, that they need help negotiating mud puddles and getting into carriages. That argument set her up perfectly for what followed.

Sojourner Truth and the Women's Rights Convention

Using the power of repetition and the charm of colloquial language, Truth mesmerized her audience. "Look at me! Look at my arm! I have plowed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me!" she declared. She then cleverly played to the crowd, feigning uncertainty while drawing listeners in. "What's this they call it?" she asked rhetorically, pointing to her head. Someone in the audience whispered "intellect," and at that moment she had their full attention. She pressed on to note that while Jesus Christ was indeed a man, "where did your Christ come from?" — "From God and a woman." It was a classic and persuasive conclusion to her argument.

While no precise record exists of how many freedom-seekers were guided to safety by Sojourner Truth, the number was doubtless in the hundreds, if not thousands. She stands forever as a powerful advocate for freedom and fairness, and the fact that she was a woman — fighting on multiple fronts simultaneously — will not be forgotten.

Truth's Rhetorical Strategies

Frederick Douglass was nothing short of brilliant. His speeches were powerful, and his writing was extraordinarily skillful — especially given that he was born into slavery and taught himself much of what he knew. His narrative prose is polished and, at times, deliberately understated, which only adds force to what he describes. Because readers approach the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass already knowing they are reading the work of a celebrated African American who was once enslaved, the power of the text operates on both cultural and historical levels. Add to that the quality of the writing itself, and Douglass's work takes on an even more dramatic resonance.

He explains in relatively calm narrative that he witnessed an overseer named Mr. Plummer cut and slash the women's heads, and that his master, Anthony, took great pleasure in whipping enslaved people. But then, with the reader's attention fully secured, he continues: "I have often been awakened at the dawn of the day by the most heart-rending shrieks of an own aunt of mine, who he used to tie up to a joist, and whip upon her naked back till she was literally covered with blood." To convey the depth of the culture of brutality he survived, Douglass added that "no words, no tears, no prayers, from his gory victim, seemed to move his iron heart from its bloody purpose" — since "the louder she screamed, the harder he whipped."

Frederick Douglass: Slave, Writer, and Orator

Both Douglass and Truth are giants in the history of this nation. Though Douglass arguably deserves recognition as a towering figure in American literature as well as history, that formal recognition has been slow in coming. Any student who reads his scholarly, descriptive, and smoothly presented narrative — whether from a historical or literary perspective — will recognize that this man deserves far greater acknowledgment than he has received. His writings are required reading in most Black History courses, but they should equally be required in every American History class, without exception.