Critique of the hypocrisy of American slavery speech
This paper discusses Frederick Douglass' speech The Hypocrisy of American Slavery. In making his speech, Douglass tackles the three most commonly used excuses justifying slavery: the alleged inhumanity of slaves, the idea that slaves were not entitled to liberty, and the idea that slavery was divinely ordained. However, instead of making his own arguments in favor of these factors, his basic approach was to use existing arguments, acknowledged by slaveholders that supported his statements. First, he showed how the laws established by slaveholding states already recognized the humanity of slaves. Second, he used a combination of the American enthusiasm for liberty and a list of how slavery deprived African Americans of their liberty to demonstrate that the deprivation of liberty that came with slavery was morally wrong. Finally, he approached the third argument that people made in support of slavery, which was that slavery was divinely inspired. However, Douglass failed to flesh out this argument. He simply made the statement that what was inhuman could not be divine.