Escape me, Slavery!

“Escape me! Slavery!” In this passage Fredrick Duouglass recounts his emotions on escaping slavery and arriving in New York in 1838, by his extraordinary use of rhetorical devices. This passage gives the reader a brief history of the life of a slave living in the days when slavery was not outlawed, but instead, looked upon as a sign of wealth. In many passages the author tends to give a 1 sentence synopsis of the proceeding work of …

…the happiness when a slave finally becomes a free man, and the constant fear of being “drug back into the pit of lions.” The use of syntax brought alive the selection with the use of dashes, and the tone of the author changes throughout the passage, as being exuberant about being free, yet having the mild sense of fear of being caught, and sent back to being a slave and leaving the “blessedness of freedom.”