Slave narratives were largely written to convince white northerners (as well as some Europeans) that slavery was an abomination and should be abolished. For example, The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, published in 1845, has a preface written by William Lloyd Garrison, abolitionist editor of The Liberator, and a letter written by Wendell Phillips. The purpose of these introductions is to let the white northern audiences know that Frederick Douglass is...
Slave narratives were largely written to convince white northerners (as well as some Europeans) that slavery was an abomination and should be abolished. For example, The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, published in 1845, has a preface written by William Lloyd Garrison, abolitionist editor of The Liberator, and a letter written by Wendell Phillips. The purpose of these introductions is to let the white northern audiences know that Frederick Douglass is really a slave and that he really wrote the narrative (as many critics contended a slave couldn't have had the literacy skills to write such an eloquent book). Garrison recounts having heard Douglass speak at an abolitionist convention. Garrison writes, "I rose, and declared that Patrick Henry, of revolutionary fame, never made a speech more eloquent in the cause of liberty, than the one we had just listened to from the lips of that hunted fugitive" (page viii). In many ways, Garrison, as a white man, had to tell the white audience that they should listen to Douglass, and he had to justify the idea that a freed slave could be just as well spoken as a white man, even the famous Patrick Henry. Other slave narratives, including Solomon Northup's Twelve Years a Slave (1853), were also intended for white audiences, and they were intended to convince northern whites that the justifications that southerns made for slavery were wrong. Many slave narratives sold a great number of copies in the north.
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