Harriet Jacobs and Frederick Douglass

When life experiences are recorded, they can sometimes be brought back alive in later times to change the lives of others. Experiences can be very good devices for revealing the truth and persuading people to live a certain way. Harriet Jacobs and Frederick Douglass accomplished this through their novels Incidents of a slave girl and Life of Frederick Douglass, an American slave. Though they have differing struggles, these two authors come together in the sense that they are writing to argue the fact that white Americans are blinded to what really goes on within a plantation. They both establish ethos through the validation of their stories by white authors.
“Again we have known you long, and can put the most entire confidence in your truth” (Wendell Phillips). The readers, who were predominantly white, were reassured that the text that they were going to read was real and had truths within it. It would have been very hard for them to accept these novels if they did not have a stamp of approval on it by a white reader. They would have felt that it was not anything of value and would have completely disregarded it. In the 1800s, there was a constant debate on whether slavery was justifiable or not. Most white civilians were constantly being bombarded with the idea that slaves lived a happy life. These authors attempted to overturn these ideas by telling their life stories. Because it definitely would have been easy to lie and twist events, they had to have people on their side that knew their situations to get their book published so that the truth could be known. This person had to have dwelled in the intellectual society and have a good reputation. This individual had to have known how sensible and brilliant the author was, because if they were smart themselves, they would not just let any piece of writing be published. They had to have evaluated it and did their research to make sure everything was right. They are establishing ethos, because they are very responsible and they know that if they are going to be represented, it will have to be on something of value and not just some piece of garbage. Pushing the idea of ethos even farther, these authors did not have to let their personal lives out like they did, they could have just sat back and not speak up for what they believed. This would have made them bad civilians with no backbone; instead, they decided to speak up, which makes them more respectable.

To conclude, your life experience can only be used as a learning tool for others if you let it be known. If you sit back and endure every piece of injustice that is thrown at you, you will never survive in this world. You will deteriorate both physically and mentally and die in vain, because you have not made a difference in anybody’s life. You will have nothing to be proud of yourself about.