Letter from Frederick Douglass

Letters of an Ex-Slave

Freedom is a very loose term which is interpreted differently by people of diverse heritage and culture. In the 1800’s and earlier it was believed by some that it was their “freedom” to be able to buy and sell fellow mankind on an open market, to be used as property for the betterment of the slaveholder’s own fortune. In this essay I will look at a letter from Frederick Douglass, an ex-slave, to Thomas Auld, his former master. The correspondence was in the form of an open public letter to Auld on the tenth anniversary of Douglass’ abolition. The letter could be considered an “autoethnographic text” which Mary Louise Pratt defines in her essay, Arts of the Contact Zone, “a text in which people undertake to describe themselves in ways that engage with representations others have made of them” (519). I will analyze the different points that make this unique piece of literature an art of the contact zone.

Douglass begins his letter by describing the duos’