Douglass, who published his account of slavery in 1845, knows that he can appeal to his white Christian audience through their religious beliefs. Therefore, he uses Christianity as common ground to sway his readers against slavery. Since slaveowners used the Bible, especially the exhortation that slaves should obey their masters, to justify slavery and its cruel oppressions, Douglass highlights the difference between religious hypocrisy and true Christianity which practices an ethic of love and mercy.
The slave auctioneer's bell and the church-going bell chime in with each other, and the bitter cries of the heart-broken slave are drowned in the [hypocritical] religious shouts of his pious master.
Douglass insists that no true Christian can support a system as cruel as slavery.
Douglass uses appeals to the common humanity he shares with his white readers. He knows that he is writing to decent people who wish to know more about the slave experience. In a famous passage, he asserts he is as much a human being as any white man, but contrasts his fate with that of his free audience. This is the language of sentiment or pathos, designed to arouse his audience's emotions and stir his readers to action (to take slaves under a "protecting wing"):
You are loosed from your moorings, and are free; I am fast in my chains, and am a slave! You move merrily before the gentle gale, and I sadly before the bloody whip! You are freedom's swift-winged angels, that fly round the world; I am confined in bands of iron! O that I were free! O, that I were on one of your gallant decks, and under your protecting wing!
And as the above passage suggests, Douglass uses vivid descriptive language throughout his work to put white readers in the place of the slave, so they can feel concretely, with all five senses, what it is like to be a slave. These are not abstract, logical arguments, such as those often used to justify slavery, but stories that allowed the reader to identify with the slaves. For example, he describes, not in general terms, but in careful detail the whipping suffered by his Aunt Hester from her master:
Before he commenced whipping Aunt Hester, he took her into the kitchen, and stripped her from neck to waist, leaving her neck, shoulders, and back, entirely naked. He then told her to cross her hands, calling her at the same time a d——d b—-h. After crossing her hands, he tied them with a strong rope, and led her to a stool under a large hook in the joist, put in for the purpose. He made her get upon the stool, and tied her hands to the hook. She now stood fair for his infernal purpose. Her arms were stretched up at their full length, so that she stood upon the ends of her toes. He then said to her, "Now, you d——d b—-h, I'll learn you how to disobey my orders!" and after rolling up his sleeves, he commenced to lay on the heavy cowskin, and soon the warm, red blood (amid heart-rending shrieks from her, and horrid oaths from him) came dripping to the floor.
Douglass understood that his audience valued a woman's modesty and sexual purity and thus points attention to the fact that Hester is an attractive woman with whom the master is probably having sexual relations and also shows the master's brutal disregard for any modesty as he strips her from the waist up to beat her. Douglass knows that this treatment of a woman, from the suggestion of rape to humiliation to inflicting a savage beating, is likely to revolt his audience and create common ground for abolishing slavery.
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