Frederick Douglass was a speaker and writer for the abolitionist movement. He was born into slavery and knows from personal experience how the institution dehumanizes everyone involved. His master's wife taught him the alphabet and so Douglass learned to write and speak against slavery. His An Account of the Life of Fredrick Douglass was an attempt to describe the peculiar institution of slavery without shocking the sensibilities of his readers. To achieve this Douglass must convince his audience to relate and identify with his life as a slave. He incorporated the same exploitative techniques used in the sentimental novel. This was a style of 18th-century European novel that engaged readers' emotions to gain supporters for a particular cause. Frederick Douglass's account of the life of Frederick Douglass appealed to the sensibilities of his readers by evoking emotions of sympathy and compassion causing them to identify with slavery and label it as unnatural. Fredrick Douglass throughout the novel describes the horrific actions that maintain the institution of slavery. Separating a child from his mother means he was never properly raised. He never knew his mother and did not build the loving bond that every human child needs to grow up emotionally healthy. Having never enjoyed, to any considerable degree, her reassuring presence, her tender and watchful care, I received the news of [my mother's] death with much the same emotions I probably should have felt at the death of a stranger. (Douglass 2) ...... middle of paper ...... family structure. The acquired slave system required slave masters to impose physiological and psychological maintenance to control slaves. One way to uphold the social order was to deprive slaves of the right to know who they were and where they came from. Ultimately preventing slaves from gaining a sense of self-fulfillment or the pursuit of happiness. Slavery as an institution broke all family ties, induced extreme suffering, and emphasized inhumanity at its core. Slavery had an emotional impact on everyone involved, and its abolition benefited all of American society.