Frederick Douglass and Benjamin Franklin are both American heroes, and yet the obvious differences between them abound. How, then, can both men be portrayed with such comparable amounts of reverence? Though they may have lived their lives in different ways, Douglass and Franklin both followed a certain pathway of hard work to gain their status.
In their rise from obscurity to fame, Frederick Douglass and Benjamin Franklin had lowly starts to their respective journeys. Both men were born to a humble beginning without much opportunity for climbing the ladder to reach a higher status. Comparably, Franklin had the more favorable life, however. His was a merchant-class family with parents that cared for their children, but since Benjamin was the fifteenth of seventeen offspring, he frequently had to rely on his own devices growing up. Frederick Douglass, of course, was born a mulatto slave with a black field hand as a mother, whom he was never close to. In fact, he only saw her a handful of times before she died. Though he did not know who his white father was, there was much talk about the master being his father and Douglass suspects that his master sold him as a result to avoid unnecessary conflict with his wife. Douglass had a number of masters, some kinder than others, and was a witness to many whippings from masters and overseers and was sometimes the victim himself. In time, neither man was satisfied with his poor condition and frequently thought of a means to a better life.
Both of these American heroes knew that hard work and self-motivation were the keys to a more promising future. Along the road, they found education to be an important tool, as well. Franklin showed an early predisposition toward being a scholar and disliked his father's trade of candle making, so he was sent to work as a printer's apprentice under his uncle. This allowed him to feed his appetite for reading and he modeled his own writing style after the professional authors whose works he read.