Both use the same means to achieve a different end. For example, race relations facilitated a significant role in abolishing slavery for both authors. For Douglass, slaves were often treated worse than farm animals. He expresses the need to assert human rights as a dire issue. Whippings were distributed generously, even with a lack of foundation. This was meant as a form of mental control over younger slave children so as to witness the omnipotent power of the slave owner. It was also meant to assert supremacy and break the personality, identity, or sense of self of the victim. Such physical cruelty plays on the psyche which must create an explanation for the pain: victims feel that they are truly unworthy. In addition to a shattered soul slaves had little left, let alone each other. The need to establish importance and find someone or something that was lower than they would cause quarrels among each other. They would argue over whose master was the kindest, smartest, or richest. .
On the contrary, Stowe caters to the white ego. Her characters with "white blood" presume the least hardship and are more intelligent, namely George and Eliza. George undertakes the role of a mastermind and gallant man in his runaway venture. He easily assimilates with the white race as Eliza is one of the few slaves with beauty and mannerisms lacking the uncultured pretenses the rest of the slaves have. To placate her Southern plantation owners, Stowe has two generous slave owning families take in Tom, and for the sake of abolition propaganda, she places Tom under a particularly brutal ownership later on. Like Douglass, Stowe offers incidents of physical savageness inflicted upon slaves by their owners. It is if she means to say artfully," There are more generous slave owners than not, but it is those inhumane few like Simon Legree that make slavery go away altogether a must. We are not all bad "they are.
