Slavery

In “Learning to Read and Write,” Frederick Douglass explains his early experiences with reading and writing. He was a slave growing up and educating a slave at that time was looked down upon and thought to be foolish. Douglass states in his piece that whites at the time thought “education and slavery were incompatible with each other” (149). Education would give slaves a strong purpose to revolt over their white oppressors.

Not all whites at the time had this attitude regarding the treatment of slaves. Douglass’ mistress at first thought that slaves should have a right to education like all people, so she taught Douglass the alphabet and the basics of reading and becoming literate. Douglass states that she was a “kind and tender-hearted woman” and she treated him as “she supposed one human being ought to treat another” (148).

Slavery did not become hard on Douglass’ mistress until she succumbed to peer pressure and the social tendencies of the time period. She started to see the education of Douglass as wrong. The evils of slavery transformed her from a caring and nice woman to a cold and harsh woman. Douglass states that slavery was as “injurious to her” as it was to him (148). Slavery, through social pressure and pressure from her husband, fundamentally changed her personality. Douglass gives an example of her new personality. If she caught Douglass reading the newspaper, she would become extremely angry and take away the paper. He stated the manner in which she did this “fully revealed her apprehension” (148). She did not want to treat him this way but she felt an obligation to her husband and the society of which she was a part of. She even became a harsher punisher than her husband.

The situation and thinking of the time that surrounded her did not match up with her values. They were actually the complete opposite. She was born into an era in which she might not have particularly belonged to and this was extremely hard on her. She knows that she laid the foundations for Douglass’ education and literacy and it was natural for him to want to learn more, but she stifled his dreams of educating himself. She feels apprehension for preventing his learning because she knows that she is directly responsible for his drive to learn and become literate.