What is the recipe for obedience? Ingredients to the bitter-sweet dish are numerous, but one is most certainly required – education, or lack thereof. In his autobiography, Frederick Douglass shed light on slavery in the United States in the 19th century. His tale reveals just how crucial education is in fostering a liberal mentality. In his pursuit of knowledge, Douglass taught himself to read and write, helped other enslaved people become literate, and escaped slavery to become the face of the abolitionist movement in the US. Douglass’s story proves that the prohibition of learning for slaves was necessary to perpetuate slavery and that escaping the chains of ignorance meant the eventual end of this vicious cycle.
Mrs. Auld, his mistress, taught Douglass the alphabet. Shortly, her willingness to instruct him quickly ceased at her husband’s command. Mr. Auld asserted that education would make a slave unfit for his position. Auld declared that giving a slave an inch would only result in him taking an ell. As it turned out, instructing the alphabet to Douglass was an inch, and “no precaution could prevent him from taking the ell” (Douglass 48). This occasion had revealed to Douglass and Mrs. Auld that education and slavery are incompatible entities that shall never entwine. This occasion had made Frederick’s quest for knowledge imminent.
In the absence of a permanent teacher, Douglass sought help wherever he could find it. He turned all connections with little boys on the street into teaching opportunities, and when he could consistently read, it was time for the most revelatory book of his childhood. “The Columbian Orator,” a book he picked up for only five cents, appropriately equipped him to deal with pro-enslavement arguments. He read this book on every occasion he could, taking particular interest in the dialogue between a master and his slave. This conversation represented the slave as intelligent and well-educated on the matter of enslavement, allowing him to “dispose of the whole argument on behalf of slavery” (Douglass 49-50).
Douglass drew great inspiration from the dialogues in the book. He states that these texts granted him vocabulary to express the thoughts and attitudes he was so desperate to utter (Douglass 50). Frederick attributes his sense of “vindication for human rights” and “denunciation of slavery” to the book, as well as the realization that truth can conquer even a slaveholder’s conscience (Douglass 50). The texts he absorbed were genuinely empowering, and yet he felt no relief.
Extensive reading led Douglass from a mental prison, but the realization of his condition made him miserable. Contempt for slaveholders grew in proportion to his rapidly accumulating knowledge. Although he cherished his mistress deeply for the care she expressed for him earlier, the abuse he endured and the awareness he gained from reading could not make him unsee the injustice she complied with. In his autobiography, Douglass expresses the dissonance of not knowing whether the knowledge he obtained was a curse or a blessing (50). He talks in length about his reoccurring oppressing thoughts connected to his condition: “I often found myself regretting my own existence and wishing myself dead; and but for the hope of being free, I have no doubt but that I should have killed myself” (Douglass 51). Despite suicidal calls and overwhelming despair, Douglass clung to the dream of freedom and kept researching.
Douglass’s thoughts of escape strengthened each day he spent as a slave. After learning the word abolition, training himself to write, changing masters, and making a failed attempt at escape, he finally broke free on September 3, 1838. Frederick’s road to freedom was paved with blood and misery. He suffered horrible mental and physical abuse, but the hope of freedom guided him nonetheless. This could not have happened if not for Mrs. Auld giving him “an inch” back in the day. As Douglass himself put it, “you shall see how a slave was made a man” (72). First, he learned how to read, and then he understood his condition. Education has given him hope to stand up for himself and equipped him with a mentality of a free man, which invited personal growth and eventual liberty.
The story of Frederick Douglass, How a Slave Was Made a Man, is a tale of how freedom follows knowledge. In his childhood, Douglass realized that proper education and slavery are mutually exclusive, as the latter cannot be sustained if the former is provided to its subjects. Douglass’s story perfectly illustrates why slaveholders had to keep their servants in involuntary ignorance. If they cannot think for themselves, they cannot be free. Douglass’s self-education inspired him to break out of servitude and liberate his brethren in misfortune. Firstly, he was taught the basics; secondly, he taught himself to be free. He was given an inch and took an ell, and his freedom followed.
Work Cited
Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave: Written by Himself. FORGOTTEN BOOKS, 2021.