Frederick Douglass Essay

Frederick Douglass once said, “If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning” (Think Exist). Frederick Douglass, a man born into slavery overcame numerous obstacles to eventually become a chief abolitionist as well as a diplomat. Frederick Douglass got his hands on a book entitled “The Columbian Orator” and introduced himself to the word abolitionist. This sparked his interest and set off a fiery passion for freedom. Douglass realized that slaveholders used ignorance as a tool to enslave their subjects; slaveholders did not want slaves to have the capacities of reading and writing. If slaves could write, then the world could be exposed to the true nature and brutality of slavery. If slaves could read about freedom and a better life, it would give them the desire to escape, and the slave would become restless and despondent with his situation. In the autobiography The Narrative of the Life Frederick Douglass, Douglass used education and free will to gain his freedom. Frederick Douglass through learning how to read, how to write and how to speak had the ability to inform the outside world about the barbarity of slavery and also set him self free from the abyss and chains of slavery. When Frederick Douglass moved to Baltimore, Sophia Auld taught him his,
A B C s. Frederick stated “Very soon after I went to live with Mr. and Mrs. Auld, she very kindly commenced to teach me the A, B, C.” (Douglass 33). Douglass had started to learn words that contained three or four letters. Just as this started to happen Mr. Auld found out that his wife had been teaching a slave to read. He no longer allowed Mrs. Auld to teach him how to read, in his own words he said, “If you give a nigger an inch, he will take an ell. A nigger should know nothing but to obey his master--to do as he is told to do. Learning