Frederick Douglass My Package And My Freedom Analysis

Frederick Douglass, a former slave and one of America’s greatest abolitionists, wrote My Bondage and My Freedom, an autobiography, in order to prove he was a slave before being an an incredible orator. In this excerpt, Douglass learns to read at the age of thirteen despite difficulties. Mrs. Auld, Douglass’s former slave owner, initially thinks Douglass deserves to be able to read like her son, Tommy. On page 523, it says, “It was no easy matter to induce her to think and to feel that the curly-headed boy, who stood by her side, and even leaned on her lap; who was loved by little Tommy, and who loved little Tommy in turn; sustained to her only the relation of a chattel.” Mrs. Auld also becomes “violent in her opposition” to Douglass’s reading because her husband put her in “check” for teaching Douglass how to read (Douglass 521, 523). Douglass said, “My mistress – who had begun to teach me – was suddenly checked in her benevolent (kindly) design, by the strong advice of her husband. In faithful compliance with this advice, the good lady had not only ceased to instruct me...” (521). Douglass appeals to the reader’s sense of …show more content…
On page 525, Douglass states, “...I had made enough money to buy what was then a very popular schoolbook, the Columbian Orator.” Reading the Columbian Orator transforms Douglass from “light-hearted” to “wretched and gloomy” by opening his eyes to the true horrors of his condition as a slave (526). Douglass wrote, “I was no longer the light-hearted, gleesome boy, full of mirth and play, as when I landed first in Baltimore... This knowledge had opened my eyes… I was wretched and gloomy…” (Douglass 526). Douglass appeals to the reader’s sense of sympathy because the reader has experience with being gleeful and giddy to being depressed and discontent with the world they live in and empathize with