Once he is free, Douglass’s literacy lets him advance the abolitionist cause far more than he could without the ability to read and write. The information that Douglass encounters through literacy broadens his understanding of the dehumanizing institution of slavery and the slaveholders’ strategies for promoting the ignorance of their slaves, and strengthens his desire to emancipate himself. However, Douglass becomes dedicated to educating himself and his fellow slaves because he sees it as a route to longer-term empowerment. Even Douglass, upon first reading about the full nature and extent of slavery, loses the little hope he had for bettering his circumstances. This way, slaves come to believe that they cannot handle an independent existence. Sinister slave owners contrive situations that force slaves to develop a distorted understanding of the nature of freedom. Masters encourage slaves to revel and drink excessively during their annual Christmas holidays, so that the slaves sicken themselves when left to their own devices and come to think of themselves as unable to be responsible for themselves.
The institution of slavery seems to depend on keeping slaves as unenlightened as possible. When Hugh Auld finds his wife, Sophia, teaching Frederick how to write, he demands that she stop, saying that “learning would spoil the best nigger in the world.” He must be able to detect no inconsistencies in slavery he must be made to feel that slavery is right and he can be brought to that only when he ceases to be a man.” Throughout his experience as a slave, Douglass finds that masters consistently seek to deprive their slaves of knowledge, in order to crush slaves’ wills to be free, or to make it so that the slaves cannot even comprehend of being free. It is necessary to darken his moral and mental vision, and, as far as possible, to annihilate the power of reason.
Douglass writes, “I have found that, to make a contented slave, it is necessary to make a thoughtless one.
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