My Bondage And My Freedom by Frederick Douglass

HOW I LEARNED TO READ--MY MISTRESS--HER SLAVEHOLDING DUTIES--THEIR DEPLORABLE EFFECTS UPON HER ORIGINALLY NOBLE NATURE--THE CONFLICT IN HER MIND--HER FINAL OPPOSITION TO MY LEARNING TO READ--TOO LATE--SHE HAD GIVEN ME THE INCH, I WAS RESOLVED TO TAKE THE ELL--HOW I PURSUED MY EDUCATION--MY TUTORS--HOW I COMPENSATED THEM--WHAT PROGRESS I MADE--SLAVERY--WHAT I HEARD SAID ABOUT IT--THIRTEEN YEARS OLD--THE _Columbian Orator_--A RICH SCENE--A DIALOGUE--SPEECHES OF CHATHAM, SHERIDAN, PITT AND FOX--KNOWLEDGE EVER INCREASING--MY EYES OPENED--LIBERTY--HOW I PINED FOR IT--MY SADNESS--THE DISSATISFACTION OF MY POOR MISTRESS--MY HATRED OF SLAVERY--ONE UPAS TREE OVERSHADOWED US BOTH.

I lived in the family of Master Hugh, at Baltimore, seven years, during which time--as the almanac makers say of the weather--my condition was variable. The most interesting feature of my history here, was my learning to read and write, under somewhat marked disadvantages. In attaining this knowledge, I was compelled to resort to indirections by no means congenial to my nature, and which were really humiliating to me. My mistress--who, as the reader has already seen, had begun to teach me was suddenly checked in her benevolent design, by the strong advice of her husband. In faithful compliance with this advice, the good lady had not only ceased to instruct me, herself, but had set her face as a flint against my learning to read by any means. It is due, however, to my mistress to say, that she did not adopt this course in all its stringency at the first. She either thought it unnecessary, or she lacked the depravity indispensable to shutting me up in mental darkness. It was, at least, necessary for her to have some training, and some hardening, in the exercise of the slaveholder's prerogative, to make her equal to forgetting my human nature and character, and to treating me as a thing destitute of a moral or an intellectual nature. Mrs. Auld--my mistress--was, as I have said, a most kind and tender-hearted woman; and, in the humanity of her heart, and the simplicity of her mind, she set out, when I first went to live with her, to treat me as she supposed one human being ought to treat another.