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Fredrick Douglass

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Fredrick Douglas
Although Fredrick Douglass encountered many cruel white masters and their servants, he also met white people who sought to help him and other slaves, which he recounts in his narrative. There were many white people that where stuck in the ways of segregation and believed that slaves and black people alike in general where nothing more than property. There were many more that also believed that slaves deserved to be treated as human beings, and didn’t deserve the treatment that they got. Half of the white people in that time were afraid to speak their minds, because of the fear of what would happen to them, as Sophia stated to Fredrick Douglass that whites could be slaves as well for helping blacks. There was many white people that honestly wanted to help back people but couldn’t because of the fear of what would happen, as in the case of Sophia Auld.
All white people were not for slavery and not all slave masters were cruel to their slaves. In fact, many white people were benevolent that he encountered such as Sophia Auld (before slavery injustice corrupted her) and president Abraham Lincoln, who was against slavery even saying “Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal”. Sophia Auld began as a “kind, caring woman” who owns no slaves to an excessively cruel slave owner. Sophia can be used as a wonderful example Douglass’s argument about slavery. Douglass uses Sophia’s transformation from kind to cruel as a message about the negative effects of slavery on slaveholders and how everyone was effected by it. Upon learning that Douglass could not read or write, Sophia immediately began to teach him the alphabet as well as the spelling of short commonly used words. Many Slaves knew how to read and write simple words

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