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Douglass becomes a Sunday school teacher to other slaves, a position he enjoys. From that day on, Covey leaves Douglass alone.ĭouglass lives for a time with William Freeland, a kind master, and Douglass finds a family among the other slaves there. Douglass spends a year with Covey, who cruelly and brutally whips the slave until Douglass finally fights him. Several years later, as a result of his original owner's death, Douglass finds himself being lent to a poor farmer with a reputation for "breaking" slaves. Soon, Douglass discovers abolitionist movements in the North, including those by Irish Catholics. Auld gives Douglass reading lessons until her husband intervenes Douglass continues his lessons by trading bread for lessons with poor neighborhood white boys and by using Thomas' books. When he is seven or eight years old, Douglass is sent to Baltimore to live with the Auld family and care for their son, Thomas. Douglass also draws attention to the false system of values created by slavery, in which allegiance to the slave master is far stronger than an allegiance to other slaves. Douglass argues against the notion that slaves who sing are content instead, he likens singing to crying - a way to relieve sorrow. He witnesses brutal beatings and the murder of a slave, which goes unnoticed by the law or the community at large. As a slave of Captain Anthony and Colonel Lloyd, Douglass survives on meager rations and is often cold.

Throughout the next several chapters, Douglass describes the conditions in which he and other slaves live. In the first chapter, Douglass also makes mention of the hypocrisy of Christian slave owners who used religious teachings to justify their abhorrent treatment of slaves the religious practice of slave owners is a recurrent theme in the text. Here and throughout the autobiography, Douglass highlights the common practice of white slave owners raping slave women, both to satisfy their sexual hungers and to expand their slave populations. Douglass' Narrative begins with the few facts he knows about his birth and parentage his father is a slave owner and his mother is a slave named Harriet Bailey.