Sophia Auld had never owned a slave and was as yet unpracticed in treating slaves cruelly. She even began to teach Douglass to read. However, she quickly stopped when her husband found out. He told her that teaching Douglass to read would ruin him forever as a slave. Upon hearing this, Douglass became determined to learn to read at all costs. During errands, he bribed poor white boys with bread to give him short lessons. These boys were often sympathetic towards his plight as a slave. He learned to write by using Thomas Auld's little copybooks for practice. When Douglass began to pursue his education in secret, he took active control over his life. This is when he first begins to re-create himself. He is turning himself from a slave who is viewed as nothing, to an educated black man who takes on an enormous role in the abolition movement.
Another example of how Frederick Douglass re-created himself is in his risky escape. Most slaves would not even think about talking back to their masters, let alone try and escape from them. Those who did try hardly succeeded. However, Douglass beat the odds. He took the money that Auld sometimes gave him and saved it up for his escape to New York, where he took on a new name and a new life. When Douglass took a new name, it was both an affirmation of his new control over his own fate and an admission that he still had a tenuous hold on his own freedom. While Douglass had learned a skilled trade, prejudice prevented him from making use of it. Douglass' description of the racism in the North hints that he considers ending slavery as only the first step in the emancipation of American blacks. After his escape, he married, started speaking at anti-slave conventions, got involved in an abolitionist newspaper, and became one of the most well known abolitionists of all time. .
Douglass wanted to impress the evils of slavery strongly upon the American consciousness.
