Sophia Auld

Sophia Auld taught Frederick Douglass the alphabet, was ordered to stop, and became harsher than her husband afterwards - a sequence Douglass used as his central demonstration of what slavery does to the people who hold slaves. She was a Baltimore weaver's daughter who had worked for her living and had never owned anyone before Douglass was sent to her household in 1826, when he was about eight. He wrote that she was the first white woman he had known who did not look at him as a chattel: she fed him, did not flinch when he met her eye, and taught him his letters and some short words because he asked. Her husband Hugh Auld stopped it, telling her that learning would spoil the best slave in the world and make him discontented and unmanageable - which Douglass overheard and afterwards called the first decidedly antislavery lecture he had ever heard, because it told him exactly what the road to freedom was. What followed is the part he insisted on. She obeyed, and went further than obedience: she began snatching newspapers from him, watching him, and treating him with a hardness she had had to learn. He wrote that slavery proved as injurious to her as to him, and that the tender heart became stone. He got the rest of his reading from white boys in the street, paying them in bread. He visited her once, decades later and free, and found her old and ill; the meeting is described briefly and without triumph. Hugh Auld later sold Douglass s freedom to British sympathisers for about seven hundred dollars in 1846. Douglass named the exchange he overheard as the pivot of his life in all three autobiographies. Sophia died in 1880.

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