For Douglass, not only self-knowledge, but knowledge itself was paramount — even knowledge of seemingly small talents — such as the ability to produce counterfeit documents. By learning how to read and write, Douglass had an opportunity to exploit the Southern stereotypical image of slaves. He was determined to reach his goal of being literate. In fact, during his early years, he developed diverse strategies to learn to read and write, including conning neighborhood children in Baltimore to teach him and copying letters he found at the shipyard and at home. His enterprising nature and dogged determination have a special place in American mythology and in its ideology. This ideology, championed by New England Transcendentalism (for example, Emerson's "Self-Reliance" and Thoreau's "Resistance to Civil Government"), is part and parcel of our nation's character. Our sympathy for Douglass is not mitigated even though he cons his childhood friends to teach him to read because his goals — freedom, education, and self-reliance — are morally noble and thus his means are justified.
Douglass considered slavery to be an economic institution that was antithetical to learning. It reduced slaves to unthinking beasts, for as Master Auld explained, "Learning would spoil the best nigger in the world. It would forever unfit him to be a slave." Education was the path toward freedom, and, through his self-education, Douglass discovered the existence of abolitionist forces which sustained his hope of escaping to the North. This logocentric paradigm, coupled with the inability of antebellum Southern whites to consider that blacks could exist within this paradigm — that is, to be literate — offered Douglass unique openings. His ability to write enabled him to forge a pass for himself and other slaves in an escape attempt.
