When he was about eight years old, Frederick was sent to Baltimore to work for Hugh Auld, Captain Anthony's relative by marriage. At first, he was treated with great kindness by Sophia Auld; her husband, Hugh, however, eventually disapproved of Sophia's attempts to teach Frederick how to read and write. Such skills, he reasoned, would make Frederick "unfit . . . to be a slave." But Frederick was determined to have an education, and he convinced the neighborhood children to help him learn. At the shipyard where he worked, he copied the scribbles of other workers to practice writing. He purchased the Columbian Orator, as well as the Baltimore American. From newspapers, he not only improved his reading ability but discovered for the first time the existence of anti-slavery movements in the North. The activists in these movements were known as abolitionists, and there were different camps within the abolitionist movement. Some of them were led by religious leaders and were closely connected with Northern Protestant churches.
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