He compares slaves to horses in order to prove that the slave owners did not want slaves to differentiate themselves form the land or the animals that resisted it. To do this would to have some consciousness that they were human and thus deserved the rights of humans. This thought process inevitably would end the hold slavery had on our race, which is why slavery sought to keep us ignorant through withholding literacy. .
Later in the same passage, Frederick says that the little white children knew their ages and he could not understand why he would be deprived of the same privilege. It is here that we see that Douglass' sense of self is challenged. He is aware that something is wrong, but is not able to identify the problem yet. "A want of information concerning my own was a source of unhappiness to me even during childhood (p339)."".
In the same chapter, Douglass writes, "My father was a white man-. He reveals to the readers the implication of his master being his father, but leaves it up the reader to decide the truthfulness of these opinions. Douglass uses phrases like "hearing my master say-, "heard speak of my parentage-, opinion was also whispered- to show the deleterious effects of slavery. He writes, "The means of knowing was withheld from me (p.340)."" Douglass identifies a dichotomy in his path from slavery to freedom, the path from the pre-linguistic or hearing to the linguistic or language. The emphasis on hearing these implications and not knowing if they are true is directly involved with seeing written documents that would show him the truth. The underlying theme here is the lack of written language and how this influenced the culture of the slaves by stealing from them their sense of family relations and the allowing slave owners to avoid taking parental responsibility for their children. Douglass states that the slave owners were dually aware of this practice and therefore put into effect laws that condemned children of slaves to the position of their mothers.
