ontrol. Educated, self-aware and free-thinking individuals are harder to control than a group of frightened illiterates. In fact, the beginning of Douglass' education is not in books but in slave songs, songs which Douglass says "breathed the prayer and complaint of souls boiling over with the bitterest anguish. . . . To those songs I trace my first glimmering conception of the dehumanizing character of slavery" (Douglass 47). At that point Douglass begins his search for freedom, although his desire is still limited by his powerlessness. This powerlessness was the key to the continuing success of slavery , for even one educated slave was a threat to most slaveholders. Thinking for oneself leads to having one's own thoughts separate from the slaveholder, a fact terrifying to those slaveholders: "If one slave refused to be corrected," other slaves would disobey and "the result would be the freedom of the slaves, and the enslavement of the whites" (Douglass 52).
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