Frederick Douglass was an American slave who lived through the horrors of slavery in the first person. His character and resolve to become literate helped him survive his childhood in the country and the city. In his memoir, The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Douglass expressed his views about slavery in the North as well as the South. Douglass shows that Slavery was detrimental to the United States because it made Christian men deceive themselves, and created bitterness between blacks and whites. While Douglass was a slave, he experienced the hypocrisy of white slaveholders in the ways related to the barbarous treating of their slaves, and the positions they held as leaders in their churches. Douglass (1845/1995)