In what ways does Douglass emphasize the corrupting nature of slavery to American society? More specifically how does this corrupting influence shape...

Douglass emphasizes the
ways in which slavery corrupts slaveowners. His audience is white northerners whom he hopes to
sway against slavery and towards abolitionism by emphasizing the evils of slavery and its
corrupting effects on whites, including Christians.

The person who embodies
these corrupting effects is his slave mistress, Sophia Auld, in Baltimore. As she is a
northerner, she is at first not aware of the southern ban against teaching slaves to read, and
she begins to instruct Douglass, then a young boy, how to read. Her husband scolds her and tells
her that learning will forever spoil a slave, and Sophia Auld halts her instruction of the young
Douglass. Douglass portrays how Sophia Auld, once a kind and Christian woman, is turned into a
vengeful and evil soul by slavery. In the character of Sophia Auld, he dramatizes the corruption
that slavery brings to whites.

In addition, Douglass shows that slavery is
degrading to people's practice of Christianity. He writes about how his master, once turned
religious, becomes even more hypocritical because the master believes that the tenets of
Christianity (as practiced in the South) permit slavery. Douglass writes, "For of all
slaveholders with whom I have ever met, religious slaveholders are the worst. I have ever found
them the meanest and basest, the most cruel and cowardly, of all others." Though he was
criticized for his claims, Douglass maintained that the slaveholding Christianity of the South
is not true Christianity but is entirely antithetical to what Christianity means. In his
narrative, he describes the corrupting influence of slavery on American institutions such as
womanhood and religion.