Prior to his conversion, he relied upon his own depravity to shield and sustain him in his savage barbarity; but after his conversion, he found religious sanction and support for his slaveholding cruelty.
Douglass explains how his master's religious conversion provided a new, perverse justification for his cruelty, replacing his former reliance on personal depravity.
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We could not but believe that there existed at the South a latent and powerful Union sentiment which would assert itself at last.
It was perhaps better for the country and for mankind that the good man could not know the end from the beginning.
This was a new and special revelation, dispelling a painful mystery against which my youthful understanding had struggled, and struggled in vain, to wit, the white man’s power to perpetuate the enslavement of the black man.