Frederick Douglass

  

Author: Carole D. Bos, J.D.

Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey was born in 1818 near the town of Easton, Maryland. Like most slaves, he did not know his birth date. Like many slaves, he had a black mother and a white father. Although he never could be sure, folks said his daddy was the plantation master, Aaron Anthony.
Because his mama, Harriet Bailey, worked as a field hand twelve miles away, little Frederick rarely saw her. His grandma was his primary care giver.
When Fred was about seven, Harriet died. Her son (the fourth of six children) was not allowed to see her when she was sick or when she passed away. Speaking of the few times he actually saw his mother, he later observed:

I do not recollect of ever seeing my mother by the light of day. [She had to walk 12 miles, one way, to visit him.] She was with me in the night. She would lie down with me, and get me to sleep, but long before I waked she was gone. Very little communication ever took place between us.  (Narrative, page 18.)

When he was about six, young Fred went to work. No longer in the care of his grandma, he would serve the needs of others until he ran away. When he found freedom, he also took a new name: Frederick Douglass.

Before the thought of freedom entered his mind, and before he was old enough to work the fields of a southern plantation, Frederick Bailey played with other children near his grandma’s cabin. He could not read or write since most slave owners believed literate slaves were dangerous slaves. School held no place in a slave child’s routine.
Lack of education was not the only factor which distinguished southern black children from southern white children. Where they lived, what they wore, what they ate always depended on the color of their skin. As an adult, in his Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, the now-literate man describes the clothes he wore as a child:

In hottest summer and coldest winter, I was kept almost naked - no shoes, no stockings, no jacket, no trousers, nothing on but a coarse tow linen shirt, reaching only to my knees.

On what kind of bed did he sleep?

I had no bed. I must have perished with cold, but that, the coldest nights, I used to steal a bag which was used for carrying corn to the mill. I would crawl into this bag, and there sleep on the cold, damp, clay floor, with my head in and feet out. My feet have been so cracked with the frost, that the pen with which I am writing might be laid in the gashes.

What of the food he ate? Was there enough to keep him well-nourished?

Our food was coarse corn meal boiled. This was called mush. It was put into a large wooden tray or trough, and set down upon the ground. The children were then called, like so many pigs, and like so many pigs they would come and devour the mush; some with oystershells, others with pieces of shingle, some with naked hands, and none with spoons. He that ate fastest got most; he that was strongest secured the best place; and few left the trough satisfied.

Slave children, like young Fred, saw things children should never see. Beatings of loved ones, for example, were not uncommon. The day Fred saw his master beat his beautiful Aunt Hester, within a breath of her life, was life-changing:

I was so terrified and horror-stricken at the sight, that I hid myself in a closet, and dared not venture out till long after the bloody transaction was over. I expected it would be my turn next. It was all new to me. I had never seen any thing like it before. I had always lived with my grandmother on the outskirts of the plantation, where she was put to raise the children of the younger women. I had therefore been, until now, out of the way of the bloody scenes that often occurred on the plantation. (Narrative, page 21.)

It wasn’t long before Fred himself met the end of the cowskin lash.

 

America’s system of chattel slavery meant that slaves were the property of slave holders. Put differently, people legally owned other people.
When slave owners died, their slaves were processed - often at auction - just like other items owned by the decedent. It is impossible to comprehend how human beings felt as they were valued along with horses and plows, silverware and table linens. When he was between the ages of ten and eleven, Frederick Bailey went through the humiliating experience:

We were all ranked together at the valuation. Men and women, old and young, married and single, were ranked with horses, sheep, and swine. There were horses and men, cattle and women, pigs and children, all holding the same rank in the scale of being, and were all subjected to the same narrow examination. Silvery-headed age and sprightly youth, maids and matrons, had to undergo the same indelicate inspection. At the moment, I saw more clearly than ever the brutalizing effects of slavery upon both slave and slaveholder. (Narrative of the Life, [at page 45] of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself.)

How was it that slaves, en masse, did not routinely revolt? Why did they not band together to throw off the yoke of chattel slavery? Young Frederick learned the answers to those questions early in life when he was sent to Baltimore to serve as a house slave. Having the good fortune to live with a kindly mistress, who had never before controlled a slave, Frederick was given a rare opportunity: She would teach him to read. The lessons didn’t last:

Very soon after I went to live with Mr. And Mrs. Auld, she very kindly commenced to teach me the A, B, C. After I had learned this, she assisted me in learning to spell words of three or four letters. Just at this point of my progress, Mr. Auld found out what was going on, and at once forbade Mrs. Auld to instruct me further, telling her, among other things, that it was unlawful, as well as unsafe, to teach a slave to read. (Narrative, page 33.)

How could learning a basic skill - like reading - be so detrimental? Frederick answers that question, using Mr. Auld’s own words:

It would forever unfit him to be a slave. He would at once become unmanageable, and of no value to his master. As to himself, it could do him no good, but a great deal of harm. It would make him discontented and unhappy.” These words sank deep into my heart, stirred up sentiments within that lay slumbering, and called into existence an entirely new train of thought.

More importantly, the young slave began to understand the source of the master’s power over his people:

I now understood what had been to me a most perplexing difficulty - to wit, the white man’s power to enslave the black man. It was a grand achievement, and I prized it highly. From that moment, I understood the pathway from slavery to freedom.

That "pathway" was education. And education began with learning to read and write.

Although she had been kind to Frederick when he first arrived, Mrs. Auld soon followed her husband’s directive. Not only were the reading lessons over, so were her endearing ways:

Slavery proved as injurious to her as it did to me...The first step in her downward course was in her ceasing to instruct me. She now commenced to practise her husband’s precepts. She finally became even more violent in her opposition than her husband himself...Nothing seemed to make her more angry than to see me with a newspaper...She was an apt woman; and a little experience soon demonstrated, to her satisfaction, that education and slavery were incompatible with each other. (Narrative, page 37.)

Undeterred in his quest to read, Frederick befriended white children in his Baltimore neighborhood. He developed a good barter system - he would give them food if they would give him lessons:

The plan which I adopted, and the one by which I was most successful, was that of making friends of all the little white boys whom I met in the street. As many of these as I could, I converted into teachers. With their kindly aid, obtained at different times and in different places, I finally succeeded in learning to read...I used also to carry bread with me...This bread I used to bestow upon the hungry little urchins, who, in return, would give me that more valuable bread of knowledge. (Narrative, page 38.)

The more he read, the more upset he became with the whole concept of slavery. This passage of his Narrative, recited here (scroll to the bottom) by his great-great grandson, Frederick Douglass IV, emotionally makes the point:

The more I read, the more I was led to abhor and detest my enslavers. I could regard them in no other light than a band of successful robbers, who had left their homes, and gone to Africa, and stolen us from our homes, and in a strange land reduced us to slavery. (Narrative, page 40.)

There was nothing for Frederick to do but escape.

As he grew older, and was hired out as an employee who worked for others, Frederick Douglass was forced to give all the money he earned to his master. Not only was he outraged about this unacceptable predicament, his plight caused the now-literate slave to think about escaping from his unchanging environment.

I was now getting...one dollar and fifty cents per day. ($26.37 per day in 2003 dollars.) I contracted for it; I earned it; it was paid to me; it was rightfully my own; yet, upon each returning Saturday night, I was compelled to deliver every cent of that money to Master Hugh. And why? Not because he earned it, - not because he had any hand in earning it, - not because I owed it to him, - nor because he possessed the slightest shadow of a right to it; but solely because he had the power to compel me to give it up. (Narrative, page 99.)

 

The first time Frederick Douglass tried to escape, he was caught and spent months in jail. By 1838, he was working as a caulker in a Baltimore shipyard and had many good friends in the city. One of those friends was a black free-woman named Anna Murray.

Increasingly weary of turning over income to his master, and of his bondage in general, Frederick picked Monday, September 3, 1838, as his escape day. By this time, he and Anna Murray had fallen in love; she gave him some of her savings to help him as he made his way north to a non-slave state.
To protect those who assisted him, Frederick did not provide details of his escape in his first two autobiographies. Only from his third book, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, written much later in life, do we know those details.
Frederick had obtained a Seaman’s Protection Certificate from a free black free sailor (such as this 1854 document held by the Library of Congress) to help him get past railroad conductors, and others, who would check his identity papers. The documents he held did NOT match his physical description. If anyone scrutinized the Certificate, Frederick would be "found out."
Dressed as a sailor, Frederick left Baltimore bound for New York City:

In my clothing I was rigged out in sailor style. I had on a red shirt and a tarpaulin hat and black cravat, tied in sailor fashion, carelessly and loosely about my neck. My knowledge of ships and sailor's talk came much to my assistance, for I knew a ship from stern to stern, and from keelson to cross-trees, and could talk sailor like an "old salt." On sped the train, and I was well on the way, to Havre de Grace [in Maryland, his home state] before the conductor came into the negro car to collect tickets and examine the papers of his black passengers. This was a critical moment in the drama. My whole future depended upon the decision of this conductor. (Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, page 198.)

For some reason, the conductor (who had been harsh with other passengers) was surprisingly calm with Frederick:

"I suppose you have your free papers?" To which I answered: "No, sir; I never carry my free papers to sea with me." "But you have something to show that you are a free man, have you not?" "Yes, sir," I answered; "I have a paper with the American eagle on it, and that will carry me round the world." With this I drew from my deep sailor's pocket my seaman's protection, as before described. The merest glance at the paper satisfied him, and he took my fare and went on about his business. This moment of time was one of the most anxious I ever experienced. Had the conductor looked closely at the paper, be could not have failed to discover that it called for a very different looking person from myself, and in that case it would have been his duty to arrest me on the instant, and send me back to Baltimore from the first station. (Life and Times, page 199.)

Onboard the train, Frederick saw people who would have recognized him had he not been wearing sailor clothes. But when he left the train at Wilmington, Delaware (the "last point of imminent danger"), to catch a ship for Philadelphia, no one suspected he was a runaway.

Within twenty-four hours of his Baltimore departure, "Fred" reached the free soil of New York City. (Later, his escapade was memorialized - and fictionalized - in song and verse.)
On September 15, 1838, days after his escape, he and Anna were married in New York. Frederick changed his last name from Bailey to Douglass, after the lead character in Sir Walter Scott’s poem The Lady of the Lake.