The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation (40 page)

After moving to the Wye House plantation at age six, Douglass witnessed the cruelties and brutality of the slave system but played with and established close ties with the older son of the plantation’s owner. As a gifted and remarkably intelligent child, he attracted the interest and empathy of his aging owner’s daughter, Lucretia Anthony, and then of her husband,
Thomas Auld. As a result, Thomas Auld became the unlikely owner of Douglass following the death of Anthony and then, suddenly, of Lucretia. Douglass’s brother, sisters, and grandmother, on the other hand, were all inherited by the “dreaded” Andrew Anthony, a gambler and alcoholic who sold Douglass’s sister
Sarah to Mississippi. Douglass looked back upon Thomas Auld, who may well have been his father, with much hostility—“When I lived with Capt. Auld I thought him incapable of a noble action.”
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But while Auld intimated at times that he might sell a misbehaving Douglass to the South, he also clearly wanted to develop Douglass’s talents and spoke of freeing him at age twenty-five.
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Douglass saw it as a blessing when Thomas
Auld sent him at age nine to live for five and a half years with Thomas’s brother Hugh, a shipwright in Baltimore. Here, thanks largely to Sophia
Auld, Hugh’s wife, who served for a time as a surrogate mother, Douglass developed skills and capabilities denied to the vast majority of
slaves in adolescence. As he later described this temporary relationship,

Above all, Sophia put Douglass on the course to literacy, and may have taught him more than he later admitted, before she accepted the rule prohibiting slaves from learning to read. At age twelve Douglass was able to purchase, read, and deeply absorb a copy of
The
Columbian Orator,
a collection of famous speeches defending liberty, including an attack on black slavery, which would remain a basic source for Douglass of
Enlightenment and American Revolutionary ideas and rhetoric.
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As Douglass became a tall, strong teenager, he also became more surly and rebellious, spending time among young men along Baltimore’s docks and shipyards, and undergoing religious conversion after attending a new Sabbath school for black children at a Methodist Church. For a variety of reasons, the Auld brothers decided that it would be safer to remove the fifteen-year-old Frederick from Baltimore and transfer him to Thomas on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. According to Douglass’s biographer
William S. McFeely, Frederick and Thomas loved each other at this time and Frederick was eager to promote his master’s religious conversion—his later indictment of Auld being a necessary repudiation of “the possibility of such a relationship” given Douglass’s “absolute condemnation of slavery.”
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Yet whatever affection Auld had for Douglass, he would not allow him to construct a “little Baltimore,” in the form of a Sabbath school for young men, on the Eastern Shore. On the contrary, in January 1834 he hired Douglass out as a field hand to
Edward Covey, an ambitious
man known for his ability to break the will of unruly slaves, who was trying to create a farm on rented land. Understandably, Douglass felt much bitterness over the torment and physical abuse he received from Covey. While downplaying the aid he received from
Bill and
Caroline, two fellow slaves who refused to help Covey, Douglass presented his decision to fight Covey as the turning point in his life, the beginning of his journey toward freedom. But his time with Covey was relatively brief and, perhaps because of Auld’s intervention, Covey never beat him again. The exposure to the brutalities of field work was clearly crucial in equipping Douglass, as the preeminent fugitive, to testify later on the meaning of dehumanization and the slave’s longing for freedom.

In 1835
Thomas Auld reassigned Douglass as a field hand to a more lenient master, William Freeland. After establishing a close friendship with two of Freeland’s slaves, Douglass became ringleader of a plot with four others to escape to the North. But the conspiracy was uncovered, Douglass was thrown in jail, and Thomas Auld faced severe pressure to sell him to the Deep South, the common fate of would-be runaways. While it is no proof of his fatherhood, Auld let Douglass suffer and worry in jail for a week, and then put him on board a boat bound for Baltimore, destined again for the home of
Hugh Auld. According to biographer
Dickson J. Preston, “As they parted, Auld told Frederick earnestly that he wished him to learn a trade, and promised that if Frederick behaved himself properly he would be emancipated at the age of twenty-five.”
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Studies of fugitives have emphasized the surprising increase in the nineteenth century of the Southern practice of hiring or
renting out slaves to various kinds of employers, and even of paying such slaves a portion of their earnings. According to
John Hope Franklin and
Loren Schweninger, “In towns and cities or in the South’s growing industries—hemp, textiles, tobacco, iron—a large proportion of the workforce was hired.”
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This system clearly added to the increasing profits, productivity, and economic growth of the slave system, even though hired slaves obtained more independence and were more likely to find ways to escape.

Like most other privileged slaves, Douglass at age twenty welcomed the chance to become an apprenticed shipbuilder-caulker back in Baltimore, to learn a trade, and then finally to live by himself, find his own employment, and pay Hugh Auld three dollars of
his wages each week. But Thomas and Hugh Auld’s offerings and promises never eradicated
Douglass’s dream of escaping to free soil, following the sailboats he had watched so longingly at age sixteen. When his delay in making a weekly payment infuriated Hugh, who then demanded that he return to his former controlled status, Douglass decided that the time had come for him and
Anna Murray, a free black housekeeper he had recently met and courted, to plan an escape to New England. As with many
fugitives, it was a specific event, such as the breakup of a family or the death of an owner, that tipped the balance between his desire for freedom and reconciling himself to his “wretched lot.”
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Douglass had helped other runaways plan such trips and was aware of the risks as well as the active network of antislavery people who helped fugitives along well-established routes, such as rail and water transports from Baltimore to Philadelphia and
New York. Since all free blacks were required while traveling to carry proof that they were not slaves, Douglass either purchased or was given the papers of a free seaman (which might well have been insufficient). Anna loaned him money for a train ticket, agreeing to meet him in New York after he succeeded in getting there.
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His trip, beginning September 3, 1838, exemplified in extreme form the fortuity that had governed Douglass’s early life. It should be stressed that only a small number of runaways succeeded in obtaining their freedom, and many from
Maryland were either captured at the beginning and then put on the auction block, or were later seized in the streets of Philadelphia or New York. For Douglass the traumatic moment came when, disguised as a sailor, he explained to the train conductor that as a sailor he never carried his free papers but offered his seaman’s papers as a substitute. The conductor paused, but said “all right,” enabling Douglass to pay his fare. There were other close calls, but Douglass finally found himself in New York, “gazing upon the dazzling wonders of Broadway.” “A free state around me, and a free earth under my feet!” Suddenly, he “was a FREEMAN.”
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For the fugitive, standing on free soil could bring a certain sense of “
rehumanization,” of achieving human capacities that slaveholders attempted to destroy. In the introduction and first chapter of this book, we noted that both slaves and domesticated animals were “tamed” by being totally confined in
spaces
that were subject to an owner’s control. While some slaves used temporary escape as a way of bargaining
over freedom of movement, it was the lack of control over space and movement that epitomized slavery, from the original slave trade from Africa to the auctions and sale of slaves to the Deep South. But once a slave like Douglass escaped, who then was in control? European traditions of
free soil, going back to the medieval German
Stadtluft macht frei,
and reinforced by England’s Somerset decision, suggested that the runaway could obtain true freedom within a city or nation like France or England. In America, though, the
U.S. Constitution—while not specifically recognizing the property rights of slaveholders—specifically required nonslaveholding states to return fugitives, an obligation spelled out by congressional legislation.

Douglass was soon overcome by this reality when he met a fellow black Baltimorean who told him that slaveholders hired other blacks for a few dollars to spot runaways, and warned Douglass not to go into any colored boardinghouse or look for a job on the wharves, since “all such places were closely watched.” Hungry and afraid to ask for directions, Douglass wandered the streets for some time before he was aided by a black sailor and finally found the house of the great
David Ruggles, the black head of
New York’s Vigilance Committee. We will later look more closely at such
vigilance committees, which gave indispensable help in protecting fugitives and enabling them to fit into the free black communities of the North. With Ruggles’s aid, Douglass wrote to Anna, who then succeeded in making use of the three trains and four boats needed to get to New York. The bride and groom were married by W. C.
Pennington—himself a runaway who had become a Presbyterian minister and abolitionist—then the couple left New York and took off for
New Bedford, Massachusetts.
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David Ruggles provided essential help in giving Douglass contacts with Quaker New Englanders who helped pay his fare to New Bedford and then took him in while he looked for day jobs (Anna was pregnant). When Douglass decided to change his name, one Quaker host even suggested “Douglas,” from
Walter Scott’s
Lady of the Lake.
Thanks to the whaling industry, New Bedford was at that time a rich and thriving small town of 12,354, of whom 1,051 were black. Despite some prejudice against black workers, Douglass found employment and spoke out at a church meeting in March 1839 against colonizing blacks in Africa, recounting his own experience with slavery. The next month he was electrified when he heard a speech by
William Lloyd Garrison, which clearly augmented his own ambition, going
back to
The
Columbian Orator,
to become a public speaker. He even succeeded in getting a free trial subscription to
The
Liberator,
which he read avidly.
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The great event that transformed Douglass’s life and launched him as the first fugitive slave to become a major orator occurred in Nantucket in August 1841. The
Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society had planned a great midsummer meeting on this lovely island, a center of Quaker-led abolitionism. It was
William C. Coffin, a New Bedford Quaker bookkeeper with strong family connections in Nantucket, who urged Douglass to attend. When Coffin spotted Douglass in the Nantucket throng, he invited the escaped slave to stand up and speak, if so moved, according to the Quaker tradition. With considerable anxiety, Douglass chose to do so, and gave an account of his life as a slave. The huge, mostly white audience, including stellar figures such as Garrison,
Wendell Phillips, and
Samuel J. May, was spellbound. In response, Garrison rose to exclaim: “Have we been listening to a thing, a chattel personal, or a man?” The audience shouted, “A man! a man!” As Garrison continued, “Shall such a man ever be sent back to bondage from the free soil of old Massachusetts?” Now the audience rose and shouted, “No! No! No!” As
McFeely eloquently puts it, though Douglass was not the first former slave to make such a speech, on this Nantucket night, “it was clear that a powerful new voice had been raised, one that demonstrated how high a former slave could stretch in a demonstration of his humanity.”
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The celebration and romanticizing of the Underground Railroad has at best been a way of publicly recognizing the humanity of slaves and the dehumanizing effects of permanently confining people in times and spaces chosen by masters.

David Blight has noted, in an insightful essay, that despite all that has been learned about slavery in recent decades, the average American is still likely to encounter the subject “first, and most often, through the
lore
of the Underground Railroad.” Throughout the North, tourists encounter countless “stations” where “conductors” supposedly protected runaway slaves, many on their way to Canada. Cincinnati’s
Underground Railroad and Freedom Center has long been one of the nation’s leading centers for learning about slavery. This long history
of congratulatory commemoration is deeply embedded in
American literature and film—it celebrates one of the few prideful historical moments in racial relations before the
civil rights movement.
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In 1872,
William Still, the leader of the
Philadelphia
Vigilance Committee and an active “operator” of the
Underground Railroad, published a book on the subject based on extensive interviews and correspondence, as well as on such personal recollections as the arrival of an elderly slave,
Daniel Payne, “infirm and well-nigh used up,” who had escaped so that he could “die on free land.” Important scholarly work began in 1892, when
Wilbur Sieburt, a historian at Ohio State University, started collecting resources that led to thirty-eight bound volumes, organized by state, as well as the publication of his
The Underground Railroad
(1898), which included a map of the detailed “routes” slaves took as they entered a supposedly highly rationalized system heading to freedom. Having interviewed former slaves who had escaped, Sieburt offered readers the chance to put themselves in the slaves’ place and did much to create the mythology of the Underground Railroad that has persisted to the present.