The Life of Frederick Douglass Page 3

  In Easton, the five were placed in jail cells while slave traders gathered outside, eager for the chance to buy the men and sell them south to Georgia, Louisiana, or Alabama. Frederick was frightened by that prospect, describing being sold south as “a life of living death beset with the innumerable horrors of the cotton field and the sugar plantation.”7

  Frederick Bailey had now been branded as a dangerous slave who had organized others into a rebellion. Rowena Auld urged her husband to sell Frederick and use the money to help buy the new house she wanted. Auld was under a lot of pressure and he walked the floor all night trying to decide what to do about Frederick.

  Historian William S. McFeely offers the opinion that Auld “cared immensely” for the boy in his “clumsy, tormented way,” and could not bear to send Frederick south into dreadful slavery.8 What actually happened gives credence to this theory. Auld went to the jail and told everyone, including Frederick, that he was selling the boy to a friend in Alabama. The youth believed he was doomed. But when they were alone, Auld told Frederick that he was not going south after all. Instead, Frederick would return to Hugh Auld in Baltimore, where he would learn to be a skilled tradesman. Auld promised Frederick that if he worked hard and stayed out of trouble, he would receive his freedom at the age of twenty-five.

  Thomas Auld’s remarkable act of compassion had spared Frederick a terrible fate, but the young man had no intention of waiting another eight years for his freedom.

  Chapter 5

  DREAM OF FREEDOM FULFILLED

  Frederick arrived at the Auld house on Philpot Street in Baltimore, but everything had changed. He was now eighteen, fully a man. He had worked as a field hand and had attempted to escape and been in jail. He was no longer the young boy who once lived in this household. Even Sophia Auld treated him differently. She seemed uneasy in the presence of a grown black man. Little Tommy was now a teenager and he no longer wanted a black older brother.

  Hugh Auld arranged for Frederick to serve as an apprentice caulker in the shipbuilding trade, at William Gardiner’s shipyard. The caulker’s job was to stop up the seams of a ship to prevent leakage. There was a great deal of prejudice against black workers in the docks in 1836 when Frederick Bailey went to work. He and the other black apprentices were constantly harassed by the white workers and forced to run errands for them. The orders shouted at Bailey and his black colleagues were usually accompanied by racial slurs. The young white apprentices were especially vicious because they resented competition from black youths. Some of the white boys said openly that the black apprentices “ought to be killed.”1

  One day a white apprentice, Ned Hays, became angry at Bailey and attacked him with a razor-sharp adze, a hatchet-like tool. Bailey defended himself with a heavy wooden hammer, knocking the adze from Hays’s hand. Later on, Hays and three of his white friends cornered Bailey. One came from the front, one from each side, and one sneaked up from behind. Bailey was struck on the head with a heavy hand spike. Stunned by the blow, Bailey fell to the ground while the four white men joined in beating and kicking him. When Bailey tried to scramble to his feet, one of them kicked him so hard in the face with his boot that Bailey feared his left eyeball had burst. Bailey’s eye closed and blood streamed down his face.

  About fifty white workers stood around while this brutal attack took place, and not one of them tried to help the outnumbered black youth. Some of the men egged the attackers on, chanting, “Kill him, kill him. . . . He struck a white person! Knock his brains out!”2

  Bloody and battered, Bailey finally got to his feet and staggered to the Auld house. When Sophia Auld saw him, all her coolness toward him disappeared. Seeing the young man’s swollen, bleeding face, she wept. She hurried to get water and linen and she washed his face. Then she bandaged his head and covered his wounded left eye with a piece of fresh beef, the remedy at that time for an injured eye.

  Hugh Auld, hearing of the attack, “poured curses on the heads of the whole shipyard company.”3 He tried to press charges against them and was enraged when he was told that because all the witnesses to the incident were white and none would verify Bailey’s story, it was useless to pursue charges.

  Hugh Auld took Bailey out of the Gardiner shipyard and Sophia Auld tended his wounds until he was healed. Then Bailey went to work at another shipyard, earning $6 to $7 a week. The entire sum went to Hugh Auld, and this rankled Bailey. He worked hard for that money and he saw no justice in giving it all to Auld.

  In the spring of 1838, twenty-year-old Frederick Bailey asked Auld for permission to provide his own room and board and keep some of his wages for himself. Auld agreed to accept a weekly sum of $3, with Bailey keeping the rest and taking care of his own needs, including buying his own caulking tools.

  Bailey was both excited and frightened at the prospect of being on his own. He had never before been responsible for his own upkeep. He went frantically in search of as much work as he could do. He was “ready to work by night as well as by day,” he later recalled.4

  Bailey took whatever work was available. He was a butler in the home of a stockbroker for a while, and one of his duties was taking the stockbroker’s child to the E.M.P. Wells School, run by Elizabeth Wells on Caroline Street. Working at the school at the time was a free young black woman, Anna Murray. Full lipped and full figured, Murray was darker than Bailey, with large, soft eyes. The two became friends. At the time Bailey was learning to play the violin, and Anna Murray encouraged him. Very soon they were courting. Murray, born in 1813, was five years older than Bailey. She was one of twelve children of Mary and Bambarra Murray, a family living on the far side of Tuckahoe Creek near the town of Denton in Caroline County, Maryland. Murray’s parents were freed from slavery one month before their daughter’s birth, so she was born free. At the age of seventeen, Murray had begun working as a domestic for Baltimore’s white families, and she had the reputation of being a fine housekeeper.

  Bailey recalled the comfortable family life he had shared in the Hugh Auld household, and he longed for a family of his own. Very early in their courtship, the young couple began making plans for marriage and saving money for their future together. Though she earned low wages, Murray managed to put aside a little each week, and Bailey saved diligently from the $6 he kept weekly. When the couple married, Bailey would remain a slave, but because Murray was a free woman, all the children of the union would be born free.

  Since Bailey was planning to get married and start his family, he was more determined than ever to put slavery behind him. He had to make his escape quickly. One day, just before dawn, Bailey obtained the papers of a free seaman, purchasing them with his savings. On September 3, 1838, Bailey donned a red shirt, knotted a handkerchief around his neck, and placed a flat-topped broad-brimmed sailor’s hat on his head. He climbed into a carriage driven by a friend and was taken to the train station. He had the address of a friend who would help him in New York and a bag containing his few possessions. But Bailey did not have a ticket. He jumped aboard the train and when the conductor came around, Bailey showed his seaman’s paper and some cash. At Havre de Grace, Maryland, Bailey left the train and boarded a ferry to cross the Susquehanna River. He boarded another train at Wilmington, Delaware, and then took a steamboat for Philadelphia. He took a ferry and the night train to New York, and soon he was walking through the crowded streets of the big city. “Dreams of my childhood and the purposes of my manhood were now fulfilled,” Bailey recalled thinking as he breathed the free air.5

  Bailey went to the home of David Ruggles, head of the Vigilance Committee that helped fugitive slaves who had come north. Frederick Bailey had changed his name to confuse any bounty hunters tracking runaway slaves. He called himself Frederick Johnson. Under that name he wrote back to Anna Murray, asking her to join him in New York. Her trip required three trains and four boats between Baltimore and New York, but they had carefully planned everything and soon the young couple was reunited.

  Wasting no time, Anna Murray put on
a plum-colored silk dress and Frederick donned the good suit he had carried in his bag for just this occasion. They went before James W. C. Pennington, a Presbyterian minister, himself a fugitive slave from Maryland. He pronounced them joined together in holy matrimony on September 15, 1838. With their wedding certificate and a $5 gift from Ruggles, the young couple began their married life.6

  Frederick and Anna Johnson headed for New Bedford, Massachusetts, to the home of another couple whose last name, by coincidence, was also Johnson. David Ruggles had directed them there. In that house they spent their first night as man and wife. During breakfast the next morning, Frederick decided that his newly adopted last name of Johnson was too common. He wanted a permanent new name. Because of the danger associated with the name Bailey, he could never return to that last name, so he and his host discussed other possible names. The host, Nathan Johnson, had just finished reading Sir Walter Scott’s Lady of the Lake and he came across a heroic Scottish chieftain named Douglas in the story. Nathan Johnson suggested to his guest that this might be a good choice for him, especially since it was a very noble name belonging to someone who, like Bailey, was brave. After a search of the city directory revealed many people named Douglas, Frederick decided he would adopt the name but make it unique by adding another s at the end. Frederick Johnson became Frederick Douglass, a name he kept for the rest of his life.

  Frederick Douglass now had a wife and soon there was a baby on the way. He needed to work and he was willing to do anything. His first wages as a married man consisted of two silver half dollars he earned for shoveling a pile of coal into a minister’s cellar. Douglass then borrowed a saw from Nathan Johnson and looked for work sawing wood. Douglass wanted something better than woodcutting though. He was bright and ambitious and he did not feel like an unskilled laborer. Still, he had to shovel coal, saw wood, dig cellars, clear rubbish, and load and unload ships to support himself and his wife. Anna Douglass, pregnant, could not work, so their income depended on Frederick Douglass. In the spring of 1839, work became more plentiful. Douglass got a job at a brass foundry and then, at last, as a caulker in the shipyards, a job he was skilled at. On June 24, 1839, the first child was born to the Douglasses—daughter Rosetta.

  During 1839, Douglass was regularly reading The Liberator and taking its abolitionist message to heart. He deeply admired the editor, William Lloyd Garrison, and he became a subscriber to the paper. Douglass could not afford to pay for the newspaper, but it was offered to him by an agent giving away free subscriptions as a promotion. As Douglass later put it, The Liberator “became my meat and . . . drink.”7

  Douglass had never read such thrilling words as he found in Garrison’s newspaper. The Liberator, Douglass said, contained words “full of holy fire and straight to the point.”8 To the young fugitive slave who had trembled with bitter rage when southern ministers justified slavery as godly, these words that slavery was a sin in the eyes of God were welcome indeed.9

  Douglass began attending antislavery meetings in New Bedford. He was content to sit and listen to the rhetoric of others, never imagining he would someday take his place at the podium. On October 9, 1840, the Douglasses’ son, Lewis Henry, was born. Douglass was finally making decent wages at the brass foundry and the shipyards. He had two children to support and he worked relentlessly.

  In the summer of 1841, Douglass decided to take a break from his heavy work schedule to attend a large antislavery convention on Nantucket, an island off Massachusetts. It had been arranged by William Lloyd Garrison. William C. Coffin, a white bookkeeper at Merchants Bank and a fervent abolitionist, also attended the convention.

  Coffin had once visited the New Bedford Zion Methodist Church, where he heard Douglass saying a few words to the congregation about what he had suffered as a slave. Coffin approached Douglass and asked him if he would tell the Nantucket convention what he had told his church group. Twenty-three-year-old Douglass had not minded sharing his experiences with his friends and neighbors at church, but the thought of addressing this large gathering of well-educated people was daunting. Still, he swallowed his fear and stood up to give his first abolitionist lecture.

  Chapter 6

  AN ORATOR IS BORN

  Frederick Douglass recalled after his speech to the convention that he had stood erect with great difficulty and throughout his presentation he had hesitated and stammered. He was followed at the speakers’ platform by William Lloyd Garrison himself, who referred to the eloquent words of the young fugitive slave. Douglass was asked to be a speaker for the antislavery cause. He accepted and was determined to go wherever he was sent. For Anna Douglass, who was carrying their third child, this would mean considerable separation from her husband.

  Anna Douglass was illiterate, so there are no letters or other written records of how she felt about her life as the wife of a man who was growing more active in the abolition movement. Many years later her daughter, Rosetta, would describe times of loneliness and frustration for her mother.

  Douglass moved the family from New Bedford to Lynn, Massachusetts, a Quaker town a few miles north of Boston. During the next two years, Douglass was always on the go, taking trains to meetings and conventions. While traveling to Dover, New Hampshire, in September 1841, Douglass was ordered out of his train seat and told to go to the “negro car.” When he refused, several white men pounced on him and hauled him from his seat. Later, when confronted with the same situation, Douglass again held his ground. He clutched the bolted bench of the train seat and refused to move. He arrived at his destination still sitting in the seat he had first occupied when the journey began.

  In his speeches, Douglass not only condemned slavery in the South but also attacked prejudice against black people in the North, such as the kind he had encountered on trains. He denounced the custom of forcing black people to occupy rear seats in public places, even in churches.

  Douglass was always deeply offended when bigotry reared its head under the guise of religion. He felt anger against the hypocrisy that permitted white people to spout Christian principles while cruelly abusing their slaves and denying black people their rights. Though bitterly cynical about organized religion, especially as practiced by southern Christians, he maintained throughout his life a strong Christian faith. He made a sharp distinction between his anger against religious people who sanctioned the “bloody atrocities of slavery” and his own beliefs.1 “I love the religion of our blessed savior,” he said. “I love the religion that comes from above in the ‘wisdom of God, which is first pure, then peaceable, gentle and easy to be entreated, full of mercy and good fruits.’”2

  Douglass also believed firmly in his own salvation, writing, “I have no uneasiness about the hereafter. I am in the trade winds of God. My bark was launched by him, and he is taking it into port.”3

  A bond was forged between Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison at the Nantucket convention. Douglass had revered Garrison even before meeting him, because of Garrison’s writings in The Liberator. On hearing Garrison speak for the first time, Douglass said, “I saw the deadened hopes of my race resurrected and ascended.”4 During their long relationship, there would be sharp disagreements and eventually a serious rift, but Douglass never lost his deep sense of admiration for and gratitude to Garrison.5

  In January 1842, only six months after his debut as a speaker, Douglass had already reached a striking level of eloquence. He was surrounded by giants in the abolition movement when he made a speech at Boston’s Faneuil Hall, but Elizabeth Cady Stanton, a leader in the movement to gain the vote for women, said the audience was “completely carried away by the wondrous gifts of his pathos and humor. On this occasion, all the other speakers seemed tame after Frederick Douglass.”6

  Douglass was described as having a “rich, melodious voice,” and he gazed at the ceiling of the auditorium as he spoke, like a southern preacher staring into the slave galleries in a church while trying to justify slavery.7 Douglass ridiculed the hypocrisy of such preaching, movin
g his audience from anger to laughter to tears. But even as he publicly described his own life as a slave, he was still a fugitive slave at risk of being captured and returned to his master in Maryland—Thomas Auld.

  At twenty-four, Douglass had not yet reached the age at which Auld had promised freedom for him, and then only if he stayed out of trouble as a faithful slave. Douglass had not fulfilled those conditions.

  On March 3, 1842, the Douglasses’ third child, Frederick Jr., was born. Anna Douglass, a quiet, reserved woman, was not comfortable in her husband’s growing limelight. It was especially intimidating to a woman who could not read to have a husband growing more famous by the day for his great oratory. Anna Douglass knew her husband spent many hours in the company of brilliant men and women who were a far cry from her and her simple ways. The more his world expanded, the more she retreated into their home, immersing herself in their children, her piecework sewing, and her housekeeping.

  The year 1843 was called the Year of the Hundred Conventions. There were to be one hundred antislavery conventions organized by the American Anti-Slavery Society. Douglass spoke at most of the meetings, traveling throughout New England, New York, Ohio, Indiana, and Pennsylvania. Not all those speeches were welcomed by gracious audiences.

  In Pendleton, Indiana, the meeting was scheduled to be held in a Baptist church, but it was moved when there were threats that the church would be burned down. The meeting was instead held on the steps of the church. A rainstorm interrupted the meeting and it was rescheduled for the following day, amid rumors that white men were planning to cause trouble. The next day found the antislavery meeting taking place in a grove of trees where seats and stands had been brought in. There was a sudden shout and an angry mob of about thirty white men came running from the woods carrying stones and rotten eggs. Some of the speakers were struck with rotten eggs. Men with stinking egg yolk running down their faces did nothing to retaliate.