by Noel Rae
1844. January 1: “I got up this morning Early and took Steven with me down to the Ferry Boat and gave him up to the Overseer of Young & Cannon. I gave Steven a pair of Suspenders and a pr of Socks and 2 Cigars. Shook hands with him and see him go On Bourd for the Last time. I felt hurt but Liquor is the Cause of his troubles; I would not have parted with Him if he had Only have Let Liquor alone but he cannot do it I believe. I received a check from Mr Cannon to day On Mr Britton & Co for four Hundred dollars and a demand note or due bill for two Hundred more.”
Before becoming an outstanding leader and speaker in the abolition movement, Frederick Douglass had to endure many hardships, as described in the first of his autobiographical works, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, published in 1845.
“I was born in Tuckahoe, near Hillsborough, and about twelve miles from Easton, in Talbot County, Maryland. I have no accurate knowledge of my age, never having been given any authentic record containing it. By far the larger part of the slaves know as little of their ages as horses know of theirs, and it is the wish of most masters within my knowledge to keep their slaves thus ignorant. I do not remember ever to have met a slave who could tell of his birthday.
“My mother was named Harriet Bailey. She was the daughter of Isaac and Betsey Bailey, both colored, and quite dark. My mother was of a darker complexion than either my grandmother or grandfather. My father was a white man. He was admitted to be such by all I ever heard speak of my parentage. The opinion was also whispered that my master was my father; but of the correctness of this opinion, I know nothing; the means of knowing was withheld from me. My mother and I were separated when I was but an infant—before I knew her as my mother. It is a common custom, in the part of Maryland from which I ran away, to part children from their mothers at a very early age. Frequently, before the child has reached its twelfth month, its mother is taken from it and hired out on some farm a considerable distance off, and the child is placed under the care of an old woman, too old for field labor. For what this separation is done, I do not know, unless it be to hinder the development of the child’s affection toward its mother, and to blunt and destroy the natural affection of the mother for the child. This is the inevitable result.
“I never saw my mother, to know her as such, more than four or five times in my life; and each of these times was very short in duration, and at night. She was hired by a Mr. Stewart, who lived about twelve miles from my home. She made the journeys to see me in the night, travelling the whole distance on foot, after the performance of her day’s work. She was a field hand, and a whipping is the penalty for not being in the field at sunrise, unless a slave has special permission from his or her master … I do not recollect of ever seeing my mother by the light of day. 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 took place between us. Death soon ended what little we could have while she lived, and with it her hardship and suffering. She died when I was about seven years old, on one of my master’s farms, near Lee’s Mill. I was not allowed to be present during her illness, at her death, or burial. She was gone long before I knew anything about it.”
Douglass’ master, Captain Anthony, was clerk and superintendent to a very rich plantation owner called Colonel Lloyd, who was said to own a thousand slaves.
“Colonel Lloyd owned so many that he did not know them when he saw them; nor did all the slaves of the out-farms know him. It is reported of him that, while riding along the road one day, he met a colored man, and addressed him in the usual manner of speaking to colored people on the public highways in the South: ‘Well, boy, whom do you belong to?’ ‘To Colonel Lloyd,’ replied the slave. ‘Well, does the colonel treat you well?’ ‘No, sir,’ was the ready reply. ‘What, does he work you too hard?’ ‘Yes, sir.’ ‘Well, don’t he give you enough to eat?’ ‘Yes, sir, he gives me enough, such as it is.’
“The colonel, after ascertaining where the slave belonged, rode on; the man also went about his business, not dreaming that he had been conversing with his master. He thought, said, and heard nothing more of the matter, until two or three weeks afterwards. The poor man was then informed by his overseer that, for having found fault with his master, he was now to be sold to a Georgia trader. He was immediately chained and handcuffed; and thus, without a moment’s warning, he was snatched away, and forever sundered from his family and friends, by a hand more unrelenting than death. This is the penalty of telling the truth, of telling the simple truth, in answer to a series of plain questions. It is partly in consequence of such facts that slaves, when inquired of as to their condition and the character of their masters, almost universally say they are contented, and that their masters are kind.
“I was seldom whipped by my old master, and suffered little from anything else than hunger and cold. I suffered much from hunger, but much more from cold. 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. 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 my 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.
“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 oyster-shells, 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.
“I was probably seven or eight years old when I left Colonel Lloyd’s plantation. I left it with joy. I shall never forget the ecstasy with which I received the intelligence that my old master (Captain Anthony) had determined to let me go to Baltimore, to live with Mr. Hugh Auld, brother to my old master’s son-in-law, Captain Thomas Auld. I received this information about three days before my departure. They were three of the happiest days I ever enjoyed. I spent the most part of all these three days in the creek, washing off the plantation scurf, and preparing myself for my departure.”
He made the journey by boat, and arrived in Baltimore early on a Sunday morning. “Mr. and Mrs. Auld were both at home, and met me at the door with their little son Thomas, to take care of whom I had been given. And here I saw what I had never seen before: it was a white face beaming with the most kindly emotions. It was the face of my new mistress, Sophia Auld. I wish I could describe the rapture that flashed through my soul as I beheld it.
“My new mistress proved to be all she appeared when I first met her at her door—a woman of the kindest heart and finest feelings. She had never had a slave under her control previously to myself, and prior to her marriage she had been dependent upon her own industry for a living. She was by trade a weaver; and by constant application to her business she had been in a good degree preserved from the blighting and dehumanizing effects of slavery. I was utterly astonished at her goodness.
“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. To use his own words, further, he said, ‘If you give a nigger an inch, he will take an ell. A nigger should know nothing but to obey his master—to do as he is told to do. Learning would spoil the best nigger in the world … It would forever unfit him to be a slave …’ These words sank deep into my heart.”
The lessons with Mrs. Auld ended, but Douglass did not give up. “I had
resided but a short time in Baltimore before I observed a marked difference in the treatment of slaves from that which I had witnessed in the country. A city slave is almost a freeman.” He soon put this relative freedom to good use. “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.” Douglass would fill his pockets with bread, of which there was always plenty in the Auld household, and “this bread I used to bestow upon the hungry little urchins, who in return would give me that more valuable bread of knowledge.”
In 1832, Frederick’s owner died, and after living seven years in Baltimore he was sent to live on a farm with another member of the family, the mean-spirited and brutal Thomas Auld. “He found me unsuitable to his purpose. My city life, he said, had had a very pernicious effect upon me.” After a few months, Thomas Auld “resolved to put me out, as he said, to be broken; and, for this purpose, he let me for one year to a man named Edward Covey,” a class leader in the Methodist church and well-known as a “nigger-breaker.”
“I left Master Thomas’s house, and went to live with Mr. Covey on the 1st of January, 1833. I was now, for the first time in my life, a field hand. In my new employment I found myself even more awkward than a country boy appeared to be in a large city. I had been at my new home but one week before Mr. Covey gave me a very severe whipping, cutting my back, causing the blood to run, and raising ridges on my flesh as large as my little finger.”
The reason given was Douglass’s failure to control a team of unbroken oxen that had damaged a cart by running it against a gate-post. Covey said “he would teach me how to trifle away my time and break gates.”
“I lived with Mr. Covey one year. During the first six months of that year scarce a week passed without his whipping me … We were worked in all weathers. It was never too hot or too cold; it could never rain, blow, hail or snow too hard for us to work in the field. Work, work, work, was scarcely more the order of the day than of the night. The longest days were too short for him, and the shortest nights too long for him. I was somewhat unmanageable when I first went there, but a few months of this discipline tamed me. Mr. Covey succeeded in breaking me. I was broken in body, soul, and spirit. My natural elasticity was crushed, my intellect languished, the disposition to read departed, the cheerful spark that lingered about my eye died; the dark night of slavery closed in upon me; and behold a man transformed into a brute!”
But not forever. “You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man.” This happened “on one of the hottest days of the month of August, 1833.” While fanning grain, Douglass had collapsed from heat and overwork. Covey beat him savagely, and Douglass ran off, but returned two days later, on a Sunday. “Upon entering the yard gate, out came Mr. Covey on his way to meeting. He spoke to me very kindly, bade me drive the pigs from a lot nearby, and passed on towards the church.” However, on Monday morning, while Douglass was in the stable throwing down some hay from the loft, “Mr. Covey entered the stable with a long rope; and just as I was half out of the loft, he caught hold of my legs, and was about tying me. As soon as I found what he was up to, I gave a sudden spring, and as I did so, he holding my legs, I was brought sprawling on the stable floor. Mr. Covey seemed now to think he had me, and could do what he pleased; but at this moment—from whence came the spirit I don’t know—I resolved to fight.” And fight they did, Douglass seizing Covey by the throat, and giving a man who came to help Covey “a heavy kick close under the ribs.” Covey called on another hand to help him, but the man replied that “his master hired him out to work, not to help to whip me.” Off and on, the fight lasted two hours, with Douglass the victor; and “the whole six months afterwards that I spent with Mr. Covey, he never laid the weight of his finger on me.
“This battle with Mr. Covey was the turning point in my career as a slave. It rekindled the few expiring embers of freedom, and revived within me a sense of my own manhood … I now resolved that however long I might remain a slave in form, the day had passed forever when I could be a slave in fact.” As for Mr. Covey, Douglass at first wondered why he did not “have me taken by the constable to the whipping-post, and there regularly whipped for the crime of raising my hand against a white man.” The only possible answer was that “Mr. Covey enjoyed the most unbounded reputation for being a first-rate overseer and negro-breaker. It was of considerable importance to him. That reputation was at stake; and had he sent me—a boy about sixteen years old—to the public whipping post, his reputation would have been lost.”
Soon after he was sent back to the household of Hugh Auld.
“In a few weeks after I went to Baltimore, Master Hugh hired me to Mr. William Gardner, an extensive ship-builder, on Fell’s Point. I was put there to learn how to caulk. It, however, proved a very unfavorable place for the accomplishment of this object. Mr. Gardner was engaged that spring in building two large man-of-war brigs, professedly for the Mexican government. The vessels were to be launched in July of that year, and in failure thereof Mr. Gardner was to lose a considerable sum; so that when I entered, all was hurry. There was no time to learn anything. Every man had to do that which he knew how to do.
“In entering the ship-yard, my orders from Mr. Gardner were to do whatever the carpenters commanded me to do. This was placing me at the beck and call of about seventy-five men. I was to regard all these as masters. Their word was to be my law. My situation was a most trying one. At times I needed a dozen pair of hands. I was called a dozen ways in the space of a single minute. Three or four voices would strike my ear at the same moment. It was—‘Fred, come help me to cant this timber here.’—‘Fred, come carry this timber yonder.’—‘Fred, bring that roller here.’—‘Fred, go get a fresh can of water.’—‘Fred, come help saw off the end of this timber.’—‘Fred, go quick, and get the crowbar.’—‘Fred, hold on the end of this fall.’—‘Fred, go to the blacksmith’s shop and get a new punch.’—‘Hurra, Fred! run and bring me a cold chisel.’—‘I say, Fred, bear a hand, and get up a fire as quick as lightning under that steam-box.’—‘Halloo, nigger! Come, turn this grindstone.’—‘Come, come! Move, move, and bowse this timber forward.’—‘I say, darky, blast your eyes, why don’t you heat up some pitch?’—‘Halloo! Halloo! Halloo!’ (Three voices at the same time.) ‘Come here!—Go there!—Hold on where you are!—Damn you, if you move, I’ll knock your brains out!’
“This was my school for eight months; and I might have remained there longer, but for a most horrid fight I had with four of the white apprentices, in which my left eye was nearly knocked out, and I was horribly mangled in other respects. The facts in the case were these: until a very little while after I went there, white and black ship-carpenters worked side by side, and no one seemed to see any impropriety in it. All hands seemed to be very well satisfied. Many of the black carpenters were freemen. Things seemed to be going on very well. All at once, the white carpenters knocked off, and said they would not work with free colored workmen. Their reason for this, as alleged, was that if free carpenters were encouraged, they would soon take the trade into their own hands, and poor white men would be thrown out of employment. They therefore felt called upon at once to put a stop to it. And, taking advantage of Mr. Gardner’s necessities, they broke off, swearing they would work no longer, unless he would discharge his black carpenters.
“Now, though this did not extend to me in form, it did reach me in fact. My fellow-apprentices very soon began to feel it degrading to them to work with me. They began to put on airs, and talk about the ‘niggers’ taking the country, saying we all ought to be killed; and, being encouraged by the journeymen, they commenced making my condition as hard as they could, by hectoring me around, and sometimes striking me. I, of course … struck back again, regardless of consequences; and while I kept them from combining, I succeeded very well; for I could whip the whole of them, taking them separately. They, howe
ver, at length combined, and came upon me armed with sticks, stones, and heavy handspikes. One came in front with a half brick. There was one at each side of me, and one behind me. While I was attending to those in front, and on either side, the one behind ran up with the handspike and struck me a heavy blow upon the head. It stunned me. I fell, and with this they all ran upon me and fell to beating me with their fists. I let them lay on for a while, gathering strength. In an instant, I gave a sudden surge and rose to my hands and knees. Just as I did that, one of their number gave me, with his heavy boot, a powerful kick in the left eye. My eyeball seemed to have burst. When they saw my eye closed and badly swollen, they left me. With this I seized the handspike and for a time pursued them. But here the carpenters interfered, and I thought I might as well give it up. It was impossible to stand my hand against so many.
“All this took place in sight of not less than fifty white ship-carpenters, and not one interposed a friendly word; but some cried, ‘Kill the damned nigger! Kill him! Kill him! He struck a white person!’ I found my only chance for life was in flight. I succeeded in getting away without an additional blow, and barely so; for to strike a white man is death by Lynch law—and that was the law in Mr. Gardner’s ship-yard; nor is there much of any other out of Mr. Gardner’s ship-yard.”