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.7
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.”8 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.”9
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.”10 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.”11
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.12
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.”13
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.14
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.15
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.”16
THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD AND RUNAWAY SLAVES
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.17
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.
David Blight is careful in acknowledging the many revisions historians have brought to the subject, especially since Larry Gara’s landmark study, The Liberty Line: The Legend of the Underground Railroad (1961), while insisting on the need to respect the local lore and mythology as a way of understanding the extraordinary “hold of the Underground Railroad on Americans’ historical imagination.”18
It should be added that the fugitive slave issue was absolutely central in bringing on the Civil War, especially after the North’s hostile response to the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, with large crowds of Northerners attempting to give aid to captured blacks. The popularity of the Underground Railroad is especially remarkable in view of the widespread fear, popularized by the South, that any significant freeing of slaves would lead to a mass migration to the North, where blacks would take jobs away from the higher-paid whites, especially immigrants. Given the profound depth of Northern racism, it’s clear that many whites who were thrilled over the slaves’ escape would not have wanted runaways settling next door or sending their children to the neighborhood school. But the assumption that most fugitives were headed for Canada helped remove some of that concern; the actual numbers of fugitives, as we will see, were not large; and the very fact that slaves were willing to take such risks undermined the Southern propaganda regarding paternalistic treatment and happy, contented bondspeople. The fugitive slave narratives enlisted crucial religious themes of redemption, exodus, and salvation, which fell into already well established tropes regarding American conceptions of freedom. As one correspondent wrote, the Underground Railroad would “thrill the heart and quicken the pulse of the eager student of the grand progressive movement of human liberty in the past,” offering “ ‘hairbreath [sic] escapes, perilous journeys by land and water, incredible human suffering for a wide readership.’ ”19
Moreover, given the constitutional structure of the Union, it was very difficult to take direct action that could have any effect on the nation’s “problem of slavery.” That point was exemplified in 1833, when the British Parliament passed a sweeping law for the gradual emancipation of colonial slaves. In America, abolitionists saw the need to limit petitioning to the supposedly constitutional abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia, ending the interstate slave trade, or prohibiting the admission of Texas as a slave state (and for many years a “gag law” suppressed all antislavery petitions). From 1856 to 1861, Lincoln and the Republicans restricted their antislavery policy to excluding any further slave states or territories. Therefore, helping fugitives became a vital and popular way of enabling even thousands of Northerners to participate personally in an activity that could give freedom to individual slaves while also renouncing national complicity in the slave system. Indeed, by projecting all of slavery’s evil on slaveholders and slave catchers, there could be a denial of national complicity and complexity and a reassuring assumption that the entire problem would be resolved as soon as individual slaves were freed in the way that runaways were. One of the defects Blight finds in the Underground Railroad lore and mythology is that it reinforces the conviction that America’s racial issue would end and did end with slave emancipation.20
Two other major shortcomings concern the omission of the predominant role of free blacks in the Underground Railroad, and an exaggerated view of the system’s organization and, especially, of the number of fugitives transported. We now know that the great Harriet Tubman was not exceptional in being a black conductor and that most fugitives preferred finding refuge in black homes or quarters. Blacks in effect ran the Underground Railroad, and black conductors often worked at occupations connected with transportation, as river men, railroad porters, or coach owners. Nevertheless, it was the white involvement—in particular the enthusiastic white response to the fugitive slave issue—that alarmed and infuriated Southerners and helped lead to secession and war. As Benjamin Quarles noted, “Slavery was weakened far less by the economic loss of the absconding blacks than by the antislavery feeling they evoked by their flight and the attempts to reclaim them.”21
This point ties in with the small number—according to one historian, “only a trickle”—of the millions of Southern slaves who actually escaped to freedom in the North or Canad
a. Ironically, the most authoritative and deeply researched book, John Hope Franklin and Lauren Schweninger’s Runaway Slaves: Rebels on the Plantation, underscores the frequency of slaves escaping locally to avoid work, to encourage concessions, to see members from broken-up families, or to avoid punishment. While precise numbers are impossible to determine, advertisements for runaways and slaveholder journals, diaries, and records make it clear that few masters could boast that none of their slaves had absconded. There can be no doubt that tens of thousands of slaves ran away each year “into the woods, swamps, hills, backcountry, towns, and cities of the South.”22
This fact, documented in great detail by Franklin and Schweninger, was related to a general pattern of preceived resistance that included theft, damaging equipment, mocking whites while seeming to flatter, playing on conflicts between masters and their white overseers, and lightening unending work with moments of song, intimacy, slowdowns, and relaxation. As human beings, most slaves had one overriding objective: self-preservation at a minimal cost of degradation and loss of self-respect. For most, the goal of “freedom” was simply unrealistic, given the rarity of manumissions, the mechanisms and institutions of social control, and the distance to the North, Canada, or Mexico (small numbers of American slaves did escape to Spanish Florida, Mexico, and even Cuba).
According to a very conservative estimate, the total number of annual runaways in the 1850s would have exceeded 50,000 (1.26 percent of the 1860 slave population; about 5 out of every 400 slaves). But the vast majority of these slaves remained fairly close to their farms or plantations and either returned or were captured within days or weeks. It is probable that between 1830 and 1860, no more than 1,000 or 2,000 fugitives annually made it to the North and achieved freedom.23 Since an average of 1,500 would be only .0375 percent of the 1860 slave population, totaling only 45,000 over a thirty-year period—far fewer than the number of slaves who escaped behind British lines during the American Revolution—it is clear that the Underground Railroad and the flight of fugitives to the North posed no serious demographic threat to the Southern slave system.
The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation Page 30