ESCAPE FROM SLAVERY; LEARNING THE WAYS OF FREEDOM
For the second time in his life, Frederick Douglass now began earnestly
to study the possible means of permanently breaking his fetters. At the
end of every week, when he turned his entire earnings over to his
master, his sense of injustice and indignation increased. He was
scarcely able to conceal his discontent. His intense longing to be free
must have betrayed itself in his countenance, for very soon he noticed
that he was being closely watched. The fact that he had at one time made
an attempt to run away caused more or less uneasiness.
Young Douglass soon found that the difficulties of escape were quite as
great in Baltimore as on the Freeland plantation. The railroads running
from that city to Philadelphia were compelled to enforce the most
stringent regulations with reference to colored people. Even free
Negroes found it difficult to comply with them. Every one applying for a
railway ticket was required to show his “free papers” and to be measured
and carefully examined before he could enter the cars. Besides this, he
was not allowed to travel by night. Similar regulations were enforced by
steamboat companies. In addition to all these difficulties, every road
and turnpike was picketed with kidnappers on the lookout for fugitive
slaves. Douglass found it much easier to learn the obstacles than the
aids to successful escape. The former were many and obvious; the latter
were few and difficult to discover. It was impossible to profit by the
experience of those who had run the gauntlet successfully, and whenever
it was learned that some keen-scented slave had found a pathway to
freedom, the information was carefully concealed from those in bonds.
Every slave preparing to escape his fetters must act without guide or
precedent, and form his own plan of deliverance.
Douglass was now convinced that he must hereafter be the arbiter of his
own fortunes. He at once decided that his great need was money. The
problem was how to get the necessary sum. His whole time and all of his
earnings belonged to his master, and so long as this was the case the
funds must still be a long way off. He finally determined to propose to
his owner, Master Thomas Auld, that he be allowed to have his own time.
In other words, he would agree to pay him so much a week, and all in
excess of that sum he would keep as his own. This proposition merely
angered Mr. Auld, who accused young Douglass of scheming to run away,
and threatened him with severe punishment, if he ever mentioned such a
thing again. But Douglass had too much at stake to give up. He made the
same proposition to Master Hugh Auld and it was accepted. By the terms
of this agreement young Douglass was to be allowed all of his time, and
to make his own contracts and collect his own wages; while in return for
these privileges, he was to pay his master three dollars each week,
board and clothe himself, and buy his own tools.
This was a pretty hard bargain, but it meant his first step toward
freedom, so he entered upon it cheerfully. From May until August, 1838,
he worked for himself under the above conditions, kept all his
obligations, and was able to save out of his earnings a neat sum of
money. In the month of August occurred an unfortunate interruption of
his plans. One Saturday night, instead of taking his wages to his
master, he was persuaded to go out of town to a camp-meeting. He
convinced himself that there could be no objection to this, since he had
the money and purposed turning it in early Monday morning. Owing to some
misunderstanding, however, he was compelled to remain one day longer
than he had intended. On coming back to the city, he went directly to
his master and made his payment. Instead of being indifferent to his
absence, Hugh Auld was almost beside himself with rage. Addressing
Douglass, he said: “You rascal, I have a good mind to give you a sound
whipping. How dare you go out of the city without my leave? Now, you
scoundrel, you have done for yourself; you shall have your time no
longer. The next thing I shall hear of you, will be your running away.
Bring home your tools at once; I will teach you how to go off in this
way.”
Poor Douglass was for the moment dismayed by this very serious
consequence of an innocent error of judgment. He had had his own way so
long, he had begun to feel that his master’s only interest in him was
the regular payment of the three dollars per week which he had been
receiving during the previous four months. All his hopes for liberty had
been staked on the continuance of this arrangement for a few months
longer. Douglass understood the man who was now his master. He had lived
with him long enough not to take his threats too seriously. Mr. Auld
would have been indeed shortsighted if he had not used an occasion of
this kind to impress his slave with the seriousness of taking such a
liberty. Douglass did not, therefore, lose heart and as a result of this
episode, he made two important resolutions. One was to go out in search
of work and return to the old contract; and the other was to fix
September 3, 1838, as the day of his flight from slavery.
He soon found good employment in the Butler ship-yards. Mr. Butler
thought much of the young slave calker and gave him every opportunity to
earn good wages. At the end of the first week, he presented to his
master the whole of his earnings, amounting to nine dollars, which was
accepted with evident satisfaction. For the moment Master Hugh seemed
entirely to have forgotten the reprehensible conduct of only a few days
before. Having thus shrewdly helped his master to recover his good
temper and natural kindness, Douglass took special pains to keep him
pleased and unsuspicious. The second week of his employment, he again
turned over the whole amount of his wages, nine dollars. Mr. Auld was
overjoyed at this earning capacity of Douglass and as an evidence of it
made him a present of twenty-five cents. In the last week he worked as a
slave, he gave his master six dollars.
Ever since the first trouble with Auld, he had been pushing his plans to
redeem his pledge to himself that he would run away on Monday, September
3, 1838. These were anxious days and many small details had to be
mastered. He must carefully avoid anything in manner or word which could
excite the slightest suspicion. He had to test the fidelity of a number
of free colored people whose aid, in secret ways, was very essential to
him. Who these persons were, has never been revealed and in fact, it was
not until many years after emancipation that Mr. Douglass disclosed to
the public how he succeeded in making his daring escape. “Murder
itself,” he says, “was not more severely and surely punished in the
state of Maryland than aiding and abetting the escape of a slave.”
Young Douglass’s flight had not outward semblance of dramatic incident
or thrilling episode and yet, as he modestly says, “the courage that
could risk betrayal and the bravery which was ready to encounter death,
if need be, in pursuit of freedom, were features in the undertaking. My
success was due to address rather than to courage, to good luck rather
than bravery. My means of escape were provided by the very means which
were making laws to hold and bind me more securely to slavery.”
By the laws of the state of Maryland, every free colored person was
required to have what were called “free papers” which must be renewed
frequently, and, of course, a fee was always charged for renewal. They
contained a full and minute description of the holder, for the purpose
of identification. This device, in some measure, defeated itself, since
more than one man could be found to answer the general description;
hence many slaves could get away by impersonating the real owners of
these passes, which were returned by mail after the borrowers had made
good their escape. To use these papers in this manner was hazardous both
for the fugitives and for the lenders. Not every freeman was willing to
put in jeopardy his own liberty that another might be free. It was,
however, often done and the confidence that it necessitated was seldom
betrayed. Douglass had not many friends among the free colored people in
Baltimore who resembled him sufficiently to make it safe for him to use
their papers. Fortunately, however, he had one who owned a “sailor’s
protection,” a document describing the holder and certifying to the fact
that he was a “free American sailor.” This “protection” did not describe
its bearer very accurately. But, it called for a man very much darker
than himself, and a close examination would have betrayed him at the
start. In the face of all these conditions young Douglass was relying
upon something beside a dubious written passport. This something was his
desperate courage. He had learned to act the part of a freeman so well
that no one suspected him of being a slave. He had early acquired the
habit of studying human nature. As he grew to understand men, he no
longer dreaded them. No one knew better than he the kind of human nature
that he had to deal with in this perilous undertaking. He knew the
speech, manner, and behavior that would excite suspicion; hence he
avoided asking for a ticket at the railway station because this would
subject him to examination. He so managed that just as the train started
he jumped on, his bag being thrown after him by some one in waiting. He
knew that scrutiny of him in a crowded car _en route_ would be less
exacting than at the station. He had borrowed a sailor’s shirt,
tarpaulin, cap and black cravat, tied in true sailor fashion, and he
acted the part of an “old salt” so perfectly that he excited no
suspicion. When the conductor came to collect his fare and inspected his
“free papers,” Douglass, in the most natural manner, said that he had
none but promptly showed his “sailor’s protection,” which the railway
official merely glanced at and passed on without further question. Twice
on the trip he thought he was detected. Once when his car stood opposite
a south-bound train, Douglass observed a well-known citizen of Baltimore
who knew him well, sitting where he could see him distinctly. At another
time, while still in Maryland, he was noticed by a man who had met him
frequently at the ship-yards. In neither of these cases, however, was he
interfered with or molested. When he got into the free state of
Pennsylvania, he felt more joy than he dared express. He had by his cool
temerity and address passed every sentinel undetected and no slave, to
his knowledge, he afterward said, ever got away from bondage on so
narrow a margin of safety.
After reaching Philadelphia, he hurried on to New York. It took him just
twenty-four hours to make the run from the slave city of Baltimore to
the free city of New York. Measured by his intense anxiety, the distance
and time must have seemed without end. For fifteen years he had been
patiently planning to get his feet upon free soil and breathe the air of
a free state. No one ever did more to free himself or to deserve the
liberty into which he was now about to enter. He came to New York, his
pulses throbbing with high hopes. He soon learned, however, that his
stay there was not safe and that the slave-traders plied their vocation
even in the free-states.
Douglass’s instinct for right action seldom failed him. Although he was
totally ignorant of New York and its people, and had never heard of a
“Vigilance Committee,” he had managed, in a few days after his arrival,
to put himself under the protection and guidance of such influential
friends of the Negro race as Lewis and Arthur Tappan, Thomas Downing,
and Theodore Wright, who were at that time high officials in that
extensive Underground Railway system which had already safely carried
thousands of passengers from bondage to freedom.
He retained a keen remembrance of his former experiences in Baltimore
and was conscious of a sense of protection in his Abolition friends; yet
at the age of twenty-one years, in this new environment of freedom, he
was in many respects as ignorant as a child. To what was north, or east,
or west of New York, he was entirely oblivious neither did he know the
kind and the condition of the people among whom he was to live and work
out his destiny. Where to go, what to do, and how to use his freedom,
were questions he could ask, but could not answer. It was enough, now,
just to know that he was free. What was to be his relationship to these
non-slave-holding people was yet to be discovered.
It is an evidence of his self-reliance and honor, as well as his loyalty
to his past, that, almost the first step in his new life, was to send
for his promised wife. She came to New York at once, and they were
wedded by Rev. J. W. C. Pennington, a Presbyterian minister of that
city. The early marriage of the young man must be regarded as an
important event in his career as a freeman. It was a marriage for love
and, as his wife was a woman of strong character and determination, she
was able actively to assist her husband while he was seeking to
establish himself in a new country. The act also made him at once a
home-builder and the head of a family. Though he was poor almost to the
very limit of poverty, without work, without habitation, and without
friends or relationships, having nothing, in fact, but himself, which
included a sound body and strong will, he went about planning and doing
things as if certain that all must come out as he wished.
His newly discovered friends decided it was best for him not to stay
longer in New York, and that New Bedford, Mass., was a much safer place.
There he could work at his trade without danger of re-capture. He
cheerfully started on his journey, though he had not enough money to pay
his way. The stage-driver, plying between Newport and New Bedford, held
a part of his baggage as security for his unpaid passage and when he and
his wife arrived at their destination they had nothing to live on except
faith. In this New England town everything was strange to Douglass, but
he was not long in finding a friend, a colored man named Nathan Johnson.
The latter, the first important acquaintance the refugee made among
Northern colored people, had a good home, good standing in the
community, and more than ordinary intelligence. He very soon discovered
that Frederick Douglass was a man of superior fibre and became his firm
friend.
Johnson’s house was well furnished with books and music, and bore other
evidences of good taste and a cultivated mind. He was in a position to
render just that kind of help which the young fugitive and his new wife
needed at this time. He at once redeemed the baggage held by the
stage-driver, and gave Douglass needed directions and advice as to how
to get work and to establish himself.
Nathan Johnson had the further distinction of being the man who gave to
the Maryland slave the name he ever afterward bore. Douglass left the
South as Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey. His new-found friend had
just been reading Scott’s _Lady of the Lake_, and persuaded the young
man that Douglas was a name of poetic and historical significance; he
was sure it would be further glorified by its new owner. With so
auspicious a beginning, the refugee started out bravely to seek work and
make a living for himself and his wife.
As he moved about in the New England town, he was much impressed by
Northern civilization, and was greatly surprised to see white people,
who while rich, educated, and powerful, were yet not slave-holders. Up
to this time he had known but two classes of white people, slave-holders
and non-slave-holders. The non-slave-holding white people of the South,
he knew, were generally ignorant, despised, and poor; while those who
owned slaves seemed to own everything else worth having. Here in New
England he observed that white people were high or low according to
their character, ability, and possessions. Life appeared to him larger,
wider, and fuller of possibilities than he had dreamed, even in his more
hopeful days down on the Eastern Shore. These impressions and the better
understanding of his own condition gave him courage and made him feel
equal to any task or problem. His first occupation, as a free man, was
putting away some coal for Ephraim Peabody, for which he was paid two
dollars. He cherished this “free money,” for it was the first he had
ever earned that he could call his own. He cheerfully went from one job
to another, proud as a bank president in the new dignity which freedom
seemed to have conferred upon him. He accepted any kind of task he could
find to do, such as sawing wood, digging cellars, removing rubbish,
helping to load cargoes on ships, scrubbing out ship cabins, and the
rough work in a foundry. The employment was hard and the pay small, yet
it did not seem so to this newly emancipated slave. The right to dispose
of his own labor, and to have and to hold all that he made was a
profound and unceasing satisfaction to him.
His spare moments were given to studying and reading everything he could
lay hold of. He saw from the first that his freedom could not be
profitably used and protected without knowledge and the mental
discipline that comes with the effort to acquire it. He was liked by
everybody who employed him, because he made it a matter of principle to
do all and more than his full duty in every occupation. He put as much
zeal, intelligence, and cheerful industry into these common tasks as he
later gave to pursuits of a more dignified character.
Young Douglass was cheered and heartened in this wholesome atmosphere of
freedom,—free schools, free labor, and general fair play, to such a
degree that it was a long time before he began to feel the presence and
trammels of race prejudice as they existed in New Bedford and elsewhere
in the North in that day. That there was a feeling against his color he
learned when he attempted to follow his trade as a calker. When he
sought to hire himself to a certain ship-owner at New Bedford, he was
told to go to work, but when he went to the boat with his tools, the
foreman informed him that every white man would quit if he struck a blow
at his trade. This unexpected _dénouement_ drove Douglass back to common
labor, at which he could earn less than one-half of what he could have
made as a calker. He accepted the situation in good spirit, however,
feeling that the worst possible treatment in freedom was infinitely
better than slavery.
He met his next rebuff when he attempted to attend one of the lectures
under the auspices of the New Bedford Lyceum Association. He was refused
a ticket on the ground that it was against the policy of the society to
admit colored people to the lecture-room. It was not long, however,
before this discrimination was done away with, since men like Charles
Sumner, Emerson, Horace Mann, and Garrison, refused to speak before the
organization unless the restriction was removed. The privilege of
attending these meetings and hearing some of the great anti-slavery
leaders was a matter of great import to Douglass. Indeed, it was the
very thing he needed as a part of his education in preparation for his
life work. He heard for the first time white men who were taking strong
positions on the question of the abolition of slavery. The existence of
an anti-slavery society and an anti-slavery movement of ever-widening
extent and influence in the nation impressed him as nothing had done
since he came from the South. The things for which he had secretly
dreamed and yearned and struggled in Maryland were now becoming great
national issues, with men of might behind them, pushing them on and
seeking to make them the foremost questions of the day.
Quite as important as the privilege of hearing slavery discussed was the
chance he obtained of reading William Lloyd Garrison’s paper, _The
Liberator_. Garrison’s direct and uncompromising words came to him like
a trumpet call. He began to cherish each number as second only in
importance to the Bible. Heretofore he had had no one to help him reason
out the philosophy of the question. What the facts of slavery were he
knew by actual and bitter suffering. The words of no one could make him
feel their injustice and pain more than his own experiences had made him
feel them, but here, behold, was a mighty man, a prophet in his moral
earnestness—a sort of Isaiah, who with inspired fervor, predicted the
ultimate downfall of slavery.
_The Liberator_ and Mr. Garrison’s words were as important to young
Douglass and his intellectual development as was the _Columbian Orator_,
which had inspired him while a slave in Baltimore. Those who knew him at
once recognized his intelligence. The colored people of New Bedford were
the first to discover his fluency as a speaker and to give ear to his
original ideas on the question of freedom for their race. He was often
called upon to speak in meetings held by colored men in the town, and in
colored churches. As far as the masses of the people were concerned,
however, he was still an obscure Negro laborer. There was no one except,
perhaps, Nathan Johnson, who saw in this patient and cheerful toiler the
promise of a public career. No men of African descent had up to this
time achieved anything like distinction. A colored man might now and
then be smart as a freak of nature; no one was prepared to think of his
becoming great by sheer force of mind and character. But the power
within this young fugitive slave and the forces without him were fast
shaping themselves to call him forth and hold him up as an example to
all the world.