The Rise of Frederick Douglass: From Slave to Freedom Fighter & Beyond

This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories, the show where America is the star and the American people. Up next, the story of the most photographed man of the nineteenth century—not Abraham Lincoln, but Frederick Douglass. Here to tell the story of Douglass’s life is Nathan Richardson, an interpreter of the man himself and playing the man himself for us in this story. Also, Joey Barretta, an expert on Douglass and a Civitas Institute Postdoctoral Fellow at UT Austin. Let’s get into the story.

Good morning, fellow citizens. It is indeed, and I’m here with unusual diffidence to talk to you about the peculiar topic of my life as a slave. I assure you that the platform which I I stand now and the place where I was born in Talbot County, near Saint Michael’s, along the Tuckahoe River is considerable, and the difficulty in getting from the former to the latter is by no means light.

The circumstances into which he was born really give you some understanding of what it must have been like to be a slave. It’s a very demoralizing institution.

I was born in Talbot County, near Saint Michael’s, around the year 1818.

He doesn’t even know his date of birth for sure.

The closest we could come would be planting time or harvest time.

That itself was a part of the feature of slavery.

The slave master did not want you to have any knowledge whatsoever. An educated slave is a worthless slave, would be the mantra of the slave master.

The enslaved person could not think of himself as someone belonging to something greater than his master’s domain.

I was taken away from my mother before I haven’t finished nursing. She was sold to another plantation about twelve miles away. I never saw my mother doing the light of day. She would occasionally walk twelve miles—twenty-four miles round trip—just to rock me to sleep at night, and by the time I woke the next morning, she would be gone back to her plantation to answer the bell for hard labor.

His father may have been a slave master, so Douglass could have been conceived in a rape, and there’s nothing that could have been done about that.

I was raised by my grandmother, Betsey Bailey, who had already given all the best years of her life to Colonel Lloyd and Captain Anthony. She had already labored and broke her back for him, and then, now relegated to a hut outside the farm to raise small children like myself and my cousins and other children. And so there I was with my grandmother, and she corralled all the children and kept us until that day came when she would eventually have to walk us to the Great House.

He didn’t think of himself as a slave, because he lived with his grandmother in a simple cabin in which there was someone who loved and cared for him. But he sort of began to understand he was a slave because she would refer to somebody called Old Master. He didn’t know who that was or fully what that meant, but she spoke of him in such a tone that Douglass took special notice of it. He begins to think: Who is this person? The problem comes when he is of sufficient age to be productive at the master’s house.

I remember the day my grandmother walked me, and I knew that I probably would not come back with her to her hut. We got to the Great House, and I was immediately struck by seeing cousins and other children running around on the plantation. She said, “Go play with your cousins. They’re happy to see you.” I was clinging to her dress because I knew if I lost sight of her, I might never see her again. But I went over to the side of the building, and I just sit there and I cried because I knew this was going to be something new that I’ve never seen before. My cousins came to me—my brother Perry, my sister Eliza. They came to me and tried to console me. Nothing could console losing first your mother, then your grandmother. Now for the first time, I’m seeing the absolute brutality of slavery: that my master would take a young woman who had interest in another young colored boy on another plantation. He found out that she had gone out in the middle of the night to see him, brought her into the kitchen, put her on a stool, tied her hands to a joist, and commenced to whip her on her back until the blood ran down her back. Witnessing this sit me into a terror, and so I started learning what this institution of bondage is all about: that the master would whip a slave for no other reason than to intimidate other slaves not to disobey the rules of the day.

People are bought and sold, and you can acquire more of them to do the work that you deem necessary. So it’s really treating them akin to the cattle you have on the farm. You breed them, you make them work, you get rid of them whenever you will, and you care for them enough that they don’t die. But you’re treating them as an animal who don’t have maybe clothing and shoes and a bed, the things that most people take for granted.

My position as a young born on the plantation was to two occasionally, if a horse or a cow or a hog got out of the gate, that I would go and fetch that horse or cow and bring them back. There was at once this particular horse that would always run away to the next plantation, and I’d find them every time in the same exact spot with a big pile of hay eating his field. And for bringing him back, I would get a reward of a biscuit or a slipper of bacon, let’s just say. I occasionally would leave the gate over. I had to do that because food was rationing and clothing was rationing to the slaves: two linen shirts, one pair of pants, one pair of shoes, one jacket, the whole of which could have cost no more than seven dollars. The children too young to work in the field would have received neither shoes, nor trousers, nor jackets. Two linen shirts per year, and when those fail you you to win naked for the rest of the year, regardless of the weather. I can remember sleeping on the cold, hard ground with a burlout bag over my head, and in the winter, the frost biting my fingers and toes, and the gash white enough to put up penciling. This was my plight on that plantation until I became such a news that I could get more tasks when we come back.

More of the remarkable story of Frederick Douglass here on Our American Stories. Lee Habib here, host of Our American Stories. Every day on this show, we bring you stories of America, stories of us, and it’s because of listeners like you that we’re able to tell the story of this great and beautiful country every day. Our stories will always be free to listen to, but they’re not free to make. If you love what you hear, consider making a tax-deductible donation to Our American Stories. Is it OurAmericanStories.com to give? Give a little, give a lot; any amount helps. To OurAmericanStories.com. And we returned to Our American Stories and the story of Frederick Douglass. When we last left off, Douglass had been sent to a slave breaker, a punishment for his growing desire to be free. Let’s return to the story.

So, just as the family was destroyed because it made a slave think of himself as something beyond the master’s property, education did the same thing.

Well, my master’s mistress called me, and she said, “Frederick, we’re going to send you to Baltimore to live with our cousins, Hugh and Sophia Auld. Now, they are city people, and we don’t want them laughing at you, so we want you to go down to the creek and wash yourself up. We’re going to give you your first pair of pants.” Can you imagine getting your first pair of pants when you’re eight years old? I ran down to the creek; I spent half the day washing myself up. I came back, I got my first pair of pants, and they put me on a sloop sailing up the Chesapeake Bay to Baltimore. Miss Sophia opened the door, and she said, “Freddie, we’ve been waiting for you. Are you hungry? Are you tired?” Well, I was quite surprised: a white woman smiling, beaming at me, inviting me in. If, even if, I had looked in the face of my slave master on the plantation, I would have gotten knocked down on chitute. She said, “Hold your head up, young man, there’s no need to be ashamed here.” I went on in. You see, I was sent there to be the helpmate for their young son, Master Thomas. He, of course, was around my age, and I was to be his butler, so to speak. In the mornings I would walk him to school, and while he was at school, I’d be at home doing his chores. Mistress Auld, Miss Sophia, she was an avid reader, a kind person.

She had no slaves before she was married, so the way she treated Douglass when he was a kid was different than how a slave master would have. She treated him like a child.

She would occasionally, as she was reading the Bible or the newspaper, share an ab or She with me. That was until her husband, Mister Hugh, came, and he said, “Sophia, I understand you’re teaching that boy how to read.” She said, “Yes, what harm could that do? If you give him an inch, he’ll take an ell. You’ll make him good for nothing.”

Master Hugh Auld comes into the picture and says, “It would spoil the best slave in the world. It would spoil him. It would make him unfit for his servile, menial task positions.” In my household, slaves were to be on edge and generally illiterate. Douglass will learn on his own.

She stopped teaching me how to read. As a matter of fact, anytime that I might be in a corner, quiet, trying to learn a letter or a word, she would come and snatch the paper right out of my hand.

And he says that from this moment where Hugh Auld tells his wife she can no longer educate Douglass that he first understood the pathway from slavery to freedom, and the pathway from slavery to freedom then was knowledge.

And once I had a few words to describe my misery as a slave, my mind started to free. You know, you cannot enslave a freed mind. Once your mind is free, your body has to follow. And so I would have to devise various methods to teach myself how to read and write. As I was walking the boys to school in the morning, they would always on the way to school be talking about the lesson, reciting the ABCs, or talking about some words. And I would say to Master Thomas—I said, “Master Thomas, do you believe that I can make a W?” And of course you would say, “How can you make a W? Who taught you how to read and write?” And I would say, “Never mind, never mind who taught me how to make the W? But I can make this W. And if I make a W in this sand, you show me how to make a Q.” And then I would make the W in the sand, and then he would be obliged to show me how to make the Q, and then I would have a Q. Or we might be walking along, and I might say to young Master Tom, “Master Tom, the biscuits on this morning’s table were very good. I have one in my pocket. Now, if you have a word in your notebook, it would be food for my brain. This biscuit in my pocket would be food for your stomach, and we wouldn’t make a trade.” He would give me the word, I would give him the biscuit, and we would both be fed. This is how I taught myself how to read and write. Well, of course, the elementary words and letters were not enough. As a matter of fact, one of the books that I saw the young boys carrying on their way back and forth to school was a book called The Columbian Orator, full of great speeches and—

Poems—basically a collection of abolitionist writings.

I decided I would make the money to buy one myself. I saw this Columbian Orator in a bookshop down on the streets of Baltimore. And so, what I did: I sat up my shoestand on the streets of Baltimore. I found myself a stump, some shoe polish, and a brush. And as the men would pass by, I would yell out to them, “Five cents to shine your shoes, sir! One cent to dust you off!” And with seventy-five cents, I purchased The Columbian Orator.

He began to see himself as a human being deserving a better life than slavery had given to him, and he questions, “Why am I in this position? What have I done to deserve this?” And he would say nothing. And he began to desire freedom when he learned that something that was good for him—education—was being taken away. That is what education really did to shape his understanding of why he wanted to be free.

“You’d scarce expect one of my age
To speak in public on the stage.
And if I chanced to fall below
Demosthenes or Cicero,
Don’t view me with a critic’s eye,
But pass my imperfections by.
Large streams from little fountains flow;
Tall oaks from little acorns grow.
And though I am now small and young,
Of judgment, weak and feeble tongue,
Yet all no great learned men,
Like me, once learned to read their ABC.” And so.

I was studying, and that was a real problem.

I had no desire to go back to the plantation. But as the slave master said—and Mister Hugh told his wife—”An educated slave is a worthless slave.” And of course, they decided to send me back to Talbot County. They put me under the servitude of a notorious slave breaker by the name of Mister Covey. And so, for the first time in my life, I found myself under the lash.

Douglass is sent to the slave breaker around age sixteen, and the goal of the slave breaker was to beat into submission the slave; so when he goes back to his master’s domicile, he will be servile again. It’s not simply a literal beating through force, but a shaping of the mind.

I am on that plantation assigned for about a year. I saw the lash almost every week for about six months.

But Covey, this really horrible person who beats Douglass regularly, also is in accordance with the general principle of slavery that Douglass observes.

You know, there are two distinct differences in the Christianity of the day: that of the slave-holding master and that of the true Jesus Christ. But I would hear and see this parody every day in the life of a slave and the slave master, who would be the most pious man in the county, and then come home and brutalize his slaves. And then they would be singing in church, “Heavenly Union.” And so I decided I would write my own poem about this parody:
“Come, senators, hear me tell,
How pious Christ whip Jack, and, and women buy,
And children sell, and preach all the sellers down the hell,
And sing of ‘Heavenly Union!’
They loudly talk of Christ’s reward,
And buying his image with a cord,
And scold and swing the lash of horde,
And sell their brother in the Lord
To handcuff ‘Heavenly Union!’”

And you’ve been listening to Nathan Richardson playing Douglass himself, and also Joey Barretta, an expert on all things Douglass, tell the story of this great and remarkable man. Douglass right there and then understood that education was his pathway to freedom. When we come back, more of this remarkable story of Frederick Douglass here on Our American Stories. And we returned to Our American Stories and the story of Frederick Douglass. When we last left off, Douglass had been sent to a slave breaker, a punishment for his growing desire to be free. Let’s return to the story.

I found myself sitting just a few yards from the Chesapeake Bay, looking at the ships sailing up to Annapolis, and the only thing that gave me any kind of hope were those white, billowing sails that represented some sort of freedom.

Douglass talks about how, in the first six months of being sent to Covey, the slave breaker, he had went scarce a week without Covey whipping him. His back was sore. Covey would resort to these tricks of deception. They worked in all weathers: cold, rain, hail, snow. He would always be required to work. He was required to work until he collapsed of exhaustion, and then he was expected to work still more. The slave breaker had done his job properly. That first six months of being beaten and abused made him a slave again. However, that won’t be where the last six months end. He says that, “You saw how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man.”

Mister Covey sent me on a task. He gave me two unbroken oxen and a cart. He sent me down to the woods to fill it up and bring wood back to the farm. Well, never having driven oxen before, it was a terrifying ordeal. We were halfway across the field, the oxen were spooked. They ran through the woods, turned the cart upside down. It took me two hours to get the cart upright. Another two or three hours to load the wood and head back to the house. And then, when I got back to the house again, the oxen got spooked. They ran into the gate, broke the wheel off, and broke the gate off the fence. Well, Mister Covey, he comes out, and he’s very angry. He’s swearing he’s going to teach me a thing or two. He’s going to give me the lash. For some reason, it did not come. Saturday, Sunday—no lash. When he’s coming from church that Sunday, he says, “Freddy, meet me in the barn. We’re going to throw down some blades.” I thought it was kind of peculiar that he would be asking me to throw down some blades on a Sunday, on the Sabbath. As soon as I walked into the barn, there he stood with a rope and a lash. And I don’t know what came over me at that very moment, but I decided that I would fight for my manhood. He reached over and tried to grab me and wear of him by the throat. He called his overseer. He came in the door, and as soon as he came in, I gave him a swift kick in the stomach, and he ran out. Covey, and there w