Having lived the relatively “open” life of an urban slave in Baltimore, in 1833 Frederick unhappily was returned to the more restrictive life of a plantation slave in St. Michaels to live with Thomas Auld.36 As he matured physically and intellectually, Frederick longed for freedom. In January 1834 he was hired out to Edward Covey, who rented land near St. Michaels. Covey, a former overseer, was known locally as a successful “slave-breaker,” and in August 1834, after six months of brutal treatment under “the tyranny of Covey” (170), the sixteen-year-old Douglass, “completely wrecked, changed and bewildered; goaded almost to madness,” ran away (162). When, upon Douglass’s return, Covey tried to assault him again, Douglass resisted, fighting Covey to a stalemate. Covey never again touched Douglass, who recalled in My Bondage and My Freedom that the confrontation with Covey “was the turning point in my ‘life as a slave.’ It rekindled in my breast the smouldering [sic] embers of liberty; it brought up my Baltimore dreams, and revived a sense of my own manhood. I was a changed being after that fight. I was nothing before; I WAS A MAN NOW. It recalled to life my crushed self-respect and my self-confidence, and inspired me with a renewed determination to be A FREEMAN” (180).
By fighting Covey, Douglass accomplished more than asserting his own strength and establishing his manhood—he protested the entire slavery system. “[M]y long-cowed spirit was roused to an attitude of manly independence,” he recalled in My Bondage and My Freedom. “When a slave cannot be flogged he is more than half free. He has a domain as broad as his own manly heart to defend” (181). Significantly, Douglass’s resistance to Covey altered his life. “It rekindled in my breast the smoldering embers of liberty . . . and revived a sense of my own manhood” (180). His confrontation with Covey released Douglass from the chains suppressing his will and identity and gave him the self-confidence to act on his own regardless of the circumstances. Andrews correctly describes this incident as “the heroic turning point of . . . [Douglass’s] future autobiographies and one of the most celebrated scenes in all of antebellum African American literature.”37
In 1836, after an unsuccessful attempt to run away from William Freeland’s farm (Douglass had been hired out there as a field hand in January 1835), and after having been imprisoned in Easton, Maryland, Douglass was sent again by his master to Baltimore; and there, working in the city’s shipyards, he became an expert caulker. “I was able to command the highest wages paid to journeymen calkers [sic] in Baltimore,” Douglass recalled (232). While working in the shipyards (1836-38) Douglass received a severe beating at the hands of white apprentices who resented his competition as a laborer.
In My Bondage and My Freedom Douglass wove his conflict with the white dockworkers into an analysis of the relative merits of the free and slave labor systems and delivered a powerful economic critique of slavery. According to Douglass, in the South, blacks and nonslaveholding whites competed for the same jobs, and white competition against slave labor drove wages down. Slavery stole from both classes, indirectly from whites and directly from blacks. According to Douglass, “Both are plundered, and by the same plunderers. The slave is robbed, by his master, of all his earnings, above what is required for his bare physical necessities; and the white man is robbed by the slave system, of the just results of his labor, because he is flung into competition with a class of laborers who work without wages” (226). Once Douglass had escaped and made his way to the North, he marveled at the wealth common workingmen held. Free from competition with slaves, northern free laborers lived more comfortably, he wrote, than most planters on Maryland’s Eastern Shore (253).
After years of dreaming of freedom, in September 1838, aided by Anna Murray, the free black woman he later married, Douglass finally escaped. “Such is my detestation of slavery,” he informed readers of My Bondage and My Freedom, “that I would keep the merciless slaveholder profoundly ignorant of the means of flight adopted by the slave” (236). In his third autobiography, Life and Times, Douglass explained how he escaped. Impersonating a free black sailor, he traveled from Baltimore by railroad, ferry, and steamboat to New York via Wilmington and Philadelphia, finally setting in New Bedford, Massachusetts.38 To elude slave catchers, in Massachusetts, Frederick adopted a new identity, taking the surname Douglass.39
As a fugitive slave Douglass worked as a common laborer, experiencing the racial proscriptions and overt white racism northern whites imposed on free blacks, until August 1841, when, at a meeting of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, he delivered an extemporaneous speech about his life as a slave. Douglass’s powerful words captivated the audience. Unlike most white lecturers and reformers, he understood slavery not as an abstraction, but firsthand; as a slave he had experienced its horrid realities, and he had the scars on his back to prove it. Douglass—articulate, clever, and handsome—personified one man’s triumph over bondage.
Sensing his potential as a powerful weapon in the abolitionists’ war against slavery, William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, and other radical white abolitionists enlisted Douglass as an antislavery platform speaker. In My Bondage and My Freedom he recalled that his work speaking against slavery “opened upon me a new life” (264). For four years Douglass excelled as an antislavery orator and served as an active member of Garrison’s circle of abolitionists and a devotee of Garrison’s newspaper, The Liberator. “I not only liked—I loved this paper, and its editor,” Douglass recalled (260). He considered Garrison to be a kindred soul and wrote that the newspaper was “after my own heart” and enjoyed a place second only to the Bible in his home. Douglass admired Garrison for his attacks on the wickedness and hypocrisy of slavery in words that “were few, full of holy fire, and straight to the point” (261).
The Garrisonians demanded “immediate” emancipation without compensating the slaveholders and without colonizing the freedpeople. They interpreted the U.S. Constitution as a proslavery document and espoused disunion, nonresistance, nonviolence. Their strategy of overturning slavery was by using “moral suasion”—a determination to shame white Americans into ending slavery—not political action. The Garrisonians also opposed any interaction or cooperation with slaveholders.40
Given his slave origins and personal history, Douglass found it difficult to support a consistent strategy of nonresistance. He nevertheless emerged quickly as an effective spokesman and a dedicated abolitionist. In My Bondage and My Freedom Douglass explained that he based his opposition to slavery not on his particular slave past, “but rather upon the indestructible and unchangeable laws of human nature, every one of which is perpetually and flagrantly violated by the slave system” (6). Audiences found his lectures so moving, so eloquent, and so successful that whites frequently questioned his credentials as a fugitive slave. “People doubted if I had ever been a slave,” Douglass wrote in My Bondage and My Freedom. “They said I did not talk like a slave, look like a slave, nor act like a slave, and that they believed I had never been south of Mason and Dixon’s line” (266).
In 1845, in Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, the former slave sought to make believers out of the reading public. In his book, published only seven years after his escape from Maryland, Douglass sought to authenticate his speeches and to establish his credibility as an abolitionist.41 He put into print the substance of his many public lectures but also courageously and vividly provided minute details of his experiences growing to manhood as chattel property and pleading for human freedom. He named names, places, and dates to validate his stories of slavery’s cruelty. In doing so, Douglass made himself vulnerable to recapture.
Giving the lie to the proslavery argument, Douglass denounced slavery as a blight on African Americans. He charged slaveholders with willfully keeping bondmen and -women illiterate and denying them access to the teachings of Christianity. Slavery brutalized and dehumanized blacks, Douglass charged. Ironically, he said, it was the masters, not the slaves, who were the savages. His former masters—Captain Anthony, Colonel Edward Lloyd, and Thomas Auld—generall
y were cruel, inhumane, unchristian men. Slaves, far from being satisfied with their condition, craved freedom. Douglass’s specificity added a powerful new force to antislavery rhetoric. Even the mere act of Douglass’s writing his Narrative overturned the basic ideological underpinnings of slavery’s apologists. “The structures of Douglass’s Narrative,” writes Valerie Smith, “may be seen to address subtly the apologists’ arguments. By using various clusters of imagery and an overarching pattern to unify his account, he discloses a complex, symbolic meaning of his life that further evinces his humanity.”42
The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass instantly transformed Douglass into one of America’s leading authorities on slavery. His book sold five thousand copies in a little over three months. By 1850, a total of approximately thirty thousand copies had been sold in America and in the British Isles. By 1848 Dutch, French, German, and Swedish editions had appeared as well.43 An anonymous reviewer in London’s Spectator remarked: “If this narrative is really true in its basis, and untouched by any one save Douglass himself, it is a singular book, and he is a more singular man. Even if it is of the nature of the true stories of De Foe, it is curious as a picture of slavery, and worth reading.”44 Closer to home, in the New York Daily Tribune the critic and social reformer Margaret Fuller commented that Douglass’s Narrative “presents a suitable answer to the hacknied [sic] argument drawn by the defender of Slavery . . . and is also a good specimen of the powers of observation and manly heart of the writer. We wish that every one may read his book and see what a mind might have been stifled in bondage.”45 Modern critics agree. According to Houston A. Baker, Jr., “Douglass’s Narrative was indisputably the product of the man himself, and both the 1845 account and its subsequent revisions and extensions . . . reveal how closely the mode of narration, authorial tone, patterns of language and imagery, and points of view mirror the author’s progression from slavery to international fame.”46
Publication of his Narrative established Douglass as America’s foremost ex-slave and most celebrated black abolitionist. Yet under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 he remained a runaway slave and was vulnerable to recapture by his former master. Thus in August 1845 Douglass launched a twenty-one-month antislavery lecture tour of England, Ireland, and Scotland, in order, he quipped, “to seek a refuge from republican slavery in monarchical England” (269). According to Ripley, the success of Douglass’s “Narrative . . . sent him into triumphant exile and made him the best known black abolitionist on two continents.” 47 “My mission to this land is purely an Anti-Slavery one,” Douglass wrote in November 1845, “and although there are other good causes which need to be advocated—I think that my duty calls me strictly to the question of slavery. I am qualified for this if I am for anything.”48 Writing to Garrison from Belfast, Ireland, in January 1846, Douglass explained how invigorating he found living in a country without slavery. “I seem to have undergone a transformation,” he wrote. “I live a new life.”49
His trip to Great Britain further convinced Douglass that both slavery and racial prejudice were unnatural. At every opportunity while abroad he exposed the all-encompassing hypocrisy of American “liberty” built atop the foundation of racial slavery. Since the Republic’s founding, church and state had worked in nefarious tandem to keep African Americans suppressed. “Slavery,” Douglass informed a London audience in March 1847, “has not only framed our civil and criminal code, it has not only nominated our presidents, judges, and diplomatic agents, but it has also given to us the most popular commentators on the Bible in America. It has given to us our religion, shaped our morality, and fashioned it favourable to its own existence.”50
Douglass’s successful overseas lectures solidified the transatlantic abolitionist movement. His presence inspired British abolitionists to raise money to purchase his freedom (and thereby enable him to move freely in the North when he returned home) and to start his own newspaper. While Douglass recognized that the Garrisonians objected to his purchase because it conceded “a right of property in man,” Douglass pragmatically acquiesced, remarking, “I could not see either a violation of the laws of morality, or those of economy, in the transaction” (277). But even more important, the black abolitionist’s trip signaled a shift in Douglass’s abolitionist ideology and allegiances. In fact, tensions between Douglass and Garrison, whose printing office published Narrative, had surfaced before he began his English sojourn.51 Though Garrison and Phillips had written testimonials to introduce Douglass’s Narrative, they ultimately became uncomfortable with their star pupil’s assertiveness, his success, and his determination to be a race leader. Ironically, they wanted Douglass to talk more like a slave, look more like a slave, and act more like a slave.52
Energized and charged by his triumphs in the British Isles, Douglass would be slavelike no more. Upon returning to America in 1847, he was an internationally prominent abolitionist, and Douglass now charted a new, more independent and self-reliant course. It quickly became clear that he could not be “managed” anymore by Garrison’s wing of the abolitionist movement. No longer merely an “exslave,” Ripley notes, Douglass now was an “exslave abolitionist who could speak with conviction born of experience.”53 During his trip, Blight explains, Douglass “experienced a growing sense of organizational and intellectual independence,” gradually breaking with the Garrisonians in what became a multilayered vituperative personal and ideological dispute.54
At the core was Douglass’s concern that African Americans in general and he in particular should play more active, less subordinate roles in the abolitionist crusade. In My Bondage and My Freedom Douglass reflected on his falling-out with the Garrisonians, whom he termed his “Boston Friends.” The Garrisonians, who relied on moral suasion to destroy slavery, counted on Douglass’s oratory to sway whites in a way that their rhetoric could not.55 After joining forces with them, Douglass found that the white abolitionists expected him simply to recount his own experiences as a bondsman while they condemned the larger system of slavery. White abolitionists often commented admiringly on Douglass’s body and appearance, suggesting that they, like southern slave owners, considered African Americans only as objects—bodies to be evaluated, not persons with ideas and arguments to be considered seriously.56
Douglass quite naturally found it difficult to accommodate the abolitionists’ expectations. “It did not entirely satisfy me to narrate wrongs,” he explained; “I felt like denouncing them. I could not always curb my moral indignation for the perpetrators of slaveholding villainy, long enough for a circumstantial statement of the facts which I felt almost everybody must know. Besides, I was growing, and needed room” (266). Rather than encouraging Douglass’s intellectual growth, the white abolitionists cautioned him against sounding too educated (266). Garrison thus essentially transformed Douglass into someone else’s text, rather than letting him create his own.57 “I am not sure that I was not under the influence of something like a slavish adoration of my Boston friends,” Douglass admitted, “and I labored hard to convince them of the wisdom of my undertaking, but without success” (291).
For example, his “Boston friends” insisted that while lecturing, Douglass should simply supply the “the facts,” while they would provide “the philosophy” (266). According to Martin, “Beneath their justifiable and ostensible concern for Douglass’s public reception lurked a blind refusal to accept him [Douglass] as his own man and their equal. This was the most important factor leading to his eventual break with the Garrisonians.”58 But while their condescension and racism helped drive Douglass away, larger ideological differences soured Douglass’s relations with his former mentors and established him “as his own man.”
While abroad Douglass had grown more forthright, more radical, in his denunciation of America’s hypocrisy over slavery. He became increasingly impatient over the conundrum facing reformers—squaring America’s rhetoric of freedom, equality, and justice with the stark reality of slavery, white racism, and sexism. Douglas
s wanted to assert himself by publishing his own abolitionist newspaper, one that would compete for readers with Garrison’s The Liberator. Douglass launched the North Star in Rochester, New York, in December 1847, and this was the “undertaking” that so angered Garrison. In his inaugural issue, Douglass assured southern slaves and northern free blacks that his newspaper would fight for the freedom of all African Americans. “Giving no quarter to slavery at the South,” he wrote, “it will hold no truce with oppressors at the North.”59 Douglass suspected that he insulted his old abolitionist friends by supposing that “[a] slave, brought up in the very depths of ignorance” could “instruct the highly civilized people of the north in the principles of liberty, justice, and humanity!” (290). Despite the Boston abolitionists’ objections, he remained convinced that the best way to combat American racial prejudice was for African Americans themselves to disprove assumptions of black inferiority (286).
In the years before the publication of My Bondage and My Freedom, Douglass also became more pragmatic, favoring expediency over ideological consistency, and differed with the Garrisonians on basic abolitionist strategy and tactics. Gradually he opposed Garrison’s rhetoric of disunion and moral suasion, declaring in 1851 that the Constitution was in reality an antislavery document and that slavery could be abolished by working within, not against, the American political system. Careful reading of Douglass’s earliest speeches reveals that to some degree he always was reluctant to discount the pragmatic as well as the moral effects of slavery’s abolition.60 By 1855, Douglass was arguing that the U.S. Constitution was an antislavery compact that guaranteed the rights of all who lived under its influence. A document designed to form a more perfect union, Douglass wrote, “could not well have been designed at the same time to maintain and perpetuate a system of rapine and murder like slavery” (293).
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