AND

THE POWER OF LITERACY

By CHRISTOPHER B. DALY

During his lifetime, which spanned most of the nineteenth century, Frederick Douglass grew to be many things: from an enslaved slave boy and teenage shipwright, to a public speaker, an abolitionist, a book author, a feminist, a political activist, a diplomat, and even (against his wishes) a vice presidential candidate. While all those activities were worthwhile, most of them would not financially support an adult with a family. As a practical matter, for most of his adult life, Douglass was a working journalist. He supported himself as the founder, publisher, editor, and lead writer of several important newspapers. First in Rochester, New York, and later in Washington, D.C., Douglass wrote for, edited, and published newspapers that demanded attention far and wide. His editorial voice was every bit as powerful as his famous speaking voice. The written word and the spoken word were both his tools and his weapons.

Douglass is the fountainhead of so much African American writing. At the time of Frederick’s childhood, though, nearly all Southern states banned teaching enslaved people to read or write. But, in one of the great flukes of history, Frederick learned the rudiments of literacy while he was still enslaved. After that, in an impressive feat of self-invention, he essentially willed himself to become literate. Without a single day of classroom education, he made himself a literary lion. In his life and career, there is a direct line that can be drawn from his acquisition of literacy to his self-liberation from slavery and on to his career as a writer and publisher. In the power of his words, Douglass found the strength to shape his times – and ours. We might well wonder how Douglass did it.

STARTING OUT

A boy named Frederick was born to an enslaved mother sometime in early 1818 in the flat, watery world of Maryland’s Eastern Shore. Due west across the Chesapeake Bay lay Washington, D.C., about 30 miles as the buzzard glides but a world away from the dark, drafty, dirty cabin where young Frederick lived. In Washington, the president was James Monroe, a Virginian who enslaved people and sometimes sold them to pay his debts. After his election in 1816, Monroe brought several of his own slaves to Washington to serve him in the Executive Mansion, which had been completed a few administrations earlier with the labor of enslaved builders.

That boy named Frederick was mostly likely born in February of 1818, but as with almost all enslaved people, he did not know the exact date of his birth. In any case, we know that Frederick was the son of a woman named Harriet Bailey. She was enslaved to a white man named Aaron Anthony. Anthony was a prominent figure in the Eastern Shore, serving as something like a chief operating officer for the truly vast Wye Plantation, which belonged to a family named Lloyd. Anthony owned dozens of slaves himself, while the Lloyds owned hundreds.

The scant evidence that exists suggests that Anthony had sex with Harriet Bailey and impregnated her. Since he owned her under Maryland and U.S. law, their relationship was, by definition, one based on coercion. The boy never learned the identity of his father. Without a legal father to bestow a last name on the child, Frederick acquired his mother’s family name, Bailey. The boy barely knew his mother, either, because she labored at a different farm, some twelve miles away. As a baby, Frederick was placed in the care of his kindly, enslaved grandmother — Hariett’s mother, Betsey Bailey, and Betsey’s free Black husband, Isaac.

When Frederick was about seven, his mother died; with no acknowledged father and now no mother, he was from then on, for all practical purposes, an orphan. During his childhood, Frederick endured a gratuitous level of deprivation. Like many enslaved children in the South, he was given almost no clothes. Most of the time, he wore a simple long shirt made of tow-linen, the coarsest and scratchiest available. That was it: no outer layers, no underwear, no pants. He also had no shoes. Most of the time, Frederick had no bed and slept on the dirt floor of his grandparents’ rude cabin. His food was mainly a corn mush, which he scooped into his mouth with an oyster shell. For an enslaved child, there were no treats, no feasts. There were also no lessons. Like other enslaved children, Frederick was taught almost nothing – except to fear his master. At the start, young Fred was at the bottom of a deep well of ignorance, with a lifetime of toil stretching endlessly ahead.

FREEING THE MIND

            “Why am I a slave?”

            As a boy, Frederick Bailey asked himself that question but found no answer. Indeed, that question only led to more questions. He knew that some Blacks were free while others were enslaved, so how could he accept it when whites said all Africans were suited to slavery or destined to it? If Blacks had a soul, how could whites not acknowledge them as brothers in god’s love? If some whites promoted abolition while other whites defended slavery, didn’t that mean that even white people did not have a single unified view of Blacks? Could it be that his condition was not permanent after all? Could he possibly liberate himself from slavery?

When Frederick was about seven, his life, which was hardly his own, took a lurch. Uprooted from his grandparents’ cabin, Frederick was suddenly walked to a different home – on the Wye plantation, the largest in the area. Enslaved children like Frederick were at the bottom of a long pecking order. He was still too young to do field work, so his value to the owners was all in the future. For now, it was enough to keep him alive, and he got barely enough food.

At the Wye Plantation, beatings and whippings were common occurrences, and the young Frederick witnessed many horrors, including a murder at point-blank range by a white overseer. His only regular respite from such depravity and cruelty on the plantation came from his new white mistress. She was a daughter of his “old master” Aaron Anthony named Lucretia, who was married to a white man named Thomas Auld. Lucretia’s father had effectively given young Frederick to her, and she looked upon the boy with favor. “She pitied me, if she did not love me,” Fred recalled, remembering that Lucretia regularly supplied him with food and sympathy.

Then, suddenly, his enslaver decided to send Frederick to live with Thomas Auld’s brother, Hugh, who lived in Baltimore with his wife, Sophia. That played out as a critical turning point in Frederick’s life, exposing him to the big city of Baltimore and to new ideas of all kinds. Not yet nine, Frederick was thrilled by the turnabout. First things first, though: he spent much of the next three days in the creek, trying to wash off the accumulated dirt and “mange” of country life. When he was finally clean, Lucretia Auld gave him his first trousers.

Early one Saturday morning in March 1826, Frederick shipped out from the Eastern Shore. Having no fondness for the plantation, he took one look back from the stern of the boat, then turned and set his sights forward. For months, he had watched from that very shore as sailboats passed by the Wye landing, looking to him like the epitome of freedom, as the ships’ skippers used the wind to go where they pleased. Now, he was on board one of those very sailing ships. The boat headed north up the Chesapeake Bay, past Annapolis, and on to Baltimore. One of the ship’s hands escorted him to his new home, where he would live with Hugh and Sophia Auld and their little son, Tommy. He immediately took a liking to Sophia, and she showed in many ways that she returned his favor. As Frederick put it later, he went from being treated as a pig on the plantation to being treated as a child. He actually lived in the same house with white people, and he slept in a real bed. Hugh Auld did not beat him, leaving Frederick in the care of his wife instead. That would prove to be not only a kindness to the enslaved boy but a life-changing decision.

Living in Baltimore meant quite a few adjustments for young Frederick – and not just the tall buildings, the shops, and the crowds he saw everywhere. The harbor was crowded with large, ocean-going ships, some carrying passengers and some carrying cargo. And there were so many free Blacks – more than Frederick had ever seen on the Eastern Shore. By 1830, four-fifths of Baltimore’s Black population consisted of free (or freed) Blacks. In general, city life granted enslaved people more opportunities and diminished the power of their enslavers to control them, and it checked many of the most violent extremes of plantation life. The city shattered the total institution of rural slavery.[i] So many of these new encounters pointed Frederick in the same direction: the world was wider than he had known it to be, and it included more categories of people than he had met so far. Still, the boy was stuck in slavery; he was owned by one white man and on loan to another.

Under the American regime of chattel slavery, the fate of Frederick’s body was sealed: he would always be the property of some white man. But what about his mind? Did his mind not belong to him? What use, of his own choosing, could he put it to? An answer was not long in coming.

As part of the Auld household, Frederick was in and out of most rooms in the place. Many a day, when Hugh Auld was off working in the shipyards, Frederick heard Sophia Auld reading the Bible aloud to herself. As he listened, he began to wonder about the mystery of reading. Watching her look at a page and listening to her turn those little ink figures into spoken words “roused in me the desire to learn.” Since he was not afraid of Sophia, he asked her if she would teach him the ABCs. “Without hesitation, the dear woman began the task, and very soon, by her assistance, I was master of the alphabet, and could spell words of three or four letters.” Lucretia was proud of her pupil and made no effort to hide the lessons from her husband. She even told him of her plan to teach Frederick to read the Bible himself.

That was too much for Hugh. From his perspective, as a white man, teaching an enslaved child to read was anathema. Although it was not illegal, teaching an enslaved person to read was, in the eyes of almost all whites in Maryland, a bad idea. Within earshot of Frederick, he laid out his reasons (and in the process, gave Frederick a life-long lesson in both the fragility of slavery and the power of literacy). Hugh Auld declared:

–“the thing itself was unlawful” (While not true, this was widely believed among whites and Blacks.)

–“it was also unsafe and could only lead to mischief.”

–An enslaved person “should know nothing but the will of his master, and learn to obey it.”

–“Learning would spoil the best n-word in the world.”

–“it would forever unfit him for the duties of a slave”

–“learning would do him no good, but probably, a great deal of harm – making him disconsolate and unhappy”

–“If you learn him now to read, he’ll want to know how to write; and, this accomplished, he’ll be running away with himself.”[ii]

In short, Auld was inadvertently providing Frederick with “the first decidedly anti-slavery lecture to which it had been my lot to listen,” as he put it several decades later. The boy was naturally disheartened about being thwarted in his lessons, but Auld’s words had another impact as well. “It was a new and special revelation . . . to wit: the white man’s power to perpetuate the enslavement of the black man.” Slavery, he now saw, was not god’s will; it was a product of Black ignorance and white violence, and it could not survive scrutiny. So, if learning unfits the Black man to slavery, then Frederick wanted all the learning he could get. Then and there, he resolved to continue his education one way or another.

Auld’s reprimand to his wife and his angry speech about slavery had clearly backfired; Auld had, in spite of himself, laid bare the wicked heart of slavery and awakened one of its greatest enemies. “From that moment I understood the direct pathway from slavery to freedom.”[iii] So, at age nine, Fred was introduced into the mysteries of the letters of the alphabet, the ways they combine to make words, and the ways words can be combined for almost any purpose. Strong magic.

Until 1830, few states made it a crime to teach enslaved people to read and write. There was little need for such laws, since most enslavers simply forbade teaching on their own plantations on their own authority. Besides, enslaved people had neither books, nor writing materials, nor instructors. But after the slave uprising in Virginia in 1831 – led by Nat Turner and carried out by literate slaves – white leaders across the South reacted with a fury. They killed more than a hundred Black rebels out of hand, then persecuted many more across the region.

White leaders also noted that Turner was a literate and popular preacher who had used written messages in his plot. Considering the power that literacy could provide to future rebellions, some states now made it a crime to teach an enslaved person to read and write. Black literacy was understood as a direct threat to the regime of white rule. Whites reasoned that if enslaved people could read, they would not limit their reading to hymns and recipes. If they could read, they could study the law; they could understand geography; they could convey messages that would allow ringleaders to organize and plan more rebellions.

In the minds of white slavers, one threat arising from literacy loomed above all others. In all the slave states, every enslaved person leaving the slaveholder’s property was required by law to carry a “pass” – a piece of paper that spelled out the bearer’s name, the owner’s name, the name of the home plantation, and the duration of the pass. And it had to be signed by the owner or overseer. It was like an internal passport, and any white person could demand to see a pass from any Black person they encountered. As the key to controlling the movements of every Black body in the South, the pass was sacrosanct. But if slaves knew how to read and write, they could certainly forge their own passes. Then, they could come and go; they could travel, plan, and meet. They could even rebel. All the more reason to keep slaves from learning to read and write. Slaveholders understood that their way of life, and maybe their very lives, depended on it.

For all these reasons, Frederick was never supposed to learn his ABCs. As it turned out, he learned the basics just in the nick of time, for every year after he started to learn, it would become more difficult and more forbidden. The window was closing, the darkness spreading. From now on, Frederick’s lessons would have to be more clandestine.

Frederick already had a base of learning on which he could build the rest by himself. Undeterred, he not only pushed himself to keep learning, he even enlisted the white boys in his Baltimore neighborhood to help him. First, Fred somehow got hold of a surefire weapon in his war on ignorance – Noah Webster’s book. Published in Boston, Webster’s “speller” was a huge hit in its day, selling more than 3 million copies in the first two decades. After the Bible and before Uncle Tom’s Cabin, it was the largest-selling book in America. It was not a dictionary (that came later), but instead an elaborate guide to correct pronunciation of English words, accompanied by examples of uplifting prose and poetry, fables and maxims, along with some rudimentary rules for composition. It was used to teach teachers and for teachers, in turn, to teach students.

For Frederick, the book practically served as his school. He carried it in one pocket and kept pieces of bread in the other. When he needed a white boy’s help with a word or concept in Webster’s speller, he would trade a biscuit for a lesson. Although the boys were white, Frederick reported later that he never met one who would defend slavery. He drew the lesson that those boys had to be inculcated into the system, for the simple reason that it was not natural after all.

In 1831, when he was thirteen, Frederick used his meager savings to buy another life-changing book, The Columbian Orator. The Orator was cultural touchstone, widely read, taught, and shared. Published in Boston, it was a compilation of great speeches and included an introduction with general advice on rhetoric from a variety of classical greats. Frederick evidently took it to heart, reading and re-reading the speeches and studying the introduction to improve his public speaking.

One item stood out to Frederick, for obvious reasons – the “Dialogue between a Master and a Slave.” The author, John Aikin, presented the issue of slavery in the form of a debate. As Frederick no doubt noticed, the slave gets much the better of the argument. The master begins by claiming that he fairly purchased the slave and that he was already enslaved by someone else.

Slave: Did I give my consent to the purchase?

Master: You had no consent to give. You had already lost the right of disposing of yourself.

Slave: I had lost the power, but how the right?

They continue sparring about the chain of responsibility. Then, the master shifts the rhetorical ground with a non-sequitur.

Master: It is in the order of Providence that one man should become subservient to another. It ever has been so, and ever will be. I found the custom, and did not make it.

Slave: You cannot but be sensible, that the robber who puts a pistol to your breast may make just the same plea. Providence gives him a power over your life and property; it gave my enemies a power over my liberty.

The slaver, perhaps worried that he is losing the debate, next demands that the enslaved show him gratitude because he has been a kind master. The enslaved character counters by noting that the “master” treats him no better than he treats the cattle he owns. In the end, the slave wins both the argument and his freedom. What a thrill that must have given the young teenager Frederick! Such were the secrets that reading could unlock.

            As he entered his teens, Frederick discovered religion, becoming a practicing Christian, and he met several black preachers in the Baltimore area. They brought Douglass the gift of the Bible, which in turn brought to Douglass several more gifts: a moral code, a faith in god, and a powerful mode of rhetoric that would shape both his public speaking and his writing for decades to come. One preacher in particular, Charles Lawson, inspired Douglass and served him as a benign father figure for a time. Together, they read the Bible, and Douglass came away determined to master what he called “the art of writing.” No longer content with reading, he now felt a call to writing as well, and the Old Testament would abide with him as perhaps his greatest literary influence.

            Armed with the power of reading and writing, Frederick began to ready himself for the great challenge of escaping slavery. He kept up his pursuit of literacy, reading every book he could buy or borrow and reading more and more of the many newspapers circulating around the Baltimore docks. In port cities, ships carried newspapers from the wider world, and a hungry young reader could learn a lot in their pages. Once, Frederick came across the powerful word “abolition” in a newspaper called the Baltimore American. Such stories, circulating among hundreds of readers, assured Frederick that he was not alone in his wish for freedom. People he did not even know wanted to help him in his quest for freedom.

Frederick also began working in a shipyard, at first doing simple chores. Unlike a plantation, a shipyard was always busy with comings and goings; working there exposed Fred to many more people – and more different types of people, including a flood tide of Irishmen and other foreigners, sailors and laborers, skilled tradesmen, and more. All those contacts, with newspapers and with people, widened his perspective further.

In 1833, when Frederick was fifteen, his life took another sudden turn. The white man who had enslaved Frederick, Thomas Auld, had a falling-out with his brother Hugh, and to punish his brother, Thomas snatched Frederick’s body back to the rural Eastern Shore of Maryland. Dismayed, the teenager now regretted that he had not tried to escape while he was living in Baltimore. Returning to Talbot County seemed like such a defeat. While sailing back southward on the great bay, Frederick could see steamboats heading north – not just to Baltimore but even farther, to Philadelphia, a free city. He began to form a plan.

For now, his body was trapped in the countryside, but he kept reading. All the while, Thomas Auld delivered beatings to Frederick’s body in an effort to make his mind more compliant. To no avail.

Then, from bad to much worse. As of new year’s day in 1834, Thomas Auld decided to send Frederick a few farms away to work for Edward Covey, a white man who was notorious throughout the area as a “slave-breaker” – that is, a man so mean and violent that he could “break” the will of even the most rebellious enslaved men. For the first time in his young life, Frederick would be a field hand, toiling outdoors all day at unskilled labor. True to his reputation, Covey rained down blows on Frederick, for even minor offenses. Over the coming year, the beatings continued, as Frederick would recall:

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![iv]

Even in his anguish and despair, though, Frederick was not utterly defeated. He had Sundays off, and he often spent those days staring from Covey’s farm out onto the broad Chesapeake. He recalled that he sometimes thought about killing himself; at other times, he thought about killing Covey. As he looked out across the bay, he could see a parade of sail, as boats navigated freely on their way to distant shores. He wondered how god could forsake him, and he returned again to the question that haunted him: Why am I a slave?

            Now he saw clearly. “I will run away. I will not stand it. Get caught, or get clear, I will try it,” he wrote later of this moment. “I had as well be killed running as die standing.” He decided to escape by water, like a sailboat running with the wind. In the meantime, he would try to “bear up under the yoke,” sure now in the belief that “there is a better day coming.” After two years of regular beatings, Frederick dared to fight back one day, and he wrestled Covey to a standstill. The fearsome white man never struck him again.

To Frederick, the lesson was clear: I WAS A MAN NOW. What’s more, he had recommitted himself to his ultimate goal – to be not just a man but a free man. At the start of 1836, just shy of eighteen years old, Frederick took a solemn vow: this would be the year he would free himself. After one failed attempt made with friends, Frederick was sent back to Baltimore under the regime of Hugh Auld.

In 1838, as Frederick turned twenty, he struck a deal with Hugh Auld. While remaining enslaved, he would no longer live in the Aulds’ household; instead, he would live elsewhere, on his own, and pay for all his rent, food, clothing, and tools. He would owe Auld three dollars at the end of every week. That way, if Frederick could find enough work and live frugally enough, he might clear a little money week by week. Living on his own also meant that Frederick could read whenever time allowed.

Somewhere, he met a dark-skinned, free-Black woman a little older than he was. Her name was Anna Murray, and she came from the Eastern Shore. Her mother had been manumitted, so Anna was free from birth, and she was now working for pay as a maid. Frederick and Anna were quickly involved in each other’s lives. Soon, they were engaged.[v]

Still, he had his mind set on freedom. But still the old question remained: How?

All through the first half of 1838, Frederick, now with the help of his confidante, Anna, thought it over. Although he knew something about the abolition movement, he did not see that as the answer. For most runaways, the central fact was that they would have to take all the risks by themselves. Self-liberation took careful planning, enormous bravery, tremendous physical exertion, and a generous amount of good luck. Most fled alone.[vi] Besides, for Frederick and Anna, there were no white benefactors or groups to shepherd them.

To go overland presented terrible risks. There were no reliable maps available to them. Slave-catchers patrolled both the South and the North for runaways, who could be returned to their enslavers for a bounty. As a result, it was not enough for a runaway to make it to the state line, or even to a big city like Philadelphia. Runaway slaves found that they had best keep going farther and farther North – as far as New England, or even all the way to that distant place called Canada.

In the end, Frederick decided that he would make his way to Pennsylvania, the nearest free state, this time by land. Frederick and Anna pooled their savings and placed their bet on the railroad. Still, one problem remained: any white person could challenge his right to travel, and the ticket-taker on the train was bound to do so. So, Frederick approached a retired sailor he knew, and the man let him borrow his official transit papers. Frederick knew how to talk like a sailor, and he got hold of some “sailor style” clothes.

Finally, all was set. Early on Monday, September 3, 1838, Frederick Bailey boarded a northbound train in Baltimore. For now, Anna stayed behind and went to work as usual. On board the smoky train, Frederick made his way north, mile by mile. Then a moment of truth: the white conductor entered the “negro car” and demanded to see Frederick’s ticket and his papers. Without much ado, the man accepted them both and passed on.

In Wilmington, Delaware, the passengers had to disembark. The next leg of the journey was by steamboat up the Delaware River, almost 30 miles farther north – a leg of the passage that would change not only Frederick’s life but the life of the country as well. Sometime that afternoon, the ship reached Philadelphia, and he stepped ashore – his first moment on free soil.

Despite his joy, there was no time to linger. He approached a Black man on the street and asked how to find the train to New York. Departing from the Willow Street station, Frederick continued to put miles between slavery and himself, between his old life and his new one. This train took him another 80 miles or so north, as far as Hoboken, on the New Jersey shore of the great Hudson River. A short ferry ride later, Frederick set foot in the country’s biggest, freest city – New York. It had been less than twenty-four hours since he had left slavery behind in Baltimore. Now, safely arrived in free territory, he was beginning his new life. Forever afterward, he would celebrate September third as his adopted birthday.

In New York, Frederick felt overwhelmed at first. He relished his freedom, but he faced a number of immediate practical problems – finding food, shelter, and work in a strange new city. He strolled among the throngs of people on Broadway in lower Manhattan, but even on this free soil, Frederick had to worry about slave-catchers. One precaution he took was to abandon his slave name of Bailey; he started introducing himself as Frederick Johnson. And he was soon reunited with Anna. As a free Black, she could travel much more easily than Frederick could, so she made her way to New York by herself. The two were married on September 15, 1838.

In a matter of days, the newlywed couple headed farther north, taking a steamer to Newport, Rhode Island, where two white abolitionist Quakers met them and took them by stagecoach to New Bedford, a major whaling port on the coast of Massachusetts. Here, some 300 miles from Baltimore, Frederick began to feel not only free but actually safe. He even registered to vote. Still, as a precaution and to distinguish himself from the many Johnsons in the area, he changed his name again. From now on, he would be known as Frederick Douglass.[vii]

Seeking work in a port city, Douglass naturally headed to the waterfront looking for a job as a caulker. Douglass soon joined the AME Zion Church that was then serving New Bedford’s large community of free and runaway Blacks. Douglass also began reading a weekly newspaper published forty miles to the north in Boston. By his own account, he fell in love with the paper and its editor, a man he would soon meet and get to know quite well.

That paper was The Liberator – the loudest voice in the growing abolition movement. That editor was William Lloyd Garrison, among the most prominent and radical of the white abolitionists. As a young man, Garrison had launched the Liberator in Boston in January 1831 for a single purpose: to abolish slavery. Thanks to Black subscribers like Douglass and help on the business side of the paper from sympathetic white businessmen, Garrison was able to publish every week for the next thirty-five years, despite threats to his life, censorship in the South, and deep divisions within the abolition movement. He also served as the founder of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society. Garrison was a self-taught, stone-cold radical who never wavered from three basic demands: immediate emancipation, full civil rights for all liberated people, and strictly non-violent methods. The great cause of abolition was to proceed by “moral suasion,” not by bullets or ballots.

To Douglass, Garrison was a godsend. “The paper became my meat and my drink. My soul was set all on fire,” he recalled a few years later. In 1839, he even got to hear the great Garrison speak in New Bedford. In the summer of 1841, Douglass spoke to his local abolition society. He was heard by a white abolitionist, William C. Coffin, who invited Douglass to the upcoming convention of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, on Nantucket Island, about fifty miles across the water from New Bedford. There, with Garrison presiding, late in the afternoon on August 11, 1841, Douglass rose from his seat and asked to speak. At that moment, two men who would prove to be among the most effective and influential editors of the nineteenth century met for the first time – Garrison and Douglass.[viii]

Garrison was thirty-five, an austere figure with a high pale forehead and prim spectacles, already famous, after a decade of journalism, advocacy, and controversy. Douglass, twenty-three years old, was tall and strong, but he was a mere laborer, unknown to the assembled white abolitionists. For Douglass to speak in public, especially to a white audience, was not only a personal challenge but also a tremendous risk, since even Massachusetts had its share of slave-catchers on the lookout for fugitives like Douglass. Rising to his feet to address an audience of white listeners, Douglass was so nervous that he could not recall later what he had talked about. Hesitant at the start, Douglass gained force as he gave his first public description to whites of the details of slavery. For many in the audience, abolitionists all, it was a revelation. Garrison was certainly moved.

When Douglass finished speaking, Garrison took to the podium and penetrated to the heart of the matter, asking the delegates:

“Have we been listening to a thing, a piece of property, or to a man?”

“A man! A man!” the white abolitionists shouted in reply.

“And should such a man be held as a slave in a republican and Christian land?”

“Never! Never!”

As much as Garrison and his newspaper were a godsend to Douglass, now the runaway ex-slave appeared as a godsend to the Anti-Slavery Society. Here was an eyewitness to the horrors of slavery whose testimony was beyond rebuttal by Southern slavers. Straightaway, Garrison offered Douglass a role as a paid public speaker for the Massachusetts anti-slavery group and launched him on a three-month tryout as a “general agent,” which opened the chance to leave his life of “rough labor” for a life where his tools would be his own powerful words. Now, he would apply all the lessons in rhetoric he learned in that precious book from his childhood, The Columbian Orator.

Frederick hit the road around New England and New York, describing his childhood in slavery on the Eastern Shore. In 1843, Douglass began working as a public speaker for the larger, national American Anti-Slavery Society, and he started traveling farther afield, reaching towns across Ohio, Indiana, and Pennsylvania. The work was important but, inevitably, repetitive. Eventually, Douglass tired of the constant retellings of his life story, and he began to chafe. “Give us the facts,” one of his abolitionist backers said. “We will take care of the philosophy.” But Douglass was not content. “It did not entirely satisfy me to narrate wrongs; I felt like denouncing them.”

So, he returned to Anna and their two children in Massachusetts, and he took up the challenge of getting his own experience down on paper. With encouragement and printing assistance from Garrison, Douglass wrote and wrote, more than 36,000 words in all. The result, in May 1845, was his debut in print, a step that allowed Douglass to take his place among the small number of published Black book authors in the United States. The book, which was the original version of his autobiography, was a great piece of writing – a work that not only bore witness to the wrongs of slavery but also demanded that justice be done. It was not the first life-narrative written by a former slave, nor the last, but it was the most influential.[ix] Despite his lack of experience, Douglass proved to be a powerful writer. The book was titled Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave. As if to anticipate the doubters, he added a revealing subtitle:

WRITTEN BY HIMSELF.

Although similar statements appear in other slave narratives, that is a line that white authors never felt the need to state. But in a real sense, Douglass was using the assertion of authorship to stake a claim for himself as a full human being.

Frontspiece from Douglass’s 1845 Narrative.

The compact book opened with a preface by Garrison, who assured readers that Douglass had actually written it and that Douglass’s experiences were representative of life under slavery. Douglass’s Narrative sold remarkably well—30,000 copies within five years—placing it among the era’s best-sellers.[x] And it had the desired effect. Here at last, beyond refutation by Southern apologists, was the snarling, hideous, bare face of slavery. These were no white traveler’s tales and no work of the imagination. In one declarative sentence after another, Douglass supplied names and dates and details. He provided as many real facts and eye-witness episodes as he felt he could without putting himself or his allies at greater risk of capture. Seven years before Harriet Beecher Stowe published her novel about slavery, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Douglass showed his readers the routine beatings, the gruesome whippings, the sexual predations—the whole sordid spectacle, all from the point of view of an intelligent, sensitive boy growing to manhood.

As it happened, Douglass’ Narrative ultimately vindicated the fears of his former enslaver. Letting an enslaved child learn to read and write threatened the entire system of slavery. In a few more years, Douglass’ words would do as much as anything to bring the hated institution crashing down.

[Adapted from a forthcoming cultural history The Democratic Art: The Role of Journalism in the Rise of American Culture. Christopher B. Daly is the author of Covering America: A Narrative History of a Nation’s Journalism.]

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[i] Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848. Chap 1.

[ii] Running away with himself” . . . Bondage, LoA, 217-18.

[iii] For Auld’s thoughts on slavery, see Narrative, 37-8 and Bondage, 217-18.

[iv] Into a brute . . . Bondage, LoA, chap XV.

[v] Living on his own . . . Blight, 78-80.

[vi] For details on the reality of escape during Douglass’s time, see John Gatrell, “Slavery, Resistance, and Flight.” Found at the Maryland State Archives. http://slavery.msa.maryland.gov/html/antebellum/essay7.html Also helpful is the publication “Blacks Before the Law in Colonial Maryland,” found in the Maryland Archives special collections.

[vii] Blight, chap. 6.

[viii] … all on fire. Narrative, LoA, 96. On Garrison’s life and career, I rely on All on Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition of Slavery by Henry Mayer (1998).

[ix] In his introduction to the anthology The Classic Slave Narratives, the scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr., surveys the work of scholars who have found more than 200 slave narratives in all, written both before and after the Civil War.

[x] The best-selling book of the time was no doubt the Bible. After that, the ranks of popular works, until Stowe’s Uncle Tom, were all written by white men – from poets like Poe and Longfellow to novelists like Cooper and Irving to nonfiction writers like Webster and Audubon.