Frederick Douglass and the city of New Bedford

New Bedford’s prominently abolitionist stance played an important role in Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey’s life.

“Your wickedness and cruelty committed in this respect on your fellow creatures, are greater than all the stripes you have laid upon my back or theirs. It is an outrage upon the soul, a war upon the immortal spirit, and one for which you must give account at the bar of our common Father and Creator.” An excerpt from Frederick Douglass’s book, My Bondage and My Freedom.

Ever since I was a teenager I have been interested in the history of warfare. So, when I saw that one of my class options at UMass Dartmouth this fall was War and Military Culture, I was excited to take it. The books we have been reading shed war under two different lights – war is waged to either spread evil or to stop the spread of evil. For example, in our own country, the north and south both put up a four-year-long mighty fight over the issue of slavery.

One side was for it and one was against it. One side saw nothing wrong with forming their own measurement of how much value a certain race should hold – to them some races were better than others. This thinking led to the abuse and oppression of slaves that was so horrific that any words I write will fail to accurately portray their intense suffering. The other side believed that the worth of any human life, created and given by God, was of equal value – race had nothing to do with the soul of a human being.

This past week, reading about the Civil War led me to think about Frederick Douglass’s story, the role New Bedford played in his life, and the role he played in the abolition of slavery. His is a very inspiring story; it will be hard to write briefly, so this article will be in two parts. This first article will cover his biography from his birth to his arrival in New Bedford.

Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey (later known as Frederick Douglass) was born into slavery in Talbot County, Maryland, around the year 1818. He never knew the exact date of his birth but eventually chose to celebrate it on February 14th. At an early age Douglass was separated from his mother, a common practice in that time and place, and brought to live with his maternal grandmother.

By the age of 12, his mother – who he never saw much – had died, he had been separated from his grandmother, and he had been moved to two different plantations. This second plantation belonged to Thomas Auld, who often hired Douglass out to other slave and plantation owners. Thomas first gave Douglass to his brother, Hugh Auld. It was here that Douglass began to learn how to read from Hugh’s wife, Sophia. In Maryland it was against state law to teach slaves to read, though, so when Hugh found out what his wife was doing, he forced her to stop. His concern was that if Douglass learned to read, he would become dissatisfied as a slave and want his freedom. Yet, Douglass secretly continued to learn to read from white children in his neighborhood.

Around the age of 12 Douglass discovered The Columbian Orator, a collection of political essays, poems and dialogues which was widely used in the American classroom to teach reading and speaking. This piece of literature was what molded his thoughts about freedom and human rights, greatly impacting his life and the role he eventually played in the abolition of slavery.

Still in his early teens, Douglass was taken from Hugh Auld’s plantation and hired out to another man, William Freeland. Here, Douglass began a weekly church service where he also taught other slaves to read using the New Testament. Freeland never interfered with these lessons, which up to 40 slaves attended, but after a while the other local slave owners became angry. They didn’t want their slaves to be educated. One week, armed with clubs and stones, they disbanded the meetings permanently.

By the time Douglass was 16, he had been hired out to yet another man named Edward Covey. Covey had gained a reputation as a “slave breaker” and lived up to that reputation with his treatment of Douglass. His regular abuse and beatings almost ruined Douglass psychologically. Yet, at one point along the way, Douglass chose to fight back. He won that fight, putting a final stop to Covey’s beatings.

Under Covey, in 1836, Douglass’s second attempt at freedom failed (he first tried escaping from Freeland). But one year later in 1837, meeting a free black woman named Anna Murray, Douglass again began to hope that he, too, could be free one day. On September 3, 1838, having received some money and a sailor’s uniform from Anna and identification papers from a seaman, he boarded a train to the safe house of an abolitionist in New York. Later, he wrote of this time: “I have often been asked, how I felt when first I found myself on free soil…There is scarcely anything in my experience about which I could not give a more satisfactory answer.

A new world had opened upon me. If life is more than breath, and the ‘quick round of blood,’ I lived more in one day than in a year of my slave life. It was a time of joyous excitement which words can but tamely describe. In a letter written to a friend soon after reaching New York, I said: ‘I felt as one might feel upon escape from a den of hungry lions.’ Anguish and grief, like darkness and rain, may be depicted; but gladness and joy, like the rainbow, defy the skill of pen or pencil” (Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, p. 120).

When Douglass arrived in New York, he immediately sent for Anna and she met him there. They were married just a couple weeks later and chose New Bedford for their first home together, arriving on September 17, 1838. New Bedford, being known for its racial tolerance in general at that time (although not totally free from prejudices), was the springboard from which Douglass went on to impact the nation so heavily in his stand against slavery and the equality of races.

Frederick Douglass and the city of New Bedford – Pt. 2

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