Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave

Contents

1. Preface, by William Lloyd Garrison 22 min 11

   William Lloyd Garrison recalls meeting Frederick Douglass at the Nantucket anti-slavery convention of August 1841, the power of his first speech, and his recruitment as a lecturing agent. Garrison insists that Douglass wrote the Narrative himself and that it is true, even understated, since slavery in Maryland was milder than further south. He cites Daniel O’Connell on slavery’s brutalising effect on any race, reports a recent unpunished killing of a slave in Maryland, stresses that Black witnesses could not testify against whites, attacks slaveholding Christianity, and ends with the slogan “No union with slaveholders!”

2. Letter from Wendell Phillips, Esq. 7 min 4

   Wendell Phillips welcomes a history of slavery written from the side of the enslaved, as in Aesop’s fable of the lion. He values Douglass’s testimony because it comes from Maryland, where slavery was said to be at its mildest, and because it shows cruelty as essential to the system rather than incidental. He contrasts northern “twilight of rights” with southern night, warns that publishing his real name puts Douglass in danger of recapture under the Constitution’s fugitive-slave provisions, and hopes New England will break from a “blood-stained Union” to become a refuge for fugitives.

3. I Birth and Parentage 13 min 5

   Douglass describes his birth in Talbot County, Maryland, his ignorance of his age, his separation from his mother Harriet Bailey in infancy, and her death when he was about seven. His father was a white man, rumoured to be his master. He explains how the law making children follow their mother’s condition let masters profit from their own children, who suffered especially, and how such births undermine the biblical defence of slavery. He introduces his master, Captain Anthony, and the cruel overseer Plummer, and describes the whipping of his Aunt Hester, his first sight of slavery’s violence.

4. II The Great House Farm 13 min 6

   Douglass describes Colonel Edward Lloyd’s home plantation, the centre of more than twenty farms, where his master was general manager. He details the slaves’ monthly allowance of food, their yearly clothing and the lack of beds and sleep, the overseers Severe and Hopkins, and the home farm’s workshops, which made it like a village. Slaves chosen for errands to the Great House Farm sang as they went; Douglass explains that these songs expressed sorrow, not contentment, and first taught him slavery’s dehumanising character.

5. III Colonel Lloyd’s Garden and Stables 9 min 3

   Colonel Lloyd’s famous garden tempted hungry slaves, and he tarred the fence to detect thieves. His stables and carriages were kept by old Barney and his son, who were whipped for any fault found in the horses. Lloyd owned so many slaves he did not know them all: one man who told him, unrecognised, that his master worked him too hard was sold to a Georgia trader. Douglass explains why slaves therefore told inquirers they were content, and how slaves of different masters quarrelled over whose master was greater.

6. IV Mr. Gore 10 min 4

   The overseer Austin Gore, a model of cold severity, shoots the slave Demby dead in a creek for refusing to come out and be whipped, arguing that leniency would lead to the slaves’ freedom; he is not prosecuted. Douglass describes how killing slaves went unpunished in Talbot County: Thomas Lanman boasted of killing two, Mrs. Hicks beat a girl to death without being arrested, and Beal Bondly shot an old man fishing for oysters off his land.

7. V Departure for Baltimore 10 min 2

   As a child on Lloyd’s plantation Douglass suffered little whipping but much cold and hunger, sleeping in a corn bag and eating mush from a trough. At about seven or eight he was sent to Baltimore to live with Hugh Auld, brother of Thomas Auld, and look after their son Thomas. He describes his joy at leaving, the voyage, and the kind face of Sophia Auld, and regards his removal to Baltimore as a providential event that opened the way to his freedom.

8. VI Learning to Read 8 min 3

   Sophia Auld, a former weaver who had never owned a slave, begins to teach Douglass the alphabet until her husband forbids it, saying that learning would make a slave unmanageable and unfit him for slavery. Douglass resolves to learn to read precisely because his master opposed it, seeing in this the pathway to freedom. He contrasts city with plantation slavery and describes the starved, beaten slaves Henrietta and Mary in a neighbouring house.

9. VII The Pathway to Freedom 15 min 5

   Over seven years in Baltimore Douglass learns to read and write. Sophia Auld, corrupted by power, becomes hostile to his learning; he trades bread with poor white boys for lessons. Reading The Columbian Orator gives him arguments against slavery but deepens his misery. He learns what “abolition” means from newspapers, is urged by two Irish labourers to run away north, and teaches himself to write from shipyard timber marks, Webster’s Spelling Book and his young master’s copybooks.

10. VIII The Valuation 12 min 3

    After Captain Anthony dies without a will, Douglass is taken back to be valued and divided with the rest of the property, ranked alongside the livestock. He falls to Lucretia Auld and returns to Baltimore. Soon all the property passes to strangers, and his grandmother, who served the family all her life, is turned out to a hut in the woods to die alone. After a quarrel between Thomas and Hugh Auld, Douglass is sent to St. Michael’s, noting on the voyage the route north to Philadelphia.

11. IX Master Thomas 13 min 4

    In March 1832 Douglass goes to live with Thomas Auld at St. Michael’s, who starves his slaves. Auld, a slaveholder by marriage, is mean and weak, and his conversion at a Methodist camp meeting makes him crueller, finding scriptural sanction for whipping the disabled young woman Henny, whom he finally turns out. Class-leaders break up a Sabbath school for slaves. Finding Douglass ruined by city life, Auld hires him out for a year to Edward Covey, a poor farm-renter famous for breaking slaves.

12. X Covey, Freeland and the Shipyard 1 h 20 min 28

    Let for a year to Edward Covey, a slave-breaker, Douglass is worked and whipped until he is “broken in body, soul, and spirit”. In August he collapses, appeals in vain to his master, and on his return fights Covey for nearly two hours; Covey never whips him again. Douglass analyses the Christmas holidays as safety-valves against revolt. Hired next to the milder William Freeland, he runs a secret Sabbath school and plans an escape with four others, which is betrayed. Sent back to Baltimore, he is beaten by white apprentices in a shipyard, learns caulking, and earns top wages, all of which he must hand to Hugh Auld.

13. XI Escape 33 min 19

    Douglass withholds the means of his escape to protect helpers and routes, and criticises the publicity of the “upperground railroad”. Resenting surrender of his wages, he hires his own time from Hugh Auld, loses the privilege, and on 3 September 1838 escapes to New York. Lonely and hunted there, he is sheltered by David Ruggles, marries Anna Murray, and moves to New Bedford, where Nathan Johnson names him Douglass. The North’s free-labour prosperity surprises him. Barred from caulking by white workers, he labours at any job, reads the Liberator, and in 1841 speaks at Nantucket, beginning his anti-slavery career.

14. Appendix 13 min 9

    Douglass answers the charge that he opposes all religion. He distinguishes “the Christianity of Christ” from the “slaveholding religion” of America, catalogues the hypocrisy of churches that whip, sell and rob while preaching, and applies Christ’s denunciation of the Pharisees to them. He means, he says, all churches, north and south, in union with slaveholders. He quotes Whittier’s “Clerical Oppressors” and a parody of the hymn “Heavenly Union” said to be by a northern Methodist preacher, and closes by pledging himself anew to the cause, signing from Lynn, Massachusetts, on 28 April 1845.