Frederick Douglass Thomas Auld, 8 September 1848
FREDERICK DOUGLASS TO THOMAS AULD
Rochester, [N.Y.] 8 September 1848.
To My Old Master.
THOMAS AULD—
SIR:—
The long and intimate, though by no means friendly, relation which unhappily subsisted between you and myself, leads me to hope that you will easily account for the great liberty which I now take in addressing you in this open and public manner. The same fact may possibly remove any disagreeable surprise which you may experience on again finding your name coupled with mine, in any other way than in an advertisement, accurately describing my person, and offering a large sum for my arrest. In thus dragging you again before the public, I am aware that I shall subject myself to no inconsiderable amount of censure. I shall probably be charged with an unwarrantable if not a wanton and reckless disregard of the rights and proprieties of private life. There are those North as well as South, who entertain a much higher respect for rights which are merely conventional, than they do for rights which are personal and essential. Not a few there are in our country who, while they have no scruples against robbing the laborer of the hard-earned results of his patient industry, will be shocked by the extremely indelicate manner of bringing your name before the public. Believing this to be the case, and wishing to meet every reasonable or plausible objection to my conduct, I will frankly state the ground upon which I justify myself in this instance, as well as on former occasions when I have thought proper to mention your name in public. All will agree that a man guilty of theft, robbery or murder, has forfeited the right to concealment and private life; that the
community have a right to subject such persons to the most complete exposure. However much they may desire retirement, and aim to conceal themselves and their movements from the popular gaze, the public have a right to ferret them out, and bring their conduct before the proper tribunals of the country for investigation. Sir, you will undoubtedly make the proper application of these generally-admitted principles, and will easily see the light in which you are regarded by me. I will not, therefore, manifest ill-temper, by calling you hard names. I know you to be a man of some intelligence, and can readily determine the precise estimate which I entertain of your character. I may therefore indulge in language which may seem to others indirect and ambiguous, and yet be quite well understood by yourself.
I have selected this day on which to address you, because it is the anniversary of my emancipation;1On Monday, 3 September 1838, Douglass boarded a train in Baltimore carrying the identification papers of a black sailor. After passing through Delaware and Philadelphia, he arrived in New York City on Tuesday, 4 September 1838. Frederick Douglass, “My Escape from Slavery,” Century Magazine, 21:125–31 (November 1881); McFeely, Frederick Douglass, 69–71. and knowing of no better way, I am led to this as the best mode of celebrating that truly important event. Just ten years ago this beautiful September morning, yon bright sun beheld me a slave—a poor degraded chattel—trembling at the sound of your voice, lamenting that I was a man, and wishing myself a brute. The hopes which I had treasured up for weeks of a safe and successful escape from your grasp, were powerfully confronted at this last hour by dark clouds of doubt and fear, making my person shake and my bosom to heave with the heavy contest between hope and fear. I have no words to describe to you the deep agony of soul which I experienced on that never-to-be-forgotten morning—(for I left by daylight)—I was taking a leap in the dark.2The metaphor “a leap in the dark” dates to the seventeenth century. Stevenson, Book of Proverbs, 1374–75. The probabilities, so far as I could by reason determine them, were stoutly against the undertaking. The preliminaries and precautions I had adopted previously, all worked badly. I was like one going to war without weapons—ten chances of defeat to one of victory. One in whom I had confided, and one who had promised me assistance, appalled by fear at the trial hour, deserted me, thus leaving the responsibility of success or failure solely with myself. You, sir, can never know my feelings. As I look back to them, I can scarcely realize that I have passed through a scene so trying. Trying however as they were, and gloomy as was the prospect, thanks be to the Most High, who is ever the God of the oppressed, at the moment which was to determine my whole earthly career, His grace was sufficient, my mind was made up. I embraced the golden opportunity, took the morning tide at the flood; and a free man, young, active, and strong, is the result.
I have often thought I should like to explain to you the grounds upon which I have justified myself in running away from you. I am almost ashamed to do so now, for by this time you may have discovered them
yourself. I will, however, glance at them. When yet but a child about six years old, I imbibed the determination to run away. The very first mental effort that I now remember on my part, was an attempt to solve the mystery, Why am I a slave? and with this question my youthful mind was troubled for many days, pressing upon me more heavily at times than others. When I saw the slave-driver whip a slave-woman, cut the blood out of her neck, and heard her piteous cries, I went away into the corner of the fence, wept and pondered over this mystery. I had, through some medium, I know not what, got some idea of God, the Creator of all mankind, the black and the white, and that he had made the blacks to serve the whites as slaves. How he could do this and be good, I could not tell. I was not satisfied with this theory, which made God responsible for slavery, for it pained me greatly, and I have wept over it long and often. At one time, your first wife, Mrs. Lucretia,3Lucretia Planner Anthony Auld (1804–27) was the third child and only daughter of Aaron and Ann Anthony. In 1823 she married Thomas Auld, a boarder in her family’s house and an employee of Edward Lloyd. Lucretia subsequently moved to Hillsborough, Maryland, where she and her husband opened a store and he served as town postmaster. Following the deaths of her father and her brother, Richard Lee, Lucretia and her older brother, Andrew, inherited their father’s estate. Her portion included the young slave Frederick Douglass. She died in 1827, survived by a daughter, Arianna Amanda Auld. Auld Family Bible (courtesy of Carl G. Auld); Preston, Young Frederick Douglass, 28, 30, 62, 87–88, 223n; Dickson J. Preston and Norman Harrington, Talbot County: A History (Centreville, Md., 1983), 191; Roberts, “Visitation of Western Talbot,” 244–45. heard me singing and saw me shedding tears, and asked of me the matter, but I was afraid to tell her. I was puzzled with this question, till one night, while sitting in the kitchen, I heard some of the old slaves talking of their parents having been stolen from Africa by white men, and were sold here as slaves. The whole mystery was solved at once. Very soon after this, my aunt Jinny and uncle Noah ran away,4Jenny Bailey (1799–?), Douglass’s aunt, was the daughter of Betsey Bailey and the sister of Harriet Bailey. Aaron Anthony owned her, and she either worked on his Tuckahoe farms or he hired her out to other local farmers. She married another of Anthony’s slaves, Noah (c. 1799–?), with whom she had three children. In August 1825 Jenny and Noah escaped from Anthony. Anthony unsuccessfully offered monetary rewards for Noah and Jenny by placing an advertisement in which he declared his intention to free both eventually. Neither of the couple was heard from again. In retaliation, Anthony sold their two living children into the Deep South. Preston, Young Frederick Douglass, 21, 27, 37, 64–66, 205–06. and the great noise made about it by your father-in-law,5Aaron Anthony (1767–1826), Frederick Douglass’s first owner and possibly his father, was born at Tuckahoe Neck in Caroline County, Maryland. Anthony’s father was a poor and illiterate farmer who died when Aaron was only two years old. Despite his impoverished origins, Anthony acquired a rudimentary education and a small amount of property. In 1795 he became the captain of the Sally Lloyd, the schooner owned by Edward Lloyd IV, the wealthiest planter in Talbot County. Two years later he improved his fortunes through his marriage to Ann Catherine Skinner, the daughter of an old and prominent Eastern Shore family, who brought with her the slave family into which Douglass was later born. Soon thereafter, Anthony became chief overseer and general manager of the Lloyd family’s thirteen farms, one of the largest estates in the United States. By the time of his death in 1826, Anthony was a moderately wealthy planter in his own right, accumulating three farms totaling 597.5 acres and thirty slaves worth $3,065. His entire estate was valued at $8,042. Anthony Family Bible, Oxford Museum, Oxford, Md.; Harriet L. Anthony, annotated copy of My Bondage and My Freedom, folder 93, 58, Dodge Collection, MdAA; Inventory of estate of Aaron Anthony, 13 January 1827, Talbot County Inventories, box 13, 5–9, MdTCH; Charles B. Clark, ed., The Eastern Shore of Maryland and Virginia, 3 vols. (New York, 1950), 1:491–92; Footner, Rivers of the Eastern Shore, 285, 299–304; Preston, Young Frederick Douglass, 22–30; idem, “Aaron Anthony.” made me for the first time acquainted with the fact, that there were free States as well as slave States. From that time, I resolved that I would some day run away. The morality of the act, I dispose of as follows: I am myself; you are yourself; we are two distinct person[s], equal persons. What you are I am. You are a man, and so am I.—God created both, and made us separate beings. I am not by nature bound to you, or you to me. Nature does not make your existence depend upon me, or mine to depend upon yours. I cannot walk upon your legs, or you upon mine. I cannot breathe for you, or you for me; I must breathe for myself, and you for yourself. We are distinct persons, and are each equally provided with faculties necessary to our individual existence. In leaving you, I took nothing but what belonged to me, and in no way lessened your means of obtaining an honest living. Your faculties remained yours, and mine became useful to their rightful owner. I therefore see no wrong in any part of the transaction. It is true, I went off secretly, but that was more your fault than mine. Had I let you into the secret, you would have defeated the enterprise entirely; but for this, I should have been really glad to have made you acquainted with my intention to leave.
You may perhaps want to know how I like my present condition. I am free to say, I greatly prefer it to that which I occupied in Maryland. I am,
however, by no means prejudiced against that State as such. Its geography, climate, fertility and products, are such as to make it a very desirable abode for any man; and but for the existence of slavery there, it is not impossible that I might again take up my abode in that State. It is not that I love Maryland less, but freedom more.6A variation of Julius Caesar, act 3, sc. 2, line 18, “Not that I loved Caesar less, but that I loved Rome more.” You will be surprised to learn that people at the North labor under the strange delusion that if the slaves were emancipated at the South, they would all flock to the North. So far from this being the case, in that event, you would see many old and familiar faces back again at the South. The fact is, there are few here who would not return to the South in the event of emancipation. We want to live in the land of our birth, and to lay our bones by the side of our fathers’; and nothing short of an intense love of personal freedom keeps us from the South. For the sake of this, most of us would live on a crust of bread and a cup of cold water.
Since I left you, I have had a rich experience. I have occupied stations which I never dreamed of when a slave. Three out of the ten years since I left you, I spent as a common laborer on the wharves of New Bedford, Massachusetts.7Douglass lived in New Bedford, Massachusetts, from autumn 1838 until autumn 1841. It was there I earned my first free dollar. It was mine. I could spend it as I pleased. I could buy hams or herring with it, without asking any odds of anybody. That was a precious dollar to me. You remember when I used to make seven or eight, and even nine dollars a week in Baltimore, you would take every cent of it from me every Saturday night, saying that I belonged to you, and my earnings also. I never liked this conduct on your part—to say the best, I thought it a little mean. I would not have served you so. But let that pass. I was a little awkward about counting money in New England fashion when I first landed in New Bedford. I like to have betrayed myself several times. I caught myself saying phip for fourpence, and one time a man actually charged me with being a runaway, whereupon I was silly enough to become one by running away from him, for I was greatly afraid he might adopt measures to get me again into slavery, a condition I then dreaded more than death.
I soon, however, learned to count money, as well as to make it, and got on swimmingly. I married soon after leaving you:8Anna Murray met Frederick Douglass in Baltimore, Maryland, at the East Baltimore Mental Improvement Society sometime in early 1838. The two became engaged by the fall and married in New York City shortly after Murray assisted Douglass in his escape from slavery. Douglass Papers, ser. 2, 1:76; Sprague, My Mother as I Recall Her, 94. in fact, I was engaged to be married before I left you, and instead of finding my companion a burden, she was truly a helpmeet. She went to live at service, and I to work on the wharf, and though we toiled hard the first winter, we never lived more happily. After remaining in New Bedford for three years, I met with Wm. Lloyd Garrison, a person of whom you have possibly heard, as he is pretty generally known among slaveholders. He put it into my head that I might make myself servicable to the cause of the slave by devoting a portion of
my time to telling my own sorrows, and those of other slaves which had come under my observation. This was the commencement of a higher state of existence than any to which I had ever aspired. I was thrown into society the most pure, enlightened and benevolent that the country affords. Among these, I have never forgotten you, but have invariably made you the topic of conversation—thus giving you all the notoriety I could do. I need not tell you that the opinion formed of you in these circles, is far from being favorable. They have little respect for your honesty, and less for your religion.
But I was going on to relate to you something of my interesting experience. I had not long enjoyed the excellent society to which I have referred, before the light of its excellence exerted a beneficial influence on my mind and heart. Much of my early dislike of white persons was removed, and their manners, habits and customs, so entirely unlike what I had been used to in the kitchen-quarters on the plantations of the South, fairly charmed me, and gave me a strong disrelish for the coarse and degrading customs of my former condition. I therefore made an effort so to improve my mind and deportment, as to be somewhat fitted to the station to which I seemed almost Providentially called. The transition from degradation to respectability was indeed great, and to get from one to the other without carrying some marks of one’s former condition, is truly a difficult matter.—I would not have you think that I am now entirely clear of all plantation peculiarities, but my friends here, while they entertain the strongest dislike to them, regard me with that charity to which my past life somewhat entitles me, so that my condition in this respect is exceedingly pleasant. So far as my domestic affairs are concerned, I can boast of as comfortable a dwelling as your own. I have an industrious and neat companion, and four dear children9Rosetta Douglass, Lewis Henry Douglass, Frederick Douglass, Jr., and Charles Remond Douglass.—the oldest a girl of nine years, and three fine boys, the oldest eight, the next six, and the youngest four years old. The three oldest are now going regularly to school10Rosetta was attending the Mott sisters’ school in Albany, New York. Presumably the older sons were also being educated. Charles Remond may have been too young to attend school.—two can read and write, and the other can spell with tolerable correctness words of two syllables. Dear fellows! they are all in comfortable beds, and are sound asleep, perfectly secure under my own roof. There are no slaveholders here to rend my heart by snatching them from my arms, or blast a proud mother’s dearest hopes by tearing them from her bosom. These dear children are ours—not to work up into rice, sugar and tobacco, but to watch over, regard, and protect, and to rear them up in the nurture and admonition of the gospel—to train them up in the paths of wisdom and virtue, and as far as we can, to make them useful to the world and to themselves. Oh! sir, a slaveholder never appears to me
so completely an agent of hell, as when I think of and look upon my dear children. It is then that my feelings rise above my control. I meant to have said more with respect to my own prosperity and happiness, but thoughts and feelings which this recital has quickened, unfits me to proceed further in that direction. The grim horrors of slavery rise in all their ghastly terror before me, the wails of millions pierce my heart, and chill my blood. I remember the chain, the gag, the bloody whip, the deathlike gloom overshadowing the broken spirit of the fettered bondman, the appalling liability of his being torn away from wife and children and sold like a beast in the market. Say not that this is a picture of fancy. You well know that I wear stripes on my back inflicted by your direction; and that you, while we were brothers in the same church, caused this right hand, with which I am now penning this letter, to be closely tied to my left, and my person dragged at the pistol’s mouth, fifteen miles, from the Bay side to Easton, to be sold like a beast in the market, for the alleged crime of intending to escape from your possession.11Douglass’s first escape attempt took place on 3 April 1835, when he and five of his enslaved friends resolved to paddle a canoe to the head of Chesapeake Bay, then proceed north on foot until they reached New York City. Before they could embark, one of their number betrayed them, and all were captured. Their hands were tied together, and they were pulled behind horses for fifteen miles to the Easton jail. Slave traders examined the captives during their incarceration, and Thomas Auld prepared to sell Douglass into Alabama. Instead, Auld changed his mind and sent Douglass back to Hugh Auld in Baltimore. Douglass Papers, ser. 2, 1:62–66. All this and more you remember, and know to be perfectly true, not only of yourself, but of nearly all the slaveholders around you.
At this moment, you are probably the guilty holder of at least three of my own dear sisters, and my only brother in bondage.12Douglass’s sisters were Sarah Bailey (1814–?) and Eliza Bailey (1816–c. 1876), and his brother was Perry Bailey (1813–c. 1878). Like Douglass, his older siblings were originally the slaves of Aaron Anthony. Following their master’s death in 1826, Sarah and Perry became the property of his son, Andrew Skinner Anthony, while Eliza belonged to Thomas Auld, Aaron Anthony’s son-in-law. In 1832 Sarah, her son Henry, and four other slaves were sold to Perry Cohee of southern Mississippi. By 1883, she had moved to Louisville, Kentucky, where she went by the name Mrs. Sarah O. Pettit. Eliza married a free black man who purchased her and their two children in 1836. They remained in Talbot County, Maryland, where they rented a small plot of land. Perry Bailey married an enslaved woman named Maria. When she was sold to a slaveholder in Texas, Perry followed her there. They remained in Texas until 1867, when they reunited with Douglass in Rochester. For two years they lived in a cottage that Douglass built for them on his property. They then settled permanently in Maryland. New York Independent, 2 March 1865, 25 July 1867; Lewis Douglass to Douglass, 9 June 1865, Perry Downs to Douglass, 21 February 1867, FD Collection, DHU-MS; Douglass to Theodore Tilton, 2 September 1867, FD Papers, NHi; Anna Downs to Douglass, 5 October 1869, Sarah O. Pettit to Douglass, 26 September 1883, both in General Correspondence File, reel 2, frames 497–99, reel 3, frames 778–80, FD Papers, DLC; Aaron Anthony Slave Distributions, 22 October 1827, Talbot County Distributions, V.JP#D, 58–59, Sale of Slaves, Andrew S. Anthony to Perry Cohee, 14 July 1832, Thomas Auld to Peter Mitchell, 25 January 1836, Talbot County Records, V.50, 192–93, V.52, 258, Manumission of Eliza Mitchell, 1 July 1844, Talbot County Records, V.58, 234—–5, all in MdTCH; Preston, Young Frederick Douglass, 164–65, 175–77, 184, 206–07, 229n. These you regard as your property. They are recorded on your ledger, or perhaps have been sold to human flesh mongers, with a view to filling your own ever-hungry purse. Sir, I desire to know how and where these dear sisters are. Have you sold them? or are they still in your possession? What has become of them? are they living or dead? And my dear old grandmother,13Betsey Bailey (1774–1849), the maternal grandmother of Frederick Douglass, grew up a slave on the Skinner plantation in Talbot County, Maryland. In 1797 she became the property of Aaron Anthony, who acquired her and several other slaves through his marriage to Ann Skinner. Betsey married Isaac Bailey, a free black who earned his living as a sawyer. The couple lived in Betsey’s cabin on Anthony’s Tuckahoe Creek farm in Talbot County, where she bore nine daughters and three sons. She was also a midwife, a service for which Anthony paid her. Upon Anthony’s death in 1826, Andrew Skinner Anthony, Aaron’s son, inherited Bailey. When Andrew died in 1833, she became the slave of John Planner Anthony. Despite this succession of masters and the death of her own husband, she remained in her cabin on the Tuckahoe Creek Farm, living alone, nearly destitute, and going blind. In 1840 Thomas Auld, John Anthony’s uncle, learned of Bailey’s condition and sent for her, caring for her in his home until her death. Aaron Anthony Slave Distribution, 22 October 1827, Talbot County Distributions, V.JP#D, 58–59, MdTCH; Inventory of Negroes owned by Aaron Anthony, 19 December 1826, Aaron Anthony Slave Distribution, 27 September 1827, folders 71 and 77, Aaron Anthony Ledger A, 1790–1818, folder 94, Aaron Anthony Ledger B, 1812–26, folder 77, 159, 165–68, Harriet Anthony, annotated copy of Bondage and Freedom, folder 93, 180, all in Dodge Collection, MdAA; McFeely, Frederick Douglass, 294; Preston, Young Frederick Douglass, 8, 16–20, 167. whom you turned out like an old horse, to die in the woods—is she still alive? Write and let me know all about them. If my grandmother be still alive, she is of no service to you, for by this time she must be nearly eighty years old—too old to be cared for by one to whom she has ceased to be of service, send her to me at Rochester, or bring her to Philadelphia, and it shall be the crowning happiness of my life to take care of her in her old age. Oh! she was to me a mother, and a father, so far as hard toil for my comfort could make her such. Send me my grandmother! that I may watch over and take care of her in her old age. And my sisters, let me know all about them. I would write to them, and learn all I want to know of them without disturbing you in any way, but that, through your unrighteous conduct, they have been entirely deprived of the power to read and write. You have kept them in utter ignorance, and have therefore robbed them of the sweet enjoyments of
writing or receiving letters from absent friends and relatives. Your wickedness and cruelty committed in this respect on your own 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.
The responsibility which you have assumed in this regard is truly awful—and how you could stagger under it these many years is marvellous. Your mind must have become darkened, your heart hardened, your conscience seared and petrified, or you would have long since thrown off the accursed load and souht relief at the hands of a sin forgiving God. How, let me ask, would you look upon me, were I some dark night in company with a band of hardened villains, to enter the precincts of your own elegant dwelling and seize the person of your own lovely daughter Amanda,14Born in Hillsborough, Maryland, Arianna Amanda Auld Sears (1826–78) was the only child of Thomas and Lucretia Anthony Auld. In 1826, after her mother’s death and her father’s remarriage, she fell under the charge of her stepmother, Rowena Hambleton Auld. In 1843 she married John L. Sears, a Philadelphia coal merchant, to whom she bore four children. The Searses moved to Philadelphia, but returned to Maryland in the early 1860s, settling in Baltimore. Amanda Sears’s childhood acquaintance with Frederick Douglass was reestablished in 1859, when he called upon her while on a speaking engagement in Philadelphia. Douglass and Amanda maintained a warm friendship over the years that followed. After her death in 1878, Amanda’s husband wrote to Douglass, “God bless you for your kindness to her.” Auld Family Bible (courtesy of Carl G. Auld); New York Herald, 6 September 1866; Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, 6 September 1866; John L. Sears to Douglass, 10 January 1878, Thomas E. Sears to Douglass, 1 February 1878, General Correspondence File, reel 3, frames 215–16, 225, FD Papers, DLC; Preston, Young Frederick Douglass, 30, 106–07, 168–70; Roberts, “Visitation of Western Talbot,” 245. and carry her off from your family, friends and all the loved ones of her youth—make her my slave—compel her to work, and I take her wages—place her name on my ledger as property—disregard her personal rights—fetter the powers of her immortal soul by denying her the right and privilege of learning to read and write—feed her coarsely—clothe her scantily, and whip her on the naked back occasionally; more and still more horrible, leave her unprotected—a degraded victim to the brutal lust of fiendish overseers who would pollute, blight, and blast her fair soul—rob her of all dignity—destroy her virtue, and annihilate all in her person the graces that adorn the character of virtuous womanhood? I ask how would you regard me, if such were my conduct? Oh! the vocabulary of the damned would not afford a word suf[fi]ciently infernal, to express your idea of my God-provoking wickedness. Yet sir, your treatment of my beloved sisters is in all essential points, precisely like the case I have now supposed. Damning as would be such a deed on my part, it would be no more so than that which you have committed against me and my sisters.
I will now bring this letter to a close, you shall hear from me again unless you let me hear from you. I intend to make use of you as a weapon with which to assail the system of slavery—as a means of concentrating public attention on the system, and deepening their horror of trafficking in the souls and bodies of men. I shall make use of you as a means of exposing the character of the American church and clergy—and as a means of bringing this guilty nation with yourself to repentance. In doing this I entertain no malice towards you personally. There is no roof under which you would be more safe than mine, and there is nothing in my house which you might
need for your comfort, which I would not readily grant. Indeed, I should esteem it a privilege, to set you an example as to how mankind ought to treat each other.
I am your fellow man but not your slave,
FREDERICK DOUGLASS.
P.S.—I send a copy of the paper containing this letter, to save postage.—
F. D.
PLSr: NS, 8 September 1848. Reprinted in NASS, 14 September 1848; Lib., 22 September 1848; ASB, 29 September 1848; General Correspondence File, reel 8, frames 578–85, FD Papers, DLC; JNH, 10:394–97 (October 1925); Woodson, Mind of the Negro, 202–09; Foner, Life and Writings, 1:336–43. PLeSr: PaF, 21 September 1848; Philadelphia Non-Slaveholder, November 1848. PL: Douglass Papers, ser. 2, 2:247–54; William L. Andrews, The Oxford Frederick Douglass Reader (New York, 1996), 102–07.