My Slave Experience in Maryland: An Address Delivered in New York, New York, on May 6, 1845
MY SLAVE EXPERIENCE IN MARYLAND: AN ADDRESS DELIVERED IN NEW YORK, NEW YORK, ON 6 MAY 1845
National Anti-Slavery Standard, 22 May 1845. Other texts in New York Evangelist, 8 May 1845; Liberator, 16 May 1845; Concord (N.H.) Herald of Freedom, 16 May 1845.
Douglass’s Narrative was only days from publication when he addressed the Twelfth Annual Convention of the American Anti-Slavery Society in New York City’s capacious Broadway Tabernacle on 6 May 1845. The National Anti-Slavery Standard exulted that the attendance was “larger than it has been for several years,” though the Liberator believed the gathering would have been larger still had the meeting been properly advertised. The New York correspondent of the American Traveller thought the crowd had been “drawn together by idle curiosity to hear women speak in public.” The clergy was “pretty numerously represented . . . , curious to see and hear what might be said and done, especially in regard to their position,” the Liberator reported. Even the prominent American Colonization Society leader, Ralph Randolph Gurley, put in an appearance, as did the English socialist Robert Dale Owen and a few Liberty party men. Garrison called the meeting to order and, after Reverend Henry Grew offered a prayer, Francis Jackson read the Treasurer’s Report and James B. Sanderson, a black friend of Douglass from New Bedford, hailed the progress of abolitionism. Wendell Phillips urged abolitionists to secede from national political and religious bodies. Jane Elizabeth Hitchcock, a lecturing companion of Abby Kelley, followed with another appeal for disunion. William C. Bell urged moderation and publicized an antislavery newspaper that he and Cassius M. Clay had recently established in Kentucky. Doug-
lass, the last speaker of the long session, talked for only a half hour. Offering a preview of his forthcoming Narrative, he publicly divulged the specific facts of his slave background for the first time. NASS, 15 May 1845.
Frederick Douglas[s] was next introduced to the audience, Mr. Garrson 1Born in Newburyport, Massachusetts, of Nova Scotian immigrants, William Lloyd Garrison (1805–79) was the most prominent figure in the American antislavery movement. In the late 1820s Benjamin Lundy, the Quaker abolitionist, converted him to antislavery and called him to Baltimore to help publish the Genius of Universal Emancipation. In 1831 Garrison brought out the first issue of his Boston antislavery weekly, the Liberator (1831–65). An uncompromising advocate of immediate emancipation by means of moral suasion and a stern critic of African colonization, he later adopted the doctrine of nonresistance and called on abolitionists to “come out” of corrupt churches, dissolve the American Union, and avoid third-party politics. A champion of many of the reforms of his day, including women's rights, temperance, and the abolition of the death penalty, he and his policies were a major reason the antislavery movement split in 1840. Garrison thereafter was the acknowledged leader of the “old organization” forces, serving twenty-three terms as president of the American Anti-Slavery Society. In December 1865 he shut down the Liberator and devoted the remainder of his life to championing women's rights, Indian rights, and prohibition. Walter M. Merrill, Against Wind and Title: A Biography of William Lloyd Garrison (Cambridge, Mass, 1963); John L. Thomas, The Liberator: William Lloyd Garrison (Boston, 1963); DAB, 7: 168–72 observing that he was one who, by the laws of the South, had been a chattel but who was now, by his own intrepid spirit and the laws of God, a man. He proceeded:—I do not know that I can say anything to the point. My habits and early life have done much to unfit me for public speaking, and I fear that your patience has already been wearied by the lengthened remarks of other speakers, more eloquent than I can possibly be, and better prepared to command the attention of the audience. And I can scarcely hope to get your attention even for a longer period than fifteen minutes.
Before coming to this meeting, I had a sort of desire—I don’t know but it was vanity—to stand before a New-York audience in the Tabernacle.2Constructed in 1836 partly for the purpose of accommodating “large bodies of Christians on anniversaries and other occasions,” the Broadway Tabernacle Church was one of the largest churches in New York City, comfortably seating 2500 persons. It was chiefly a Congregational church. The great revivalist, Charles Grandison Finney, was its first pastor. Lewis Tappan of the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society was one of the more illustrious abolitionists in the congregation. History of the Broadway Tabernacle Church . . . (New York, 1846), 3–4. But when I came in this morning, and looked at those massive pillars, and saw the vast throng which had assembled, I got a little frightened, and was afraid that I could not speak; but now that the audience is not so large and I have recovered from my fright, I will venture to say a word on Slavery.
I ran away from the South seven years ago—passing through this city in no little hurry, I assure you—and lived about three years in New Bedford, Massachusetts, before I became publicly known to the anti-slavery people. Since then I have been engaged for three years in telling the people what I know of it. I have come to this meeting to throw in my mite, and since no fugitive slave has preceded me, I am encouraged to say a word about the sunny South. I thought, when the eloquent female3Jane Elizabeth Hitchcock Jones (1813–96), born in Vernon, New York, became an antislavery lecturer in the early 1840s and was among the band of antislavery reformers who moved to Salem, Ohio in 1845, in order to give new impetus to the Garrisonian movement in the West. Active in the Western Anti-Slavery Society, she coedited until 1849 the Society ’s organ, the Anti-Slavery Bugle, helped organize local antislavery societies, and wrote The Young Abolitionist, a children’s guide to slavery and abolition. In 1846 she married Benjamin Smith Jones (1812–62), a Quaker abolitionist and coeditor of the Bugle. From 1850 to 1856 she devoted most of her energies to the women's rights movement, resuming her antislavery labors before the Civil War. She served on the executive committee of the Western Anti-Slavery Society and as general agent of the Ohio Woman's Rights Association. In 1862 she returned to Vernon, New York, where she lived in quiet retirement. Douglas A. Gamble, “Garrisonian Abolitionists in the West: Some Suggestions for Study, Civil War History, 23 : 58–59 (March 1977):, Edward T. James et al., eds., Notable American Women, 1607–1950: A Biographical Dictionary, 3 vols. (Cambridge, Mass, 1971), 2 : 285–86. who addressed this audience a while ago, was speaking of the horrors of Slavery, that many an honest man would doubt the truth of the picture which she drew; and I can unite with the gentleman from Kentucky4Douglass refers to William C. Bell (?–1845), the general agent of the antislavery newspaper the True American, which Cassius M. Clay was preparing to issue from Lexington, Kentucky. A socialist and a critic of popular religion, Bell was also an educational reformer and offered a theory of “practical education” in his Analysis of Pope's Essay on Man . . . (Lexington, Ky., 1836), NASS, 10 July 1845: Lib., 2 May 1845: Asa Earl Martin, The Anti-Slavery Movement in Kentucky Prior to 1850 (Louisville, Ky., 1918), 115. in saying, that she came far short of describing them.
I can tell you what I have seen with my own eyes, felt on my own person, and know to have occurred in my own neighborhood. I am not from any of those States where the slaves are said to be in their most degraded condition; but from Maryland, where Slavery is said to exist in its mildest form; yet I can stand here and relate atrocities which would make your blood to boil at the statement of them. I lived on the plantation of Col. Lloyd 5Edward Lloyd V (1779–1834) of Wye House was the scion of Talbot County's first family of the Maryland Eastern Shore. One of the state's largest landowners and slaveholders, he was also in his day Maryland's most successful wheat grower and cattle raiser. As a charter member of the Maryland Agricultural Society, a founder of at least two banks, and a speculator in coal lands, he became the wealthiest of a long line of Lloyds that reached back to colonial Maryland. From 1806 to 1808 he was a U.S. congressman, voting in 1807 against the bill to end the African slave trade. For the next two years he was governor of Maryland, and from 1811 to 1816 he served in the state legislature. In 1819 he was elected to the U.S. Senate, from which he resigned in 1826 to return to the Maryland senate, of which he was president until 1831. Commonly called “Colonel” (as were all the Lloyds of Wye, in deference to their customary position as head of the local militia), he was remembered among the quality as “the Governor“ and among the commonalty as “Lord Cock-de-doodle-do.” Oswald Tilghman, History of Talbot County, Maryland, 1661–1861, 2 vols. (Baltimore, 1915), 1 : 134–210; Hulbert Footner, Rivers of the Eastern Shore: Seventeen Maryland Rivers (New York, 1944), 283–90; BDAC, 1227. on the eastern shore of Maryland, and belonged to
that gentleman’s clerk.6Aaron Anthony (1767–1826) was Douglass's first owner and possibly his father as well. Anthony was born in what is now Caroline County on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, the youngest son of poor, illiterate farming parents. In 1795, after having amassed a small portion of property, he became the captain of the Lloyd family schooner, hence his title “captain.” Two years later he married Ann Catherine Skinner, who was the daughter of an old and prominent Talbot County family; she died from the effects of a long illness a few months after Douglass was born. The marriage brought Anthony the slave family from which Douglass was descended and a promotion a short while later to the position of chief overseer and general manager of the thirteen farms that comprised Edward Lloyd’s Talbot County estate. By the time of Anthony ’s death, he was a modestly wealthy man, having accumulated three farms, thirty slaves, and various items of personal property valued in all at $8,042. The slaves alone were worth $3,065. Anthony Family Bible, Oxford Museum, Oxford, Maryland; Talbot County Inventories, 13 January 1827, Box 13, pp. 5–9; Dickson J. Preston, “Aaron Anthony” (unpublished paper, Easton, Maryland, 1977), MdTCH, Easton, Md.; Douglass, Narrative, 24; idem, Bondage and Freedom, 43; Footner, Rivers of the Eastern Shore, 285; Charles B. Clark, ed., The Eastern Shore of Maryland and Virginia, 3 vols. (New York, 1950), 1 :491–92. He owned, probably, not less than a thousand slaves.7Douglass exaggerates the number of slaves owned by Colonel Edward Lloyd V. In 1790 Lloyd's father, Edward Lloyd IV, owned 305 slaves; by 1861 his grandson, Edward Lloyd VII, had 700 slaves, and these included chattel in Mississippi. There were only 167 slaves on Lloyd’s Home House plantation or “Great House Farm” at the time of Douglass's residence. Douglass may have taken on faith a saying perhaps still current during his childhood: “God Almighty never intended any white man should own a thousand niggers, but Colonel Lloyd [Edward IV] had 999.” Footner, Rivers of the Eastern Shore, 280–81; Tilghman, Talbot County, 1 : 225. Cf. Douglass, Narrative, xii, 27–28.
I mention the name of this man, and also of the persons who perpetrated the deeds which I am about to relate, running the risk of being hurled back into interminable bondage—for I am yet a slave;—yet for the sake of the cause—for the sake of humanity, I will mention the names, and glory in running the risk. I have the gratification to know that if I fall by the utterance of truth in this matter, that if I shall be hurled back into bondage to gratify the slaveholder—to be killed by inches—that every drop of blood which I shall shed, every groan which I shall utter, every pain which shall rack my frame, every sob in which I shall indulge, shall be the instrument, under God, of tearing down the bloody pillar of Slavery, and of hastening the day of deliverance for three millions of my brethren in bondage.
I therefore tell the names of these bloody men, not because they are worse than other men would have been in their circumstances. No, they are bloody from necessity. Slavery makes it necessary for the slaveholder to commit all conceivable outrages upon the miserable slave. It is impossible to hold the slaves in bondage without this.
We had on the plantation an overseer, by the name of Austin Gore, a man who was highly respected as an overseer—proud, ambitious, cruel, artful, obdurate.8The censuses of 1820 and 1830 list an Austin Gore, whereas various Lloyd family account books and cash books mention an Orson Gore, whose tombstone in Spring Hill Cemetery, Easton, Maryland, has the dates 1794–1871. In any event, Gore was the overseer on Edward Lloyd's Home House plantation. An acquaintance later challenged the characterization that Douglass drew of Gore, saying that Gore was “a respectable citizen living near St. Michaels [Maryland], and . . . a worthy member of the Methodist Episcopal Church; . . . all who know him, think him anything but a murderer.” A. C. C. Thompson, “To the Public—Falsehood Refuted," reprinted in the NASS, 25 November 1845 and in Lib., 12 December 1845; Douglass, Narrative, 38–41; idem, Bondage and Freedom, 119–25: cf. Various account books and cash books, 1820–30, reel 10, Lloyd Family Papers, MdHis; U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1820, Manuscript Population Schedule, Maryland, Talbot County, St. Michaels District, p. 336, RG29, DNA. Nearly every slave stood in the utmost dread and horror of that man. His eye flashed confusion amongst them. He never spoke but to command, nor commanded but to be obeyed. He was lavish with the whip, sparing with his word. I have seen that man tie up men by the two hands, and for two hours, at intervals, ply the lash. I have seen women stretched up on the limbs of trees, and their bare backs made bloody with the lash. One slave refused to be whipped by him—I need not tell you that he was a man, though black his features. degraded his condition. He had committed some trifling offence—for they whip for trifling offences—the slave refused to be whipped, and ran—he did not stand to and fight his master as I did once, and might do again—though I hope I shall not have occasion to do so—he ran and stood in a creek, and refused to come out. At length his master told him he would shoot him if he did not come out. Three calls were to be given him. The first, second, and third, were given, at each of which the slave stood his ground. Gore, equally determined and firm, raised his musket, and in an instant poor Derby was no more.9His actual name was Bill Demby (1802?–22), though Douglass in his second autobiography thought it could have been Denby. Demby, whose family had been Lloyd property since the latter decades of the seventeenth century, was one of the twenty-three slaves on Colonel Lloyd’s “Davises Farm” plantation in Talbot County, Maryland. The incident Douglass describes apparently occurred in 1822, about two years before Douglass was sent to live on the Lloyd estate. In the Return Book for 1 January 1823 there is this listing: “Bill Demby dead (age) 21,” with a notation signifying that he had been a prime field hand. Return Book, 1 January 1822, 1 January 1823, “Land Papers-Maintenance of Property, Land Volumes 34–59,” Lloyd Family Papers, MdHis; Douglass, Bondage and Freedom, 122; idem, Narrative, xxiii. He sank beneath the waves,
and naught but the crimsoned waters marked the spot. Then a general outcry might be heard amongst us. Mr. Lloyd asked Gore why he had resorted to such a cruel measure. He replied, coolly, that he had done it from necessity; that the slave was setting a dangerous example, and that if he was permitted to be corrected and yet save his life, that the slaves would effectually rise and be freemen, and their masters be slaves. His defence was satisfactory. He remained on the plantation, and his fame went abroad. He still lives in St. Michaels, Talbot county, Maryland, and is now, I presume, as much respected, as though his guilty soul had never been stained with his brother’s blood.
I might go on and mention other facts if time would permit. My own wife had a dear cousin who was terribly mangled in her sleep, while nursing the child of a Mrs. Hicks. Finding the girl asleep, Mrs. Hicks beat her to death with a billet of wood, and the woman has never been brought to justice.10The actions of Mrs. Giles Hicks are more fully described in Douglass, Narrative, 41–42; idem, Bondage and Freedom, 125–26. It is not a crime to kill a negro in Talbot county, Maryland, farther than it is a deprivation of a man’s property. I used to know of one who boasted that he had killed two slaves, and with an oath would say, “I’m the only benefactor in the country. ”11Douglass identifies the person quoted as Thomas Lanman, a ship carpenter. One of the man's friends said that his name was Thomas Lamdin, but in reality it was probably Thomas H. W. Lambdin. By 1845 he was a school teacher in the neighborhood of St. Michaels, Maryland. “All the harm that can be said of him is, that he is too good-natured and harmless to injure any person but himself,” the friend added. In January 1848 Lambdin was elected the town bailiff of St. Michaels. A. C. C. Thompson, “To the Public-Falsehood Refuted,” reprinted in the NASS, 25 November 1845 and in Lib., 12 December 1845; Douglass, Narrative, 41; idem, Bondage and Freedom. 124–25; Tilghman, Talbot County, 2 : 395.
Now, my friends, pardon me for having detained you so long; but let me tell you with regard to the feelings of the slave. The people at the North say—“Why don’t you rise? If we were thus treated we would rise and throw off the yoke. We would wade knee deep in blood before we would endure the bondage.” You’d rise up! Who are these that are asking for manhood in the slave, and who say that he has it not, because he does not rise? The very men who are ready by the Constitution to bring the strength of the nation to put us down! You, the people of New York, the people of Massachusetts, of New England, of the whole Northern States, have sworn under God that we shall be slaves or die! And shall we three millions be taunted with a want of the love of freedom, by the very men who stand upon us and say, submit, or be crushed?
We don't ask you to engage in any physical warfare against the slaveholder. We only ask that in Massachusetts, and the several non-slaveholding States which maintain a union with the slaveholder—who stand with your heavy heels on the quivering heart-strings of the slave, that you will stand off. Leave us to take care of our masters. But here you come up to our masters and tell them that they ought to shoot us—to take away our wives and little ones—to sell our mothers into interminable bondage, and sever the tenderest ties. You say to us, if you dare to carry out the principles of our fathers, we'll shoot you down. Others may tamely submit; not I. You may put the chains upon me and fetter me, but I am not a slave, for my master who puts the chains upon me, shall stand in as much dread of me as I do of him. I ask you in the name of my three millions of brethren at the South. We know that we are unable to cope with you in numbers; you are numerically stronger, politically stronger, than we are—but we ask you if you will rend asunder the heart and [crush] the body of the slave? If so, you must do it at your own expense.
While you continue in the Union, you are as bad as the slaveholder. If you have thus wronged the poor black man, by stripping him of his freedom, how are you going to give evidence of your repentance? Undo what you have done. Do you say that the slave ought not to be free? These hands—are they not mine? This body—is it not mine? Again, I am your brother, white as you are. I’m your blood-kin. You don’t get rid of me so easily. I mean to hold on to you. And in this land of liberty, I’m a slave. The twenty-six States that blaze forth on your flag, proclaim a compact to return me to bondage if I run away, and keep me in bondage if I submit. Wherever I go, under the aegis of your liberty, there I’m a slave. If I go to Lexington or Bunker Hill, there I’m a slave, chained in perpetual servitude. I may go to your deepest valley, to your highest mountain, I’m still a slave, and the bloodhound may chase me down.
Now I ask you if you are willing to have your country the hunting-ground of the slave. God says thou shalt not oppress: the Constitution says oppress: which will you serve, God or man? The American Anti-Slavery Society says God, and I am thankful for it. In the name of my brethren, to you, Mr. President,12William Lloyd Garrison. and the noble band who cluster around you, to you, who are scouted on every hand by priest, people,
politician, Church, and State, to you I bring a thankful heart, and in the name of three millions of slaves, I offer you their gratitude for your faithful advocacy in behalf of the slave.