Profiles in Character #2: Fred Bailey Becomes Frederick Douglass

“My mother and I were separated when I was but an infant--before I knew her as my mother,” he wrote in The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass in 1845.  He saw her only on nights when she was permitted to walk 12 miles from the plantation where she was enslaved, and she died when he was about seven.   Not even sure about the year of his birth (perhaps 1817), Fred Bailey would escape from slavery, make his way to New England, where he became a noted abolitionist working with William Lloyd Garrison and then to Rochester, New York.  His newspaper, the North Star, and his renown would spread across the world based on his intellect, oratory, and writing. 

On the plantation in rural Maryland, “I suffered much from hunger, but much more from cold,” he said.  “I had no bed,” and “[O]ur food . . . was MUSH.”  As a young boy, he was sent to serve a family in Baltimore, a stroke of luck that “laid the foundation, and opened the gateway, to all my subsequent prosperity.”  Mrs. Auld “commenced to teach me the A, B, C.”  Soon, her husband stopped her, but learning could not be forbidden.  So Fred took on the task of his own education, driven by passion and the understanding that what he was being denied kept him enslaved but also could unlock the door to his freedom. 

“Though conscious of the difficulty of learning without a teacher,” he wrote, “I set out with high hope, and a fixed purpose, at whatever cost of trouble, to learn how to read.”  What Auld “most dreaded, that I most desired,” and it only served to inspire me with a desire and determination to learn.”  

Introduced to preaching in Baltimore, he grasped the power of oratory.  Meeting Charles Lawson, an old man of deep religious faith, he also became steeped in Christianity and its power as a force for demanding freedom.  “I must go on reading and studying the scriptures,” he said.  Reading ignited the desire to write.   He began in a shipyard, studying the letters carpenters scrawled on ships’ timbers.  That led to copying these letters and then words and passages from The Columbian Orator (commonly used in schoolrooms of the period), the Bible, and a hymnbook.

Forced to return to the Eastern Shore in 1833, he was soon sent “out . . . to be broken” by Edward Covey, a local overseer, who regularly beat him.  “My natural elasticity was crushed, my intellect languished, the disposition to read departed,” he later wrote.  Yet eventually he fought back, risking certain death for striking his master.  But Covey did not retaliate, perhaps afraid to admit he was soundly beaten by a slave, and the effect on Douglass was that “I was nothing before.  I was a MAN NOW.”

Hired out to another slaveholder, he began to preach, under threat of punishment, in clandestine meetings of enslaved workers, encouraging them to learn to read and write as well.  Hatching an escape plan he forged a “pass” for everyone in the group who would leave with him, but the plan was foiled.  Rather than being killed, however, he was sent back to Baltimore, from where he would finally escape to freedom in 1838.

Upon the suggestion of a man who he briefly lived with in New Bedford, Massachusetts and who had been reading “Lady of the Lake,” a poem by Sir Walter Scott, Fred took on the name Douglass adding an extra “s” to the character’s name in the poem to ensure his name would be distinctive.  Fred Bailey thus became Frederick Douglass, completing the metamorphosis from slavery to freedom, from ignorance to enlightenment.

Douglass initially believed in “moral suasion,” that highlighting the contradiction between Christian ideals and slavery would propel its end. Yet, in time he came to admit that only political action, and eventually war, would abolish it.  A confidant of Lincoln, he used his education and passion in the service of arguing for the war and recruiting black soldiers. 

His life, he once said, was anchored in “reading and thinking.”  He therefore urged blacks to be “honest, industrious, sober and intelligent.”  He was the living proof that white Americans’ belief in the intellectual inferiority of blacks was a myth to perpetuate their enslavement. 

In arguably his greatest speech, “What to a Slave is the Fourth of July?,” Douglass reached the pinnacle of rhetoric and logic that his passion for learning had given him.  A boy who could have easily remained a slave, a freeman who could have easily torn his nation apart, he called upon faith, history, and a hopeful spirit:

“I do not despair of this country.  . . . "The arm of the Lord is not shortened," and the doom of slavery is certain. I, therefore, leave off where I began, with hope. While drawing encouragement from the Declaration of Independence, the great principles it contains, and the genius of American Institutions, my spirit is also cheered by the obvious tendencies of the age.”

Photo Credit: National Endowment for the Humanities