Cold Open

It's the evening of August 11th, 1841, in a lecture hall in Nantucket, Massachusetts.

The room is packed, its air close and tinged with the smell of tobacco and sweat. Large anti-slavery banners hang above the podium where a man is announcing the next speaker.

When he hears his name, 23-year-old Frederick Douglass stands up from his seat in the crowd and awkwardly slides past the row of other audience members. Though he knew this moment was coming, he suddenly feels flustered.

When he gets to the aisle, every single head in the hall swivels in his direction. He doesn't know where to look, so he stares at the floor.

He takes uncertain steps as if he's never walked before. Simply putting one foot in front of the other takes all of his concentration.

But finally, he reaches the stage. He stands behind the lectern and looks out at the sea of curious white faces.

“Just tell your story,” the organizers said to him. But his first words come out cracked and inaudible. His halting voice is the only sound in the room. And he desperately wants to turn and leave. But he tells himself he's been through far worse. So, he straightens his back, takes a deep breath, and, word by painful word, begins telling the story of his life in slavery.

From this nervous beginning, Frederick Douglass will grow into one of the most powerful public speakers in American history. In his long campaign for the abolition of slavery, he will return to the story of his youth and early manhood—from his time in Baltimore to the moment he made himself a free man, disguised as a sailor, on a train pulling out of Baltimore, on September 3rd, 1838.

Introduction

From Noiser and Airship, I’m Lindsay Graham, and this is History Daily.

History is made every day. On this podcast—every day—we tell the true stories of the people and events that shaped our world.

Today is September 3rd, 1838: Frederick Douglass Escapes Slavery.

Act One: Learning

It's March 1826, in Baltimore, 15 years before Frederick Douglass' speech to the anti-slavery convention.

Eight-year-old Frederick sits at a small wooden table in the parlor of a brick rowhouse. Thin windowpanes throw pale, dust-flecked light across the floorboards. The tang of tar and salt drifts in from the shipyards down the block and mixes with the wood smoke from the kitchen fire somewhere behind him.

His mistress Sophia Auld sits beside Frederick. With a battered copy of Webster's spelling book open in front of her, she traces out the letters and words for him. Frederick can't get over how friendly she is—she’s just about the only white person he can remember ever smiling at him.

Frederick was born into slavery on a vast Maryland plantation. As a small child, he went half-naked in a single coarse shirt and slept curled inside an old corn sack. Then when his first owner died, he was given to a woman, who in turn passed him on to her brother-in-law’s family—the Aulds in Baltimore. And that's where he met Sophia.

Sophia’s finger moves beneath the first row of letters, and she says each one slowly, waiting for him to echo it back—A. B. C. Frederick's hungry mind absorbs the information, and he'll gladly stay here all day if that was an option.

But then Sophia’s husband, Hugh, barges in. His wide eyes flit from the pair of them to the book. He lays into his wife, saying if Sophia teaches Frederick to read, he'll become unmanageable.

From that moment on, something in Sophia curdles. The same hands that once guided Frederick's finger along the page now snatch newspapers from him. The warmest white face Frederick ever knew becomes one of the most hostile.

But Frederick never forgets those few short lessons he received—or Hugh's opposition to them. He realizes that if his enslaver plans to control him by keeping him illiterate, learning to read is how he'll break free.

From that moment on, Frederick takes his lessons any way he can. He completes his errands around the city as quickly as possible to buy precious minutes to learn. He trades bread for reading tips from poor white boys on the street. He studies the markings shipyard carpenters chalk onto timber—S for starboard, L for larboard—and copies them over and over on fences, sidewalks, and backstreet brick walls with a lump of stolen chalk.

With fifty cents he earns from shining boots, he buys a book called “The Columbian Orator.” Inside, he finds a dialogue in which an enslaved man argues so persuasively for his own freedom that his enslaver grants it. He also begins reading newspaper articles about the national campaign to end slavery. And the more he learns about this abolition movement, the more he yearns for his own freedom.

But he can’t forget that he is still enslaved. And when he is 15, Frederick is caught in a dispute between Hugh and his brother, Thomas Auld. In the end, he is sent back to rural Maryland, and it's a bitter blow for Frederick. The enslaved men and women on Thomas’s farm rarely have enough to eat—and Frederick spends much of his time just searching for ways to supplement his diet.

On more than one occasion, he deliberately lets Thomas’s horses run loose and follows them down to a friendlier house nearby, where he knows he’ll be given a square meal. After a few months of such behavior, though, Thomas decides that Frederick is indeed unmanageable. So he farms him out for a year to Edward Covey, a notorious local slave breaker. Under Covey’s watchful gaze, Frederick must toil from before dawn until after dark. He’s worked and whipped in equal measure, until the boy who once devoured books can barely summon the energy to read at all.

One blistering August afternoon, Frederick is fanning wheat under a merciless sun when his legs give way beneath him, and he passes out. He’s brought to by Covey kicking him. Frederick blinks in confusion and doesn’t get up fast enough for Covey’s liking. So Covey picks up a hickory slat and strikes Frederick across the head with it.

With blood pouring down his face, Frederick escapes into the woods. From there, he makes his way seven miles to Thomas Auld’s home and begs him for protection. But Thomas orders him back to Covey. Frederick returns the following morning, hoping that Covey’s anger has passed. But it hasn't.

Still, the next time Covey strikes, Frederick's independent spirit will finally resurface, and he'll do something few have dared and even fewer have survived—he’ll raise his hand against his enslaver.

Act Two: Fighting

It's August 1833, on Edward Covey's farm in Maryland, three days after he beat Frederick Douglass with a hickory slat.

It's early morning, and Frederick is in the stables feeding the horses and cleaning out their stalls. He finds the smell of manure and the heat of the animals strangely comforting. But then, footsteps sound behind him. He turns to see Covey, silhouetted in the stable entrance by the gray dawn light. He has a loop of rope in his hand. He runs at Frederick—but Frederick scrambles back, evading his grasp.

Covey comes at him again, and this time, something in Frederick snaps. Instead of fleeing, he lunges at his enslaver and grabs him by the throat so hard his fingernails draw blood. Terrified, Covey croaks for help. One of his men comes running, but Frederick kicks him so hard under the ribs that he’s out of the fight before it's even begun.

Frederick turns back to Covey, and they grapple with each other until they're both too tired to go on. Another white man in Covey’s position might have gone to the constable and had Frederick whipped. But Covey won't risk his reputation as a slave breaker, so he keeps the fight quiet. And he never raises his hand to Frederick again. For Frederick, this is a watershed. He may still be enslaved in body. But in spirit, he's free.

After his year with Covey ends, Frederick is hired out to a farmer near the town of St Michaels. There, in secret, he sets up a Sunday school for other enslaved men and women. At its peak, more than forty gather for lessons under trees or in a free Black neighbor's house. Every one of them risks a whipping just by showing up. But they still come, determined to learn how to read.

For Frederick, it's rewarding work. And over time, he grows closer to some of his students, and with four of them, he hatches a plan to escape. They intend to steal a canoe and row north. But the morning they're due to leave, a strange dread comes over Frederick. He becomes convinced that they have been betrayed. Hours later, his fears are confirmed. He doesn’t know who it is, but someone talks, and just when freedom seems within reach, Frederick is thrown in jail.

For a week, slave traders visit his cell every day, sizing him up like livestock. Frederick knows what awaits him—sale at auction and then life as a brutalized plantation hand in the Deep South.

But then, to Frederick's amazement, Thomas Auld takes him out of jail and sends him back to his brother Hugh in Baltimore. Frederick is to be retrained as a ship's caulker. And after all, as far as the Aulds are concerned, anyone can be a field hand. But they think Frederick is more valuable than that.

Frederick learns his new trade fast and is soon commanding wages that rival any free caulker in the city—nine dollars in his best weeks. Eventually, Hugh Auld grants him a rare privilege—Frederick can find work on his own, so long as he hands over a fixed sum to Hugh each week. This arrangement lasts for a while until, one week, Frederick is a day late handing over his earnings. Hugh is furious and ends the arrangement. In response, Frederick simply stops working for an entire week.

And while he’s on strike, Frederick gets to thinking. Liberties that can be taken away on a whim are no liberties at all. So he must escape slavery for good. To camouflage his intentions, Frederick quietly goes back to work as if nothing has happened. Hugh is delighted—and never suspects a thing.

In this second escape attempt, Frederick still needs help. But this time, he’s sure his new accomplice won’t betray him. Anna Murray is a free woman in Baltimore. And she and Frederick are in love.

So in early September 1838, he makes his final preparations. Anna meets him and presses her life savings into his hands. It’s nine years of wages, plus what her featherbed fetched at auction. She hands over a bundle of clothes too—a sailor's red shirt and a black cravat that she has sewn herself.

Then the lovers hug. If this works, she will follow him north, and they'll marry as free people.

But they both know what happens if it doesn't go as planned—Frederick will be dragged south in irons, sold off and forced to work as a plantation for the rest of his life. And Frederick and Anna will never see each other again.

Act Three: Running

It's the morning of September 3rd, 1838.

Frederick Douglass sits in the segregated car of a train pulling out of Baltimore; his heart is racing. Outside the window, the flat fields and scattered farmhouses of Maryland blur past. Coal smoke drifts back along the cars, catching in his throat, and the wheels beat out a steady, clattering rhythm on the rails beneath him.

Farther along the car, a conductor has started checking Black passengers' free papers—the documents that prove that they are not enslaved. But Frederick doesn't have any. His plan is to pose as a sailor in a red shirt, black cravat, and wide-brimmed tarpaulin hat, and hope that the conductor respects the uniform enough not to ask too many questions. But right now, though, that plan feels perilously thin.

Frederick's moment of reckoning soon arrives. The conductor turns to him, takes in his outfit, and demands his papers. Frederick tells him he never takes them to sea. The conductor asks if he can prove he's free some other way. So Frederick pulls out his one card—sailor's protection papers, borrowed from a Black friend. They carry the American eagle and identify the bearer as a free sailor. They also describe a man who looks nothing like Frederick. But between the eagle and the uniform, it's apparently enough. The conductor takes one glance at the papers, nods, and moves down the car. Frederick realizes he can breathe again.

But as the train surges north, he reminds himself that the journey isn't over yet—he's still deep in slave territory, with many hurdles ahead of him. But he’s passed the first and sternest test.

Days later, he’s safely in New York, and Frederick sends for Anna. She joins him, and they marry on September 15th. The couple then moves to the relative safety of New Bedford, Massachusetts, where Frederick finds work as a laborer. But he also preaches at his church and soon catches the attention of a prominent abolitionist. This man persuades him to address a major anti-slavery convention in Nantucket. There, on stage, Frederick is terrified, but as he starts speaking, something happens. The crowd, dead silent at first, leans in. Applause and shouts of encouragement start to ring out, and when Frederick finally finishes, he is roared off the stage.

From there, Frederick becomes a rising star of the abolitionist movement, and eventually a national celebrity. When the Civil War comes, he acts as a recruiter of Black troops for the Union armies. And when the war ends and slavery is finally abolished, he becomes Marshal of the District of Columbia and then the U.S. Ambassador to Haiti. But it is his writing and skills as an orator that will define his legacy. The road to freedom for Black Americans was long and hard. But Frederick Douglass helped lead the way after his own escape from slavery, dressed as a sailor, on September 3rd, 1838.

Outro

Next on History Daily. September 4th, 476 CE. An 11-year-old emperor is deposed by a Germanic chieftain, breaking the power of the Roman Empire in the West forever.

From Noiser and Airship, this is History Daily, hosted, edited, and executive produced by me, Lindsay Graham.

Audio editing by Muhammad Shahzaib.

Sound design by Mollie Baack.

Music by Thrumm.

This episode is written and researched by Laurie Harris.

Edited by William Simpson.

Managing producer Emily Burke.

Executive Producers are William Simpson for Airship and Pasal Hughes for Noiser.