Read a firsthand account of the horrors of American slavery and bravery in the face of oppression, written by a man who found freedom from slavery through education and escape from Baltimore to New York.

Frederick Douglass was born Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey in Talbot County, Maryland. Much like animals, most slaves don’t know their birthdate and age, beyond a season like planting-time, harvest, or cherry-time. Douglass was no exception to this general rule. It was considered rude and inappropriate to ask a slaveholder such questions. It indicated a discontented, restless disposition. At the time of this writing, his best estimate was that he is likely between 27 and 28 years old.

Douglass’ mother was Harriet Bailey. He only saw her a handful of times before she died when Douglass when seven. They were separated while he was still an infant. This was part of a common practice in Maryland, perhaps to disrupt any affection between mother and child. Douglass’ father was a white man, his master, actually, which accounts for Douglass’ mulatto complexion.

In keeping with the law, all offspring of such an arrangement were to follow the condition of the mother, namely slave. So the plantation owner was able to slake his lust and profit from it with the birth of another slave, to sell or become a field hand.

Such offspring often incurred special wrath from the mistress. She was happy to find any fault with them and to see them get whipped for the slightest infraction—real or imagined. This pleasure was intensified if she thought the husband was giving the mulatto child preferential treatment. A man would usually sell these slaves, because it is against human nature to watch your black child be tied up and flogged by your white one at the command of your wife. One word from the master in the slave’s defense would confirm the wife’s suspicions of infidelity, which only made matters more difficult for the slave.

For the first several years of Douglass’ life, he lived on the edge of the plantation and was cared for by an old slave woman who could no longer work in the fields. When he came to live on Captain Anthony’s plantation, he witnessed his Aunt Hester getting brutally whipped by a livid Anthony.

When he called her one evening, she was not around. Aunt Hester was found to be in the presence of a slave named Ned from a neighboring plantation. Why the master should be so possessive of Aunt Hester is a matter of speculation, but she was exceptionally beautiful in face and figure. He brought her into his kitchen, stripped her from neck to waist, tied her hands, and held them up with a hook hanging from the stable’s joist. He shouted, “damned bitch” over and over as he whipped her as blood poured out of her naked back.

Douglass hid himself in closet, afraid that he would be next. This was Douglass’ induction into the heinous world of slavery, a threshold dripping with his aunt’s blood and screams.

Slaves were given a monthly allowance of food at the plantation where Douglass lived. Adult men and women got a bushel of cornmeal and eight pounds of meat, usually fish or pork. Each year, adults were given two rough linen shirts, one pair of linen trousers, a jacket, a pair of stockings and a pair of shoes. Children unable to work in the fields didn’t get jackets, shoes, stockings, or trousers. They got two shirts, and if these became unusable part way through the year, they would go naked. Young children completely naked were not an uncommon sight, even in winter.

The slaves on the plantation did not have beds, but each adult was rationed a rough, inadequate blanket; however, the inadequate sleeping arrangements posed a lesser challenge than finding the time to get sleep. After a long day in the fields, there remained cooking, cleaning, and washing to be done. This cut into hours of sleep that the slaves desperately needed. After a few hours of sleep on the cold, damp ground, there was a wakeup call that the slave would answer or else answer to the overseer’s whip.

Colonel Lloyd owned the collection of plantations and about 400 slaves. The home plantation was a small self-sufficient village with capabilities for carpentry, metal work, cloth making, grain grinding, shoemaking, and so on. The slaves from the affiliated plantations called this place the Great House Farm. It was considered a great honor to be the slave from an outer plantation to be entrusted with an errand to the Great House Farm. It was the slave’s equivalent to election to Congress. Those who were sent to collect their and their fellow slaves’ monthly allowances were especially enthused. En route, they would traipse through the woods, and, in their solitude, fill the forest with their song. Deep, sonorous, and mournful, they would encompass ecstatic joy and deep sorrow. The sadness of the songs was enough to impress upon someone the inhumanity of slavery, for only profound suffering could elicit the kind of songs composed in the woodlands. Only the hardest of hearts would not be softened to contemplate the inhumanity after listening to those rich and pained melodies. Some have absurdly ventured that the slave’s singing is a sign of his contentment. They sing not from happiness but pain. They sing most when they are most miserable. These songs created Douglass’ framework for the cruelties of slavery. Even years after freedom, the memory of these songs brought tears to Douglass’ eyes.

Douglass was about seven or eight years old when he left the plantation and was brought to Baltimore, to live with the Auld family and wait upon their son Thomas. It was here that Douglass saw something he’d never seen before in his short life: a white person with a kind and smiling countenance. Sophia Auld had never owned a slave before Douglass, and, for a time, had relied on her own work as a weaver to support herself. She’d been spared the dehumanizing power of slavery, and it showed in her loving disposition toward young “Freddy.” His conditioned behavior of servile deference didn’t make her happy. She didn’t find it disrespectful or impudent, but normal and acceptable when Douglass looked her in the face. If anything, she found the slovenly disposition unsettling.

It was here in Baltimore, under the tutelage of Miss Sophia, that Douglass learned to read. He had memorized the alphabet and could read three- and four-letter words when Mr. Auld discovered what his wife was doing. He scolded her and forbade her from educating him. Not only was it illegal, but it was dangerous. It would make him discontented with his life.  Better for the slave to believe that his purpose was to obey his master. “If you teach that nigger to read,” Mr. Auld told his wife, “there would be no keeping him. It would forever unfit him to be a slave.”

The great fear that Douglass’ learning put into the heart of Mr. Auld was branded in Douglass’ young mind. In that moment, Douglass saw clearly the pathway to freedom. His resolve to learn to read would surpass his masters’ resolve to keep him in the prison house of ignorance. Mrs. Auld then made it her job to prevent Douglass from reading, from even glancing in the direction of a book or newspaper. The mistress went from angel to demon, from dove-like gentleness to lion-like ferocity as she got a taste for slavery and power. Even the kindest heart is not immune to its pernicious influence.

Douglass was born a slave but refused to die one. Education was a vital piece to his freedom from slavery. He decided to master reading and writing before attempting escape. He learned by challenging young boys at the shipyard, telling them that he could write better than they could, writing something with a lump of chalk he kept with him. They would write something in response or correct his mistakes, and Douglass would take note. When he was alone in the house, he would read the newspaper and would fill in the blanks that Master Thomas left in his penmanship books, meticulously imitating Thomas’ writing style to avoid suspicion.

Overall, the slaveholding culture in Baltimore was more favorable than on the plantations, such as it was. In many respects, he lived almost as a freeman. No one in the city wanted to be perceived as a cruel master, so city slaves didn’t go hungry and were beaten more infrequently than on the plantations. There was a sense of shame that curtailed the more violent impulses that plantation overseers felt perfect freedom to indulge. A slaveholder in Baltimore would hate to draw the disapproving glances of his neighbors who owned no slaves.

Even still, an increasingly learned Douglass was experiencing the discontent that his master had predicted. His ire and indignation over the injustice of slavery grew. So fierce was his hatred for his position that he sometimes regretted learning, and even considered ending his life. It was the thought of freedom that sustained Douglass in his moments of despondency.

When Douglass was about 16, he was sent back to the plantation of Thomas Auld—Hugh Auld’s brother. Thomas Auld was an exceptionally cruel man. To get away from his master (and to get a full meal) Douglass would “accidentally” let his master’s horse go free and track him down again at the plantation of Mr. Auld’s father-in-law, a far kinder man who wouldn’t let Douglass return without a full belly. Eventually Thomas Auld grew tired of what he took to be Douglass’ carelessness. City life had clearly made Douglass incompetent and he needed to be broken and trained for plantation life.

Auld sent to Douglass to one Edward Covey for disciplinarian purposes. Covey had gained a reputation as a “negro breaker.” Plantation owners and overseers would send him slaves for an agreed-upon period of time. Covey was too poor to own more than a few slaves, but would rent slaves from other plantations for up to a year. They would work his fields, and their masters would get back servile, submissive slaves.

Douglass got his back whipped raw every week. Covey would sneak up on slaves who were slacking and derive a sick joy in finding them idle. What made Covey worse than most slave drivers was that he was religious. The religious were the worst kind of slaveholders because they tortured and humiliated their slaves with an arrogant piety, believing their abuses were sanctioned by the loving and humble Christ.

One time, Douglass was beaten so badly, that he ran the seven miles back to Thomas Auld’s plantation to complain, the blood in his hair and covering his clothing as proof of abuse. At moments, Douglass’ story and pleas seemed to move Thomas Auld, but Auld was dismissive of Douglass’ fears that Covey would kill him if he went back. Auld told Douglass he could stay the night, but needed to return to Covey at first light.

When Douglass returned, Edward Covey ran at him with a whip. Douglass ran into the fields and hid until a furious Covey gave up the manhunt. Several days later, Douglass returned, and Covey calmly directed Douglass to herd the pigs to a different sty. The façade of tranquility was shattered the following day, when Douglass was called into the stable to feed the horses. Covey crept up behind Douglass and tried to tie him up, but to his own surprise and Covey’s—Douglass decided to fight. Covey began to tremble like a scared child, and in the two-hour fight that ensued, Douglass drew Covey’s blood, but Douglass remained mostly unscathed. For the remaining six months that Douglass worked on Covey’s plantation, Covey didn’t touch a hair on Douglass’ head. Douglass speculates that it would have tarnished Covey’s reputation for breaking slaves had he called a constable for a public flogging or lynching.

This fight with Covey reawakened dying embers of hope for freedom in Douglass. It was a kind of resurrection for him, a rising out of the tomb of slavery. To keep the long arm of slavery at bay was reclamation of his dignity and humanity. Douglass decided that from that moment on, the slave owner who wanted to whip him would have to kill him, too.

Douglass’ first attempt at escape ended before it started. After months of planning, thinking, and rethinking with a handful of his close friends, whom he had taught to read and now wanted to escape as well, word of the escape plan had been leaked to the plantation owner. The owner and the mistress immediately pegged Douglass as the instigator and ringleader. After spending several nights in jail, he was sent back to Baltimore to live with Hugh and Sophie Auld. Here in Baltimore he learned to caulk ships, but had to endure the scorn and beatings of white construction crews, who saw Douglass as taking a white man’s job and wage. Ironically, the eight or nine dollars that Douglass made each week he handed over to his master, Hugh. Once a week, Mr. Auld robbed Douglass of the dignity of a being worth his wage, of working for a reward. This reignited in Douglass the desire to escape.

Douglass was unwilling to share the specific route and methods of his escape to New York. To specify risked ruining an escaping slave’s advantage over his pursuant master. For this reason, Douglass took issue with the Underground Railroad, which, though heroic in its efforts, should have been less forthright about its efforts and intentions. Why give any advantage to the slave owner looking to overtake the fleeing slave? It was better to let the master walk in the darkness of ignorance, unsure of which way to go or by what methods his human chattel would elude him.

It was hard for Douglass to describe what he felt when he realized he was free, but he likened it to a man at sea, pursued by pirates, who is suddenly brought on board a friendly war ship, or to a man who’s escaped the lion’s den. He considered it the most exciting moment of his life.

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