The escape was quite elaborate, requiring Bailey to take a train north, then a steam ferry across the Susquehanna River, and then resume the train journey, to arrive at Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, an anti-slavery stronghold. She encouraged his aspirations to be free, lent him money and helped his escape. In 1837, Bailey had met and fallen in love with Anna Murray, a free black woman in Baltimore about five years his senior. Two years later, in September 1838, aged 20, he finally managed to escape to the free North. He made good comrades among the other male slaves and helped organise a group escape of about 6 slaves in April 1836, but the conspiracy was discovered and Bailey was severely punished. He speculated that his father was the plantation master, but he never had any proof.įred Bailey, as everyone called him, was about seven years old when his mother died, and soon after that he was given to Lucretia Auld, who sent him to serve her brother-in-law, Hugh Auld in Baltimore and his wife, Sophia, who was the first to teach him to start to read and write, until her husband forbade her.Īfter seven years of relative good treatment as a domestic slave in Baltimore, Bailey was sent to a plantation to work in the fields and subjected to brutal treatment.
( Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, chapter X) Brief bioįrederick Douglass was born Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey to Harriet Bailey, a slave woman, and an unknown white father, probably in February 1818. He must be able to detect no inconsistencies in slavery he must be made to feel that slavery is right and he can be brought to that only when he ceases to be a man. It is necessary to darken his moral and mental vision, and, as far as possible, to annihilate the power of reason.
I have found that, to make a contented slave, it is necessary to make a thoughtless one.
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