The title page of the introduction and part of the table of contents of The Columbian Orator, first published in 1797. Douglass carried his personal copy out of slavery with him.
Education and Slavery were incompatible with each other.
—FREDERICK DOUGLASS, 1845
On a spring day in March 1826, Lucretia Auld gave Frederick Bailey the good news: he was to be sent to Baltimore in just three days to live with the family of Hugh Auld, Thomas’s brother, and to be the boyhood companion for Tommy Auld, Hugh’s son. Big changes were afoot for all of Aaron Anthony’s slaves. Old Master was ill and aging, his house soon to be taken over by a new head overseer; the blacks had to be redistributed to other places in the Lloyd empire, hired out, or perhaps even sold. Frederick was lucky, and Lucretia was happy for him; she promised him his first pair of trousers if he would thoroughly clean himself before traveling to the city. Douglass reports that he spent most of the next three days in the creek scrubbing the “plantation scurf” and the “mange (as pig drovers would call it)” off his body. The boy was sleepless with excitement, “working for the first time in the hope of reward.”1
A boy might have been frightened by this prospect of such a drastic change in his familiar surroundings. But not Frederick. He remembered no dread and only exhilaration at seeing the Baltimore he had heard so much about from an older cousin who worked on the Sally Lloyd, Colonel Lloyd’s sloop, and had come back with so many magical stories about ships, buildings, soldiers, and markets in the city. Frederick had no real family to leave behind—no parents to miss, and his brother and sisters were but strangers to him. He suddenly felt liberated from a future at the Wye plantation of little more than “hardship, whipping, and nakedness.” He remembered the day as a Saturday, since he had no knowledge yet of months; with pride in his new trousers, Douglass, sharing the deck with a flock of sheep, boarded the Sally Lloyd on what was likely March 18, 1826, for the journey to Baltimore. Ever giving his boyhood a narrative and a meaning, Douglass remembered himself the excited eight-year-old boy, stepping on the boat, as he “gave to Colonel Lloyd’s plantation what I hoped would be the last look.” Then he moved to the bow of the sloop and “spent the remainder of the day in looking ahead.” This would not by any measure be the final time he would see the Wye plantation. He would come back again in both helpless fear and personal triumph. Talbot County and the Eastern Shore would forever be the deepest wellspring of his fertile memory. But at this juncture, no one could imagine how the history of the Chesapeake region, as well as that of the entire nation, would change in no small measure because this fresh-faced orphaned slave boy rode a boat to Baltimore that day in 1826.2
The sloop traversed Chesapeake Bay, which to Frederick, “opened like a shoreless ocean.” It went into port first at Annapolis, where during a brief stay the boy was not allowed ashore; he did, however, see the dome of the statehouse of Maryland’s capital. Since it was the first city he had ever seen, he remembered his youthful reaction as something like “travelers at the first view of Rome.” Then on Sunday morning they arrived in Baltimore harbor. Frederick Bailey looked in awe as he saw two- and three-masted sailing ships, steamers, church spires, and four- and five-story buildings and warehouses. They landed at Smith’s Wharf, near Gardiner’s Shipyard, in Fell’s Point, just southeast of the Inner Harbor. Since the 1760s, Fell’s Point had been a hive of taverns and boardinghouses, as well as a growing center for the building and fitting out of oceangoing ships. In 1793, a French fleet overloaded with colonists escaping the slave rebellion in Saint Domingue (Haiti) arrived in the harbor. Among them was a ship’s carpenter, Joseph Despeaux, and a contingent of Haitian slaves. With his workers, Despeaux founded Fell’s Point’s first shipyard, where soon they were constructing the famous Baltimore clipper ships, the fastest ocean crafts afloat.3
One of the sloop hands guided Frederick to the home of Hugh and Sophia Auld on Aliceanna Street (he remembered it as “Alliciana” Street), just a few blocks up from the harbor. He had arrived in one of most thriving and growing port cities in North America. It was one of the largest trading centers in the United States for tobacco, wheat, flour, and even coffee. Its shipbuilding industry was booming, and just a few months after his arrival, on July 4, 1826, the cornerstone was laid for the soon-to-be-famous Baltimore and Ohio Railroad (the B&O), which would link the Atlantic Ocean with the Mississippi River. The city had a population of nearly eighty thousand people, composed of approximately sixty thousand whites, four thousand black slaves, and more than fourteen thousand free blacks. Baltimore had the largest concentration of free persons of color in the United States, a demographic fact that would play a key role in Douglass’s fate. The city proudly announced its civic consciousness in building major monuments; in October 1829, Frederick would have witnessed, at least from a distance, the unveiling of the massive Washington Monument, a 280-foot-high structure, with a 24-foot-high base and the first president’s statue on top of the obelisk. The year of his arrival the first of three shot towers was erected, the massive stone structures in which shot was produced by dropping molten lead from the top to water tanks below.4 This was a new visual, technological, and human universe for young Frederick. Here was a city with great churches, squares, and a skyline, and, to a boy from a plantation on the other side of the bay, an endless panorama for his senses and his imagination.
Douglass portrayed himself as the country bumpkin arriving in the big city. He felt the strange brick pavement under his feet, which would be so hot in summer heat, gazed at the buildings, and was especially struck at the noise, the “startling sounds reaching my ears from all directions.” The boy felt “strange objects glaring upon me at every step” and raw fear. His chief trouble was the roving “troops of hostile boys ready to pounce upon me at every street corner.” They chased him for sport and called him an “Eastern Shore Man.” Thus facing a street hazing, a Fell’s Point initiation that he called his “moral acclimation,” Frederick learned that life had given him a break as it also thrust him into the unknown. He had arrived in an urban environment with slaves but not really a “slave city.” Baltimore was undergoing a massive European immigration (130,000 arrived between 1820 and 1850), and those Fell’s Point streets were full of Irish and German boys marking their territories. The port and the shipyards were booming; carpenters, caulkers, sailors, and dockworkers of all kinds competitively and jealously protected their livelihoods. The city broiled with volatile politics, sometimes led by firehouse organizations and their political clubs and gangs. Outbreaks of rioting and political violence were common. The ships continued to be built to make the future of a great seaport; the wheat trade boomed and a textile industry thrived in making clothing and ship’s sails. But the labor for this great expansion was largely white, and the slave population was dwindling (from 4,357 in 1820 to 3,212 in 1840) as the free black community grew in numbers (from 10,326 in 1820 to 17,980 in 1840), if not in human rights.5
But Douglass, still numbered among the slaves, was someone’s property with a mind and body growing almost beyond the system’s capacity to contain him. Not long after Frederick’s arrival, the Aulds moved a few blocks south, to a house on Philpot Street, as close as one could live to the shipyards, where Hugh was an aspiring shipbuilder. At the Aulds’ house, Frederick met a white family who at first took him in like a relative. To his astonishment and joy, Sophia Auld—Hugh’s wife—displayed “the kindliest emotions” in her face, and her tender demeanor toward the boy put him in a world he had never known from white people. And he hit it off immediately with “Little Tommy,” of whom “his Freddy,” as “Miss Sophia” put it, was to “take care.” Surrounded by all this dreamlike affection, Frederick remembered his emotions: “I had already fallen in love with the dear boy; and with these little ceremonies I was initiated into my new home, and entered upon my peculiar duties.”6 Compared to all his previous experience it was a home and would remain so for several years; but it would also be a place for learning stern lessons for life, as well as to find and savor the one possession that might save his life.
For nearly his first two years with the Aulds, Sophia treated him “more akin to a mother than a slaveholding mistress.” Indeed, as Douglass pointed out, Sophia Auld had never been a slaveholder before his arrival. She allowed him to feel like a “half-brother” to Tommy. She was pious, attended church regularly, and exuded kindness toward the black boy who was now turning ten or eleven years old. She was Douglass’s humane “law-giver,” he said, and such sweetness made him “more sensitive to good and ill treatment.” Living on carpets, sleeping in a good straw bed, eating good bread, and wearing clean clothes did not hurt either. But the great gift she gave him was literacy. In 1845 Douglass recollected simply that Sophia had of her own accord taught him his ABCs as well as his first lessons in spelling. But by 1855 he remembered it a little differently. By then it was part of his “plan,” and after repeatedly hearing her read aloud from the Bible, he frankly asked her to teach him to read. Either way, Sophia was proud of her pupil, and Frederick was an extraordinarily eager learner.7
In the sordid history of American slavery, few images are more powerfully ironic than that of Sophia Auld reading in what Douglass described as a “voice of tranquil music” while the slave boy lay asleep under a table near her feet. In a scene he retold in speeches, but not in the autobiographies, he remembered first hearing her read from the book of Job. She “waked me to sleep no more,” Douglass declared in a speech in Belfast, Ireland, in January 1846. He often told of encountering the Bible by finding pages of it strewn on a Baltimore street a few years after first hearing it in Sophia’s melodious voice. Ever awake to the power of a metaphor, he “raked leaves of the sacred volume” and, after washing and drying them, read the remnants. But from Sophia, a world had opened through, of all visions, that of the tragic, suffering, benighted Job!8
Whether or not she read past the first chapter of Job to the boy, in his own later reading the adult writer and orator would have found countless resonances and uses of Job’s voice. When Douglass was in the depths of despair, each of Job’s uses of the question why fit Douglass’s condition. “Why died I not from the womb? Why did I not give up the ghost when I came out of the belly?” Or even more poignant, as Douglass gained literacy, “Why is light given to a man whose way is hid, and whom God hath hedged in?” As Douglass came to see words as his holiest possession, he could share Job’s deep frustration: “How forcible are right words! But what does your arguing reprove? Do ye imagine to reprove words, and the speeches of one who is desperate, which are as wind?” And surely, it was Job’s declarative voice of complaint, defended directly to God over and again, that could teach Douglass a new tongue: “Therefore I will not refrain my mouth; I will speak in the anguish of my spirit; I will complain in the bitterness of my soul.”9 Could Sophia even have grasped what an instrument of power she had unleashed in Frederick?
If Sophia had not realized the potential danger of her actions, her husband soon informed her. When Frederick was about eleven years old, Hugh Auld suddenly forbade with stern anger any further instruction in reading for the young slave. Auld rebuked his wife; literacy was “unlawful” in Maryland for slaves, he claimed, and “learning would spoil the best nigger in the world.” Douglass took great care to quote several lines he claimed he recalled his master speaking. They were to become a new kind of text for him in understanding and thwarting slavery’s hold on his mind and body. If Douglass was taught to read the Bible, “there will be no keeping him,” Auld reportedly said. It would “forever unfit him for the duties of a slave.” And in full paternalistic gravity, the anxious slave owner maintained that “learning would do him no good, but probably, a great deal of harm—making him disconsolate and unhappy.” Before long, the young slave would “want to know how to write,” Auld warned. In retrospect, Douglass made the most of this traumatic juncture in his newfound life in Baltimore. He called master Hugh’s chastisement of his wife in front of the slave the “first decidedly antislavery lecture to which it had been my lot to listen.”10
As autobiographer, Douglass constantly portrayed especially his early life as a series of turning points, episodes of crisis, confrontation, and learning, where the hero is tested, sometimes brutally and beyond his will or strength. Most of the time, though, the hero endures and gains self-knowledge and some new ground in his personal war against his enslavers. None of these turning points or battles was ever more important than his ascent to literacy and knowledge.
Words would become Douglass’s stock-in-trade; if Miss Sophia had provided the gift of literacy first, he now claimed, with no small amount of bravado, that master Hugh had also given him a gift. Auld’s “iron sentences” became inspiration rather than denial. Douglass recollected himself awakening for the first time to the “white man’s power to perpetuate the enslavement of the black man.” If “knowledge unfits a child to be a slave,” Douglass later wrote, then he had found the motive power of his path out, or at least inward, to freedom. Ever ready to employ biting irony to make his case, Douglass left this telling and honest description of the lesson learned: “That which he most loved I most hated; and the very determination which he expressed to keep me in ignorance, only rendered me the more resolute in seeking intelligence.” Although still a child, Douglass nevertheless remembered the episode as a seismic shift in his conception of the world. “In learning to read, therefore,” Douglass declared, “I am not sure that I do not owe quite as much to the opposition of my master, as to the kindly assistance of my amiable mistress.”11 Even as a child, Douglass learned to negotiate with and define himself by his opposition. This was a life lesson Douglass would invoke time and again in his later career, whether the enemy was a master, an overseer, a mob throwing brickbats, a stiflingly competitive fellow abolitionist, proslavery ideology, the Confederacy itself, Abraham Lincoln, or white supremacists who defined him out of the human family. Their opposition became his motive power, their arguments his own tools of counterargument in the courts of moral justice.
In the case of the Aulds and reading, Douglass would steadily see to the center of one of slavery’s mysteries, and into its evil heart. With his quest for literacy and the liberation of his mind, Douglass turned his own youth into one of the most profound meditations ever written on the character and meaning of slavery, of the slaveholders’ mentality, and of human nature itself. In his first two autobiographies, Douglass seemed intuitively aware of Georg Hegel’s famous insight about the mutual dependence of the master and the slave, of their inherent need for recognition from each other for the system to work. From experience, Douglass had his own ways of showing how the more perfect the slave, the more enslaved the master. And he showed how slavery, no matter how brutal its forms and conditions, was the meeting of two kinds of consciousness in a test of wills, and that total domination or absolute authority by the master was only rarely possible. He understood just how much the master’s own identity as an independent, powerful person depended on the slave’s recognition through his willing labor of that master’s authority. But as Hegel put it, and Douglass lived it, in that labor, and the master’s necessity of recognizing his humanity in performing it, “the bondsman becomes aware, through this rediscovery of himself by himself, of having and being a mind of his own.”12 The house on Philpot Street, as well as the entire teeming domain of Fell’s Point, became for Douglass a kind of psychological and philosophical school in which he discovered that most precious thing—his mind. And he learned just how much his enslavers needed his mind as they struggled to suppress it. Emerging in the youthful slave was not only an intelligence and passion for survival and knowledge, but a political instinct as well.
According to Douglass, Sophia “lacked the depravity indispensable to shutting” her slave boy “up in mental darkness.” She needed a great deal of “training,” he wrote, to succeed in “forgetting my human nature,” or in “treating me as a thing destitute of a moral and intellectual nature.” But now, under her husband’s orders, she surely tried to push against what Douglass called “nature” itself. “One cannot easily forget to love freedom,” wrote the former slave, “and it is as hard to cease to respect that natural love in our fellow creatures.” Sophia started out on her brief career as a slave master as a “tender-hearted woman,” but under the new social strictures, her “lamb-like disposition gave way to one of tiger-like fierceness.” By various clandestine “indirections,” as he cleverly called it, the eager young reader smuggled newspapers and even books into the house, and even into his bed in a loft. Compellingly, Douglass observed the dark irony of Sophia’s tragic learning curve. However hard she tried, it was all but impossible for her to see the black eleven- and twelve-year-old as mere chattel. “I was more than that,” he asserted, “and she felt me to be more than that. I could talk and sing; I could laugh and weep; I could reason and remember; I could love and hate. I was human, and she, dear lady, knew and felt me to be so.”13
Douglass later used his achievement of such self-awareness for numerous antislavery, as well as personal, purposes. But he also used it to demonstrate Miss Sophia’s moral ruin, as he found his own moral ascent. “Conscience cannot stand much violence,” Douglass philosophized. “In ceasing to instruct me, she must begin to justify herself to herself.” Thus her anger when she saw Frederick in a corner “quietly reading a book or a newspaper.” She came to treat him like a “traitor” launching a dangerous “plot.” With Sophia constantly suspicious of Frederick’s reading, and Frederick constantly wary of his mistress’s policing of his habits and thoughts, together, as Douglass later phrased it, they reached the same conclusion: “education and slavery are incompatible with each other.”14 This master-slave relationship, having begun with motherly love and childlike adoration, became an all-out war for either total liberation or unconditional surrender. Outwitting his mistress and her angry husband, Frederick went out into the streets to recruit reinforcements for his little war.
For Frederick Bailey, reading was manna from heaven; but he was the one giving out the bread. Right on Philpot Street, near the Durgin and Bailey Shipyard, Frederick made friends with several white boys who lived in the same neighborhood. He would later claim this was all part of his “plan,” cleverly “using my young white playmates” as teachers. But his recollections make clear that he developed a genuine bond with these struggling and hungry immigrant kids. Frederick carried his Webster’s spelling book, and at every chance he would corner the white boys and, while “seated on a curbstone or a cellar door,” solicit from them spelling lessons in return for his “tuition fee”—Sophia Auld’s fresh warm bread. A “single biscuit” would also lead to animated discussions of why Frederick was a slave for life and why the white boys were free. The boys took him into their secret emotional havens and supported their enslaved friend. They told him slavery was unfair and that he would be free one day, especially when he turned twenty-one. Their words encouraged him, Douglass remembered. This convinced him that young boys were natural abolitionists, at least until they reached a certain age when they were no longer “unseared and unperverted” by slavery’s material and moral logic.15
Douglass trusted the “consciences” of his young mates, whom he would not name in the early autobiographies to protect them from retribution in their adulthood. But by the time of writing Life and Times in 1881, he thanked four by name: Gustavus Dorgan, Joseph Bailey, Charles Farity, and William Cosdry. Here was Douglass’s first comradeship with young Irishmen, his first trusted experience with humanism beyond race. As white boys condemned the hypocrisy and oppression of their parents toward one of their favorite fellow street urchins, perhaps Douglass found even ultimate experiential inspiration for his later speeches and writings. Whenever Douglass made arguments against slavery from the natural-rights tradition, which he did persistently after 1841, he could reflect upon this experience with the boys of Philpot Street, who often told him that “they believed I had as good a right to be free as they did,” and that “they did not believe God ever made anyone to be a slave.”16
As a slave in Baltimore, feeling more and more hemmed in as he grew in size and age, Douglass needed all the evidence he could muster to keep nature on his side. Then he found the book that changed his life. His white friends carried and studied a school reader, The Columbian Orator, by the compiler and teacher Caleb Bingham. On a day in 1830, Frederick took fifty cents he had earned on odd jobs around the shipyard, went to Nathaniel Knight’s bookstore on Thames Street, and purchased a secondhand copy of the book he would later call his “rich treasure” and his “noble acquisition.”17 From that day forward in his life as a slave, The Columbian Orator became his constant companion, whether he was hiding in his loft reading space at the Aulds’ Baltimore house, back on the Eastern Shore as a desperate teenager teaching some fellow slaves in a Sabbath school, or carrying it as almost his sole worldly possession when he escaped to freedom at age twenty.
The title page of the introduction and part of the table of contents of The Columbian Orator, first published in 1797. Douglass carried his personal copy out of slavery with him.
The Columbian Orator went through twenty-three editions and many printings in at least ten cities from Vermont to Maryland over the more than sixty years it remained in print. With hardly any formal schooling, although a good deal of reading in his prairie farming background, the twenty-two-year-old Abraham Lincoln studied with relish the classical and Enlightenment-era oratory in The Columbian Orator during his first winter (1831–32) in New Salem, Illinois. That an urban slave youth living in Frederick Bailey’s circumstances in Baltimore would, only a year earlier, discover this book through his white companions, who were in school, where there was an edition published in Maryland, is not surprising. That Douglass would embrace and later celebrate the language in this book is also not surprising. The Columbian Orator was much more than a stiff collection of Christian moralisms for America’s youth. It was the creation of a man of decidedly antislavery sympathies, one determined to democratize education and instill in young people the heritage of the American Revolution, as well as the values of republicanism.18
Caleb Bingham’s eighty-four entries were organized without regard for chronology or topic; such a lack of system was a pedagogical theory of the time designed to hold student interest. It held Frederick Bailey in rapt attention. The selections included prose, verse, plays, and especially political speeches by famous orators from antiquity and the Enlightenment. Cato, Cicero, Demosthenes, Socrates, John Milton, George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, William Pitt, Napoléon, Charles James Fox, and Daniel O’Connell (whom Bingham mistakenly identifies as O’Connor) all appear at least once, and some several times. Most of the pieces address themes of nationalism, individual liberty, religious faith, or the value of education. The reader as a whole reflected, as Bingham intended, New England’s long transition from seventeenth-century Calvinism to nineteenth-century evangelical, freewill doctrine, from Puritan theocracy to the Revolutionary era’s separation of church and state. As Douglass tackled the pages of The Columbian Orator in his early teens, whether he grasped the contexts or not, he would have repeatedly encountered irresistible words such as “freedom,” “liberty,” “tyranny,” and the “rights of man.”19 Well before he read any serious history, he garnered and cherished a vocabulary of liberation.
Among the most striking features of the collection were eleven dialogues, most of them originally written for the book by David Everett, Bingham’s associate in Boston. They were both serious and comical, aimed at the ethical imagination of young people and laced with moral tales about human nature, truth telling, and reversals of fate where underdogs outwit their oppressors. In “Dialogue Between the Ghosts of an English Duelist, a North American Savage, and Mercury,” the Englishman is revealed as the greater “savage,” while the Mohawk Indian, respected for his cultural differences, achieves the higher virtue. With such stories about democratized education and ethnic pluralism, it was as if Frederick Bailey had landed in a modern multicultural classroom in the midst of a slave state. He read many speeches, and especially one dialogue, “repeatedly.” “Dialogue Between a Master and a Slave” is to modern eyes a naïve and simplistic exchange between a slave owner and his bondman; but it profoundly affected Douglass as he read its improbable conclusion. If we can imagine our way into a thirteen- or fourteen-year-old’s sensibility, what Douglass discovered in this story was that slavery was subject to “argument,” even between a master and a slave. That the slave would convince the master to liberate him is improbable, but the teenager, psychologically imprisoned in his seemingly permanent fate, needed all the examples he could find of reason winning over power. The bondman even gets the last word in the dialogue, warning the slaveholder that despite his “kindness,” he, the slave, is still “surrounded by implacable foes” bent on “revenge.”20
On page after page of The Columbian Orator, Frederick found the reality of his condition, as well as dreams and justifications of his escape. His reading added not only to his “limited stock of language,” he recalled, but it enabled him “to give tongue to many interesting thoughts which had frequently flashed through my soul.” Young, angry, but exhilarated by the ferment and liberation in his mind, if not yet his body, Douglass felt his special book pouring “floods of light on the nature and character of slavery.” He believed he had “now penetrated the secret of all slavery and oppression, and had ascertained their true foundation to be in the pride, the power and the avarice of man.”21 As an adult autobiographer, representing how a budding adolescent discovered knowledge of himself and of the human condition, Douglass left a transcendent record of the light emerging in his mind.
From Slaves in Barbary: A Drama in Two Acts, Douglass must have read aloud in solitude, which was his favorite habit, about a fascinating and motley collection of captives being sold as slaves. They include Turks, an Irishman, a black American slave named Sharp, and an American sea captain named Kidnap. In Douglass’s imagination the story and the group may have felt a little like his gang of friends from the Baltimore streets. In a reversal of fortune, both Sharp and Kidnap are sold, but the white sea captain is put under Sharp’s “instruction.” Sharp has a thick slave dialect, which may have attracted the young Douglass, but he would surely have relished the eloquent speech of Teague (the Irish captive) in which he declares, “If men were made to be slaves and masters, why was not one man born with a whip in his hand and gold spoon in his mouth; and another with a chain on his arm, or a fetter to his heel?” And Douglass could not have missed the rousing ending, where Hamet, the “Bashaw of Tunis,” frees a noble captive named Francisco, declaring, “Let it be remembered, there is no luxury so exquisite as the exercise of humanity, and no post so honourable as his, who defends THE RIGHTS OF MAN.”22 In his youth, Douglass had seen and learned so much about gold spoons, chains, and whips. He knew much about whites and blacks trapped in a system’s fated destiny. But he never met a Bashaw he could trust.
From The Columbian Orator Douglass learned a great deal of motivation and confidence; but trust in the people around him, friend or foe, would be a long time coming. Above all, what Douglass found in this book was an elocution manual. Bingham’s long introduction, “General Directions for Speaking,” which drew upon the ancients to demonstrate a variety of practical techniques for effective oratory, may have been the most important thing Douglass ever read. The primary aim of oratory, said Bingham, was to create “action” between speaker and audience. “The perfection of art consists in its nearest resemblance to nature,” the educator argued. True eloquence emerged when the orator could train his voice to “follow nature.”23 Bingham provided specific examples of such elements of speech making as cadence, pace, variety of tone, and especially gestures of the arms, hands, shoulders, and head. Young Frederick was enthralled, and though he could not yet know it, his life’s vocation, his true calling, appeared as a saving grace.
Gaining knowledge—through experience, and now so importantly through reading, and slowly, through what he called the “art of writing”—became young Douglass’s reason for living. It came with both joy and fear. In his first two autobiographies, Douglass wrote honest passages about his seizure of literacy that speak to the ages, to anyone who has ever found learning a pathway to genuine liberation. One can never know exactly how much Douglass imagined himself speaking to history, to millions of potential readers living behind walls of oppression. But he surely did here. “The increase of knowledge,” he reported, “was attended with bitter, as well as sweet results. The more I read the more I was led to abhor and detest slavery, and my enslavers.” More than overseers’ beatings, fear of sale, or hunger and futurelessness, it was as if Douglass the writer of 1845 and the reviser of 1855 had found the existential core of his slave life: “As I read, behold! the very discontent so graphically predicted by master Hugh had already come upon me . . . The revelation haunted me, stung me, and made me gloomy and miserable. As I writhed under the torment of this knowledge, I almost envied my fellow slaves their stupid contentment.” Ten years earlier in the 1845 Narrative, Douglass had kept the point sharp and unforgettably eloquent:
I have often wished myself a beast. I preferred the condition of the meanest reptile to my own. Anything, no matter what to get rid of thinking! It was this everlasting thinking of my condition that tormented me. There was no getting rid of it. It pressed upon me by every object within sight or hearing, animate or inanimate. The silver trump of freedom had aroused my soul to eternal wakefulness. Freedom now appeared, to disappear no more forever. It was heard in every sound, and seen in every thing. It was ever present to torment me with a sense of my wretched condition. I saw nothing without seeing it, I heard nothing without hearing it, and felt nothing without feeling it. It looked from every star, it smiled in every calm, breathed in every wind, and moved in every storm.24
When Douglass’s memory spoke within him, it often poured out in prose poetry. Remembering with all of his senses, did a twenty-seven-year-old writer ever express the craving for knowledge, life, and love, or the yearning for real freedom, any better?