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Alison Stewart: This is All Of It. I'm Alison Stewart. Thank you for spending part of your day with us. Whether you're listening on the radio, live streaming, or on demand, I'm grateful you're here. On the show today for the 4th of July, the man who asked the question, "What to the slave is the 4th of July?" the abolitionist, Frederick Douglass. All day today, you'll hear my full bio conversation with historian David Blight, author of the biography, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom, which won the 2018 Pulitzer Prize.

We'll learn about Douglass's early life, born into slavery in Maryland, his escape to the North, and how he became one of the most famous abolitionists of the 19th century. Plus, we discussed Douglass's relationship with President Lincoln and how he approached the politics of fighting for abolition and suffrage as well as his final years before his death in 1895. Let's get this started with David Blight about the early life of Frederick Douglass.

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Alison Stewart: For his book, David Blight used primary source materials, Douglass's own words, plus new information drawn from private collections to produce an 829-page book that took more than a decade to write. We'll start with Frederick Douglass's early life. He was born in February 1818 but was never sure of his birthday because he was born enslaved and didn't know his biological family well. As a child born into slavery, he was loaned out to different households, including some where he was beaten and whipped.

There was one Baltimore household where the mistress allowed him to learn his letters, which ultimately changed his whole life. Douglass became obsessed with words eventually using that to his advantage when he escaped from Baltimore to the North at age 20 in 1838. I started the conversation by asking David Blight what slavery looked like on the Eastern Shore of Maryland as compared to the Deep South.

David Blight: Slavery on the Eastern Shore of Maryland was a bit different than on the other side of the Chesapeake Bay. There were very few cities or towns. There was more plantation-style agriculture. Douglass indeed, Frederick Bailey, grew up in part on the largest landholding in all of Maryland, the Wye plantation, which was a vast, self-sufficient plantation that grew everything it needed.

It backed up right onto the Chesapeake Bay. In effect, it backed up onto access to the ocean. The Eastern Shore was always a little bit more out of the way and some might say backward than the Eastern Shore. In fact, in Douglass's own descriptions of it, he described the area he was born in as the worn-out soil of the Eastern Shore because that was when he was remembering his slavery days there.

Alison Stewart: Slavery destroyed families. How did it destroy Fred Bailey's biological family?

David Blight: Well, Frederick Douglass was born probably in the cabin of his grandmother, Betsy Bailey. His mother, Harriet, was one of several daughters. He never knew his kinfolk. He barely knew his mother. He last saw her when he was only six years old and he had very few vivid memories of her. In fact, he invented images of her in his writing. He never knew who his father was, although he always heard that his father was one of his masters.

The best two candidates are his original owner, Aaron Anthony, and his second owner, Thomas Auld, but we still don't know for sure who Douglass's father was. He didn't even know his siblings and he had four of them until he was about eight years old. He had just been sent to Baltimore. He was sent back to Baltimore, I'm sorry, back to the Eastern Shore because his owner, Aaron Anthony, had died. All of Anthony's slaves were to be divided up.

There's a very vivid moment in Douglass's autobiographies where he describes all of Anthony's 25 or 30 slaves being lined up and divided up among kinfolk or sold to so-and-so or given to so-and-so. He looked around and he said, "Many of these were my siblings." He said he didn't even know who they were. Now, he was sent back to Baltimore at that point, which was one of the several strokes of luck in his life to be-- In fact, he was given to Thomas Auld, who was related to Aaron Anthony.

Anyway, Douglass's kinfolk and family, if you will, was destroyed by slavery. In fact, he had little in the way of any sense of family until after he escaped from slavery at age 20 and made his own family. In fact, one of the great themes of Douglass's early life and, for that matter, throughout his life was this search for home, this sense of a search to know what home was, where it was, and indeed who his kinfolk actually were. He will actually spend the rest of his days to the age of 77, trying to figure out who his father was, but he never really did conclusively know his paternity.

Alison Stewart: You write about a savage beating of his aunt. How did that change him?

David Blight: He sees his Aunt Hester beaten by his owner, Aaron Anthony, who was possibly his father. Her naked back, she is strapped up to a wall. Anthony did not know that little Fred was in the room. Little Fred was six years old and hiding in a crawl space next to a fireplace in the kitchen house at the Wye House plantation. He sees his aunt beaten bloody because, according to Douglass's remembrance, she had rejected Anthony's sexual advances. She was only a late teenager at that time.

Anthony was known to abuse his women slaves and, in this case, brutally abused her. Douglass saw that. He saw the blood drip on the floor. He vividly describes it in the autobiography and makes a great deal of anti-slavery propaganda about that beating. It's not the first and it's not the last beating he will see. Indeed, he will receive any number of beatings himself, but he turns that blood and that violence in his writing into a metaphor of at least one aspect of the very depths of what slavery could do to human beings, to both their bodies and their minds.

Alison Stewart: There are a few moments when Frederick Bailey catches a small break. It actually turns out to be a huge break, I should say, because he's sent to Baltimore. He's loaned out to Baltimore and he encounters a woman who has never had a slave before. Sophia Auld. How did her initial treatment of him change him forever? I think we should point out, she starts to teach him to read.

David Blight: Oh, yes, Sophia Auld was his white mistress in Baltimore, where he is sent when he's seven years old. In the first year and a half or so that he was there, he was supposed to be there to be the companion of the Auld son. His name was Tommy. That's fine, but he was obviously a bright kid, this Fred was. Sophia Auld took him in. According to Douglass, later, she took him in like another son. She began to teach him to read and write. She taught him his letters.

She read out loud with him. She allowed him to collect other kinds of reading. She read the Bible with him. That is how he learned his initial literacy until Sophia's husband, Hugh Auld, came in one day and saw her teaching little Frederick to read and allowing him to recite. According to Douglass, his memory of it was that Auld vehemently instructed his wife, "You shall never teach that kid to read again."

"If you give an N-word an inch, they'll take an ell," according to Douglass, and forbade his wife to teach literacy. Douglass has a wonderful reminiscence of that in the second autobiography where he says, "That was the first anti-slavery speech I ever heard." He decided on the spot. He tells us that if all thought-reading was so terrible, then maybe it's something he ought to get. [chuckles]

Alison Stewart: That was anarchy for an enslaved person to read.

David Blight: Well, it wasn't as uncommon as we might think.

Alison Stewart: It was illegal though, right?

David Blight: It was illegal in most states. That's true. It was indeed illegal in Maryland. There's no question that some slaves not only learned to read and write but were actually taught so sometimes by ministers, sometimes by their owners, and their mistresses. Obviously, this is the most important skill Douglass ever achieved. It's one of the most important things about his life. It's also one of those mysteries that cannot be totally explained. Why did this 7, 8, 9-year-old kid take to language so eagerly?

What was it about this kid who just couldn't get enough to read? He encounters his white playmates on the streets of Baltimore. He's only 9 and 10 years old and he finds that all of them are carrying around a little-- not a little, but a school reader called The Columbian Orator. Douglass tells us he wanted one of those. He wondered why he couldn't have one of those. He didn't get to go to school like the white kids.

He did manage by the time he was 11 at a bookstore in Thames Street in Fells Point in Baltimore to, in fact, barter for his own copy. He got his own copy of The Columbian Orator by the age of 11 and 12. That book became a treasure. That's actually what Douglass called it, a treasure in his life. This book was not only a compilation first published in 1797. It was a compilation of speeches over the years.

Some of them from classical times like Demosthenes and Cicero, but most of them from the Age of Enlightenment, British and American, and included some dialogues that had been invented by the book's creator, a man named Caleb Bingham. One of the dialogues in the book was this imaginary moment when a young slave just convinces his owner to free him. Now, this book became so crucial to Douglass, not just because of all these speeches he could eventually read but, most importantly, it was a manual of oratory.

The introduction, the first 20 pages or more, is a manual. It's a how-to book of how to give a speech, how to gesture with your hands, how to modulate your voice, what you do with your shoulders. Then from the middle on, it's an analysis of how great oratory must have moral messages and so on. There was no more important possession to Frederick Bailey, later Douglass, while he was a slave than that book. When he escaped from slavery at age 20, the only possessions he had on his body were the clothing where he was dressed in a disguise of a sailor, a wide-brim sailor's hat, a few dollars in one pocket, and his Columbian Orator in the other pocket.

In fact, one of my favorite memories of all the years of doing research on Douglass is one of the times I was at Cedar Hill, Douglass's House in Washington, DC, which is a national park site now. They have his original copy of The Columbian Orator. They let me sit at his desk. I put on the white gloves. They let me hold that original edition in my own hands. It was like touching and feeling Douglass's holy grail.

Alison Stewart: We'll continue the conversation with David Blight about his book, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom. Coming up, we learned how Frederick Bailey escaped from Maryland and made his way to an area now known as Tribeca. We'll hear how he and his wife Anna became The Douglasses after the break.

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Alison Stewart: This is All Of It. I'm Alison Stewart. We're back with more of my conversation with David Blight. We pick up Frederick Douglass's story with his plan to escape enslavement and start a new life in the North, where he ultimately settles in New Bedford, Massachusetts, and gets a new name and a newfound obsession, anti-slavery writing.

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Alison Stewart: He had tried to escape and was caught. He tries again and is successful in 1838 around the age of 20. What was different about his successful attempt as opposed to early attempt?

David Blight: The earlier attempt had been a scheme with about four or five other slave teenagers and young men, which was a very bad plan. They were going to steal some canoes and boats and just sail up to Chesapeake or row their way up to Chesapeake somehow. They got caught. At that point, Douglass was jailed for two weeks where he didn't know if he'd be sold South or if he'd ever live to tell it.

When he escaped out of Baltimore in late August of 1838, it was a well-planned scheme. It must be said here that if Douglass hadn't spent those years in Baltimore, we wouldn't know about him. Of his 20 years as a slave, he spent 11 of those years on the Eastern Shore. He spent nine of those years on and off in Baltimore, a city that was a major port to the ocean, a major maritime center, a city in which he encounters all kinds of other people, and a city in which he got very involved in the large free Black community of Baltimore.

There were far more free Blacks in Baltimore than there were slaves. It's there that he meets Anna Murray, who would be his first wife. It was in Baltimore where he had enough freedom of movement, not only to plan an escape but to begin to imagine his way out of Baltimore. The escape plan was simply-- Although it was incredibly dangerous and it took enormous bravery to do it, he dressed as a sailor.

He jumped on a train one morning, all perfectly planned for when the train would leave with his little trunk. He had borrowed the identity papers of a Black sailor who was retired. He took three trains and three steamboats or ferry boats. He crossed three major rivers. In about 38 hours from Baltimore, he arrived at the base of Chambers Street in Lower Manhattan in New York City. Had he been caught, we wouldn't even know about him.

He'd have been sent back to Baltimore and probably finally sold South somewhere into cotton slavery. That escape worked. It not only worked. Within two days, he found his way to the house of David Ruggles, who operated a kind of vigilance group in New York City to protect fugitive slaves. It was from there, he wrote a letter back to Baltimore. We don't know who that letter went to because Anna was not literate.

Somebody got the word to Anna that he was safe in New York and that she was to come. This was all preplanned. She had her bags packed. She managed to buy a ticket. Same three trains, same three ferry boats, and she arrived in New York City in the same 38 hours. They got married in the parlor of David Ruggles. Only a matter of five days after he had escaped out of Baltimore

Alison Stewart: New York friends, if you'd like to go see where that was, there's a lovely plaque at 36 Lispenard Street right on the corner of Church Street there. What advice does David Ruggles give Fred Bailey? Now, he's arrived in New York. He's got to make a life.

David Blight: Well, he tells him, "First, get the hell out of town." He says he and Anna should go North to New Bedford, Massachusetts. It'd be safer. It was not safe in 1838 in New York City for most fugitive slaves. It was a very risky business. Up in New Bedford, the major whaling port of New England, it was known as an enclave for fugitive slaves. It had a strong Black community. Ruggles even gave him a couple of names to look up as soon as they arrive.

Anna and Frederick, again on steamboats and then by carriage, made their way to New Bedford, Massachusetts, where they spent their first night in the home of a free Black man who was himself earlier an escaped slave. His name was Johnson. [chuckles] At the first morning in that house, Douglass says, "I think I need a new name." Mr. Johnson agreed with him. Douglass thought, "Well, what should I pick?" Mr. Johnson told him, "Well, don't pick Johnson. There are way too many of us."

Johnson, according to Douglass, had just been reading Sir Walter Scott's Lady of the Lake, which was an epic poem by the great Scott writer. The hero in that epic poem is a man named Douglas with one S. Johnson tells him this. Douglass said, "I like that name. I like the sound of it, but I'm going to give it one more S for distinction." That's how Douglass became Frederick Douglass. It was on the first morning in New Bedford, Massachusetts.

He and Anna will live in New Bedford for the next three years. Their first two children will be born there. Douglass worked in every kind of manual labor you can imagine in that great whaling port. He carried whale oil casts. He worked in a foundry. He did all kinds of odd jobs for people. Here's one of my favorite facts about Douglass. Either in his first year or his second year, certainly by 1840, because there's a record, he walked to City Hall, which is only two blocks from where they were living, and he registered to vote.

I found the record. It's right there. It says "Frederick Douglass." It gives his address. He paid the $50 poll tax. Massachusetts had a poll tax. By the way, it wasn't a poll tax to try to prevent anybody from voting necessarily. It was a poll tax to try to pay for the electoral system. What we do know is that by the time he was 21 or 22, the runaway slave, illegal immigrant if you like, Frederick Douglass registered to vote.

Alison Stewart: Frederick Douglass is in New Bedford working as a laborer. He takes a liking to another piece of writing, The Liberator, a paper. How does this paper ignite his career as an abolitionist?

David Blight: It's almost as important as The Columbian Orator. When Douglass discovers this newspaper edited by William Lloyd Garrison in Boston, this radical anti-slavery paper, he was stunned. He read it voracious every week. It was a weekly paper. He would even tack it on the wall in one of his jobs. He worked the bellows in a foundry down by the docks. He said he could work that bellows with one arm and he could follow the newspaper.

He would tack it up on the wall and he would read The Liberator while working that bellows. All of us may have had jobs early in our life where we weren't doing anything intellectually challenging and we looked for something to distract us. The paper was full of analyses of slavery. It was full of stories about slavery. At that point, Douglass didn't care what the ideological bent of the paper was.

He was just thrilled to find a newspaper that was engaged in this radical criticism of the existence of slavery and even the existence of racism. It will soon lead to him being discovered by some of the disciples of William Lloyd Garrison because Douglass didn't only read this Liberator. He got involved in the local Black church. In fact, it's one of the first things he did. There was a small African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church in New Bedford.

They called it the Little Zion. He may have gotten involved there literally the first month or two they were there. Within the first year, they had him preaching. They found out this kid could preach. He'd been doing that already back on the Eastern Shore. He was running a debate group and a preaching group among his slave buddies when he was 18 on the Eastern Shore. He started to preach and the congregation decided to ordain him.

In the AME Zion Church at that point, you could be ordained as a preacher just by the congregation getting together with its elders and declaring you a preacher. You didn't have to go to divinity school. He was actually technically ordained by them. That's where he learned, to a certain extent, the principles of homiletics, of how you preach to the text of the Bible. Each week had its text.

It was while giving one of these sermons, he didn't preach there every week. He was one of the preachers. He's 21 probably or 22 at the most. He was first discovered there by some white abolitionists who dropped in to go to church that day or to see what was happening. One thing led to another. It was after that that he got invited first to a convention of abolitionists that met in New Bedford and then, especially by William Lloyd Garrison's organization, the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society.

He was invited in the late summer, 1841, when he's 23 to take the steamer out to Nantucket to an anti-slavery convention on Nantucket island. It was in August 1841 at Nantucket in the Atheneum Library, which is still there, where Douglass gave his first real speech to white abolitionists. He was a hit, a big hit. In fact, it was a two-day convention. He spoke on the first day and they invited him to speak again the second day.

What Douglass did in this first speech, we don't have an actual text of it, but we know the kinds of speeches he was then quickly giving was basically telling stories from his slave life. The stories we end up later reading about in his narrative, stories about the Eastern Shore, stories about the Wye plantation, stories about the Aulds in Baltimore, and so on and so on. There he was at age 23.

Now, he does tell us that he quaked in his boots that first time he had to get up on a big platform at the Atheneum and speak to this august room full of white abolitionists. He triumphed. He says he trembled when he first started speaking. He not only got through it, he wowed them. Garrison then hired him to be an itinerant lecturer on the anti-slavery circuit.

By September and October of that fall, 1841, he was a slightly-paid itinerant lecturer for the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society. It is the last time in Douglass's life that he would do manual labor for pay. He'd do manual labor again for his own home and his own homestead here and there. The rest of Douglass's life from that day forward, he made a living with his voice and his pen. He's one of the few people in the 19th century who could actually do that.

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Alison Stewart: Up next, we continue our examination of what made Douglass such a gifted speaker and how that skill allowed him to connect with unexpected audiences around the United States leading him to become one of the most prominent abolitionists in US history.

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