“I have no accurate knowledge of my age, never having seen any authentic record containing it”—an obscure beginning for Frederick Douglass, one of the most distinguished abolitionists of the nineteenth century (41).* So he chose tomorrow, February 14, to celebrate his birth. Now February is set apart in the United States and Canada as Black History Month. Born in Maryland in 1818, Douglass ultimately toiled twenty years in slavery, nine more as a slave fugitive, and spent an entire lifetime fighting for abolition. He protested slavery twenty years before the Civil War and lived to see black emancipation, though the fight continued long after his 1895 passing, his exact age unknown, but not his name. Douglass’s ultimate weapon in this battle was the power of his own personal witness. His pen proved mightier than the whip. His book An American Slave is “the most artistically crafted and widely read of all the American slave narratives” (vii).
Frederick Douglass’s book has been dissected by historians, feminists, and literary critics. This epic account of slavery and freedom was deeply informed by his familiarity with the Bible and his recognition of the power of religious symbols in fighting oppression. It appealed to many of his contemporary Americans by drawing on the literary approaches of escape-from-captivity narratives, tales of self-made men, and spiritual autobiographies (11). But Douglass didn’t preach an easy faith to comfort the pious; he issued a stinging Jeremiah-like rebuke of religious and political establishments which countenanced oppression (11). His powerful voice is perhaps best remembered today for his utterly remarkable 1852 speech (one of the greatest American sermons of all time) “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July,” but his autobiography (actually one of three he wrote) is so eloquent and stirring that many of his contemporary whites couldn’t fathom that a black man could possibly have written it. The book relates his earliest memories of slavery and the circumstances of his flight to freedom. Can I deny God’s hand in this man’s work? Latter-day scripture admonishes: “Seek ye out of the best books words of wisdom; seek learning, even by study and also by faith” (D&C 88:118). I have no doubt that Douglass’s book is one of the best we are so enjoined to read and ponder.
As a youth in Baltimore, Douglass became difficult to manage and his master sent him to a Mr. Covey in Talbot County, Maryland, in order to be broken as a field hand (79-80). “If at any one time of my life more than another, I was made to drink the bitterest dregs of slavery, that time was during the first six months of my stay with Mr. Covey,” Douglass recounts (83). Covey’s farm was ironically situated within view of Chesapeake Bay, allowing Douglass to catch glimpses of the great sails of ships freely coming and going on the water. The following excerpt from An American Slave is his spiritually thrilling and emotionally jarring lament (retrospectively framed) regarding his time on Covey’s farm. Perhaps drawing on the lament of the Book of Job (Job 7:11; 10:1), it is a cry from his own dark night of the soul, as he called it, his “dark night of slavery.” His anguished cries blend anger toward with hope in God:
We were worked in all weathers. It was never too hot or too cold; it could never rain, blow, hail, or snow, too hard for us to work in the field. Work, work, work, was scarcely more the order of the day than of the night. The longest days were too short for him, and the shortest nights too long for him. I was somewhat unmanageable when I first went there, but a few months of this discipline tamed me. Mr. Covey succeeded in breaking me. I was broken in body, soul, and spirit. My natural elasticity was crushed, my intellect languished, the disposition to read departed, the cheerful spark that lingered about my eye died; the dark night of slavery closed in upon me; and behold a man transformed into a brute!
Sunday was my only leisure time. I spent this in a sort of beast-like stupor, between sleep and wake, under some large tree. At times I would rise up, a flash of energetic freedom would dart through my soul, accompanied with a faint beam of hope, that flickered for a moment, and then vanished. I sank down again, mourning over my wretched condition. I was sometimes prompted to take my life, and that of Covey, but was prevented by a combination of hope and fear. My sufferings on this plantation seem now like a dream rather than a stern reality.
Our house stood within a few rods of the Chesapeake Bay, whose broad bosom was ever white with sails from every quarter of the habitable globe. Those beautiful vessels, robed in purest white, so delightful to the eye of freemen, were to me so many shrouded ghosts, to terrify and torment me with thoughts of my wretched condition. I have often, in the deep stillness of a summer’s Sabbath, stood all alone upon the lofty banks of that noble bay, and traced, with saddened heart and tearful eye, the countless number of sails moving off to the mighty ocean. The sight of these always affected me powerfully. My thoughts would compel utterance; and there, with no audience but the Almighty, I would pour out my soul’s complaint, in my rude way, with an apostrophe to the moving multitude of ships:—
“You are loosed from your moorings, and are free; I am fast in my chains, and am a slave! You move merrily before the gentle gale, and I sadly before the bloody whip! You are freedom’s swift-winged angels, that fly round the world; I am confined in bands of iron! O that I were free! O, that I were on one of your gallant decks, and under your protecting wing! Alas! betwixt me and you, the turbid waters roll. Go on, go on. O that I could also go! Could I but swim! If I could fly! O, why was I born a man, of whom to make a brute! The glad ship is gone; she hides in the dim distance. I am left in the hottest hell of unending slavery. O God, save me! God, deliver me! Let me be free! Is there any God? Why am I a slave? I will run away. I will not stand it. Get caught, or get clear, I’ll try it. I had as well die with ague as the fever. I have only one life to lose. I had as well be killed running as die standing. Only think of it; one hundred miles straight north, and I am free! Try it? Yes! God helping me, I will. It cannot be that I shall live and die a slave. I will take to the water. This very bay shall yet bear me into freedom…Meanwhile, I will try to bear up under the yoke. I am not the only slave in the world. Why should I fret? I can bear as much as any of them. Besides, I am but a boy, and all boys are bound to some one. It may be that my misery in slavery will only increase my happiness when I get free. There is a better day coming.”
Thus I used to think, and thus I used to speak to myself; goaded almost to madness at one moment, and at the next reconciling myself to my wretched lot….You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man (84-85).
The rest of the book recounts Frederick Douglass’s escape and his battle against the institution of slavery. Pass this excerpt along in Frederick Douglass’s honor, and to celebrate Black History Month. Grab the free Kindle edition of An American Slave here, or check out other free online options here.
*Cited page numbers are from Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself, with Related Documents (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2002 [second edition]), an excellent critical edition with introductory material, textual annotation, selected reviews, documents, speeches, and several appendices.