My Bondage and My Freedom

Glossary

A

Anna Murray Douglass: A free Black woman from Baltimore whom Douglass married in New York immediately after his escape, and who traveled with him to New Bedford to begin their life as free people together. Her free status had been part of what made the escape plan feasible, and she shared the hard first winter of poverty and uncertainty that followed their arrival in the North.; Related: The Escape, Nathan Johnson, New Bedford Wage Discrimination
Aunt Katy: The enslaved cook at Colonel Lloyd's home plantation who had charge of feeding the children in the kitchen, including the young Douglass, and who punished him by withholding food for a full day. The episode—resolved only when his mother arrived on one of her rare nighttime visits to confront Katy and feed him—shows how slavery installed cruelty within the enslaved community itself, and gave Douglass one of his few vivid memories of his mother's protection.; Related: Betsey Bailey, The Great House Farm
Austin Gore: An overseer on Colonel Lloyd's plantation who shot and killed an enslaved man named Denby for wading into a creek to escape a whipping, then faced no legal consequence whatsoever. Douglass presents Gore's unpunished killing, and the local justification that a slave's life was 'worth but half a cent' to the law, as concrete proof that plantation slavery placed enslaved people entirely outside legal protection.; Related: Colonel Edward Lloyd, The Legal Definition of Slavery

B

Baltimore vs. Plantation Slavery: Douglass draws a sustained contrast between the isolated brutality of plantation slavery under Colonel Lloyd and the comparatively milder, more supervised conditions of urban slavery in Baltimore, where he was sent as a boy to live with Hugh and Sophia Auld. City slaveholders, exposed to public opinion and neighbors, were less likely to indulge in the open violence common on remote farms, and it was in Baltimore that Douglass first learned to read—an opportunity plantation slavery would almost certainly have denied him.; Related: The Great House Farm, Sophia Auld, Literacy Prohibition
Betsey Bailey: Douglass's maternal grandmother, who raised him in her cabin at Tuckahoe until he was about six years old and held a respected, semi-independent standing in the local community as a skilled midwife and fisher of shad and herring. Her enforced separation from him—and her later abandonment, in old age, to a hut in the woods once she was no longer useful to her enslavers—illustrates for Douglass how slavery destroyed even the most protective family bonds.; Related: Colonel Edward Lloyd, Aunt Katy
British Abolitionist Tour: Douglass's roughly two-year lecture tour of Britain and Ireland, undertaken partly to escape recapture after the publication of his 1845 Narrative revealed his identity and former owner. He lectured widely against slavery, clashed publicly with American clergy who tried to silence him, and found in British audiences a degree of respect and 'fair play' he had rarely experienced at home, even as he was still refused his booked cabin on the return voyage because of his race.; Related: The Free Church of Scotland Controversy, Purchase of Freedom

C

Colonel Edward Lloyd: The wealthy planter who owned the large Wye River plantation where Douglass spent much of his early childhood, and whose household exemplified the near-total legal impunity of a slaveholder operating on an isolated, self-contained estate. Douglass describes Lloyd's plantation as functioning almost like an independent nation, where the master's word was law and cruelties such as Austin Gore's killing of the slave Denby went entirely unpunished.; Related: The Great House Farm, Austin Gore, Betsey Bailey

E

Edward Covey: A poor but land-renting farmer with a local reputation as a 'negro-breaker,' to whom Thomas Auld hired Douglass out for a year of deliberately brutal labor and discipline. Covey worked and whipped Douglass into near-total submission through constant surveillance and unpredictable violence, until Douglass, after collapsing from heat exhaustion and being refused help, finally fought him to a physical standstill.; Related: Thomas Auld, The Fight with Covey, Sandy Jenkins

H

Hugh Auld: Brother of Thomas Auld and Douglass's master in Baltimore for much of his youth, in whose household Douglass learned shipyard caulking. It was Hugh Auld's angry insistence that reading would ruin a slave that inadvertently taught Douglass the connection between literacy and freedom; later, Douglass hired out his own time to Hugh, paying him a fixed weekly sum, before finally escaping in 1838.; Related: Sophia Auld, Literacy Prohibition, The Escape

J

James McCune Smith's Introduction: The 1855 edition opens with an Introduction by James McCune Smith, a Black physician and abolitionist intellectual, rather than by a white sponsor as Douglass's 1845 Narrative had been. Smith frames Douglass's life as proof that a formerly enslaved man could reason, write, and lead on his own authority, explicitly rebutting claims that Douglass's eloquence must derive from white ancestry. The choice of a Black author to introduce a Black narrator's book was itself a statement about who was authorized to vouch for whom.; Related: The Garrisonians, The Liberator

L

Literacy Prohibition: When Hugh Auld discovered his wife Sophia teaching young Douglass his letters, he forbade it, explaining that literacy would make a slave 'unfit' to be a slave by giving him discontent and the means to reason his way to freedom. Douglass says this angry explanation, meant as a warning, instead revealed to him the precise value of education and hardened his determination to learn to read and write by any means available.; Related: Sophia Auld, Hugh Auld, The Columbian Orator

M

Moral Suasion vs. Political Action: The strategic divide within the antislavery movement between Garrisonian 'moral suasionists,' who rejected voting and political engagement as complicity with a pro-slavery Constitution, and abolitionists who came to believe political and electoral action was necessary to actually abolish slavery. Douglass's own shift from the former position to the latter, reached after independently restudying the Constitution's text and history, was the immediate cause of his break with Garrison and his old Boston allies.; Related: The Garrisonians, The North Star

N

Nat Turner's Rebellion: The 1831 Virginia slave uprising, news of which reached Douglass as a boy in Baltimore around the same time he was teaching himself the meaning of the word 'abolition' from a newspaper. The rebellion and the harsh reprisals that followed it sharpened Douglass's early understanding that slavery was a system enslaved people themselves might rise against, not merely a condition to be endured.; Related: Baltimore vs. Plantation Slavery, The Internal Slave Trade
Nathan Johnson: A free Black resident of New Bedford who, with his wife, sheltered Douglass and his new wife Anna on their arrival, loaned them money to redeem their baggage, and gave the fugitive his lasting surname, choosing 'Douglass' after the hero of Scott's 'Lady of the Lake.' Douglass presents Johnson's comfortable, well-read household as living proof against the slaveholders' claim that Black people could not prosper without white mastery.; Related: The Escape, Anna Murray Douglass, New Bedford Wage Discrimination
New Bedford Wage Discrimination: On reaching New Bedford as a free man, Douglass sought work at his trade of ship caulking, at wages roughly double a common laborer's, but was told every white caulker would walk off the job if he struck a blow on the vessel. He was forced instead to take whatever unskilled work he could find—sawing wood, digging cellars, shoveling coal—despite his skill, an early demonstration that freedom from slavery did not mean freedom from racial exclusion in the labor market.; Related: Nathan Johnson, Anna Murray Douglass, The Liberator

P

Purchase of Freedom: While Douglass was in Britain, English supporters led by Mrs. Henry Richardson raised funds to purchase his legal freedom from Hugh Auld, formalizing his manumission and removing the constant threat of recapture under which he had lived since his escape. Douglass accepted the arrangement pragmatically, since it let him return to the United States and resume his public work without fear of being reclaimed as property.; Related: British Abolitionist Tour, The Escape, Hugh Auld

S

Sandy Jenkins: A free-born but re-enslaved man who advised Douglass to carry a certain root as a charm to protect him from whipping before his confrontation with Covey, and who later joined, then may have betrayed, the planned canoe escape from William Freeland's farm. Douglass treats Sandy's root charm skeptically even as he records that his fight with Covey happened to succeed the same week he carried it, and leaves open whether Sandy's warning dream of birds of prey anticipated the escape plot's discovery.; Related: Edward Covey, The Fight with Covey, The Canoe Escape Plot
Sophia Auld: Hugh Auld's wife, who had never owned a slave before Douglass arrived in her Baltimore household and initially treated him with unaccustomed kindness, including beginning to teach him to read. Douglass describes her subsequent transformation into a harsh and suspicious mistress, once her husband forbade the lessons, as evidence of how the institution of slavery corrupted even naturally kind individuals who acquired power over another human being.; Related: Hugh Auld, Literacy Prohibition, Baltimore vs. Plantation Slavery

T

The 'Kind Master' Argument: A defense of slavery, common among sympathetic northerners, that likened the master-slave relation to a benign, near-parental bond and treated abuses as regrettable exceptions rather than the system's nature. Douglass rebuts it by quoting slave codes directly and arguing that slavery survives only by the threat and use of violence: remove the whip and the chain, he writes, and no enslaved person would remain on the plantation, which proves cruelty is not incidental to slavery but structurally necessary to it.; Related: The Legal Definition of Slavery, The Slavery Party
The Canoe Escape Plot: A failed 1836 plan, organized while Douglass was hired to William Freeland, to escape by canoe up the Chesapeake Bay with fellow enslaved men Henry and John Harris, Sandy Jenkins, Charles Roberts, and Henry Bailey. The plot was discovered before it could be carried out; Douglass and the others were jailed at Easton, where slave-traders circled hoping to buy them south, though Douglass was ultimately returned to the Aulds rather than sold.; Related: William Freeland, Sandy Jenkins, The Escape
The Columbian Orator: A schoolbook of speeches and dialogues that Douglass purchased as a boy in Baltimore, most memorably a dialogue in which a captured slave out-argues his master into freeing him. The book supplied Douglass both with reading practice and with his first structured arguments against slavery, deepening the 'new anguish' of understanding his condition even as it fed his hope of escaping it.; Related: Literacy Prohibition, Sophia Auld
The Escape: Douglass declines to describe the specific means by which he fled slavery on September 3, 1838, explaining that publishing the method would close that route for others still enslaved. He left Baltimore by rail and boat disguised with borrowed sailor's papers, reaching New York within a day and beginning, almost immediately, the anxious, homeless first hours of his life as a fugitive.; Related: Hugh Auld, The Canoe Escape Plot, Nathan Johnson
The Fight with Covey: A two-hour physical struggle in the cow yard in which Douglass, for the first time, refused to submit to a whipping and fought Covey to a draw, after which Covey never touched him again nor reported the resistance, apparently to protect his own reputation as a breaker of slaves. Douglass calls this the turning point of his life in bondage, writing that it rekindled his sense of manhood: 'You were nothing before; you are a man now.'; Related: Edward Covey, Sandy Jenkins, The Escape
The Free Church of Scotland Controversy: During his British tour, Douglass helped expose that the Free Church of Scotland, led by Doctors Chalmers, Cunningham, and Candlish, had solicited and retained money from American slaveholders for its church-building fund. The resulting public campaign, rallied under the cry 'SEND BACK THE MONEY!', became a national controversy in Scotland after the church's leaders publicly defended the transaction rather than returning the funds. Douglass credited the episode, along with a shipboard mob and hostile American press attacks, with forcing the question of American slavery before the British public.; Related: British Abolitionist Tour, Purchase of Freedom
The Fugitive Slave Law of 1850: Federal legislation that Douglass condemns for extending slavery's reach into free states, obligating northern citizens to assist in capturing alleged fugitives and denying the accused a jury trial. He singles out its structure of paying the presiding commissioner a higher fee for ruling a defendant a slave than for ruling them free, calling it a system that put a direct financial thumb on the scale of every case.; Related: The Internal Slave Trade, The Slavery Party
The Garrisonians: The faction of American abolitionists led by William Lloyd Garrison, who held that the U.S. Constitution was a pro-slavery document, that voting or holding office under it was morally compromising, and that the Union itself should be dissolved rather than reformed. Douglass began his public career as a loyal Garrisonian lecturer but, after founding his own newspaper and studying the Constitution independently, broke with them around 1851, concluding the Constitution was in fact an anti-slavery instrument. The break cost him old friendships and drew accusations of apostasy from former allies.; Related: The North Star, James McCune Smith's Introduction, Moral Suasion vs. Political Action
The Great House Farm: The name given by the enslaved people themselves to Colonel Lloyd's central home plantation, the hub around which some twenty smaller farms and their overseers were organized. Being sent 'to the Great House Farm' was regarded among the slaves as a mark of temporary favor, and Douglass uses the mournful songs sung by slaves en route there to argue that such singing expressed real sorrow, not contentment, contrary to the myth that enslaved people's songs proved their happiness.; Related: Colonel Edward Lloyd, Baltimore vs. Plantation Slavery
The Internal Slave Trade: Douglass distinguishes the foreign slave trade, outlawed by Congress in 1808, from the flourishing domestic trade that moved enslaved people from the Upper South to the cotton and sugar states of the Deep South, a trade he witnessed firsthand as coffles passed his boyhood home on Baltimore's Philpot Street. He names Austin Woldfolk's Baltimore slave-trading operation as typical of a business that treated the forced separation of families as ordinary commerce, and links it to the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law's structure of paying commissioners more for returning an alleged fugitive to slavery than for freeing them.; Related: The Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, The Slavery Party
The Legal Definition of Slavery: In his Reception Speech and later essays, Douglass argues that slavery must be understood not as a set of individual cruelties but as a precise legal condition: a person reduced by statute to property, with no right to marry, own goods, testify against a white person, or refuse any use their owner chose to make of them. He quotes state slave codes verbatim to show that this status, not the presence or absence of a 'kind' master, is the actual substance of the institution.; Related: The 'Kind Master' Argument, The Internal Slave Trade
The Liberator: William Lloyd Garrison's Boston-based abolitionist newspaper, which Douglass first encountered soon after reaching New Bedford. Reading it, he later wrote, became his 'meat and drink' and drew him fully into organized antislavery work, eventually leading to his recruitment as a paid lecturer for the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society.; Related: The Garrisonians, The North Star, New Bedford Wage Discrimination
The North Star: The antislavery newspaper Douglass founded in Rochester, New York, over the strong objections of his Boston abolitionist friends, who doubted a man 'nine years from slavery' could edit a paper for an educated public. Establishing it marked Douglass's emergence as an independent thinker and organizer rather than a lecturing agent of the Garrisonian societies, and it became the platform from which he argued his revised, anti-Garrisonian view of the Constitution.; Related: The Garrisonians, The Liberator, Moral Suasion vs. Political Action
The Slavery Party: Douglass's term for the loose but coordinated political alliance he identifies as pursuing five goals: suppressing antislavery speech, expelling free Black people from the United States through colonization, permanently entrenching slavery, nationalizing it so it would be respected in every state, and extending it into Mexico and Central America. He argues the 1850 Compromise was this party's foundational achievement and traces its influence across party lines in Congress.; Related: The Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?
Thomas Auld: Hugh Auld's brother and, at various points, Douglass's legal owner, described as stingy, inconsistent, and made more rather than less cruel by his religious conversion. It was Thomas Auld who, unable to control the increasingly assertive Douglass, sent him to the notorious Edward Covey for a year specifically 'to be broken.'; Related: Hugh Auld, Edward Covey, William Freeland

W

What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?: Douglass's famous oration, delivered in Rochester on July 5, 1852, and reproduced in this volume, in which he tells his white audience that Independence Day celebrates a liberty the enslaved do not share: 'This Fourth of July is yours, not mine.' He refuses to argue academically that the slave is a man, insisting instead that the moment calls for 'scorching irony' and 'biting ridicule' rather than gentle persuasion, and closes by measuring America's professed principles against its practice before the nations of the world.; Related: The Slavery Party, Moral Suasion vs. Political Action
William Freeland: The master to whom Douglass was hired out after his year with Covey, and whom Douglass describes as the fairest of all his enslavers, though still a slaveholder who profited from his labor. Douglass observes that irreligious masters like Freeland were often preferable to pious ones, since Freeland made no false pretense of Christian benevolence to excuse his ownership of human beings; it was while with Freeland that Douglass ran a secret Sabbath school and planned his first escape attempt.; Related: Thomas Auld, Sandy Jenkins, The Canoe Escape Plot