Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave

Glossary

A

A New Name in New Bedford: The episode in which Douglass, having already changed his surname twice while fleeing slavery — from Bailey to Stanley, then to Johnson — settled on his final name at the breakfast table of his New Bedford host, Nathan Johnson. Because so many people in New Bedford were already named Johnson, Nathan Johnson suggested "Douglass," drawn from Sir Walter Scott's Lady of the Lake, and Douglass agreed on the condition that he keep his birth name "Frederick." He had been, until this point, "Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey," the name given him by his mother.; Related: Anna Murray, The Underground Railroad, The Liberator
Anna Murray: A free Black woman from Baltimore who became Douglass's wife, traveling to New York to marry him within days of his own escape. Frederick Johnson, as Douglass was then calling himself, and Anna Murray were married by Reverend J. W. C. Pennington in the presence of David Ruggles, after which the couple traveled together to New Bedford, Massachusetts, to begin their life as free people.; Related: David Ruggles, A New Name in New Bedford

C

Captain Anthony: Douglass's first master, a farm owner and sometime ship's captain who served as Colonel Lloyd's clerk and superintendent. Douglass witnessed his first whipping under Anthony's roof — his own Aunt Hester, stripped and tied to a hook for the offense of being seen with a man from another plantation — an event Douglass calls "the blood-stained gate, the entrance to the hell of slavery." Anthony died intestate, which triggered the estate valuation that inventoried Douglass alongside livestock.; Related: The Valuation, Colonel Lloyd, Thomas Auld
City Slavery Versus Plantation Slavery: The marked difference Douglass observed between the treatment of enslaved people in Baltimore and on Colonel Lloyd's plantation. He writes that "a city slave is almost a freeman, compared with a slave on the plantation," attributing the difference to city slaveholders' fear of public shame among non-slaveholding neighbors rather than to any greater humanity. He immediately qualifies the point with the case of Mary and Henrietta, two enslaved girls on his own street beaten and starved by their mistress, to show the contrast was one of degree, not of kind.; Related: The Allowance System, Sophia Auld, Hugh Auld
Colonel Lloyd: Colonel Edward Lloyd owned the plantation where Douglass spent his early childhood, holding as many as a thousand enslaved people across some twenty farms answering to his "home plantation," the Great House Farm. Lloyd was immensely wealthy and demanded absolute deference from every enslaved person on his land, to the point that a man was sold south merely for admitting to a stranger — who turned out to be Lloyd himself — that he was mistreated. Douglass's own master, Captain Anthony, served as Lloyd's clerk and "overseer of the overseers."; Related: The Great House Farm, The Overseer System, The Valuation

D

David Ruggles: A New York abolitionist and activist, himself later afflicted with blindness, who found Douglass shortly after his arrival in New York City in 1838 and sheltered him at his boarding house. Ruggles arranged for Douglass's marriage to Anna Murray, advised him to settle in New Bedford rather than Canada, and gave the newly married couple a letter of introduction and money for their journey. Douglass calls his kindness something he "shall never forget."; Related: Anna Murray, A New Name in New Bedford, The Underground Railroad

E

Edward Covey: A poor farm-renter with a reputation as a "negro-breaker," to whom Thomas Auld sent Douglass for one year "to be broken." Covey worked enslaved people from before dawn until after dark, disguised his movements to spy on them from hiding, and whipped Douglass almost weekly during the first six months, at one point beating him nearly senseless over an accident with an untrained ox team. Despite this reputation, Covey was also "a professor of religion — a pious soul — a member and a class-leader in the Methodist church," which Douglass presents as characteristic of slaveholding piety rather than contradictory to it.; Related: The Battle with Covey, Thomas Auld, Slaveholding Religion

G

Garrison's Preface: William Lloyd Garrison's introductory essay to the Narrative, recounting Douglass's electrifying first public speech at the 1841 Nantucket anti-slavery convention and vouching personally for the truth of the account that follows. Garrison anticipates skeptics who would doubt that a man so eloquent could truly have been enslaved, and preemptively answers them by noting that Douglass names his former enslavers and locations, making his claims verifiable. Garrison famously writes that the speech "gave the world assurance of a MAN."; Related: Wendell Phillips's Letter, The Liberator
Give a Nigger an Inch, He Will Take an Ell: Hugh Auld's warning to his wife after discovering she had been teaching Douglass to read: "If you give a nigger an inch, he will take an ell...Learning would spoil the best nigger in the world." Douglass says these words, meant to frighten Sophia Auld into silence, instead handed him "a new and special revelation," converting his master's own argument against literacy into his strongest motive for pursuing it. He credits Hugh Auld's opposition as being nearly as instructive as Sophia Auld's kindness in his path to reading.; Related: Hugh Auld, Sophia Auld, The Prohibition on Slave Literacy

H

Hugh Auld: Sophia Auld's husband and Douglass's Baltimore master, who forbade his wife from continuing Douglass's reading lessons on the grounds that literacy would make him "unfit...to be a slave" and "unmanageable." Douglass later hires his own time from Hugh Auld for a weekly fee, and it is Hugh's household to which Douglass returns after the failed 1835 escape plot, where he learns the caulking trade and is compelled to surrender his wages every week. Douglass credits Hugh's own warning against literacy with revealing to him, inadvertently, the exact pathway from slavery to freedom.; Related: Give a Nigger an Inch, He Will Take an Ell, Sophia Auld, The Prohibition on Slave Literacy

S

Slave Songs: The songs enslaved people sang, especially on the road to the Great House Farm on allowance day, which Northern audiences often mistook for evidence of contentment. Douglass insists the opposite is true: "slaves sing most when they are most unhappy," and the songs were "the prayer and complaint of souls boiling over with the bitterest anguish." He traces his own first "glimmering conception of the dehumanizing character of slavery" to hearing them as a child, before he could consciously understand their meaning.; Related: The Great House Farm, Colonel Lloyd
Slaveholding Religion: Douglass's term, developed fully in the Narrative's Appendix, for the distinction between "the Christianity of this land" — which he calls "corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering" — and "the Christianity of Christ," which he professes to love. He indicts clergy who preach on Sunday after wielding "the blood-clotted cowskin" all week, and slaveholders like Thomas Auld who found scriptural justification for cruelty after their religious conversions. The Appendix closes with a quoted verse indicting complicit clergy and a parodied hymn mocking slaveholders' professed piety as "heavenly union."; Related: Thomas Auld, The Killing of Demby, Edward Covey
Sophia Auld: Hugh Auld's wife and Douglass's mistress in Baltimore, who had never owned an enslaved person before and initially treated Douglass with unguarded kindness, teaching him the alphabet before her husband forbade it. Douglass describes her subsequent transformation in stark terms: slaveholding turned a woman whose "face was made of heavenly smiles" into one whose "cheerful eye...became red with rage," as she progressed from ceasing his lessons to snatching newspapers from his hands in fury. He uses her as his central case study for slavery's corrupting effect on enslavers themselves, not only the enslaved.; Related: Hugh Auld, Give a Nigger an Inch, He Will Take an Ell, The Prohibition on Slave Literacy

T

The Allowance System: The fixed monthly and yearly rations Colonel Lloyd issued to enslaved people on his farms: eight pounds of pork or its equivalent in fish and one bushel of corn meal per adult each month, and a set of coarse clothing once a year worth about seven dollars total. Children too young for field work received no shoes, stockings, or trousers at all, going naked between allowance days. Douglass presents the system's stinginess as calculated, not accidental — barely enough to sustain labor and never enough for comfort.; Related: The Great House Farm, Colonel Lloyd, City Slavery Versus Plantation Slavery
The Battle with Covey: The physical confrontation in which Douglass, after collapsing from illness and being kicked and struck with a slat by Covey, resisted for the first time, seizing Covey by the throat and fighting him for nearly two hours until Covey gave up. Douglass calls it "the turning-point in my career as a slave," writing that it "rekindled the few expiring embers of freedom" and gave him "a sense of my own manhood" — the chapter's title, "How a Slave Was Made a Man," refers directly to this fight. Though he remained legally enslaved for four more years, Douglass states he was never whipped again.; Related: Edward Covey, The Secret Sabbath School, The Betrayed Escape Plot of 1835
The Betrayed Escape Plot of 1835: A plan Douglass organized with five fellow enslaved men — Henry Harris, John Harris, Henry Bailey, Charles Roberts, and Sandy Jenkins — to paddle a canoe up the Chesapeake Bay and travel north by the guidance of the North Star, timed for the Easter holidays. The plot was betrayed to their masters by an informant the men believed they had identified among themselves, and all were seized, tied, and marched to jail in Easton, where slave traders came to appraise them for sale. Douglass alone was not returned home afterward; his master instead sent him back to Baltimore to learn the caulking trade.; Related: The Battle with Covey, The Secret Sabbath School, The Underground Railroad
The Columbian Orator: A schoolbook Douglass acquired around age twelve containing a dialogue in which an enslaved man's arguments persuade his master to grant him freedom, along with a Sheridan speech denouncing tyranny and defending human rights. Reading and rereading it gave Douglass language for thoughts he had already felt but could not yet articulate, and it was here that he first encountered clear arguments against slavery rather than merely a felt sense of its wrongness. The book deepened his hatred of slaveholders even as it sharpened his understanding of freedom, leaving him, in his words, with "a view of my wretched condition, without the remedy."; Related: The Prohibition on Slave Literacy, Hugh Auld
The Great House Farm: The nickname enslaved people gave to Colonel Lloyd's central plantation, the administrative "seat of government" for his roughly twenty farms, where monthly food allowances and yearly clothing were distributed and where overseers' disputes were settled. Being chosen to carry errands there was considered a high honor among the enslaved, prized chiefly because it meant time away from the driver's lash. It was on the road to the Great House Farm that Douglass first heard the sorrowful singing he later identified as evidence of slavery's suffering, not contentment.; Related: Colonel Lloyd, Slave Songs, The Allowance System
The Killing of Demby: The killing of an enslaved man named Demby, who waded into a creek to escape a whipping from overseer Austin Gore. When Demby refused to come out after three warning calls, Gore shot him dead at point-blank range and faced no legal consequence whatsoever — Colonel Lloyd and Captain Anthony accepted his explanation that Demby had become "unmanageable." Douglass presents the killing as proof that Maryland law offered no protection to enslaved people, since the only witnesses were enslaved and therefore barred from testifying against a white man.; Related: The Overseer System, Colonel Lloyd, Slaveholding Religion
The Liberator: William Lloyd Garrison's abolitionist newspaper, which Douglass began reading about four months after settling in New Bedford. Douglass writes that the paper "became my meat and my drink" and that its denunciations of slaveholders "sent a thrill of joy through my soul." His growing involvement with the anti-slavery movement through the paper led directly to his invitation to speak at the 1841 Nantucket convention that launched his public career.; Related: A New Name in New Bedford, Garrison's Preface
The Overseer System: The chain of command by which slaveholders delegated the daily brutality of plantation discipline to hired overseers, who in turn answered to a chief overseer at the home plantation. Douglass profiles a succession of overseers on Colonel Lloyd's farm — the drunken, murderous Mr. Severe, the comparatively mild Mr. Hopkins, and the "artful, cruel, and obdurate" Austin Gore — to show that the system rewarded whichever man could extract the most labor through fear. An overseer's professional reputation depended entirely on his severity, which gave men like Gore every incentive toward violence.; Related: Colonel Lloyd, The Killing of Demby, Edward Covey
The Prohibition on Slave Literacy: The unwritten but rigorously enforced rule among Maryland slaveholders that enslaved people must never be taught to read, on the theory that literacy would make them "discontented" and impossible to control. After Hugh Auld ended his lessons, Douglass taught himself by trading bread for reading lessons from poor white boys in Baltimore's streets and by copying letters from shipyard timber markings. Once literate, Douglass discovered The Columbian Orator and Northern newspapers, which gave him language for the abolitionist ideas he had already begun to sense.; Related: Give a Nigger an Inch, He Will Take an Ell, The Columbian Orator, Sophia Auld
The Secret Sabbath School: An informal school Douglass ran on Sundays, first for fellow enslaved men Henry and John Harris and eventually for more than forty enslaved people, teaching them to read using old spelling books at the home of a free Black man near St. Michael's. Every person who attended risked thirty-nine lashes if discovered, and the school was eventually broken up by a mob of white "class-leaders" who attacked it with sticks and stones. Douglass calls teaching his fellow enslaved people "the sweetest engagement with which I was ever blessed."; Related: The Prohibition on Slave Literacy, The Battle with Covey, The Betrayed Escape Plot of 1835
The Underground Railroad: Douglass's discussion, on the eve of narrating his own successful 1838 escape, of why he deliberately withholds every detail of his method — deriding what he calls the too-public "upperground railroad" practiced by some abolitionists, which he argues does more to warn slaveholders than to help enslaved people escape. He states plainly that a full account of his escape route "would induce greater vigilance on the part of slaveholders," closing off the very avenue by which "some dear brother bondman might escape." His stated motto upon reaching freedom was "Trust no man."; Related: David Ruggles, The Betrayed Escape Plot of 1835, A New Name in New Bedford
The Valuation: The estate appraisal following Captain Anthony's death without a will, in which Douglass and the other enslaved people on the plantation were formally assessed for a division of property between Anthony's heirs. Douglass describes being "ranked together" with "horses, sheep, and swine" for the inspection, calling it a moment that showed him "more clearly than ever the brutalizing effects of slavery upon both slave and slaveholder." The division that followed scattered enslaved families by the word of white men alone, including Douglass's elderly grandmother, who was ultimately abandoned in a remote hut to die alone.; Related: Captain Anthony, Colonel Lloyd, Thomas Auld
Thomas Auld: Lucretia Auld's widowed husband, who inherits Douglass after his sister-in-law's death and later undergoes a religious conversion at a Methodist camp meeting. Douglass reports that the conversion made Thomas Auld "more cruel and hateful in all his ways," giving him scriptural justification for withholding food and for having a lame young woman whipped for hours at a time while quoting the Bible over her. Judging Douglass increasingly unmanageable, Thomas Auld sends him to Edward Covey to be "broken."; Related: Slaveholding Religion, Edward Covey, Sophia Auld

W

Wendell Phillips's Letter: An open letter from abolitionist Wendell Phillips to Douglass, printed after Garrison's preface, urging him to publish his story despite the real danger that naming his former masters could expose him to recapture under federal law. Phillips frames Douglass's firsthand account as something the abolitionist movement has lacked — testimony from an enslaved person rather than secondhand report — noting that "we have been left long enough to gather the character of slavery from the involuntary evidence of the masters." He closes by admitting that, in Douglass's position, he "should throw the MS. into the fire," underscoring the risk Douglass knowingly accepted.; Related: Garrison's Preface, The Underground Railroad