American Experience; The Abolitionists; Interview with John Stauffer, part 1 of 5

OK, we all know him. So in his autobiography, Douglas mentions not only that he was separated from his mother in birth, but it was customary to do so in the period he grew up. Why would that be the case? I was thinking about it a bit. In the large plantations, the reason why he would be, why a slave at birth would be separated from his mother is really to increase the productivity of the slave workforce. So he and other very young slave children would live with a grandmother who would be too old to work and her duty, her responsibility to decide would be to care for these young children so the mother then could go off to work. And that was very common on a plantation, particularly a large plantation like the Lloyd plantation, which was one of the largest in Maryland. And so Douglas barely knew his mother. And the first five years or so of his life, he spent running around as he put it wild and free

with his grandmother until he was dumped at the Lloyd house, the White House. And that was his first introduction, really, to slavery. How do you think he was affected by that separation by? It was very traumatic. In fact, when his grandmother dropped him at the last, it was because of instructions from his master, Aaron Anthony. He didn't know what was going on. So she took him to the White House. She left him there and then she just left. She disappeared. And he was horrified. And some scholars have argued that because of that, he had a hard time trusting people after that. I disagree, I think that's an extreme. But imagine a five-year-old child being abandoned by the only parental figure that he knows.

That's essentially what happened to Douglas. And he was around cousins and some siblings, but he really didn't know them. And so suddenly, in one day, he had to experience slavery that he had never really witnessed before. It was truly traumatic. And he acknowledges that in all three autobiographies. Great. I just wanted to mention that we assume that the audience knows nothing. There's no preconceptions. And so you don't need to say that. Some people say that, or. OK. OK. And it was at the other interesting small point that his master is not that he didn't keep track of his age. Did the master consciously deny his slave's knowledge at their own age? Yes. It was common for masters. Well, masters treated their slaves as property, as chattel, as things.

And so their date of birth, unlike most humans, was really irrelevant. In fact, Douglas never knew how old he was. Douglas estimated that he was born in 1819. We know he was born in 1818. And the only reason we know it is that in the account books on the plantation, there's a listing for his birth in February of 1818. Much as a business owner would list an inventory. And when he acquired that inventory in an account book. And that's how we now know that Douglas was born in February of 1818. Now, why did the old jumping ahead to Douglas being sent to Baltimore for the first time? Why was he sent to Baltimore? He was sent to Baltimore because. So Douglas was sent to Baltimore because his master, Aaron Anthony's daughter, was named Lucretia Ald.

And Lucretia was married to Thomas Ald. Thomas's brother, Hugh Ald, lived in Baltimore. And they had a young boy named Tommy. And Tommy wanted a playmate. And this was a tight-knit family of whites. And so Thomas and Lucretia, who really had control of Douglas, even though he was technically owned by Aaron Anthony, was sent to be the playmate of Tommy Ald in Baltimore. Why do you think of all the slaves around that place? Why Frederick Douglass? That's why Frederick Douglass sent there. I think that Frederick Douglass was, well, we know he was a privileged slave. What does that mean? Douglass, until he returns to the Eastern Shore when he's older, Douglass doesn't experience

the normal kind of slavery that most other young boys do. He really did not work as a field hand. He was provided given special attention. He was his Aaron Anthony called him his my little Indian boy. He showed a certain affection for Douglass. Douglass never knew who his father was. He knew his father was a white man. He wasn't sure who it was. At one point, later in his career, when he's giving a lecture in England, he suggests that it's Thomas Ald. And if, in fact, it was Thomas Ald was his father, then there was a reason why Thomas Ald would give certain considerations to Douglass that he wouldn't to other slaves. But if he wasn't Thomas Ald, there's a good reason to believe that it was another white man who had a vested interest in making sure that Douglass was well cared for

because, after all, Douglass was his son. Now, how was slavery in Baltimore different from slavery on the Lloyd estate? How was slavery in Baltimore different from slavery in the Eastern Shore of Maryland on the Lloyd estate? Profoundly different. If you were a slave, the best place to be, first of all, was in a city. And if you could choose your city, you would choose a city like Baltimore. Why? Because one Baltimore is a black metropolis that's much farther north than most other slave cities. So your chances of becoming free as a slave in Baltimore are far greater. Moreover, in Baltimore, there are thousands of free blacks living alongside of slaves, which means that you have access to comrades or colleagues who may help you to become slaves,

even though in Baltimore and in other slave cities, in large part because of whites, slaves, and free blacks did not interact as frequently as one might think. And more importantly, the slaves in a city and the slaves in Baltimore had a greater freedom of mobility than they did on a plantation. So it was very common for slaves to work where they chose to work. And as long as they gave their earnings to their master, that was the main thing the master cared about. There were many instances of slaves in Baltimore that this happened to Douglas at the end of his career as a slave, in which he was allowed to live where he wanted. And the only thing he had to do is every Saturday, at a pre-arranged time he had to deliver his weekly earnings to his master. And that's a kind of half-freedom that is completely unknown in the Eastern Shore of Merrill

and on a plantation, in which most slaves are field hands, where they are working from sun up to sundown. It's brutal labor. It's back-breaking labor. Whereas in Baltimore, Douglas is representative. He learned to craft. He became a skilled clocker. He became skilled at helping to build ships. That kind of skilled artisanship was extremely rare on a plantation. Yes, there were skilled slaves. There were artisanal slaves, really artists, but they were a tiny minority of the slave population on, say, the Lloyd plantation. And what were the odds of a slave becoming free on the Lloyd plantation? What did they know be else at the moment? What were the odds of a slave becoming free on the Lloyd plantation? They were far greater than had the Lloyd plantation been in Mississippi or Alabama.

In general, fewer than 5%, far fewer than 5% of slaves were able to escape. And about 98% to 99% of slaves who successfully escaped came from the border states. After all, if you're in Maryland for you to reach free soil or free them, you're only traveling a matter of a few hundred miles. If you're in Mississippi or Alabama, it's thousands of miles through slave country, through, in essence, a totalitarian state with slave patrols everywhere. And you're not given a map as a slave. And so the percentage of slaves in Baltimore who were able to escape was, we don't know the statistics. It's probably between 10 to 25 or even 30% over the long period of time. And in fact, the Baltimore that whites and pro-slavery advocates were so worried about the slave population

Baltimore running away that in the 1850s, Maryland, as well as most other slave states, sought to pass law in slaving every free black, in part, as a way to try to protect their property. And the property of slaves were the most valuable asset that southerners had. If you're an ambitious white southerner and poor, and your goal was to get rich, the first thing you do is buy slaves before you buy land, before you get married. The easiest way to get rich is you first acquire a slave, and then with that slave you acquire other assets. Because the price of slaves increased on a regular basis from 1830 to 1860, price of land fluctuated, price of wheat fluctuated, price of cotton fluctuated, the one commodity that had the best yield, so to speak, was the price of slave.

And by an 1850, for instance, an average field hand would sell for roughly $1,000. That's rough equivalent at today's money, $75,000. Wow. So Douglas gets to Baltimore, and he finds his different life. And he's very taken struck by Sophia. Why do you think Sophia tried teaching or started teaching? Why does Sophia try to teach Douglas how to read? Sophia had never been a slave owner before. And so she sees this young, good-looking, curious, bright, little boy. And he's a mulatto, playing with his son, Tommy. And she starts to teach Tommy, his ABCs. Now most women, if they teach their son their ABCs,

and the son has a playmate, they'll teach. The playmate, his ABCs, which she did, after all she had never been a slave owner before. She didn't understand the degree to which literacy was the worst thing that you could give a slave, because it gave you a sense of power, a sense of dignity, and the means by which to become free. And in fact, the reason that she stopped teaching Douglas, his ABCs, is when her husband saw her giving a lesson to Douglas, and he demanded that she quit immediately. In fact, he said, if you give a slave an inch, you'll take an out. He said, the easiest way to unfit a slave for slavery is to provide them with literacy. And Douglas overheard that. And so he concluded, well, if the easiest way to unfit me for slavery is to become literate, I'm going to do everything I can to be literate. And so what Douglas had at this point,

he knew his ABCs. He had a certain sense of phonetics, but he really hadn't learned to read or write. He essentially borrowed or stole one of the spelling books from Tommy Al, who had already written out his letters. So he could begin to write his letters, and then begin to put together words. And he would trace over the letters that Tommy Al already did. And then Douglas as a playmate of Tommy Al interacted with numerous white boys on the streets of Baltimore. And when he would go out, he'd fill us pockets with biscuits of bread and trade biscuits of bread for words. Ask about what does that word mean? How do you spell, I'll give you a biscuit if you tell me. And on the streets of Baltimore, he'd find a piece of chalk, and he would practice his writing on barrels, on wood, or cement with chalk. That's in essence how he learned to read and write. And then one day in Baltimore, in fact, he described it as the equivalent of a conversion,

a religious experience, both the acquisition of literacy. And then the book that was, after the Bible, the most important book in Douglas's life. One day in Baltimore, he witnessed some white boys practicing their speaking, their public speaking. And they did so with this book called the Columbian Order. The Columbian Order was a collection of speeches edited by Caleb Bingham, the nation's preeminent, or one of the nation's preeminent educators at the time. And it was designed for young boys to become effective orders. And Douglas understood that public speaking was one of the few forms of entertainment in the nation. And specifically, if you were a young, ambitious boy, the easiest way to rise up in the world was to become effective order. There were few limits. The closest analogy is that public speaking in Douglas's day was similar to becoming an athlete, a musician,

an actor, a television personality. There were few limits in terms of how far you could rise. And so he saw these boys on the streets of Baltimore using the Columbian Order, practicing their oration and their public speaking debate. And Douglas said, I need to copy that. So he shined shoes on the saw. He was forbidden to do so because he's a slave. He shined shoes, requires enough money, walks into a used bookstore, and requires a copy of the Columbian Order. And the Columbian Order, in the speeches that Caleb Bingham compiled, a number of the speeches were explicitly and vigorously anti-slavery. In fact, Douglas's favorite piece in there was a dialogue between a master and a slave in which the master agrees that slavery is wrong. And through debate, the slave convinces the master to liberate him. And Douglas said that the Columbian Order, more than any other

text, he said, it gave tongue to my thoughts. It gave him a voice that he had never had before. Right. So we're going to talk about 18, 28, 29 first. OK. And of course, Gary didn't get started. Right. What was the status of the abolition of the 1828? 1828 was a crucially transformative year in the United States, especially for reform and most especially for abolitionism. In 1828, the Black abolitionists had already founded and were publishing Freedom's Journal, which is really the first immediate abolition newspaper. It was becomes the foundation for William Lloyd Garrison's liberator, which begins in 1831.

And when I say 1828, a transition or transformative moment in American history, really, it's transformative because it marks the transition from gradual approach to ending slavery to immediate approach to ending slavery. From the revolution through roughly the Missouri crisis in the beginning in 1819, it's safe to say that most statesmen believed in theory that slavery was an evil. James Madison declared publicly that slavery was America's original sin. And that's somewhat representative. Now most of the founders and most of the framers were slave owners themselves. But they believed in theory that over time, over a long period of time, 1,500 years, eventually this sin should be abolished. And so the method for ending slavery agreed upon by most founding fathers and framers,

not all, but most from the Constitution really through the teens, was that northern statesmen and leaders would not interfere with slavery in the southern states and southern leaders would work to gradually congenial end slavery at some future date. So George Washington, as another example, when he published his will that declares he will free all his slaves after his death, he did so as a model, as a symbol. Here's the symbol of America offering an answer to this problem, this central problem in the United States. And in fact, from the revolution and the Constitution through the 1820s, every northern state passes laws that end slavery, either through legal fiat or through legislative gradual emancipation laws. Over the same time, however, slavery

becomes in the southern states more profitable than slave owners had ever imagined. In fact, during the revolution, the immense profits achieved from tobacco growing, slave-based tobacco, had really died out. So at the time of the revolution, slavery was no longer profitable in the way it had been in the 50 or 100 years or earlier, except for Georgia and South Carolina, who were the two holdouts at the Constitutional Convention. The upshot is that slavery becomes increasingly profitable in part because of the cotton gin, with the development of the cotton gin cotton becomes king and it's based on slave labor. Throughout the teens, increasingly, southerners repudiate their sense that at some future date, they should end slavery. And that reaches a crisis when Missouri petitions to enter the Union as a slave, state Missouri,

when it petitions, is by far the northernmost state that wants slavery that still exists. And so over the course of the 1820s, after southerners refuse to hold up their end of the bargain, of working toward an eventual abolition of the United States, abolitionists who earlier had embraced that gradual approach, who had earlier from the revolution through the 1820s abolitionists respected statesmen and leaders because they could believe in them, they could trust them, they had faith in them, after all, statesmen had successfully abolished slavery throughout the north. And suddenly that changes. Suddenly, the gradual means to ending slavery is no longer working. And African-Americans were the first group to understand that, which is why throughout the 1820s,

they increasingly become much more shrill, much more militant in their demands. And they begin the Freedom's Journal, which is the first black newspaper in the country, and a central platform of that journal is immediate emancipation with the understanding the gradualism will not work. And so 1828 really marks that shift. It's when Garrison is also, he's technically a gradualist at this point. He has not totally repudiated colonization, which was the organization that is the most prominent that advocates both a gradual means to end slavery and ridding the nation of the free blacks. And so it's this crucial moment. So, as the movement gets going, you know, the needs will get Garrison moving. Right. What hurdles did they did a movement of social reform face? It would be unfamiliar to Americans today.

The hurdles that Garrison and the new immediate face is that dissent or protest in the United States from the revolution through the teens was based on this assumption that you protested with a sense of gentility, with a sense of respect toward your superiors and toward your leaders. And you did not come across as militant or as revolutionary. You showed respect. You showed a certain gentility. And there was this sense of deference to the existing social order. That was the way to obtain reforms in the United States during this period. It was one way of framing it is to see this early period from the revolution until through the 1820s

or into the 1820s as one that's based more on enlightenment thought, enlightenment thought. There are two aspects that are important here. One is the notion of universal freedom. The other is this understanding that we defer to an existing and fairly rigid social order. You know your place in society, so you have a certain respect for your superiors. What Garrison and what African-Americans were positing in the late 1820s is a complete social leveling and an unwillingness to be deferential to their betters. And so when Garrison, in print, refers to this very respectable Boston merchant as a murderer. That was totally unacceptable language. And he's immediately sued for libel. He refuses to pay his due.

Just get you redo that last bit because he's a newberry person. Newberry person, sorry. So when Garrison... Yes, yes, yes. So when Garrison publicly calls this massachusetts merchant, this wealthy, upstanding massachusetts merchant, a murder for participating in the domestic slave trade, that's totally out of bounds of what's considered acceptable forms of dissent protest. And so of course he is immediately sued for libel. He refuses to pay his fine and he's thrown in jail. No. No, no, no. No, no, no, no.