American Experience; The Abolitionists; Interview with David William Blight, part 3 of 6

If you get uncomfortable, you probably have to pay me. Yeah. He doesn't need some space here. Better than too hot, though. Why would somebody like Covey be useful? Well, Edward Covey was himself a slave holder, but he obviously also was a person that disobedient slaves were hired out to. Now, the idea that he was a professional slave-breaker is sometimes overdone, I think, in the way that some people have written about Douglas. But he was a person who disciplined, undisciplined teenage slaves. He lived on a farm just west, a little northwest of St. Michael's in the Eastern Shore. Thomas Alde, who owned a store in St. Michael's, when Douglas came back from Baltimore,

and this was a Fred Bailey at age 17, who was not happy. Oh, okay, I'm sorry. Douglas, when he came back from Baltimore, is 17 years old, and is disgruntled, discontented, morose. It's possible he was just despondent. You don't want to work in the field anymore. He'd been to the city. Don't let the kids see the city. He'd want to go work in the field. He'd want to go spread manure, and so on. And so, Alde sends him over to Covey for a period of time. It ended up being about eight months. And it was a horrible time for Douglas. Covey beat him. Douglas says he'd never beat him on a Sunday because he was a good Christian Methodist. He was lonely. He had nobody. He could see or imagine as protector. He simply labored for Covey.

And in his despondency at times, Covey would take him out and whip him. Now, whether Covey whipped him as many times as Douglas said, we don't know for sure. It gave Douglas a story, though, that he exploit... Yeah, come down. Sorry. Oh, oh, it isn't. You do have a space here. Yeah, we just turn it on. Oh, okay. Well, you don't have to. Don't, if you don't want to. Good. It gave him a story. His experience with Covey gave Douglas a story that he turned into the pivot and effect of his autobiography. Let me tell you how a man was made a slave. Let me tell you how a slave became a man. And that becoming, of course, was his now famous fight that he has with Covey. He ran away at one point. He was ran into the woods. He was at large for 48 hours or so. That's when he met Sandy Jenkins,

who kept roots and was sort of... Oh, I don't know. We don't want to call him a witch doctor. But anyway, Sandy Jenkins showed him his root and gave Douglas his root for good luck and so on. And he ran all the way back to all the same Michaels and Ald said, go back and send him back to Covey, but when he got back, Covey, according to Douglas, took him on and they fought Douglas claims for two hours now. I don't really believe that fight lasted two hours. We don't have any direct evidence to fight ever occurred, but Douglas has made it into possibly the most famous moment in the history of slave narratives because it becomes his resurrection through violence. It becomes his resurrection to manhood, the way he writes about it. How does a male slave establish independence by fighting? In this case, fighting with his fists. He took on Covey, according to Douglas, he bested him.

And after that, he tells us in the remaining month or two that he spent there, Covey never laid a hand on him again. So at least in the way Douglas converts that experience whatever really happened into a story, it becomes the way in which a young male slave can resist, stand up, use physical violence to protect himself, in self-defense, and reinvent himself as an adult in effect. But he also used it. I would strongly urge everyone to read Douglas's narrative and bondage and freedom as second autobiography, but particularly to read the passage where he remembers being on Covey's farm. It's the single most lyrical, beautiful moment in all slave narratives. It's Douglas remembering standing on a ridge on Covey's farm on one of his loneliest, most despairing days looking out at the Chesapeake Bay,

where he sees the white sailing ships on a July afternoon. And he imagines those white sailing ships as vessels of freedom, he says, flying around the world. Oh, that I were on one of your gallant decks. Oh, that I was there flying with you. He converts it into this beautiful metaphor of imagined freedom. And then at the end of that passage, of course, he says, but alas, I am locked in this prison. I cannot get on one of your gallant decks. And I had the personal experience some years ago of touring the Eastern Shore, which I've done several times, but with the late Dick Preston, who wrote the book Young Frederick Douglass, and Dick took me to Covey's farm to the land. And we went up on a ridge right over the Chesapeake Bay, on a July afternoon. And he said, turn around and look. And there they were on a day in the 1980s, the Chesapeake Bay full of white sailing ships. And it was one of those moments where you realized,

oh, my God, it wasn't a metaphor. He did not make that up. Sure, it's a metaphor in the way he uses the Covey fight and so on in the story. But that's a real memory. That then Douglass the writer, Douglass the artist, converts into one of the most beautiful expressions of the meaning of freedom you can ever write. So the Covey experience has many uses, I think both in his own life, but also particularly in the way he came to represent his life as an autobiographer. By the time he leaves Covey, he's about 18 years old, 17 going on. He's almost 18. And he's then sent to the Freeland Farm, an owner who was much more lenient. An owner he actually quite respected. I know that we're not going to have the job. Why wouldn't Covey have had Douglass punished? Well, Covey would have punished Douglass

because it was his job in effect to discipline this kid. Sorry, after the fight. Oh, why wouldn't he have it? The begs the question, I think, for the audience. Well, the answer is we don't know why Covey didn't turn Douglass into the constables. Have him jailed. He beat up a slaveholder according to Douglass. Leeds credence to the idea that maybe that fight wasn't as vicious as Douglass makes it out to be. We can speculate that Covey was embarrassed. And that's a good abolitionist explanation. And therefore, Covey didn't want anybody to know. He just had a behind-kicked by a teenage slave and a front who was authority and a front to his power. We don't really know why Covey didn't turn him in. It's possible he didn't turn him in because he had a relationship with Thomas All that he didn't want tomorrow.

This was a financial relationship, a business relationship. And this could really mess that up, or muddy his business relationships in St. Michael's, which is only a few miles up the road. So the answer is we don't really know why Covey didn't just... But also Douglass' time with Covey was about to end. Much has been made of this over the years. This was Douglass's triumph over the evil slave owner or the slave breaker, Edward Covey. I'm skeptical about just how much we make of this story. It's not my own favorite episode in Douglass's autobiographies. But what he did with it lyrically in his own story is really quite brilliant. Covey, by the way, goes on to become very successful. And over time, a much larger landowner and died relatively rich.

We might wish otherwise, but that's not the case. And his sons fought in the Confederate Army in the Civil War and one of them has his name on the Confederate monument out in front of the Eastern Maryland courthouse. And I can report that just as of last summer, 2011, an extraordinary new statue of Frederick Douglass now stands in front of the Eastern Maryland courthouse, where Douglass was jailed as a slave, only about 20 steps from the Confederate monument that includes the son of Edward Covey. That's my favorite juxtaposition of slave and slaveholder that I can think of in the United States. I will take a quick detour to Boston, and we'll go ahead. So, you guys can spend much racer-treatment

for according how you spend it. I don't know a lot about that, but go ahead. Well, yeah. Sure. We did just very quickly. Yeah. What more would your personality have been than how she would impact the shape of the Hungarian? Well, Garrison fell very much in love with Helen Benson. And indeed, one of the most interesting things about their relationship to those of us who studied abolition and Garrison is that often Garrison's image is of this stern ferocious, radical, you know, who was impatient and impetuous and intolerant almost, but his letters to Helen are these loving husbands' letters. He was a punster in some of these letters. He had an endearing relationship with her. Now, does that mean she humanized him with her personnel?

Does that mean she softened him? Perhaps. He had deep, loving relationships with his children. Growing up in that home with Garrison constantly under threat, physical threat, and nearly killed at least once in Boston in 1836, was never easy, and they never had any money to speak of. So I think we can conclude that Helen had a deeply humanizing impact on Garrison himself. The ferocious public abolitionist was the pussycat at home, and particularly what we know about that comes largely from the large stash of letters, which are so loving and endearing. He's a much softer human being and his relationship with her than the Garrison we see on the platform or the Garrison of the voice in the liberator. Yeah, I think to choose an abolitionist that,

I think it would be sort of an abolitionist parent. Yeah. You don't want to be gone around, son? Oh, god, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. In fact, that's no. Or even Douglass's son, actually. What an easy user. So back to my guy. I like that idea of an abolitionist dad. Don't know about that. I don't know if you can actually talk about that. As you say, very young. He's not the figure we built. We'll be later. What would I have seen and what it does with his engagement in the early days? Yeah.

Well, Douglass escaped at age 20. But in Indians, up in New Bedford, Massachusetts, when he's 21 and 22, he begins to speak once in a while at the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church in New Bedford. That's the first place so far as we know that he ever gave, stood up and spoken public. And he's discovered there by the Garrisonians in 1840-41. And his first public speech was on then Tuckett in August of 1841, where he said he quaked in his shoes, speaking to white people. He had never spoken to white people. But within a year, he goes out on the circuit in 1841-42. And in the 43, he's doing a tour all over the Midwest with Garrison, day after day, night after night in churches, town halls, and so forth, in outdoors sometimes. If you were to witness a Frederick Douglass speech, let's say in 1843, out in Ohio or upstate New York or in Massachusetts, you would have seen Douglass standing up

and basically telling the stories that he tells in his narrative. He would tell the Covey story. He would tell about Miss Sophia, teaching him to read and write. He would tell about kind masters and evil masters, but when you get a little bit better master and then a better master you want to be your own master. I mean, the very language that we have, enough texts or enough reports of his earliest speeches to realize they're basically what he wrote up in the narrative when he sat down to write it in 18, the wonder of 1845. So you had him telling his story. This was my, this is how I grew up. And it was absolutely compelling. Here was this handsome, young, stunning, six foot one black man who's 24 years old, 25, who's getting up and telling you, naming all these people, he's telling you about Edward Covey,

he's telling you about Thomas Alden, he's telling you about Miss Sophia, he's telling you about the boys and the streets of Baltimore. And it's a compelling story. I was born and raised a slave. I was raised on the largest slave operation in Maryland. I was owned by the odds and I worked on the land of Colonel Lloyd. And you know, I've seen the depths of slavery. I've seen kind masters and evil masters. The reason I think it worked at first, he's going to be a different kind of order later. The reason it worked is because these were simply great stories. And it was a hunger, hunger in whatever we might call an anti-slavery audience across the North to hear an actual former slave tell his personal stories about what happened to him. And of course, part of the reason this worked so well is he was simply so good at it. He was, you know, eloquent. He was a great story.

He was a great storyteller. He was a great mimic. He would do mimicry of an old, or excuse me, of a Covey, or even of Miss Sophia. Of course, he would fold the Bible into it. He would, he loved to tell the story of how Miss Sophia first read the Bible to him, and he read the, and he claimed she read the book of Job to him. You know, to a Christian audience, you think this woman thinking reading the book of Job to a slave boy. So it was, here he was 24, 25 years old telling you, well, here's how I grew up 10 years ago. This happened 12 years ago. Or he'd tell the story of the overseer named Austin Gore, who shocked the runaway slave named, named Denby in a river and the blood flowing in the river. And all of this was so compelling that the Garrisonians just loved it. You know, Fred, tell your story. Of course, is what they kept telling him. And he's fine.

He was happy to do it. They were paying him. I mean, not a lot, but he was being paid to do this now. This is how he was actually meeting a living from 1842 to 1845. Douglas became public orator. And then he sat down to kind of write it all up in this lyrical narrative that's only about 120 pages long. That's what you'd have witnessed. And if you witnessed it out in Ohio or, you know, Indiana or wherever, you might have witnessed it occasionally, especially in outdoor public gathering, with some jeering and some heckling from audiences. And he and Garrison famously got into a terrible fisticuffs in Pendleton, Indiana, where Douglas even broke his wrist trying to fight off a crowd that attacked him. So the other audiences that were, you know,

stunned and admiring of this young black man who could speak like this. And there were plenty of people in those audiences that thought this was a most dangerous thing in America letting this young black guy do this. But Douglas, I think, loved those. He loved the rape partay of hostile audiences. He would play off them, as long as they didn't kill him. So, in that time, they also, the abolitionists and Boston, they'd get up this campaign to be take a day to paint, and so on. What's... I haven't had, suddenly, had the cylinders feel about these moves towards desecligation and the big other force, especially. When it strikes me, it's an astute discipline of famine in America. Well, the abolitionists of New England,

and particularly in Boston, began to work against the law whenever they could, whether that was school segregation or segregation on railways and transportation systems and so forth. And it is, in some ways, the most vivid forerunner of our modern civil rights movement. Going to court to try to desegregate a public school. Going to court to try to desegregate rail line or a trolley car. Southern reactions to this sort of thing take time. What bothered southerners more than maybe changing the school law or the interracial marriage law in Massachusetts, but troubled southerners most, though, was the way in which these abolitionists by the thirties and into the forties were helping fugitive slaves. This was their runaway property.

And it was... We call it the Underground Railroad. No one was calling it the Underground Railroad until the late 1840s and into the 1850s. And as Douglas liked to say, it was more of an overground railroad. He said that explicitly, in fact, in his narrative. But what most bothered southerners was the way in which these networks of abolitionists in their understanding and in their vision of this, were beginning to set up networks to help fugitive slaves be funneled out of the south. That was their greatest fear. Yes, they were troubled by any change of an interracial marriage law. I mean, that was about as a natham as you could imagine. Ironically, of course, since the 1850 census alone shows us approximately 250,000 designated malatos in the southern population. And there were no doubt many, many more than that. Everyone who ever traveled in the south was always stunned at the shades of color among the slaves. And of course, Angelina Grimke observed and witnessed

much of this in her own personal experience. But it was the fugitive slave question that most animated southerners... And we find southern congressmen and senators by the 1840s, and certainly after the fugitive slave act of 1850, demanding return of fugitive slaves, demanding new laws, demanding a new apparatus to return fugitive slaves. That was their greatest fear of abolition. That and the idea that abolitionists, at some point, might actually try to ferment slave rebellion, slave insurrection in their own midst. That idea in the southern mind that what abolitionists ultimately wanted was not only, you know, negro equality of some sort. They wanted to make blacks equal and equal to... write the right to marry whites and all of that political rights are being discussed. But their greatest fear was what they always called abolition emissaries.

These were going to be agents of abolitionist organizations and siltrating the south and siltrating the slave quarters, fermenting slave resistance and slave rebellions. Now, there's very, very little of that that was ever done or accomplished because it was almost impossible. But it's, of course, what makes John Brown, eventually, in the raid on Harper's Ferry, you know, the fruition of this decades-old claim. I mean, who was the ultimate abolition emissary but John Brown and his small band of men? Of course, slaves didn't need somebody usually from the north coming down to whisper in their ear, you know, you ought to resist. They knew the dangers of that. They knew how to do it and survive and they knew the dangers of it if they didn't learn how to do it and survive. Do you want one of the mathematical things about this? Yeah, that's very interesting.

Yes, there is a sense in which, if we want to call this both sides, that is the pro-slavery persuasion in the south, representing the Northern Congress and in the presidency usually, in the anti-slavery movement, they both are fearful. They're losing this debate. They're losing this struggle. They're losing it in the law. They're losing it. I mean, southerners hate the idea of the so-called personal liberty laws, which are beginning in the 1830s and they're at one point or even supported by the Supreme Court sort of. That meant that a state could pass a law in effect, all but nullifying, the federal requirement of returning future to slaves, was concerned by the 1850s explicitly did this. As did two or three other states. Seven is that, oh my God, if they keep doing this, we have no hope. We have no place in this union, if they can do it.

Whereas abolitionists, always a small minority, always under threat, always underfunded. They're papers censored. Their newspapers banned in the U.S. males. Congress almost, you know, denying them even right to be heard, even though they planted thousands of petitions on Congress in the 1830s. You could point to one, two, or three people in the entire U.S. Congress by the early 1850s that you could really call anti-slavery, or much less an abolitionist or tiny handful. So the abolitionists almost always feel like they're losing this debate. And you know what? In public opinion? In many ways they were. We tend to get rather, you know, rather triumphal and teleological about this. We think the abolitionists are basically winning this argument because, of course, slavery is evil. Of course, it's immoral.

Of course, that eventually has to be faced. Country has to get rid of it. If you told an abolitionist that in 1850, when it passed a fugitive slave act, you told an abolitionist that in 1852, or 54 after the Kansas and Nebraska Act, which seemed to... All right. Well, 1850, of course, comes to a crisis because of the Mexican War. The United States goes to war with Mexico, 1846 to 1848, gains the entire Mexican session, which is the whole of the Great Southwest, potential building of creating three, four, five new states. California is ready for statehood. Huge territory called California, would it be slave, would it be free? So there has to be a compromise. Or the union is under threat. Seriously under threat, in 1850. There are southerners organizing. They actually wrote a thing. Tell whom? Drafted what was called the Southern Manifesto, which basically argued that if California

came into the union as a free state, that southerners should meet and organize and consider possible succession, because this was going to ruin the balance of slave to free states. There were 15 slave and 15 free states at that moment. If you brought California with its potential over time, huge expansive territory, what would that do? Well, part of the compromise of 1850, of course. The most notorious part of the compromise of 1850 was a much more rigid federal fugitive slave act. There had been a fugitive slave clause in the original constitution. Requiring in relatively vague terms, the return of fugitive servants and property and so forth. But by 1850, the Southern is demanding now. I mean, Henry Clay, who drafts most of this, the great compromiser, goes to Daniel Webster of Massachusetts, and says, Daniel, we've got to do a fugitive slave act. My fellow Southern slaveholders are demanding

we've got to do this. And then we've got to find some way to modify Northernans. They did and they didn't, which is the nature of compromise. But that fugitive slave law now required through a system of magistrates, federal appointed magistrates that were supposed to be planted all over the North. It required the return of all fugitive slaves to their owners, if they could be found, or if they demanded the fugitive slave return. And moreover, it created to many Northerners an obviously unfair system. If the fugitive slave was returned to his owner by this magistrate, which in effect was a court of law, the magistrate received $10 fee. If not returned, he got $5. Now, we look at that today and we say, what have they made of it? That's not justice, that's ridiculous. But it tells us much about the politics of passing that compromise. Now, the fugitive slave act, we can't measure this.

We don't have any polling data. But the fugitive slave act had the effect of converting a fairly large number of Northern whites, especially in certain areas, in certain towns and cities in the North, where it was known fugitive slaves were passing through. A lot of Northerners had never touched abolitionism. Didn't get near an anti-slavery meeting down at that church. Thought these people were fanatics and a little dangerous. Not on the edge of society. You don't go near them. But the idea that a runaway slave risks life and limb in everything to escape. It might be traveling through their town, or way to Canada, or on the way to upstate New York, or wherever they're going, or Ohio. And now, I'm required by law to go help find them. And if I have any knowledge of it, I'm a felon too, because I can be accused of harboring a fugitive slave, this human being who runs away for their liberty.

A lot of people thought, you know what? Abolitionists are dangerous, but that fugitive slave law is terrible. That's a terrible law. That's an immoral law. I don't like abolitionists, but I hate the fugitive slave act too. It's one great moment, where we can begin to see the politicization of slavery, the politicization of the fugitive slave store, which really serves the growth of anti-slavery thinking, anti-slavery sentiment, at the same time. In the early 1850s, into the mid-1850s, when the radical abolitionists, the garisonians and many others, are beginning to lose influence. They're beginning to lose influence with the larger population as the slavery question. Whether it's fugitive slaves escaping into the North, or it's the expansion of slavery into the West, is now rather suddenly and almost overwhelmingly becoming a huge issue in national politics. And in the wake of the fugitive slave act,

you get many attempts to free fugitive slaves out of jails, famous cases, Jerry McKinney, Liberation in Syracuse, New York, cases in Boston, there are cases all over the North of literally mobs of people who broke into court houses, broke into jails, and helped fugitive slaves to freedom. Now sometimes they succeeded and sometimes they didn't. It's also this period, when large numbers of blacks living in the North, who were themselves still fugitive slaves, left for Canada. And now we don't know the exact numbers. We often work with a sort of rule of thumb number that something like 20,000 African-American former slaves moved from the northern states into Canada in the decade of the 1850s. We don't know that number for sure,

but it's a very large number. Many thousands left to go to Canada under fear of this new federal law. That's the political situation.