71 pages • 2 hours read
Frederick DouglassMy Bondage and My Freedom
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 1855A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 22-23
Chapter 22 Summary: “Liberty Attained”
Less than a week after leaving Baltimore, Douglass arrived in New York City. Still, he wasn’t completely safe. There, he met a previously enslaved freedom seeker. Known as “Allender’s Jake” in Baltimore, he called himself “William Dixon” in New York. Tolly Allender, Dixon’s previous enslaver, had attempted and failed to recapture him. Jake had narrowly avoided recapture and warned Douglass that the city was full of Southerners and that some of the Black people in the city looked out for freedom seekers in exchange for a few dollars from people who caught them. He also warned Douglass against going to the wharves to look for work or to boarding houses for a room. Jake then began to suspect the possibility that Douglass could be involved in an attempt to recapture him. He soon left for work.
Despite this precariousness, New York in 1838 was still safer for enslaved people than it was after the passage of “the new fugitive slave bill” (335). Douglass had little money—only enough for a few loaves of bread, but nothing to pay for a room. He kept his secret for as long as he could but decided that he had to search for an honest man to help him. He was a good judge of human faces and selected that of a sailor named Stewart who listened to Douglass’s story and took him to his house. Meanwhile, Stewart sought out David Ruggles, then secretary of the New York Vigilante Committee and an abolitionist. Douglass ended up with Ruggles. While staying there, he sent for his intended wife, Anna, and married her in New York.
After finding out that Douglass had trained as a caulker, Ruggles advised him to go to New Bedford, Massachusetts, where he could find plenty of work, due to the many ships that are there “fitted out for the whaling business” (336). Douglass followed this advice and went to New Bedford, though he still had no money—not even enough to pay his and his wife’s fare from Newport, Rhode Island. Their bags remained ransom until Mr. Nathan Johnson, one of Ruggles’s contacts, loaned Douglass the $2 and took Douglass and Anna into the home that he shared with his own wife. While in New Bedford, Douglass changed his name. It had become Johnson sometime during his existence in enslavement—a name that was already popular in town and one that nearly every freedom seeker who arrived in New Bedford from Maryland assumed. Nathan suggested the surname of Douglass.
In his observations of Nathan Johnson, Douglass noticed that the condition of white laborers in the North was far better than that of the white Southern working class. The white working class in New Bedford lived in more comfortable homes—some of them had more comforts and refinement than many enslavers on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. Johnson, too, lived in a nice house and was a cultured man. He also worked hard, and his callused hands were proof.
When Douglass arrived in New Bedford one afternoon, he saw many Quakers milling about, which reassured him. The shipbuilding business in New Bedford involved going to Baltimore, buying old ships, and bringing them back to repair, with the aim of making them better and more valuable than before. There were other possibilities in New Bedford: Black and white children attended school together; the community remained united in refusing to allow a freedom seeker’s return to his previous condition; and there was no statute to prevent a Black man from holding office in Massachusetts.
Douglass found work on his third day in town, “stowing a sloop with a load of oil for the New York market” (343). It was dirty and difficult work, but his wages would now be his own. He soon went in pursuit of a caulking job but received warning that his presence would cause white workers to strike. Douglass then took any work he could find. The winter was difficult, partly because of the high food prices. During the worst months, he earned $9 per month and was renting two rooms for $9 every three months. Anna was unable to work, leaving him responsible for paying for food and necessary furniture. Douglass worried about going into debt.
While working out his finances, he decided to join the Methodist Church. After recognizing that Northern Methodist churches upheld segregation and, thus, were complicit in racism, he broke ties. Around four or five months after his arrival in town, a young man gave him a copy of the Liberator, edited by William Lloyd Garrison and published by Isaac Knapp. Though Douglass was unable to pay for the paper, the young man still took him as a subscriber. Douglass fell in love with the paper, which expressed many of his own anti-enslavement thoughts. He admired Garrison’s words, which were “few, full of holy fire, and straight to the point” (348). In Garrison, he had found a hero. The Liberator arrived at Douglass’s home every week, and he read every article. He spent his first three years in New Bedford devouring the paper and attending every anti-enslavement meeting in New Bedford.
Chapter 23 Summary: “Introduced to the Abolitionists”
In the summer of 1841, there was a major anti-enslavement convention in Nantucket, Massachusetts. William C. Coffin, a well-known abolitionist at the time, had heard Douglass speaking to a Black audience at a little schoolhouse where the group worshipped. He invited Douglass to speak at the convention. Douglass recalls that he was very nervous during the speech, but he succeeded in conveying the power of his message. At the end of the meeting, John A. Collins, then the general agent of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, asked Douglass to become an agent for the society. Douglass worried about Auld discovering and arresting him, but Collins persisted and Douglass consented to speaking at events for three months. Collins presented Douglass’s scarred back to crowds to display enslavement’s cruelties. Aside from this, Douglass’s abolitionist work helped him forget the stigma of being Black.
One of his first duties with the society was to get more subscribers to the newspapers the Anti-Slavery Standard and the Liberator. When Douglass traveled through eastern Massachusetts with fellow abolitionist George Foster to perform this duty, many large groups gathered to hear Douglass speak. The abolitionists usually introduced him as “chattel,” a “thing,” or “a piece of southern property” (355). Some deemed it foolish of him—a freedom seeker—to expose himself so publicly and to confess to being of such low origin. The only precaution that Douglass took, when he first began making speeches, was to withhold his former name, his enslaver’s name, and the state and county from which he had liberated himself.
During his first few months of telling his story, he provided only the barest facts of his personal experiences. The abolitionists asked that he share only those facts, while they would furnish the philosophy. In some instances, they asked him to inflect his speech in “the plantation manner” so that he wouldn’t seem too educated (355). His proper speech did create doubts in the minds of some white Northerners who wondered if he had ever been enslaved. He didn’t, in their view, look or act like someone previously enslaved. His education, too, contradicted everything they knew about enslaved people’s ignorance.
Four years after becoming an orator, Douglass wrote out the facts of his life, giving the specific names of people and places. This act put him in danger of recapture and forcible return to Maryland. He knew that anyone could easily betray him and use the anti-enslavement newspapers to trace his whereabouts at meetings. Garrison and abolitionist Wendell Phillips had no faith in the state of Massachusetts to protect Douglass from capture. Phillips went as far as to advise Douglass to burn his narrative.
Chapters 22-23 Analysis
After escaping to New York, Douglass realized how freeing himself from enslavement didn’t guarantee him personal freedom. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which allowed people to capture refugees from enslavement in the North and ship them back to their enslavers, made the life of a freedom seeker a perilous one. It also created the circumstances in which Douglass was neither able to find a place to live nor to work. This raises tension in the text even after his liberation, signaling that the story is not over, even while Douglass himself reaches a relatively happy ending.
While in New York, Douglass sent for Anna Murray, a woman whom he had met either at a debating society’s social gathering or in church, and married her. It is conspicuous that Douglass mentions Anna for the first time here. She was several years older than Douglass and had met him either in 1837 or 1838, when he was still bringing home his wages as a caulker to Hugh Auld.
Douglass’s name change, like his marriage, was one of the ways in which he declared his autonomy from his enslaver. Finally, in the North, he could exercise the same liberties as any other adult. This highlights a departure from The Dehumanizing Effects of Slavery.
When he relocated to New England with his wife, he noticed differences in the standard of living here compared to that of Maryland. Even wealthy planters did not seem to live as well, and they lacked New Englanders’ sense of culture. Douglass contrasts this with the culture of dissipation that flourished in Maryland. There’s a suggestion here that the New Englanders’ work ethic fostered a better quality of life.
In these chapters, Douglass also chronicles his exit from the Methodist Church—an institution about which he seemed to have been ambivalent. Leaving the church didn’t quell his need for community, which he found by joining abolitionist circles. The Liberator had become his new Bible.
William Lloyd Garrison, a Massachusetts native and co-founder of the New England Anti-Slavery Society, started the Liberator in 1830, shortly after leaving the American Colonization Society. While Garrison had initially supported the repatriation of Black Americans to West Africa, he left the society after he realized that its true aim was to rid the United States of free Black people. Isaac Knapp, the publisher of the Liberator, was born in the same town as Garrison—Newburyport—and worked as a printer and bookseller. Douglass’s discussion of these papers highlights another aspect of Literacy as the Gateway to Freedom: Not only does learning to read and write empower people to seek freedom, but using literature to spread the word about abolitionism also provides an avenue for fighting for freedom.
Douglass’s disillusionment with the New England abolitionists began when he realized that they took less interest in who he was than in how he could serve their cause, which was, ironically, about him. They wanted Douglass to put himself on physical display while they controlled the narrative of abolition. Douglass’s composition of his autobiography was his proof of his existence as a real person instead of a symbol.
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