Frederick Douglass escaped enslavement in 1838 – but here's why he was still far from true freedom

In the autumn of 1838, a young man in his early twenties boarded a northbound train from Maryland, USA. Dressed as a sailor and carrying borrowed identity papers, he looked to be just another person in the busy crowd of travellers who were heading out across the United States.

Within a day he had reached New York. As he stepped out into the city in the northern state, he left behind a lifetime of enslavement.

The man was Frederick Douglass (at the time still known by his birth name, Frederick Bailey). His escape would go on to become one of the best-known stories of the 19th-century abolitionist movement, but in the moment, it was a desperate risk. For a man like Douglass, freedom was certainly not a guarantee of safety.

It wasn’t until nearly a decade later that Douglass would find himself living without the constant shadow of his history looming over him, threatening to pull him back in. In those first years, Douglass was still living in fear.

Speaking on the HistoryExtra podcast, academic Clare Elliott explains why.

Frederick Douglass’s early years

Frederick Douglass was born into enslavement, growing up in a plantation in Talbot County, Maryland, separated from his family. But when, precisely, he was born is uncertain.

“He thought that he was born in 1818,” explains Elliott. “But there's always a question mark over the birth of enslaved people.”

Douglass’s early years, up until the cusp of adulthood, were marked by shocking deprivation and violence. “There’s a horrible and often quoted passage,” Elliott notes, “where Douglass talks about himself and the other enslaved children eating mush from a trough like so many pigs.”

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Scenes like these, described vividly in his 1845 autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, demonstrate the physical and psychological hardship that Douglass was subjected to.

By his teens, Douglass had been hired out to work in Baltimore for a white couple named Hugh and Sophia Auld, where Sophia began teaching him the alphabet. Subsequently, he continued to teach himself in secret using discarded newspapers and copybooks. For an enslaved person like him, literacy was absolutely an act of tacit rebellion.

The plan for escape

By his early twenties, Douglass had met Anna Murray, a free Black woman living in Baltimore. “She was able to provide some financial assistance for that [1838] escape,” Elliott says. “And he also borrowed merchant seamen’s papers, which allow him to posture as a free Black seaman.”

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So, disguising himself as a sailor, Douglass embarked on a risky journey north via train and ferry. By 4 September 1838, Douglass had arrived in New York City.

But freedom, he soon realised, had its own dangers.

“In 1838, he was not free: he [had] escaped,” says Elliott. “And his response to that escape was not one of joy, not one of satisfaction. It was not even relief … he had a crushing sense of anxiety.”

Even in the so-called free states, Fugitive Slave Laws allowed enslavers to reclaim runaways. Slave catchers operated openly, and many abolitionist safe houses were under surveillance. “He said that he felt insecure and deeply lonely,” Elliott explains, “and he was repeating this mantra to himself, saying: ‘Trust no man.’”

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It was in New York that the fugitive Frederick Bailey would first change his name, choosing the surname Johnson, before becoming Frederick Douglass upon travelling to Massachusetts. “He took that name, Douglass, to change his identity,” says Elliott. The name was a reference to The Lady of the Lake, an 1810 romantic poem by Sir Walter Scott, and it also shielded him from capture.

Still, Douglass lived in a state of anxiety for nearly a decade. “He was not really free,” Elliott says. “Not until his manumission was bought.”

Douglass’ journey across the Atlantic

In 1845, Douglass published his autobiography, and it made him internationally famous. Though it brought some level of income, and attention to the cause of abolition, it also brough further threat; fame meant that capture was once again a real possibility. To protect himself, he travelled to Britain and Ireland to lecture on abolition.

The journey was pivotal for two reasons.

Foremost, it was in Britain that he officially became a free man.

In Newcastle-upon-Tyne in the north of England, Douglass met two Quaker sisters-in-law, Anna and Ellen Richardson. They were driven to help his cause, and succeeded.

“They wrote to his master, Thomas Auld, and asked to be able to raise funds and pay for his freedom,” Elliott says. “They sent him home to the US in 1847, a free man.”

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Second, he learned that the treatment of Black people across the Atlantic wasn’t the same as in the US.

“He was treated much more like an equal,” Elliott explains. “He noticed a difference, and he went back with a fire in his belly to do more for the abolitionist cause.”

Why was Britain so different? By the mid-19th century, slavery had been abolished across the British empire for over a decade, and public opinion (shaped by campaigns led by figures such as William Wilberforce) had turned decisively against it.

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The return to America

When Douglass returned to the United States in 1847, he did as a newly free man and a public intellectual. And the contrast he observed between his reception in Britain versus his treatment in America sharpened his resolve.

“His time as a lecturer, an orator and a campaigner for abolition picked up when he returned to the US, and he felt an obligation that came with this freedom,” Elliott says.

In 1847, he founded his own newspaper, The North Star – a reference to the celestial marker that many enslaved people used for navigation when escaping from the South – and became one of the most prominent voices in the American abolitionist movement. His speeches often attacked the hypocrisy of a republic that was built on the idea of liberty, while upholding human bondage.

Over the following decades, Douglass advised presidents – including Abraham Lincoln and James Garfield. He also campaigned for women’s suffrage, and served as a diplomat. Douglass knew what it meant to be enslaved and to be free, and the anxiety of the threshold in-between. With that experience, and with his gifts, he became one of the leading lights of the American abolitionist movement.

Clare Elliott was speaking to Paul Bloomfield on the HistoryExtra podcast. Listen to the full conversation.