It is an evidence of his self-reliance and honor, as well as his loyalty to his past, that, almost the first step in his new life, was to send for his promised wife. She came to New York at once, and they were wedded by Rev. J. W. C. Pennington, a Presbyterian minister of that city. The early marriage of the young man must be regarded as an important event in his career as a freeman. It was a marriage for love and, as his wife was a woman of strong character and determination, she was able actively to assist her husband while he was seeking to establish himself in a new country. The act also made him at once a home-builder and the head of a family. Though he was poor almost to the very limit of poverty, without work, without habitation, and without friends or relationships, having nothing, in fact, but himself, which included a sound body and strong will, he went about planning and doing things as if certain that all must come out as he wished.
His newly discovered friends decided it was best for him not to stay longer in New York, and that New Bedford, Mass., was a much safer place. There he could work at his trade without danger of re-capture. He cheerfully started on his journey, though he had not enough money to pay his way. The stage-driver, plying between Newport and New Bedford, held a part of his baggage as security for his unpaid passage and when he and his wife arrived at their destination they had nothing to live on except faith. In this New England town everything was strange to Douglass, but he was not long in finding a friend, a colored man named Nathan Johnson. The latter, the first important acquaintance the refugee made among Northern colored people, had a good home, good standing in the community, and more than ordinary intelligence. He very soon discovered that Frederick Douglass was a man of superior fibre and became his firm friend.
Johnson’s house was well furnished with books and music, and bore other evidences of good taste and a cultivated mind. He was in a position to render just that kind of help which the young fugitive and his new wife needed at this time. He at once redeemed the baggage held by the stage-driver, and gave Douglass needed directions and advice as to how to get work and to establish himself.
Nathan Johnson had the further distinction of being the man who gave to the Maryland slave the name he ever afterward bore. Douglass left the South as Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey. His new-found friend had just been reading Scott’s Lady of the Lake, and persuaded the young man that Douglas was a name of poetic and historical significance; he was sure it would be further glorified by its new owner. With so auspicious a beginning, the refugee started out bravely to seek work and make a living for himself and his wife.
As he moved about in the New England town, he was much impressed by Northern civilization, and was greatly surprised to see white people, who while rich, educated, and powerful, were yet not slave-holders. Up to this time he had known but two classes of white people, slave-holders and non-slave-holders. The non-slave-holding white people of the South, he knew, were generally ignorant, despised, and poor; while those who owned slaves seemed to own everything else worth having. Here in New England he observed that white people were high or low according to their character, ability, and possessions. Life appeared to him larger, wider, and fuller of possibilities than he had dreamed, even in his more hopeful days down on the Eastern Shore. These impressions and the better understanding of his own condition gave him courage and made him feel equal to any task or problem. His first occupation, as a free man, was putting away some coal for Ephraim Peabody, for which he was paid two dollars. He cherished this “free money,” for it was the first he had ever earned that he could call his own. He cheerfully went from one job to another, proud as a bank president in the new dignity which freedom seemed to have conferred upon him. He accepted any kind of task he could find to do, such as sawing wood, digging cellars, removing rubbish, helping to load cargoes on ships, scrubbing out ship cabins, and the rough work in a foundry. The employment was hard and the pay small, yet it did not seem so to this newly emancipated slave. The right to dispose of his own labor, and to have and to hold all that he made was a profound and unceasing satisfaction to him.
His spare moments were given to studying and reading everything he could lay hold of. He saw from the first that his freedom could not be profitably used and protected without knowledge and the mental discipline that comes with the effort to acquire it. He was liked by everybody who employed him, because he made it a matter of principle to do all and more than his full duty in every occupation. He put as much zeal, intelligence, and cheerful industry into these common tasks as he later gave to pursuits of a more dignified character.
Young Douglass was cheered and heartened in this wholesome atmosphere of freedom,—free schools, free labor, and general fair play, to such a degree that it was a long time before he began to feel the presence and trammels of race prejudice as they existed in New Bedford and elsewhere in the North in that day. That there was a feeling against his color he learned when he attempted to follow his trade as a calker. When he sought to hire himself to a certain ship-owner at New Bedford, he was told to go to work, but when he went to the boat with his tools, the foreman informed him that every white man would quit if he struck a blow at his trade. This unexpected dénouement drove Douglass back to common labor, at which he could earn less than one-half of what he could have made as a calker. He accepted the situation in good spirit, however, feeling that the worst possible treatment in freedom was infinitely better than slavery.
He met his next rebuff when he attempted to attend one of the lectures under the auspices of the New Bedford Lyceum Association. He was refused a ticket on the ground that it was against the policy of the society to admit colored people to the lecture-room. It was not long, however, before this discrimination was done away with, since men like Charles Sumner, Emerson, Horace Mann, and Garrison, refused to speak before the organization unless the restriction was removed. The privilege of attending these meetings and hearing some of the great anti-slavery leaders was a matter of great import to Douglass. Indeed, it was the very thing he needed as a part of his education in preparation for his life work. He heard for the first time white men who were taking strong positions on the question of the abolition of slavery. The existence of an anti-slavery society and an anti-slavery movement of ever-widening extent and influence in the nation impressed him as nothing had done since he came from the South. The things for which he had secretly dreamed and yearned and struggled in Maryland were now becoming great national issues, with men of might behind them, pushing them on and seeking to make them the foremost questions of the day.
Quite as important as the privilege of hearing slavery discussed was the chance he obtained of reading William Lloyd Garrison’s paper, The Liberator. Garrison’s direct and uncompromising words came to him like a trumpet call. He began to cherish each number as second only in importance to the Bible. Heretofore he had had no one to help him reason out the philosophy of the question. What the facts of slavery were he knew by actual and bitter suffering. The words of no one could make him feel their injustice and pain more than his own experiences had made him feel them, but here, behold, was a mighty man, a prophet in his moral earnestness—a sort of Isaiah, who with inspired fervor, predicted the ultimate downfall of slavery.
The Liberator and Mr. Garrison’s words were as important to young Douglass and his intellectual development as was the Columbian Orator, which had inspired him while a slave in Baltimore. Those who knew him at once recognized his intelligence. The colored people of New Bedford were the first to discover his fluency as a speaker and to give ear to his original ideas on the question of freedom for their race. He was often called upon to speak in meetings held by colored men in the town, and in colored churches. As far as the masses of the people were concerned, however, he was still an obscure Negro laborer. There was no one except, perhaps, Nathan Johnson, who saw in this patient and cheerful toiler the promise of a public career. No men of African descent had up to this time achieved anything like distinction. A colored man might now and then be smart as a freak of nature; no one was prepared to think of his becoming great by sheer force of mind and character. But the power within this young fugitive slave and the forces without him were fast shaping themselves to call him forth and hold him up as an example to all the world.