Notwithstanding his progress in gaining knowledge, his considerate master and kind mistress, his loving companion in Tommy, his good home, food and clothes, he was not happy or contented. None of these things could stifle his yearning to be free. He has aptly described his own feelings at this time in speaking of Mrs. Auld: “Poor lady, she did not understand my trouble, and I could not tell her. Nature made us friends, but slavery made us enemies. She aimed to keep me ignorant, but I resolved to know, although knowledge only increased my misery. My feelings were not the result of any marked cruelty in the treatment I received. It was slavery, not its mere incidents, I hated. Their feeding and clothing me well, could not atone for taking my liberty from me. The smiles of my master could not remove the deep sorrow that dwelt in my young bosom. We were both victims of the same overshadowing evil,—she as mistress, I as slave. I will not censure her too harshly.”
But if his hopes and aspirations were excited by the vast and vague horizon which the thought of emancipation opened to him, he was, on the other hand, driven to something like despair when he considered how distant and inaccessible was this “land of freedom” of which he dreamed. The nearer and clearer appeared to him the possibility of this larger life, the more torturing became the restraints that kept him from seeking it. It was when thus pursuing in thought this phantom of a greater world although at the same time in despair of ever attaining it, that he found peace for a while in the consolation of religion. His imagination had been aroused by the preaching of a white minister, a Methodist, named Hanson. Feeling himself wretched and alone, he was in a state of mind, as so many others have been before and since, to find comfort in the thought of a kindly and overshadowing Power, a Protector to whom he might turn, in his great distress, without reserve and without misgiving. He surrendered himself completely to this new faith in God. In his search for more light, he met a lasting friend and guide in the person of a colored preacher to whom he fondly refers as “Uncle Lawson.” This good and pious old man lived very near the home of Mr. Auld. Young Douglass said of him: “He was my spiritual father. I loved him intensely, and was at his house every chance I could get.”
Douglass’s master and mistress knew that he had become religious, and though they were at that time but lukewarm in their support of the church, they respected the piety in the young slave and seem to have encouraged it. But unfortunately the boy’s interest in religion had increased his desire to read, in order to become thoroughly acquainted with the Bible. “I have gathered,” says Mr. Douglass, “scattered pages of the Bible from the filthy street gutters, and washed and dried them, that in moments of leisure I might get a word or two of wisdom from them.”
Uncle Lawson could read a little and Douglass, who went frequently with him to prayer meeting, spent much of his spare time on Sunday helping him decipher its pages. When his master learned what he was doing, he threatened to whip him if he went to Lawson’s again, but he stole away whenever he could and got his needed instruction in the simple lessons of faith.
Uncle Lawson was probably the first colored person that young Douglass had met who appreciated his longings and powers. He was also the first person who awakened in him a dim consciousness that he was destined for a public career. Speaking of this, Douglass once said: “His words made a deep impression upon me, and I verily felt that some such work was before me, though I could not see how I could ever engage in its performance.” The old preacher could go no further than to give utterance to the familiar exhortations: “Trust in the Lord, the Lord can make you free”; “Ask in faith and He will give you what you ask.” The boy’s great respect for the honesty and piety of Uncle Lawson lent these words a deep significance, and he never forgot the lessons that he learned from this simple-minded man. How important was this teaching is evidenced by Mr. Douglass’s own testimony: “Thus assisted and thus cheered on under the inspiration of the preacher, I worked and prayed with a light heart, believing that my life was under the guidance of a wisdom higher than my own. I always prayed that God would in His great good mercy and His own good time, deliver me from my bondage.” After Douglass learned how to write with tolerable ease, he began to copy from the Bible and the Methodist hymn-books at night, when he was supposed to be asleep. He always regarded this religious experience as the most important part of his education; it had the effect, not only of enlarging his mind, but also of restraining his impatience, and softening a disposition that was growing hard and bitter with brooding over the disadvantages suffered by himself and his race. He greatly needed something that would help him to look beyond his bondage and encourage him to hope for ultimate freedom.
While he was undergoing this, to him, novel religious experience, and while he was gradually being adjusted to the situation in which he found himself, there came one of those dreaded changes in the fortunes of slave-masters that made the status of the slave painfully uncertain. His real master, Captain Anthony, died, and this event, complicated with some family quarrel, resulted in Douglass being recalled from Baltimore to the plantation. This was a depressing incident in his slave-life. It is true that Mr. and Mrs. Auld were not at this time as gentle with him as when he first came to the city. He was under stricter discipline, was constantly watched, and his liberties were circumscribed in many ways that were both inconvenient and irritating. But in spite of all this he was comparatively free from the usual severities of slavery. He had many interests and many happy relationships that he was able to cultivate outside of the Auld household. He had become something of a leader among the young colored men of the city. He had taught many of them their letters. Among the white boys of his acquaintance he also had a large circle of friends, who loved him and were loyal to him. Most important of all was his affection for his religious teacher, Uncle Lawson. Through these attachments in the more complex life of the city, and the opportunities for mental and spiritual growth which they offered, he was able to throw off to a great degree the gloom and doubt of his earlier youth. He had begun to feel that he was actually preparing himself for that larger life of leadership in freedom, that had been hinted to him by Uncle Lawson. But all these happy relations were rudely severed when he was recalled to the plantation.
“It did seem,” he said, “that every time the young tendrils of my affection became attached, they were rigidly broken off by some unnatural, outside power, and I was looking away to Heaven for the rest denied to me on earth.”
CHAPTER II
BACK TO PLANTATION LIFE
When young Douglass left Baltimore to go back to the plantation, he was about sixteen years of age;—strong, healthy, and fully capable of the hard work of a field hand. But this was not the most difficult task he now had to face. Conditions that he met there were to test his character as it had never been tested before, and the trials he endured during this period profoundly influenced all his future life. For the first time in many years, he was to feel the “pitiless pinchings of hunger.” He says: “So wretchedly starved were we that we were compelled to live at the expense of our neighbors, or steal from our own larder. This was a hard thing to do, but after much reflection, I reasoned myself into the belief that there was no other way to do—and after all there could be no harm in it, considering that my labor and person were the property of Master Thomas, and that I was deprived of the necessaries of life. It was simply appropriating what was my own, since the health and strength derived from such food were exerted in his service. To be sure, this was stealing according to the law and gospel I had heard from the pulpit, but I had begun to attach less importance to what dropped from that quarter, on certain points.”
Having found a principle upon which he could justify, against the precepts of morality, the practice of stealing from his own master, in order to get enough to eat, it was not difficult to go farther and discover a warrant based on grounds quite as logical, for the habit of stealing from others beside his master, when the same necessity seemed to justify it.