Frederick’s heart fell, but obediently he went with his master. The next several days went by in comparative idleness on the Auld place just outside St. Michaels. Frederick’s stature with the other slaves had grown. By them he was treated as an honored guest, and in this he found some comfort. But the Alabama friend did not put in an appearance, and finally Captain Auld announced that he had decided to send him back to Baltimore again, to live with his brother Hugh. He told Frederick that he wanted him to learn a trade, and that if he behaved himself properly he might emancipate him in time.
Frederick could hardly believe his ears. The morning came when they went into St. Michaels, and there he was placed in the custody of the captain of a small clipper. They set sail over the waters of the Chesapeake Bay toward Baltimore.
Chapter Five
One more river to cross
On its way to the sea, the Patapsco River cuts through the old city of Baltimore. Here the fall line—the point where the harder rocks of the Piedmont meet the softer rocks of the coastal plain—moves close to the coast, and the deep estuary affords a large sheltered harbor. Baltimore was a divided city: by temperament, dreamily looking toward the South; but, during business hours at least, briskly turning her face to the North. The old English families seemed to be dwindling, and the “upstarts” wanted business.
Early in the nineteenth century, Baltimore became second only to New York as port of entry for immigrants from Europe—Irish, Italians, Greeks, Poles, Scandinavians. They spread out from Baltimore all over Maryland. The increase of population in Baltimore, especially foreign or non-British population, made the counties afraid. When the Federalists were overthrown in 1819 the issue of apportioning of delegates by population came up in the Assembly. It was defeated because the counties refused to place the great agricultural state of Maryland “at the feet of the merchants, the bank speculators, lottery office keepers, the foreigners and the mob of Baltimore.”
For many years this attitude helped to retard enfranchisement of Jews. Not until 1826 were Jews allowed to vote. This was just two years after thin, stoop-shouldered Benjamin Lundy came walking down out of the backwoods of Tennessee, a printing press on his back, and began turning out the Genius of Universal Emancipation, first antislavery journal to appear in the whole country.
After the “Jew Bill” got by, Baltimoreans paid more attention to Lundy’s journal. There was talk of “outside influence”; and one day Austin Woolfolk, a notoriously mean slave-trader, beat up the editor on the street and nearly killed him.
The city’s business was expanding. Shipbuilding had started in the Colonial days. With the new roads bringing in products from the west, merchants were soon making shipments in their own vessels and the town’s prominence as a seaport was assured. By 1810 the city had become the third largest in America. The population had quadrupled since the Declaration of Independence, mainly because of the maritime business. Baltimore clippers brought coffee from South America, tea and opium from China, and slaves from Africa.
It was well known that smuggling sprang up, after the importation of African slaves was made a felony. By 1826 the interstate traffic was enormous. Boatloads of slaves, manacled together, were conveyed in sailing vessels along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts to New Orleans, great slave mart of the South. These cargoes of living freight were listed openly in the papers with the regular shipping news. Law or no law, the great city of Baltimore had little patience with “loose talk” about so lucrative a market. A meddling outsider, William Lloyd Garrison, was thrown in jail. Publication of the Genius ceased, and all copies of the incendiary journal were destroyed. At least that’s what the merchants thought. But old marked sheets had a way of turning up in the queerest places!