EW VOLUMES ON THE shelf of American literature provide us with so thorough an understanding of African-American experience before the Civil War as Frederick Douglass’s moving autobiographical account. The man who would become one of nineteenth-century America’s most respected citizens knew the painful side of America’s story from personal experience, and wrote about it with deep passion and great skill.

Born a slave in Talbot County on the eastern shore of Maryland, Frederick Douglass gives his readers a vivid description of both the landscape and the slaveholding culture that shaped his early life. Douglass bluntly tells his readers not to expect him to say much about his family of origin—genealogical trees did not flourish among slaves. He never met a slave in that part of the country who knew his own age with any degree of certainty, and such questions, when put to the slave masters, were regarded as evidence of an impudent curiosity.¹ By relating his birth to other known events, Frederick placed his birth date as February 1817.² Christened Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey, he later changed his surname, first to Stanley and then to Johnson before adopting the name Douglass in 1838.

As a young child, Frederick was sent to Baltimore to live with the Hugh Auld family, relatives of his owner, an experience he regarded as one of the most fortuitous of his life. “Viewing it in the light of human likelihoods, it is quite probable that but for the mere circumstances of being thus removed, before the rigors of slavery had fully fastened upon me, before my young spirit had been crushed under the iron control of the slave driver, I might have continued in slavery until emancipated by the war.”³

Growing in Faith
During the seven years in Baltimore Frederick learned to read and write. It was there that  he also developed his first comprehension of the system of slavery and how it bound him and more than 4 million Black Americans in a soul-crushing and debilitating condition. There he made up his mind that he would one day escape. In Baltimore Frederick also found God for himself. His spiritual mentor, Uncle Lawson, helped Frederick to trust the biblical promise that if he asked for anything in faith, not wavering, God would grant it. The young slave believed that freedom was definitely something worth asking for.

In 1833 Douglass went to live in St. Michaels, Maryland. He dates his move by two dramatic events: it was the year after the first cholera epidemic in Baltimore, and “it was also the year of that strange phenomenon when the heavens seemed about to part with their starry train. I witnessed this gorgeous spectacle,” he writes, “and was awestruck. The air seemed filled with bright descending messengers from the sky. It was about daybreak when I saw this sublime scene. I was not without the suggestion, at the moment, that it might be the harbinger of the coming of the Son of man, and in my then state of mind I was prepared to hail Him as my friend and deliverer. I had read that ‘the stars shall fall from heaven,’ and they were now falling. I was suffering very much in my mind. It did seem that every time the young tendrils of my affection became attached they were rudely broken by some natural outside power, and I was looking away to heaven for the rest denied me on earth.”⁴

To many Protestant Christians this event, known as the “falling of the stars,” was the  direct fulfillment of predictions made in Scripture. Jesus had promised that prior to His second coming the stars would fall from heaven (Matt. 24:29; Mark 13:24, 25); and John the revelator’s prophecy of the seven seals revealed that at the opening of the sixth seal, the stars would fall from heaven “even as a fig tree casteth her untimely figs, when she is shaken of a mighty wind” (Rev. 6:13). 

Douglass’s record of his emotional, positive response to this stellar phenomenon is remarkable—a testimony to his spiritual maturity at age 16. It also suggests Douglass’s thorough familiarity with the Bible and pictures him in a personal, even intimate relationship with his Lord. Frederick’s eyewitness account of this memorable celestial display is one of the most accurate and detailed on record.

Turning Point
Because his owners had noticed his insatiable desire to learn, Frederick became a pawn in the White family’s internal squabbles and was later sent to the farm of Edward Covey, a man  noted for his ability to break the will of slaves. After six months of Covey’s mistreatment the young slave determined to resist, fully aware of the possible consequences.

One Sunday morning Covey “jumped” Douglass in a barn—and Frederick fought back. It was a long, brutal struggle. “The battle with Mr. Covey,” he later wrote, “ . . . was the turning point in my ‘life as a slave.’  I was a changed being after that fight. I was nothing before—I was a man now . . . with a renewed determination to be a free man. . . . After resisting him, I felt as I had never felt before. It was a resurrection from the dark and pestiferous tomb of slavery, to the heaven of comparative freedom. . . . This spirit made me a free man in fact, though I still remained a slave  in form.”⁵ He still remained a slave on Covey’s estate, but the overseer never again attempted to whip him.

In January 1834 Douglass moved again, this time to the home of William Freeland. He describes his treatment under Freeland as “heavenly” compared to that of Covey. Through the urging of Henry and John Harris, fellow slaves owned by Freeland, Douglass opened a “Sabbath school” to teach other slaves how to read and write. “I held my Sabbath school at the house of a free colored man. . . . I had at one time over forty scholars . . . mostly men and women. I look back to those Sundays with an amount of pleasure not to be expressed. . . . The work of instructing my fellow slaves was the sweetest engagement with which I was ever blessed. We loved each other, and to leave them at the close of the Sabbath was a severe cross indeed.”⁶

“It was necessary to keep our religious masters . . . unacquainted with the fact,” he wrote, “that instead of spending the Sabbath in wrestling, boxing and drinking whiskey, we were trying to learn how to read the will of God. . . . My blood boils as I think of the bloody manner in which Messrs. Wright Fairbanks and Garrison West, both [nearby White Sunday school] class leaders, in connection with many others, rushed in upon us with sticks and stones, and broke up our virtuous little Sabbath school at St. Michaels—all calling themselves Christians.”⁷

Foiled Freedom
As 1836 dawned, Frederick Douglass made a New Year’s resolution that the year would “not close without witnessing an earnest attempt, on my part, to gain liberty. This vow not only bound me to make good my own individual escape, but my friendship for brother-slaves was so affectionate and confiding that I felt it my duty, as well as my pleasure, to give them an opportunity to share in my determination.”⁸ Frederick described his plan to four young men who all willingly agreed to participate. Their plot was discovered, however, and instead of escaping to freedom, they were dragged to jail.

“Could the kind reader have been riding along the main road to or from Easton that morning, his eye would have met a painful sight. . . . Five young men guilty of no crime save that of preferring liberty to slavery . . . on their way to prison.”⁹ Providentially, none of the young escapees was killed for the attempt; in fact, no one was even flogged. The four were released in a few days, and Douglass about a week later. Though threatened, they weren’t sold to Southern slave traders, as frequently happened to other slaves recaptured during escape attempts. Ultimately all five ended up back under the control of their owners.

The failure of this first attempt at freedom didn’t dim Frederick’s desire, however, and he continued to search for another opportunity. On Monday, September 3, 1839, disguised as a free Black sailor, he left Baltimore on a train, never again to return as a slave.

Douglass published his story in the North for the first time in 1845, at age 27. After publication he grew concerned that some readers might conclude that he opposed all religion, because of the ways in which he had attacked some aspects of Christianity. He added an appendix to later editions, clearly detailing his beliefs: “What I have said respecting and against religion, I mean to apply to the slave holding religion of this land, and with no possible reference to Christianity proper; for between the Christianity of this land, and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference—so wide, that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked. . . . I can see no reason, but the most deceitful one, for calling the religion of this land Christianity. I look upon it as the climax of all misnomers, the boldest of all frauds, and the grossest of all libels. . . .We have men-stealers for ministers, women-whippers for missionaries and cradle-plunderers for church members. . . . Here we have religion and robbery the allies of each other—devils dressed in angel’s robes, and hell presenting the semblance of paradise. . . . I hold it to be strictly true of the overwhelming mass of professed Christians in America. . . . They love the heathen on the other side of the globe, . . . while they despise and totally neglect the heathen at their own doors.”¹⁰

Rising Above It
The richness of Douglass’s later life and his significant contributions as an abolitionist publisher, orator, writer, and statesman take on even greater meaning in light of his early experience. Knowing keenly the feelings of the oppressed, this Black American walked with kings, counseled presidents, and dined with aristocrats—and did so with great dignity and grace. He never allowed himself to be pulled down to the level of his detractors. He “didn’t let nobody turn him ’round.”

On the tenth anniversary of his escape Frederick Douglass penned a letter to his former owner that suggests just how deeply the spirit of Jesus had affected him: “I entertain no malice toward you personally. There is no roof under which you would be more safe than mine; and there is nothing in my house which you might need for your comfort, which I would not readily grant. I should esteem it a privilege, to set you an example as to how mankind ought to treat each other.

I am your fellow man, but not your slave.”¹¹

Today Frederick Douglass is celebrated as one of America’s most eloquent advocates for the equal worth and dignity of all people. His story reminds us that a commitment to gospel values will never let us rest easy while others for whom Christ died still struggle under physical, economic, or spiritual oppression.

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 ¹ Frederick Douglass, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass. Written by Himself (New York: Collier Books, 1892), p. 27.
 ² At least one major biographer places that date as February 1818: William McFeeley, Frederick Douglass (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1991), p. 3.
 ³ Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave. Written by Himself, ed. Benjamin Quarles (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1960), p. 75.
 ⁴ Douglass, Life and Times, pp. 103, 104.
 ⁵ Ibid., p. 143.
 ⁶ ———, Narrative, p. 114.
 ⁷ Ibid., p. 113.
 ⁸ ———, Life and Times, p. 156.
 ⁹ Ibid., p. 170.
¹⁰ ———, Narrative, pp. 155, 156, 157, 159.
¹¹ Philip Foner, The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass: Early Years, 1817-1849 (New York: International Publishers, 1950), p. 343.

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Donald F. Blake is a lifelong Seventh-day Adventist with a consuming passion for Christian education and for community development through service. He writes from Bloomfield, Connecticut.