My Bondage and My Freedom

The composition of what became known as the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass—what Douglass describes as his “pamphlet”—in the spring of 1845 led him to go to England to escape possible risk. While attempting to buy a ticket on the Cumbria, a ship on the Cunard line, Douglass’s friend, James N. Buffum, told him that he could not travel in the first-class cabin with the others. Instead, he would have to ride in the second-class cabin. While Douglass’s friends were outraged, he was unfazed. His friends asked him to visit them on the saloon deck and Douglass sometimes obliged, but he largely kept to his own section of the ship. Passengers from New Orleans and Georgia did not like the fact that he was going to speak and threatened to throw him overboard, leading to the stern intervention of Captain Judkins who ordered the arrest of the troublemakers. At this announcement, the Southern mob scampered and behaved themselves for the remainder of the voyage. After landing in Liverpool, the offended men went to the press with their complaint, which was a mistake. Their announcement not only brought them public censure but also ensured Douglass a larger audience.

In a letter to Garrison, written in January 1846, Douglass described his experiences in Ireland, where he disembarked. He expressed his admiration for America’s beauty but his outrage at its commitment to injustice. In Ireland, which he had traveled extensively by this time, meeting all kinds of people, he felt like any other man walking its streets. The Irish seemed to know nothing of the racism that was prevalent in the United States.

Douglass divided his time between England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, lecturing in large towns and cities throughout the British Isles. In England, groups raised funds to ensure Douglass’s freedom. Some of his abolitionist friends, however, took offense that he had consented to the offer, which suggested an acknowledgment of his being property. Douglass’s abolitionist friends in England also encouraged him to remain in the country, offering to set him up. He insisted, however, on returning to the US to help those who remained in bondage. He consented to the offer to pay for his freedom because he had become too notorious to avoid recapture. American newspapers, both in the North and the South, expressed surprise that someone “so illiterate and insignificant” aroused so much interest and sympathy in England (371).

In his speeches, Douglass asserted, his intention was never to turn the English against Americans—a point that he made in a letter to Horace Greeley. Four matters helped him present the problem of American enslavement to the British public: the announcement about Douglass’s attack on the Cambria; the Free Church of Scotland’s acceptance of money from enslavers and traders of enslaved people; the Evangelical Alliance’s inclusion of enslavers; and the Worlds Temperance Convention, where Douglass clashed with some clergymen. As for the Free Church, it kept the money gained from enslaving people but aroused the anti-enslavement sympathies of the Scottish people. The Evangelical Alliance was an attempt to unionize all of the world’s evangelical Christians. There were 60 or 70 American clergymen in attendance, including Reverend Samuel Hanson Cox, the moderator of the New School Presbyterian General Assembly. Cox not only made bitter remarks against Douglass at the convention but also published a letter in American newspapers denouncing him. Douglass replied to the reverend and got a very respectful hearing before the British people.

Douglass also noticed that more people became interested in hearing him narrate his story. He began to think that his British abolitionist friends should give him the means of printing his own paper, devoted to the cause of other enslaved Black Americans. Part of Douglass’s motivation was to disprove the assumption of Black people’s natural inferiority. By operating his own press, his labors could speak to “the mental energies of the race itself” (380). Douglass made these points to his friends, in addition to reminding them that there was no newspaper published by Black Americans. As a result of his arguments, they raised $2,500 for his paper.

In the spring of 1847, Douglass returned to the US. While boarding the Cambria again, he found that one of the ship’s agents had given the berth that Douglass purchased to someone else and forbade him from entering the saloon. This news, too, got to the British press, and the public condemned these actions. The owner of the shipping line, Samuel Cunard, wrote a letter to the newspapers expressing regret over the matter and promising that nothing like it would ever occur again on one of his ships.