Frederick Douglass: The Caulker Who Taught Himself to Read

Walk down to the Fells Point waterfront and look at the ships. The skyline has changed since the eighteen thirties, but the scale of the water has not: it is still a working harbor where the Patapsco opens to the bay, and in the decades before the Civil War this mile of dock was one of the most industrially active waterfronts on the Eastern Seaboard. Ships were built here, caulked here, launched here. And Frederick Douglass worked here.

He was enslaved. He had been sent to Baltimore by his enslaver, Thomas Auld, in an arrangement that allowed Auld to collect wages Douglass earned as a skilled ship's caulker. Douglass was among the most capable workers on the docks. He was also, by law, prohibited from learning to read. He found a way anyway. He traded biscuits for reading lessons, paying white boys on the street in food for the knowledge he was not supposed to have. He studied the letters on ships' timbers and reproduced them in chalk on paving stones. He asked questions and listened to the answers.

What he absorbed on those docks was not just literacy. Baltimore in the eighteen thirties and eighteen forties had approximately twenty-five thousand free Black residents, the largest free Black urban community in the United States at the time. Douglass worked alongside free Black caulkers who earned their own wages and owned their own tools. The distinction between his status and theirs was a line drawn entirely by law and the threat of violence behind that law. He could see, every day, what freedom looked like. It was on the same docks where he was enslaved.

He escaped in September of eighteen thirty-eight, dressed in the uniform of a free Black sailor, carrying borrowed identification papers. He was twenty years old. Within three years he was speaking before abolitionist audiences in New England. Within five he had published his first autobiography, naming his enslavers, discarding the anonymity that his colleagues urged for his own safety.

The maritime economy of Baltimore, which held him by force, was also the thing that educated him. He said so himself.