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My Bondage and My Freedom

Frederick Douglass · 1855 primary

passage 91 of 254 · CHAPTER I. *Childhood* > CHAPTER XIII. *The Vicissitudes of Slave Life* (6/6)

↪ you wandered here via “USS Chesapeake attack” — the connecting lines are tinted below

in brief
Douglass describes traveling from Baltimore to St. Michael’s in 1833, reflecting on a bitter feud that kept him from returning, and forming a plan to escape while watching steamers to Philadelphia.

was going without the hope of ever returning to Baltimore again; the feud between Master Hugh and his brother being bitter and irreconcilable, or, at least, supposed to be so.

In addition to thoughts of friends from whom I was parting, as I supposed, forever, I had the grief of neglected chances of escape to brood over. I had put off running away, until now I was to be placed where the opportunities for escaping were much fewer than in a large city like Baltimore.

On my way from Baltimore to St. Michael’s, down the Chesapeake bay, our sloop—the “Amanda”—was passed by the steamers plying between that city and Philadelphia, and I watched the course of those steamers, and, while going to St. Michael’s, I formed a plan to escape from slavery; of which plan, and matters connected therewith the kind reader shall learn more hereafter.

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topics: exile, wandering, and banishment · fate, destiny, and necessity · voyages and seafaring

My Bondage and My Freedom · Frederick Douglass · 1855