“I Love You but Hate Slavery”: Douglass Writes to a Former Master | by Lois E. Horton

An affectionate letter from Frederick Douglass to Hugh Auld illustrates the complexity  of emotional ties, family relations, and attachments to home that could connect  enslaved men and women and slaveholders. Those complex connections allowed Douglass  to write, “I ran away from you, or rather not from you but from Slavery. . . . I love you,  but hate Slavery,” to someone who had held him in bondage.1

Hugh and Sophia Auld were very important in Douglass’s formative years. Frederick  Douglass (then Frederick Bailey) was owned by Thomas Auld, Hugh’s brother, but lived  with Hugh and Sophia in Baltimore from age eight to age fifteen and returned to them  again at age eighteen until his escape from slavery two years later. In common with many  other slaves, Douglass never knew his date of birth, and he tried several times to get further  information about his age from the Aulds. He writes here to ask Hugh exactly when  he first came to live with them.

Douglass assures Auld that his response will not be published. This seemingly strange  statement was perhaps necessary because in 1848 Douglass had published an open letter  to Thomas Auld in his newspaper, the North Star, and republished it in the appendix to  his second autobiography, My Bondage and My Freedom. That letter was an anti-slavery  polemic from the former slave to his former master. Therein, he excoriated Thomas Auld  for abandoning Douglass’s grandmother, Betsy Bailey, to a lonely cabin in the woods in  her old age, an accusation for which he later publicly apologized.

Douglass spent his earliest years with his grandmother on the Eastern Shore; he remembered  only a few nocturnal visits from his mother, who was enslaved on a farm some  distance away. When he was six, his grandmother took him to live and work in the big  house on the Wye River plantation of US Senator Edward Lloyd, managed by Frederick’s  owner at the time, Aaron Anthony. When Anthony retired to one of his farms in 1826, he  took his slaves with him, while Anthony’s daughter, Lucretia, and her husband, Thomas  Auld, moved nearby to run a store. A short time later, Anthony and then Lucretia died,  and Thomas inherited ownership of Frederick. He was sent to live and work at the home of Thomas’s brother Hugh, a shipbuilder in Baltimore, his wife, Sophia, and their twoyear-  old son, Tommy.  While with the Aulds in Baltimore, Frederick became something of a big brother to  Tommy. Indeed, they may have had an indirect family relationship. Douglass was never  certain, but it is likely that Aaron Anthony was his father, which would have made him a  half-brother to Lucretia Auld, Tommy’s aunt by marriage.

Sophia, a religious woman from a poor family, first helped Frederick learn to read,  an ability crucial to his later accomplishments. Hugh tolerated though disapproved of  Sophia’s efforts. Douglass later agreed with Auld’s assertion that being able to read unsuited  him for slavery. When Douglass was fifteen, Thomas and Hugh had an argument  over Hugh’s refusal to take a maimed enslaved woman into his household, and Thomas  demanded that Frederick be returned.  

On his return, Thomas beat him regularly and then hired him out to a slave breaker  named Covey, with whom Douglass had a physical fight famously recounted in The  Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass as the occasion that marked his passage into  manhood. In 1836, after about three years, Douglass’s future was in great jeopardy. He  was jailed for leading a group of other young men in an unsuccessful escape attempt, but  instead of selling him farther south, Thomas Auld sent him back to Hugh in Baltimore.  There he worked in the shipyard as a caulker until his successful escape in 1838.  After publishing his Narrative in 1845, Douglass fled to England, and British abolitionists  applied to Thomas Auld to purchase his freedom. To effect the transaction,  Thomas sold Douglass to Hugh for $100. In 1846, abolitionists paid Hugh the equivalent  of about $700 in exchange for Douglass’s freedom papers.

In the second paragraph of this letter, Douglass mentions having seen Amanda, the  daughter of Thomas and Lucretia Auld. He hadn’t seen her in more than twenty years, since  she was a child. In 1859, Douglass was told that she had heard him speak in Philadelphia,  where she lived with her husband, John Sears. Learning this, Douglass visited Sears at his  office hoping to see Amanda and get information about his still-enslaved relatives. After  some hesitation, Sears staged a large gathering at their home, which Douglass suspected of  dramatically testing his recollection of Amanda. He did recognize Amanda, and she and  Frederick had a joyful reunion. Douglass spoke with her about her mother, Lucretia Auld,  who had died when Amanda was a child.

In writing to Hugh requesting information about his early life, Douglass drew  throughout the letter on the affection between himself as a child and youth and the family  of Hugh Auld. He had suffered in slavery and escaped from bondage to the Auld family,  but his hope for Auld’s cooperation rested on their complex relationship. Unfortunately,  Douglass never did learn the exact year of his birth.  

Hugh Auld Esq

Transcript of a letter from
Frederick Douglass to Hugh Auld, October 4, [ca.1859]
in Benjamin Auld’s hand, ca. 1890 1

Rochester Oct. 4th (1857)

My dear Sir.

My heart tells me that you are too noble to treat with indifference the request I am about to make, It is twenty years since I ran away from you, or rather not from you but from slavery, and since then I have often felt a strong desire to hold a little correspondence with you and to learn something of the position and prospects of your dear children. They were dear to me – and are still – indeed I feel nothing but kindness for you all – I love you, but hate Slavery, Now my dear Sir, will you favor me by dropping me a line, telling me in what year I came to live with you in Aliceanna St. the year the Frigate was built by Mr. Beacham.

The information is not for publication – and shall not be published.

We are all hastening where all distinctions are ended, kindness to the humblest will not be unrewarded Perhaps you have heard that I have seen Miss Amanda that was, Mrs. Sears that is, and was treated kindly such is the fact, Gladly would I see you and Mrs. Auld – or Miss Sopha as I used to call her. I could have lived with you during life in freedom though I ran away from you so unceremoniously, I did not know how soon I might be sold. But I hate to talk about that. A line from you will find me Addressed Fredk. Douglass Rochester N. York. I am dear sir very truly yours. Fred: Douglass

1. The original letter in Frederick Douglass’s hand, in the Charles Deering McCormick Library of Special Collections at Northwestern University, is dated only “October 4,” with no year. The copy in the Gilder Lehrman Collection shown here is a copy made by Benjamin Auld, Hugh and Sophia’s younger son, possibly in the 1890s. The addition of “1857” was probably a guess on Auld’s part. The reference in the letter to the meeting between Douglass and Amanda Sears suggests that the original letter was written circa 1859.