Ariannas

Here are a couple of oddities

Frederick had a younger sister named Arianna, born around October 1822, four years after himself, two years after the sister between them, and three years before their youngest sister. He also had a cousin named Arianna, who was about a decade younger than his mother.*

In late 1826 or early 1827, Lucretia Auld gave birth to a little girl. The little girl was named Arianna.

Lucretia, as you may remember, was the daughter of Aaron Anthony, Frederick's first master, and the wife of Thomas Auld, Frederick's second master.

Slave babies sometimes received the names of members of the white family, but the reverse seems unusual. So, how to account for a baby in the white family being given the same name as a slave baby?  A popular name? Since masters could exercise control of the naming of slave babies, was Arianna a favorite name of Anthony, so he gave the name to the eldest Arianna and his grandchild, with Frederick's sister being named for her cousin? Was this a name in the Skinner family -- the family of Anthony's wife -- that I have not yet discovered?

Both enslaved Ariannas appear on the Anthony inventory and division documents, the elder Arianna valued at $200 and the younger at $5. The other women of Arianna the elder's age received the same appraisal. Arianna the younger, however, was appraised $70 lower than two of other five year olds and $65 lower than yet another five-year old on the list, $25 lower than the two year-old boy and $20 lower than each of the two-year old girls, $15 lower than one of the one-year olds, and even $5 lower than her younger, one year old sister. In other words, what about her made her so unattractive to the appraisers and at such an early age?

In the division of the Anthony estate, the elder Arianna went to Richard Anthony and the younger Arianna went to Andrew Anthony, whom Frederick dreaded for his intemperance


----------------------------
*I'm actually uncertain of the exact relationship, and have to get back to the U.S. to look at the Dodge Collection with greater precision. Dickson Preston did not go that wide in his genealogy tables in Young Frederick Douglass. Right now, I think she was probably sister to Katy, the cook, since their parents comprised one of the two families included in Ann Skinner Anthony's dowry.

Where Was Douglass Between 1826 and 1827?

In spring 1826, Frederick sailed to Baltimore to live with Hugh and Sophia Auld as a babysitter or nanny to their two-year-old son Thomas. In the fall, Aaron Anthony, Lucretia's father and Frederick's master, died at Lucretia and Thomas Auld’s home in Hillsboro, Talbot County, not too far from where Douglass had lived as a very small child.

Between Anthony’s death in November and the inventory of his estate in December, Frederick returned to Talbot County for appraisal as part of Anthony’s estate. The list showing the valuation of Frederick and his family, the people owned by Anthony, bears the date 26 December 1826. The list demonstrating the division of the people to the three heirs bears the date 27 Sept 1827. In July 1827, Lucretia died.

In his accounts, Douglass wrote that he learned of Lucretia’s death only after he returned to Baltimore. His most recent biographers express perplexity as to the reason he would not have known of her death, since, they presume, he would have been there in the county at the time. William McFeely posits that no one told Frederick about Lucretia's death until later, clearly assuming that Frederick did not see her at all during his time back in the country. All appear to believe that Douglass arrived in Talbot County shortly before the valuation document was created and left after the division document was drawn up.

Douglass himself did not clearly depict what happened during this process. He told of returning to Talbot County. He explained the valuation and, on the heels of that explanation, told of his family’s fears of the division. In reading his autobiographies, an audience could imagine that all of the slaves were, as William McFeely described in Frederick Douglass, gathered in one place on one day, lined up, appraised like livestock, and then separated into various groups and led off to their new masters.

The dates of the documents, however, suggest that both took place at vastly different times, nearly a year apart. Douglass revealed very little about what actually happened at the valuation and division. For instance, although he worried about his grandmother’s fate, he wrote nothing of seeing her. The only relative he specifically noted as encountering was his older brother Perry. He also said nothing specifically of meeting his potential masters or mistress, with the exception of Andrew Anthony, whom he described as beating and kicking Perry in the head then threatening to do the same to Frederick.* The autobiographies served as abolitionist propaganda, meant to describe the violence done to slave bodies, families, and communities, so his description of this episode steps away from the strictly personal to describe a process in general. So, his depiction eliminated the intimacy of his experience in order to focus upon the reduction of humans to property and the violation of kinship ties as a result.

What actually happened, then? My hypothesis is this. Anthony died and his executors called all of his slave property to Talbot County for appraisal. Most of Frederick’s kin seems to have lived within the county on Anthony’s farms or hired out, so the appraisers could go to see them easily and estimate their price on the slave market. Baltimore was probably too far, so they called him back. Once the estate managers had fixed his dollar value -- $110 in 1826, or $2092.15 in 2010 – they had no reason to keep him about since the division itself would first take place on paper and the new masters would decide where to move their new property, if they so chose.

Furthermore, if any cash changed hands for Frederick’s services in Baltimore, he seems to have been oblivious to the transaction; but, if his work brought his master an income, then whether or not he became the property of Thomas Auld or one of Lucretia’s brothers, any time he spent away from Baltimore or not working in some capacity was lost income for the estate. If he was not earning his master an income, he at least was not eating his master’s food or costing his master anything for his upkeep, all of which fell to Hugh Auld, as far as seems reasonable. Therefore, keeping Frederick in the country, doing nothing in particular that he mentioned, was not a prudent financial decision.

More likely, Frederick arrived in Talbot County, was appraised, and then was sent back, all lasting a total of a few weeks – which he stated was the length of the duration of his trip. Even if the trip lasted as long as the six months that he said it felt, he would have returned in May or June, before Lucretia’s death in July. Thus, he actually did only learn of her death after the fact.

-------------------------
*Perry, incidentally, was probably inherited by Andrew since he was later inherited by Andrew’s son, Joseph. When I checked on this bit of information for this post, I realized that Perry did not appear on the division list, nor did one or two other men listed in the valuation list. Now, I have some questions for those documents, and will have to analyze them a bit more rigorously. On first glance, they seem to include only the women, older men, and children; but I may be wrong. In any case, why isn't Perry on that list?

Image: Illustration from My Bondage and My Freedom (1855): http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/douglass55/ill1.html

Lucretia Auld and Frederick Bailey/Douglass

Douglass treated Lucretia Auld very well in his autobiographies. When a cousin wounded him in the forehead, leaving the permanent scar above the bridge of his nose that added to the intensity of his gaze in photographs, Lucretia bound him up. When he grew hungry, he discovered that, if he sang under her window, she would give him bread. She gave him his first pair of pants for his trip to Baltimore to stay with her in-laws, Hugh and Sophia Auld. He contrasted Lucretia with Aunt Katy, the cook in the kitchen, who was his grandmother's niece. Katy, roughly his own mothers age (and mistakenly referred to as "Katy Emblem" in some secondary sources), he described as starving and otherwise abusing him.

Some historians have overblown Lucretia's kindness by misunderstanding Douglass's account. They portray Lucretia as interceding for little Frederick. Yet, Frederick never specifically said that she did that. She just bound his bleeding head once, and gave him bread when he entertained her. Sending him to Baltimore had little to do with saving him from Katy or anyone else.

Historians also make much of his alleged special treatment at her hands, but they fail to take into account that he described his own experiences without the context of the other children around him. They attribute this alleged special treatment to their alleged kinship as half-siblings and to Frederick's supposed obvious exceptionalism. No evidence exists to suggest that the kinship would have made her treat him specially, especially if she did not treat his siblings -- who would also have been her half-siblings -- with the same consideration. In fact, he himself suggested that kinship might mean worse treatment when he told the tale of the planter Edward Lloyd's enslaved son whose white brother send him to the auction block. The exceptionalism too comes from Douglass's portrayal of himself in isolation and from biographers' tendency to see backward in time, attempting to pinpoint brilliance at an early age in order to explain the genius as an adult.

Frederick's "special" treatment may simply have been a result of being in the right place at the right time. Sure, he was smart in figuring out a way to manipulate Lucretia to feed him, but she probably just thought he was cute and amusing. When her sister-in-law, expecting a new baby, wanted a young boy to keep watch on her two-year-old son, Lucretia looked out her window and saw an older boy, who had a little cultivation through his association with David Lloyd (another white son of the planter Edward Lloyd), could entertain, and was approaching the age in which he would be sent somewhere for some purpose. Why not send him? Frederick's cousin Henny was probably sent to Baltimore a few years later for the same purpose. Her story did not end so well, but that is for another time.

Meanwhile, Lucretia, from her mother's death, oversaw the home in which both Frederick and Aunt Katy lived. Katy seemed to have had charge of the children sent to live in the kitchen, all between the ages of six and nine, but Lucretia was in charge of Katy. That would mean that the rations given to Katy to feed the children came from Lucretia. Lucretia, as mistress of the house, had the power to intercede and ensure that the children were fed more, if she so chose. She did not.

---------------------------
Illustration from Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1882) depicting Harriet Bailey, his mother, defending him against Aunt Katy.

Obituary for Thomas Auld in the Baltimore Sun, Feb. 12, 1880

Funeral of an Old Marylander -- The funeral of Capt. Thomas Auld, who died near St. Michael's on Sunday last, as stated in t THE SUN, took place yesterday. he was buried by the side of his first wife, who was a Miss Anthony, and in whose right Capt. Auld was some time the owner of Frederick Douglass. Several of the grandchildren of Capt. Auld, daughters of Mr. John L. Sayers, who live in this city, attended the funeral. Capt. Auld was 84 years old, a native of Talbot county, and for many years commanded the Easton packet-boat, running between that place and Baltimore city.. Subsequently he was engaged in farming, and at the time of his death resided with his son-in-law, Mr. John C. Harper. Captain Auld leaves also a daughter living in Texas, Mrs. Wm. Bruff. He was married four times and survived all of his wives, whose maiden names were Miss Lucretia Anthony, Miss Hamilton, Miss Annie Harper and Miss Lucretia Thompson. When he married his last wife Captain Auld was over seventy years of age. He also has a nephew in this city, Lieut. B.F. Auld, of the Baltimore police force. The father of Lieut. Auld, Mr. Hugh Auld, held a bill of sale from his brother, Capt. Auld, for Fred. Douglass, (or Bailey, as he was named when owned by that family,) and when the purchase money was paid for the freedom of Douglass, some time after his escape, it was sheared equally between the two brothers. The father of Capt. Auld was in command of the American troops in Talbot county during the war of 1812, and when the British forces went to land at Bayside, the two youths, Thomas and Hugh, were employed to give intelligence of their movements. Capt. Auld was widely known and greatly respected throughout the county in which he lived.

Thomas Auld may be one of the few former slaveholders whose obituary named one of his former slaves and indicates that he, the owner, was renowned for owning that particular slave.

In 1826, Lucretia Auld inherited part of the extended Bailey family upon the death of her father, Aaron Anthony. The part of the family included Frederick, his older sister Eliza, his aunts Milly and Hester, several cousins, and a baby who was probably his youngest sister, Harriet, only about a year old. Their value totaled $935.00 -- that's $17,783.30 in 2010 dollar amounts. Lucretia died in July 1827. Her husband, Thomas Auld, inherited her property and thereby became the master. In 1828, he married Rowena Hambleton -- not "Hamilton." Both Lucretia and Rowena appeared in his autobiographies, one very favorably and one less so.

Lieutenant B.F. Auld was Benjamin Franklin Auld, son of Hugh and Sophia Auld. He did not appear in Douglass's autobiographies but was born in 1828, during the time that Douglass lived in the Auld household in Baltimore. He and Douglass corresponded in later decades, Douglass asking him for details of the Aulds' fates and of his own childhood.

Mr. John L. Sears -- not "Sayers" -- married Arianna Amanda Auld, daughter of Lucretia and Thomas Auld. Douglass visited Arianna Sears in 1859 when she lived in Philadelphia, just before he learned of the failure of John Brown's raid at Harpers Ferry, which forced him to leave a bit early and much more clandestinely than planned for an English tour. He also visited her again on her deathbed. Neither seemed to have cared for Rowena Auld, who died in the 1840s.

Mrs. William Bruff, as far as I can tell, was Louisa Auld Bruff, the daughter of Thomas and Rowena. In the 1880s, she offered to sell her St. Michael's home to Douglass for a somewhat inflated price. He seems to have declined the offer. Instead, he later bought a summer home in the black middle class community, Highland Beach.

The father of Hugh and Thomas -- and Arian, Edward, Zepporah, Willison, Washington, Sarah and Haddaway -- was Hugh Auld, Sr. He was in the militia in Talbot County during the War of 1812. He also appears to have owned slaves for a period of time in the first decade of the 1800s, but did not keep them. Dickson Preston says that he freed them, but gave no source for that information.  He also says that the land owned by the Auld, Sr., was sold by him to Thomas Kemp (no relation to my grandfather, as far as I know, whose ancestors were in southern Mississippi at the time), but the documents that he cites near that statement say that the property was sold at a Sheriff's Sale on the order of Auld's creditors.  The Aulds with which I am concerned, both Hughs and Thomas, as well as an Edward (probably the brother of the older Hugh), were all involved in maritime trade on the Chesapeake -- the packets from Baltimore to Talbot County -- and in shipbuilding.

I've been trying to piece all of this together in the past week because there is more to Lucretia, Sophia, and Rowena Auld than Douglass himself let on or his biographers have investigated.

Image of Thomas Auld from

Dickson J. Preston,Young Frederick Douglass, the Maryland Years

(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), 109.