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.

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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.

A Snag in Chapter One

I get trapped in my periodization sometimes. Originally, Chapter 1 broke down neatly into mothers and mistresses, with little overlap. Douglass's mother, the near non-entity he struggled to know as he wrote his autobiographies, is followed by his grandmother, whom he knew better and longer for the first few years of his memory. Then, he moved under the supervision of Lucretia Auld, then Sophia Auld, then Rowena Auld, then Sophia Auld again, then he ran away.

As I begin to get deeper into the story, this arrangement, which is a good skeleton, is far too simple. The mother and grandmother overlap; and, in the telling, the grandmother comes second, not first. At the Anthony house, where Lucretia moves to the front of the story, her counterpoint in the kitchen, Aunt Katy, begins to demand space (and she was quite the demanding woman in Douglass's version of events). Rowena Auld is little more than a guard dog of the pantry, and Douglass spent few months under her supervision for her to merit too much attention. During those months, however, it seems that his sister Eliza has some small role that he suggested but upon which he did not elaborate. His cousin Henny also pushes her way into the story. Yet, in this particular series of episodes in which he lived in Talbot County as a teenager, he carefully constructed and described a male-dominated world. Sophia he knew the longest and most intimately, and she appeared and re-appeared three times in his life. She will take up a good chunk of the chapter, and she will also reappear in a later chapter.

My initial divisions, too, have not taken into account the women scattered throughout his autobiographies who suffered brutal beatings and, he implied, rape. In fact, I’m pretty sure that, while he spoke in general terms of men being beaten, he described specific instances of beatings as happening to women (and one elderly man). I can buy that he saw few black women when he was hired out as a field hand in his teens in Talbot County, but in Baltimore, where he spent over half of his life until his escape, black women were in the majority. He only mentioned two, and they were beaten by a neighbor. As for free black women, he mentioned Sandy’s wife only. Otherwise, you would never know that black women could be free in Fells Point until you get to his marriage in New York to Baltimorean Anna Murray who, by the way, he mentioned in a footnote in the Narrative, was free.

As I organized this chapter, I had overlooked women who were not the primary caretakers of Douglass. Since this chapter has to do with his formative experiences with women and, by extension, his formative experiences with race, I cannot omit these women and the function that they served in creating the world in which he grew up. I also cannot omit the fact that he uses their stories in making his own point and that those stories only told what he saw and could use. He was not maliciously appropriating their lives, he seemed to be trying to speak for them when they could not, but he did not know or relate much more of their story than the beating, and they might have told the story in a different way. These often unnamed women haunt this chapter in a way that I have not yet fully incorporated and I have to do something with the absence of the free black women from his autobiographies.