Edward Covey

Edward Covey was the Maryland farmer to whom Frederick Douglass was hired out in 1834 to be broken, and the fight between them is the turning point of Douglass's life as he told it. Covey was a poor man renting land near St Michaels, and his business model depended on his reputation: slaveholders sent him difficult young men for a year at a time, and he got a year of hard labour out of them at no wage while the owner got back someone compliant. Douglass, then about sixteen, was worked from before dawn in all weather and whipped roughly weekly for six months, and wrote that Covey succeeded in breaking him in body, soul and spirit. In August 1834, after collapsing in the field and being beaten for it, he walked to his owner to complain, was sent back, and when Covey came at him he fought - a fight in the stable yard lasting nearly two hours, which Covey neither won nor reported, because reporting it would have destroyed the reputation his livelihood rested on. Douglass wrote that he was never whipped again in his four remaining years of slavery, and that the fight rekindled the embers of freedom in him. Covey had also bought an enslaved woman named Caroline to bear children and forced a hired man on her, which Douglass describes directly. He lived out an obscure life and died in 1875. Almost everything known of him comes from the three autobiographies of the man he beat, which is a reversal of the ordinary way such records survive. Douglass returned to St Michaels as a free and famous man in 1877 and visited his former owner Thomas Auld, but not Covey. The Narrative of 1845 sold thirty thousand copies in five years and forced Douglass abroad, since naming Covey and Auld had identified him as a fugitive.

• Lived: 1806 CE – 1875 CE
• Nationality: American
• Roles: other