Hugh Auld

Hugh Auld stopped his wife teaching Frederick Douglass to read, and in explaining why told the boy exactly how to become free. He was a Baltimore shipbuilder, the brother of Thomas Auld, and Douglass was sent to his household in 1826 at about eight to be a companion to his son. Sophia Auld had begun teaching him the alphabet; when Hugh found out he forbade it, saying that learning would forever unfit him to be a slave, that he would become unmanageable and of no value to his master, and that it would make him discontented and unhappy. Douglass, overhearing, understood that literacy was the thing being kept from him because it worked, and afterwards called it the first decidedly antislavery lecture he had heard. Auld later hired him out as a caulker in the Baltimore shipyards, took his wages, and beat him after white apprentices attacked him; that arrangement, in which Douglass earned money and handed it over, is what he was escaping when he took a train north in 1838 with a borrowed seaman's protection paper. After the Narrative was published in 1845 and named him, Auld reportedly swore to recapture him. In 1846 he agreed to sell Douglass's freedom for about seven hundred dollars, paid by British sympathisers, which is how Douglass became legally free. The two men met once more, in 1859. He died in 1861. The Baltimore shipyard where Douglass worked was Gardiner s, and the attack there in 1836 nearly cost him an eye. Douglass named the house on Aliceanna Street in the Narrative. Hugh died the year the war began.

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