Thomas Auld

Thomas Auld legally owned Frederick Douglass, sent him to Edward Covey to be broken, and lived to be visited by him as a free and famous man. He was a shipbuilder's clerk in Maryland who acquired Douglass through his first wife's family, and it was his brother Hugh's wife in Baltimore who began teaching the boy to read until Hugh stopped her on the grounds that literacy would make him unfit to be a slave - the sentence Douglass said revealed to him the whole mechanism of the thing. Auld brought him back to the Eastern Shore in 1833, found him unmanageable, and hired him out to Covey for a year. Douglass wrote that Auld experienced religious conversion at a camp meeting in 1832 and became more cruel afterwards rather than less, using scripture to justify the whip, and the Narrative of 1845 named him. Douglass published an open letter to him on the tenth anniversary of his escape, addressed to a man he said he had once served and now intended to use as a means of exposing the system. Auld was reportedly stung enough to free his remaining slaves. In 1877 Douglass, by then a United States marshal, went to see him on his deathbed at St Michaels; the two men wept, Auld said that had he been in Douglass's place he would have run too, and Douglass withdrew an accusation from the Narrative he had come to believe was unfair to Auld's family. The reconciliation was criticised by abolitionists at the time. He died in 1880 aged eighty-five. Douglass wrote about the visit in the third and final version of his autobiography, published in 1881. The house at St Michaels still stands and is part of a heritage trail.

• Lived: 1795 CE – 1880 CE
• Nationality: American
• Roles: other