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CHAPTER II.
LIFE AS A FREEMAN.

My free life began on the third of September, 1838. On the morning of the 4th of that month after an anxious and most perilous but safe journey, I found myself in the big city of New York, a free man; one more added to the mighty throng^{†At the time of Douglass's arrival in 1838, New York City was America's largest, with a population of approximately 300,000. Burgeoning with new immigrant populations from Germany and Ireland, the city had become home to peoples from across Europe. The Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Wards, located south of Canal Street, were the city's most densely populated and the homes of the majority of the newly immigrated. Douglass found himself in the midst of this community; Ruggles's home on Lispenard Street was one block south of Canal Street. New York Times, 17 July 1921; Jay P. Dolan, "Immigrants in the City: New York's Irish and German Catholics," CH, 41:354-55 (September 1972).} which like the confused waves of the troubled sea, surged to and fro between the lofty walls of Broadway.^{†Central to the culture and business of nineteenth-century New York City, Broadway bustled with activity. The avenue was marked with stores, fancy hotels, and theaters that provided inexpensive entertain-ment to New Yorkers of all social classes. In 1836 John Jacob Astor opened a six-story 300-room hotel on Broadway, just west of City Hall Park. Called first the Park Hotel, and later renamed the Astor House, it would be the most prestigious hotel in the nation for many decades. Broadway was a center of constant activity, and trying to cross the street was considered risky because it was crowded with carriages and omnibuses. The street was home to America's first department stores and gained a reputation as a fashionable shopping district by midcentury. The five-block strip intersected by Canal, Grand, Broome, Spring, Prince, and Houston Streets was an especially popular area for window-shoppers who found Broadway to be the perfect promenade. Broadway became a more serious business district as it reached beyond the City Hall Park area, where publishers, law firms, and newspapers found a fashionable address for their business. Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (New York, 1999), 404, 436, 600, 668, 692 .} Though dazzled with the wonders which met me on every hand my thoughts could not be much withdrawn from my strange situation. For the moment the dreams of my youth and the hopes of my manhood, were completely fulfilled. The bonds that had held me to "old master" were broken. No man now had a right to call me his slave or assert mastery over me. I was in the rough and tumble of an outdoor world, to take my chance with the rest of its busy number. I have often been asked, how I felt, when first I found myself on free soil. And my readers may share the same curiosity. There is scarcely anything in my experience about which I could not give a more satisfactory answer. A new world had opened upon me. If life is more than breath, and the "quick round or blood,"^{†Douglass possibly quotes a passage in Philip James Bailey's (1816-1902) epic poem Festus, which first appeared anonymously in 1839; "Life's more than breath, and the quick round of blood./ It is a great spirit and a busy heart./ The coward and the small in soul scarce do live./ One generous feeling--one great thought--one deed/ Of good, ere night, would make life longer seem/ Than if each year might number a thousand days." Philip James Bailey, Festus, 8th ed. (London, 1866), 47.} I lived more in one day than in a year of my slave life. It was a time of joyous excitement which words can but tamely describe. In a letter written to a friend soon after reaching New York I said: "I felt as one might feel upon escape from a den of hungry lions."^{†Douglass alludes to the story of Daniel and the lions' den. Dan. 6:1-28.} Anguish and grief, like darkness and rain may be depicted; but gladness and joy, like the rainbow, defy the skill of pen or pencil. During ten or fifteen years I had, as it were, been dragging a heavy chain, which no strength of mine could break; I was not only a slave but a slave, for life. I might become a husband, a father, an aged man, but through all, from birth to death, from the cradle to the grave, I had felt myself doomed. All efforts I had previously made to secure my freedom, had not only failed, but had seemed only to rivet my fetters the more firmly, and to render my escape more difficult. Baffled, entangled, and discouraged, I had at times asked myself the question. May not my condition after all be God's work, and ordered for a wise purpose, and if so, was not submission my duty? A contest had in fact been going on in my mind for a long time, between the clear consciousness of right, and the plausible make-shifts of theology and superstition. The one held me an abject slave—a prisoner