17

HISTORICAL ANNOTATION 645

justified enslaving dark-skinned races on a misinterpretation of Noah's curse on
Ham. While most southern Christians did not believe that intellectual growth was
impossible for slaves, they envisioned such progress as occurring slowly and in
minuscule increments barely noticeable over the course of centuries. George M.
Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on
Afro-American
Destiny, 1817-1914 (New York, 1971), 43-96; David M. Goldenberg, The Curse of
Ham: Race and Slavery in Early Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (Princeton, N.J.,
2003), 167; Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The
Origins of American
Racial Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge, Mass., 1981), 116-57; William Stanton, The
Leopard's Spots: Scientific Attitudes toward Race in America,
1815-59 (Chicago,
1960), 92-97, 100; Christopher A. Luse, "Slavery's Champions Stood at Odds:
Polygenesis and the Defense of Slavery," CWH, 53:379-412 (December 2007);
Arthur Riss, "The Art of Discrimination," English Literary History, 71:251-87
(Spring 2004).
8.14-15 His encounter with the overseer of the eastern shore plantation] An allusion
to Douglass's audacious fight with the Maryland yeoman farmer Edward Covey
(c. 1806-75), who had been given oversight of Douglass by Thomas Auld for the year
1834. Covey started out as a farm-renter in Talbot County, Maryland, but managed to
accumulate $23,000 in real estate by 1850. Covey's reputation as a slave breaker
enabled him to rent or even to receive the free use of field hands from local slave
owners anxious to have their slaves taught proper discipline. Harriet Lucretia
Anthony, the great-granddaughter of Aaron Anthony, remembered that "Mr. Covey
was really noted for his cruelty and meanness." Inventory of the Estate
of Edward
Covey, 15 May 1875, Talbot County Inventories, TNC#3, 578, MdTCH; Harriet L.
Anthony, annotated copy of Bondage and Freedom, folders 93, 203, Dodge
Collection, MdAA; 1850 U.S. Census, Maryland, Talbot County, 240 (free schedule);
Preston, Young Frederick Douglass, 117-31.
8. 16 unwritten rule of law] According to Maryland law, death was the punishment
for any slave who refused to surrender himself or herself or resisted apprehension.
The code actually permitted the pursuer of a resisting slave to "shoot,
kill, and
destroy such negro or negroes." The General Public Statutory Law
and Public Local
Law of the State of Maryland From the Year 1692 to 1839, 3 vols.
(Baltimore, 1840),
1:65.
8.18-19 plotting with other...giving them passes] In 1836 Douglass and five
other slaves plotted to escape via a stolen ship from Talbot County, Maryland, to the
North. Douglass recounts this failed effort in chapter 19 of this autobiography.
8.19-20 the unequal...ship yard] Douglass was apprenticed as a ship's caulker in
William Gardner's Baltimore shipyard in 1836. The attack on Douglass by white
shipyard workers at Gardner's wharf occurred approximately eight months after he
began employment there and is described in chapter 20 of this autobiography.
McFeely, Frederick Douglass, 58-63.
9.7 John Brown meeting] Newspaper reports vary significantly on the details of