This quiet stretch of Fells Point streets is where an eight-year-old boy named Frederick Bailey arrived around 1826 to begin a life that would remake American history. Frederick Bailey — the name given to him at birth — was sent to Baltimore around 1826 at the age of eight to serve in the household of Hugh Auld on Aliceanna Street in Fells Point. Baltimore was a revelation.
The city's large free Black population, its thriving churches and social organizations, and the sheer density of urban life offered a vision of what Black freedom could look like that the isolated plantation never could. Sophia Auld, Hugh's wife, began teaching the boy to read before her husband ordered her to stop, explaining that education would make him unfit for slavery. The warning backfired.
Douglass later wrote in his autobiography that it was the most important lesson of his life: education and slavery were incompatible, which meant education was the path to freedom. He borrowed or traded for books wherever he could find them, paying white boys with bread in exchange for reading lessons. By the time he was a teenager he had read The Columbian Orator, a collection of political speeches that gave him the language of liberty.
His years in Baltimore produced a man who would become the most influential African American of the nineteenth century and one of the greatest orators in American history.