Chapter 3 - Page 2

and that slave-hunters and spies were numerous, that old residents of the city were not safe, and that any recent fugitive was in imminent danger. After this cheerful communication Douglass's informant left him, evidently fearing that Douglass himself might be a slave-hunting spy. There were negroes base enough to play this role. In a sailor whom he encountered he found a friend. This Good Samaritan took him home for the night, and accompanied him next day to a Mr. David Ruggles, a colored man, the secretary of the New York Vigilance Committee and an active antislavery worker. Mr. Ruggles kept him concealed for several days, during which time the woman Douglass loved, a free woman, came on from Baltimore; and they were married. He had no money in his pocket, and nothing to depend upon but his hands, which doubtless seemed to him quite a valuable possession, as he knew they had brought in an income of several hundred dollars a year to their former owner.

Douglass's new friends advised him to go to New Bedford, Massachusetts, where whaling fleets were fitted out, and where he might hope to find work at his trade of ship-calker. It was believed, too, that he would be safer there, as the anti-slavery sentiment was considered too strong to permit a fugitive slave's being returned to the South.

When Douglass, accompanied by his wife, arrived in New Bedford, a Mr. Nathan Johnson, a colored man to whom he had been recommended, received him kindly, gave him shelter and sympathy, and lent him a small sum of money to redeem his meagre baggage, which had been held by the stage-driver as security for an unpaid balance of the fare to New Bedford. In his autobiography Douglass commends Mr. Johnson for his "noble-hearted hospitality and manly character."

In New York Douglass had changed his name in order the better to hide his identity from any possible pursuer. Douglass's name was another tie that bound him to his race. He has been called "Douglass" by the writer because that was the name he took for himself, as he did his education and his freedom; and as "Douglass" he made himself famous. As a slave, he was legally entitled to but one name,--Frederick. From his grandfather, Isaac Bailey, a freeman, he had derived the surname Bailey. His mother, with unconscious sarcasm, had called the little slave boy Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey. The bearer of this imposing string of appellations had, with a finer sense of fitness, cut it down to Frederick Bailey. In New York he had called himself Frederick Johnson; but, finding when he reached New Bedford that a considerable portion of the colored population of the city already rejoiced in this familiar designation, he fell in with the suggestion of his host, who had been reading Scott's _Lady of the Lake_, and traced an analogy between the runaway slave and the fugitive chieftain, that the new freeman should call himself Douglass, after the noble Scot