There is a detail about Frederick Douglass's escape from slavery that tends to get lost in the telling.
There is a detail about Frederick Douglass's escape from slavery that tends to get lost in the telling. He did not escape alone. Before Douglass boarded that train north in 1838, before he became the most celebrated abolitionist speaker in America, before the autobiographies and the speeches and the audiences that hung on every word — there was a young woman in Baltimore who made all of it possible. Her name was Anna Murray. She had been born free in Denton, Maryland in 1813 — the first of her parents' children to enter the world without chains, just a month after her mother and father had been manumitted. Freedom was the first thing she ever owned. She understood, with the particular clarity of someone who had watched her older siblings born into bondage, exactly what it was worth. By seventeen, Anna had moved to Baltimore and established herself as a laundress and housekeeper, earning a real income in one of the country's most complex cities — a place where tens of thousa...