x.com/Gena_I_Gorlin/status/2044936785159946449
1 correction found
After escaping slavery, his first job was loading coal onto ships.
Douglass did not say his first job as a free man was loading coal onto ships. In his autobiographies, he says his first paid work was handling coal at a house and then stowing a sloop with oil; he does not describe a first ship-loading job involving coal.
Full reasoning
Douglass's own accounts contradict this wording.
In Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845), he writes that his first paid work after arriving in New Bedford was "stowing a sloop with a load of oil" and says this was "the first work, the reward of which was to be entirely my own." He does not say the cargo was coal.
In his later autobiography Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, he is even more specific about the sequence: first he carried a pile of coal into Rev. Ephraim Peabody's house, and then "My next job was stowing a sloop ... with a cargo of oil for New York." So the coal job was household labor, not loading coal onto ships, and the first ship cargo he identifies was oil, not coal.
The post's description appears to blend these two separate details into a single inaccurate claim.
2 sources
- Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave | Library of Congress
"I found employment, the third day after my arrival, in stowing a sloop with a load of oil.... It was the first work, the reward of which was to be entirely my own."
- Life and Times of Frederick Douglass | Project Gutenberg
"On my way down Union street I saw a large pile of coal ... You may put it away" and then "My next job was stowing a sloop at Uncle Gid. Howland's wharf with a cargo of oil for New York."