to thomas ault, he worked in the store in st. michaels. he is a 16-year-old boy. he was always complaining he was hungry. he had never done field work. he had never been a field hand. and ault had him out doing every kind of field work. now growing frederick bailey now hated it. a ault was the first master to whip him. he wasn't very good at it. ault gave up. for the better part of a year, rented douglass to one edward covey. edward covey became douglass master for a year between the ages of 16 and 17. edward covey beat douglass and terrorized him and broke his memory and broke him and lost his will. at one point he fled back to st. michaels and begged to be taken away from the fiend. ault said no. go back the next morning. he went back the next morning with his tail between his legs. it was a sunday. edward covey did not beat slaves on sunday, but on monday morning, he met douglass in the stables lifting hay. with a switch and according to douglass, he resisted and they fought, claimed douglass for two hours. i never believed that fight lasted two hours. maybe 20

the two likely candidates were aaron anthony, his first owner or thomas ault, his second owner. he never truly would know and we still don't. he was sent to live in baltimore to be the companion in 1827 of tommy ault, the nephew of his owner, thomas auld. and so he went. one of the first great breaks of douglas sl' life was indeed becoming an urban slave boy because there was there that his mistress so if i yao auld taught him the alphabet, gave him language. something his owners would live to regret. as did maybe others. no one took to words and language quite like this kid. we can't explain entirely his extraordinary gift for the music of words. the music of language that he heard in his head. but he did have a few sort of teachers. and one of them was sophia ault. until her husband, hugh, ordered home run after most of a year, stop teaching that save boy words and language. slaves are not to be literate. but nothing could stop him. he learned a lot about language in the streets of baltimore from little white boys. he made real friends among the little white boys. most of them

douglass, by then, a famous man, he went back to the eastern shore, this time with press following thomas ault's death bed in st. michael's, mare you or aren't y? he never found out, which in part of evidence that ault was probably not his ,as to pop that question. i can also tell you on his first ever visit back to maryland's eastern shore, the week after maryland became a fr s 1864, he went back to baltimore for the first time, free baltimore. he gave a speech. among the people that came up to him afterwards was a black woman, a bit older than him. she walked up and said, frederick, i'm your sister elysia. how are you doing? i named my first son for you. he extended family. black and white. d good deal of energy just trying to figure that out. it makes him, in some ways, a prototype of thousands if not millions of other americans, who either seek to discover the multiracial character of families and their past or who find out about it when someone tells them. yes, sir. >> did lincoln and douglass meet? >> yes. >> and i'd be interested, what was lincoln's impression? what did lincoln say about