Immediately after his arrival in New York, he married a free African American woman he had met in 1837 in Baltimore and who came to New York with him, Anna Murray. As a slave, of course, he would not have been permitted to marry without his master’s consent. To avoid being discovered and returned to slavery, he stopped using the last name Bailey, and called himself Frederick Johnson. The newlyweds moved on north to New Bedford, Massachusetts, and were assisted by a black couple, Mary and Nathan Johnson, who were associated with the abolitionist movement.
[After 1837] Frederick decided to change his last name again, and asked Nathan Johnson to choose a new one for him. He insisted, however, that he keep his first name. Johnson had been reading Sir Walter Scott’s epic narrative poem The Lady of the Lake, a literary sensation of the nineteenth century. He picked the name of the leader of the Scottish clan Douglas, one of the poem’s key figures. Frederick chose to spell his new last name with a slight difference – a double‘s’. With his new wife Anna he thus adopted the new name he would keep for the rest of his life and would make world famous – Frederick Douglass.
