“The sight of the broad brim and the plain, Quaker dress,” he recalled later, “which met me at every turn, greatly increased my sense of freedom and security. _I am among the Quakers_, thought I, _and am safe_. Lying at the wharves and riding in the stream, were full-rigged ships of finest model, ready to start on whaling voyages. Upon the right and the left, I was walled in by large granite-fronted warehouses, crowded with the good things of this world. On the wharves, I saw industry without bustle, labor without noise, and heavy toil without the whip. There was no loud singing, as in Southern ports where ships are loading or unloading--no loud cursing or swearing--but everything went on as smoothly as the works of a well-adjusted machine. How different was all this from the noisily fierce and clumsily absurd manner of labor-life in Baltimore and St. Michaels! One of the first incidents which illustrated the superior mental character of Northern labor over that of the South, was the manner of unloading a ship’s cargo of oil. In a Southern port, twenty or thirty hands would have been employed to do what five or six did here, with the aid of a single ox hitched to the end of a fall. Main strength, unassisted by skill, is slavery’s method of labor. An old ox worth eighty dollars was doing in New Bedford what would have required fifteen thousand dollars’ worth of human bone and muscle to have performed in a Southern port.... The maid servant, instead of spending at least a tenth part of her time in bringing and carrying water, as in Baltimore, had the pump at her elbow. Wood-houses, indoor pumps, sinks, drains, self-shutting gates, washing machines, pounding barrels, were all new things, and told me that I was among a thoughtful and sensible people. The carpenters struck where they aimed, and the caulkers wasted no blows in idle flourishes of the mallet.”[1] He remembered little about the hardships of that first winter in the North, and only mentioned in passing that he was not permitted to use his skill as a caulker. Even here white labor shut the black worker out. The difference between the wage of a caulker and that of a common day-laborer was 50 per cent. But Frederick would not be stopped. He was free. So he sawed wood, dug cellars, shoveled coal, rolled oil casks on the wharves, loaded and unloaded vessels. It was the cold that he remembered. Nothing had prepared them for the cold--the silent, thick, gray cold that shut down like a vise over the land. The tiny house on a back street, which had seemed the fulfillment of their dreams, now was a porous shed. It had none of the Northern conveniences, and each trip through the snowdrifts to the distant well with its frozen buckets was a breath-taking effort.