He says that if he hadn’t been sent to Baltimore he might have never escaped his bonds until after the war.
But I’m not sure that the war, and emancipation, would have necessarily occurred the way that it did without his eloquent agitation for it.
In the list of those I credit for the demise of the institution of slavery in this country, I place Douglass at or very near the top.
The next two chapters explain how Douglass learned to read, which also required a particular set of circumstances. That is a key factor in his rise to prominence among the abolitionist movement in later years. The Lloyds and Aulds had no idea what they were unleashing by the the simple transfer of a slave to Baltimore.