Escaped slave who became the leading abolitionist voice in America.
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Frederick Douglass was born enslaved in February 1818 on Maryland's Eastern Shore, so uncertain of his own birthday that he later chose February 14 for himself. He never knew his father, a white man, and saw his mother only a few times before she died. Sent to Baltimore as a boy, he was taught the alphabet by his enslaver's wife until her husband forbade it, then taught himself to read with bread traded to poor white children for lessons. Reading, he wrote, showed him the pathway from slavery to freedom. Sent back to the country as a field hand, he was beaten by a so-called slave breaker until he fought back and won.
On September 3, 1838, disguised as a sailor and carrying papers borrowed from a free Black seaman, he rode the train north to New York, married Anna Murray, who had helped him escape, and took the name Douglass in New Bedford, Massachusetts. Three years later a speech at an antislavery meeting on Nantucket made him a paid lecturer, and his Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845) made him famous, so famous that he fled to Britain to avoid recapture until English friends bought his freedom. Back home he founded his own newspaper, The North Star, in Rochester, New York, broke with his mentor William Lloyd Garrison over whether the Constitution could be used against slavery, and stood with the women's rights movement at Seneca Falls in 1848. His 1852 speech asking what the Fourth of July meant to the enslaved remains one of the sharpest pieces of American oratory.
When the war came he pressed Abraham Lincoln relentlessly to make it a war against slavery and to arm Black men. After the Emancipation Proclamation he recruited for the 54th Massachusetts, where two of his sons served, and met Lincoln at the White House three times to argue for equal pay and protection for Black soldiers. After the war he fought for the Fifteenth Amendment and against the collapse of Reconstruction, and he held federal office as marshal and recorder of deeds for the District of Columbia and as minister to Haiti. He died at his home, Cedar Hill, in Washington on February 20, 1895, hours after speaking at a women's rights meeting. Harriet Tubman and Douglass admired each other; he once wrote to her that while he had worked in the daylight and been applauded, she had worked in the night with only the stars to witness. Follow his fight through the Civil War journey.
Further reading
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