Frederick Douglass

Frederick Douglass was an American abolitionist, writer and public speaker who escaped from slavery in Maryland and became the most famous Black American of the nineteenth century. His autobiographies and speeches made him the leading voice of the campaign against slavery, and after the American Civil War he spent three decades fighting for the civil and political rights of freed people and of women.

Douglass was born Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, in Talbot County, probably in February 1818; like most enslaved people he never knew his exact birth date. His mother, Harriet Bailey, was enslaved, and his father was a white man, possibly his owner. He was raised mainly by his grandmother and saw his mother only a few times before her death when he was about seven.

As a boy he was sent to Baltimore to serve the family of Hugh Auld. Sophia Auld began teaching him the alphabet until her husband stopped her, saying that reading would make a slave unfit for slavery. Douglass took the lesson to heart and went on teaching himself, trading bread with white children for reading lessons and studying a schoolbook of speeches, The Columbian Orator. Sent back to the countryside as a teenager, he was hired out to Edward Covey, a farmer known for breaking resistant slaves through beatings. After months of abuse Douglass fought back, and Covey did not whip him again. He later described the fight as the turning point of his life.

On 3 September 1838, disguised as a sailor and carrying papers borrowed from a free Black seaman, Douglass escaped by train and steamboat from Baltimore to New York. Anna Murray, a free Black woman from Baltimore who had helped plan the escape, joined him there and they married. The couple settled in New Bedford, Massachusetts, where he took the surname Douglass to avoid slave catchers.

In 1841 he spoke at an antislavery meeting on Nantucket and was hired as a lecturer by William Lloyd Garrison's Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society. His speaking was so polished that some audiences doubted he had ever been enslaved. His answer was the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, published in 1845, which named people and places and became a bestseller. Because it exposed him to recapture, he spent nearly two years lecturing in Ireland and Britain, where supporters raised money to buy his freedom legally from his owner in 1846.

Back in the United States, Douglass moved to Rochester, New York, and in 1847 founded his own newspaper, The North Star, later Frederick Douglass' Paper. He broke with Garrison, who regarded the Constitution as a pro-slavery document and rejected voting, and came to argue that the Constitution could be used against slavery and that political action was necessary. His home in Rochester was a station on the Underground Railroad.

In 1848 he attended the Seneca Falls Convention and was one of the few men to back the resolution demanding votes for women. On 5 July 1852 he delivered his best-known speech, "What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?", contrasting American celebrations of liberty with the reality of slavery. He published a second, longer autobiography, My Bondage and My Freedom, in 1855. He knew the radical abolitionist John Brown but refused to join the raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859, and afterwards fled briefly abroad because he was suspected of involvement.

Douglass saw the war that began in 1861 as a chance to end slavery and argued from the start that Black men should be allowed to fight. Once the Union began enlisting Black soldiers in 1863, he recruited for the 54th Massachusetts Infantry, in which two of his sons served. That year he met President Abraham Lincoln at the White House to protest the unequal pay and treatment of Black troops. He was often critical of Lincoln's caution, but later spoke of him with respect. The Thirteenth Amendment of 1865 abolished slavery throughout the United States.

After the war Douglass campaigned for the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, which guaranteed citizenship and banned racial discrimination in voting. The question of whether Black men should get the vote before women strained his friendship with suffragists such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, though he remained a supporter of women's suffrage all his life.

He moved to Washington, D.C., edited the New National Era and was briefly president of the Freedman's Savings Bank shortly before it collapsed in 1874. A loyal Republican, he backed Ulysses S. Grant, and was appointed United States marshal for the District of Columbia in 1877 and recorder of deeds in 1881. He published a third autobiography, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, in 1881. From 1889 to 1891 he served as minister resident and consul general to Haiti, where he became caught up in an unsuccessful American attempt to lease a naval base.

Anna Murray Douglass died in 1882. In 1884 Douglass married Helen Pitts, a white feminist twenty years younger, a marriage that drew criticism from both Black and white Americans. He continued to speak against lynching and the retreat from Reconstruction in the South. On 20 February 1895, after attending a meeting of the National Council of Women, he died of a heart attack at Cedar Hill, his house in the Anacostia district of Washington, which is now a national historic site.

Douglass was among the most photographed Americans of his century and used portraits deliberately to counter racist caricatures. His autobiographies are central texts of American literature, and his insistence that the nation live up to its founding principles influenced later civil rights leaders, including Martin Luther King Jr., and is still cited across the political spectrum.