Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey was born in February 1818 based on records from his former owner Aaron Anthony. Historian Dickson J. Preston determined this date using extant documents, though Douglass himself had no accurate knowledge of his age.
On the 3rd of September 1838, Frederick Douglass escaped by boarding a northbound train of the Philadelphia, Wilmington and Baltimore Railroad in Baltimore. He traveled dressed in a sailor's uniform provided to him by Anna Murray and carried identification papers obtained from a free black seaman.
Douglass set sail for Liverpool, England, on the 16th of August 1845 and later spent time in Scotland where he was appointed Scotland's Antislavery agent. Maps of the places in Edinburgh where he stayed are held by the National Library of Scotland.
After returning to the U.S. in 1847, Frederick Douglass started publishing his first abolitionist newspaper, the North Star, from the basement of the Memorial AME Zion Church in Rochester, New York. In 1870, he started his last newspaper, the New National Era, attempting to hold his country to its commitment to equality.
During his trip to Britain in 1846, British supporters led by Anna Richardson raised funds to buy his freedom from his American owner Thomas Auld. This legal purchase occurred while he was traveling in Ireland and England before he returned to America in the spring of 1847.