Frederick Douglass

• 1. Introduction

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  Frederick Douglass had no birth certificate, no record of his own age, and no settled name. He was born Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey into slavery on the Eastern Shore of the Chesapeake Bay in Talbot County, Maryland. He never knew the exact day he came into the world. So he chose one. He picked February 14, remembering that his mother had called him her Little Valentine. That single act, a man inventing his own birthday, captures something about the whole life. Here was someone who had to build himself from almost nothing, against a system designed to keep him from reading, from speaking, from being counted as a person at all.

  Northerners who heard him speak could not believe such a great orator had ever been a slave. He wrote his first book partly to answer their disbelief. That book became a bestseller. How does a child forbidden to read become the most photographed American of his century? How does a man who escaped bondage end up conferring with presidents, touring Europe, and refusing to smile for the camera on purpose? And why, after breaking with the most famous abolitionist of the age, would he say of his enemies, I would unite with anybody to do right and with nobody to do wrong?

• 2. The Forbidden Alphabet

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  When Douglass was about 12 years old, Sophia Auld began teaching him the alphabet. He had been sent from a Maryland plantation to Baltimore, to serve Hugh Auld and his wife Sophia. From the day he arrived, Sophia saw that he was fed, clothed, and given a bed with sheets and a blanket. He described her as kind and tender-hearted, a woman who treated him as she supposed one human being ought to treat another.

  Hugh Auld put a stop to the lessons. He believed literacy would make an enslaved person desire freedom. Douglass later called this the first decidedly antislavery lecture he had ever heard. Very well, thought I, he wrote. Knowledge unfits a child to be a slave. From that moment he understood the direct pathway from slavery to freedom.

  Sophia, under her husband's influence, came to believe the same thing in reverse. She snatched a newspaper away from him and hid her Bible and every other reading material. So Douglass turned to white children in the neighborhood, learning his letters from them and from the writings of the men he worked beside. Knowledge is the pathway from slavery to freedom, he often said. Around age 12 he found a classroom reader called The Columbian Orator, an anthology of essays, speeches, and dialogues first published in 1797. He credited it with clarifying his views on freedom and human rights. Later he learned his own mother had been literate too, a fact he treasured above any claim of his unknown white paternity.

• 3. How A Slave Was Made A Man

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  In 1833, Thomas Auld took Douglass back from Hugh and sent him to Edward Covey, a poor farmer with a reputation as a slave-breaker. Covey whipped him so often the wounds had no time to heal. Douglass said the beatings broke his body, soul, and spirit. He described himself in his Narrative as a man transformed into a brute.

  The 16-year-old finally fought back. After Douglass won the physical confrontation, Covey never tried to beat him again. He came to see that fight as the hinge of his entire life. You have seen how a man was made a slave, he wrote. You shall see how a slave was made a man.

  In 1837, Douglass met and fell in love with Anna Murray, a free Black woman in Baltimore about five years his senior. Her free status strengthened his belief that he too could be free. She encouraged him, aided him, and gave him money. On the 3rd of September 1838, dressed in a sailor's uniform she had provided and carrying a free Black seaman's identification papers, he boarded a northbound train out of Baltimore. He crossed the Susquehanna by steam-ferry, passed through Wilmington, Delaware, and reached Philadelphia, then went on to the safe house of abolitionist David Ruggles in New York City. His entire journey to freedom took less than 24 hours. He later wrote that he felt as one might feel upon escape from a den of hungry lions.

• 4. Choosing A Name

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  Anna Murray followed him north, and they married on the 15th of September 1838, just eleven days after he reached New York. At first they took the name Johnson to divert attention. The couple settled in New Bedford, Massachusetts, an abolitionist center full of former enslaved people, then moved to Lynn in 1841.

  Johnson proved far too common a name in New Bedford. Douglass wanted something more distinctive and asked Nathan Johnson, his host, to choose for him. Nathan had been reading Walter Scott's poem The Lady of the Lake, in which two principal characters carry the surname Douglas. He suggested it, and the man born Bailey became Douglass.

  He and Anna had five children: Rosetta, Lewis Henry, Frederick Jr., Charles Remond, and Annie, who died at the age of 10. Charles and Rosetta helped produce his newspapers. Anna remained a loyal supporter of his public work, though she never learned to read. After her death in 1882, he married Helen Pitts in 1884, a white suffragist from Honeoye, New York, and a graduate of Mount Holyoke. The marriage drew a storm of controversy because Pitts was white and nearly 20 years younger. Douglass answered the critics simply. His first marriage had been to someone the color of his mother, his second to someone the color of his father.

• 5. The Pen And The Platform

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  Some skeptics in 1845 questioned whether a Black man could have written Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. Composed during his years in Lynn, the book became an immediate bestseller. Within three years it had been reprinted nine times, with 11,000 copies circulating in the United States, and it was translated into French and Dutch for European readers. He went on to publish My Bondage and My Freedom in 1855, and Life and Times of Frederick Douglass in 1881, revising it in 1892.

  Douglass first heard William Lloyd Garrison speak in 1841, in Liberty Hall, New Bedford. At a later meeting he was unexpectedly invited to tell his own story, and was urged to become an anti-slavery lecturer. Days afterward, at age 23, he gave an eloquent account of his life as a slave at the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society's convention in Nantucket. He came to call Garrison's paper, The Liberator, second only to the Bible in his heart.

  The lecturing carried real danger. In 1843, on the American Anti-Slavery Society's Hundred Conventions tour, a mob in Pendleton, Indiana, chased and beat him until a Quaker family, the Hardys, rescued him. His hand was broken and healed improperly, bothering him for the rest of his life. By 1847 he could write to Garrison, I have no love for America, as such. The institutions of this country, he said, did not recognize him as a man.

• 6. Crossing The Ocean

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  Douglass set sail on the Cambria for Liverpool on the 16th of August 1845, as fears grew that the fame of his book might draw his former owner to reclaim him. He arrived in Ireland as the Great Famine was beginning. Eleven days and a half gone, he wrote, and I breathe, and lo, the chattel becomes a man. In Ireland he found he could ride in a cab beside white people, dine at the same table, and enter the same church door without insult.

  Dublin's extreme poverty astonished him, much of it reminding him of slavery. He wrote to Garrison that the cause of humanity is one the world over, and that a true abolitionist could not steel his heart to the woes of others. He befriended the Irish nationalist Daniel O'Connell, a great inspiration to him.

  During this trip Douglass became legally free. British supporters led by Anna Richardson and her sister-in-law Ellen of Newcastle upon Tyne raised funds to buy his freedom from Thomas Auld. He met Thomas Clarkson, one of the last living British abolitionists who had helped persuade Parliament to abolish slavery in Britain's colonies. In Scotland he was appointed Scotland's antislavery agent. With his wife still in Massachusetts and three million of his brethren still in bondage, he returned to America in the spring of 1847, soon after O'Connell's death.

• 7. Breaking With Garrison

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  Using 500 pounds given to him by English supporters, Douglass started his first abolitionist newspaper, the North Star, from the basement of a church in Rochester, New York. Its motto declared, Right is of no Sex, Truth is of no Color, God is the Father of us all, and we are all brethren. He and Anna turned their home into a stop on the Underground Railroad, sheltering more than four hundred fugitive slaves.

  The split with Garrison became one of the abolitionist movement's most notable divisions. Garrison held that the Constitution was pro-slavery, pointing to the Three-fifths Compromise, the protection of the slave trade through 1807, and the Fugitive Slave Clause. He even burned copies of the document. Douglass once shared that view, but reading and experience brought him to other conclusions. By around 1847 he argued the Constitution could and should be used as a weapon against slavery.

  In an 1860 speech in Glasgow, Douglass explained the change. When I escaped from slavery, he said, I adopted very many of the Garrisonians' opinions, being young and having read but little. He came to reject Garrison's call to dissolve the Union, saying that leaving it would place the slave system more exclusively under the control of the slaveholding states. Douglass built his own theory of rights from the experience of the enslaved, what one scholar calls natural rights from below.

• 8. The Wider Cause

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  In 1848, Douglass was the only Black person to attend the Seneca Falls Convention, the first women's rights convention. When Elizabeth Cady Stanton asked the assembly to demand women's suffrage, many present opposed it. Douglass rose and spoke in favor, saying he could not accept the vote as a Black man if women could not claim it too. After his words, the resolution passed. He pressed the case again in The North Star, declaring, We hold woman to be justly entitled to all we claim for man.

  On the 12th of March 1859, Douglass met radical abolitionist John Brown and others in Detroit to discuss emancipation. Brown later stayed with Douglass and wrote his Provisional Constitution during the visit. Shortly before the raid on Harpers Ferry, the two met in an abandoned stone quarry near Chambersburg, Pennsylvania. After a day and a night of discussion, Douglass declined to join, considering the mission suicidal. The fugitive Shields Green, who had been staying with Douglass, went with Brown instead. Douglass kept the meeting secret for 20 years.

  Douglass considered photography a tool against slavery, believing the camera would not lie. He became the most photographed American of the 19th century. He never smiled, refusing to feed the racist caricature of a happy slave, and looked directly into the lens with a stern gaze.

  On the 14th of April 1876, Douglass delivered the keynote at the unveiling of the Emancipation Memorial in Washington's Lincoln Park. He spoke frankly, calling Lincoln the white man's President and noting his tardiness in joining the cause of emancipation. Lincoln was neither our man nor our model, he said, yet he also asked whether any friend of freedom could forget the night after the first day of January 1863. The crowd gave him a standing ovation. Afterward he wrote to a Washington newspaper criticizing the statue, which showed a Black man still on his knees. What I want to see before I die, he wrote, is a monument representing the negro erect on his feet like a man.

  Douglass earned a string of firsts. In 1872 he became the first African American nominated for Vice President, as Victoria Woodhull's running mate on the Equal Rights Party ticket, nominated without his knowledge and never acknowledging it. President Hayes named him United States Marshal for the District of Columbia, confirmed by the Senate on the 17th of March 1877, making him the first person of color in that post. He later served as Recorder of Deeds and, in 1889, as minister resident and consul-general to Haiti, resigning in July 1891 over American designs on Haitian territory.

  In 1877 Douglass visited Thomas Auld, his former enslaver, on his deathbed, and the two men reconciled. That same year he bought Cedar Hill, the home on a hill above the Anacostia River that became his final residence, expanding it from 14 to 21 rooms.

  On the 20th of February 1895, Douglass attended a meeting of the National Council of Women in Washington, D.C. He was brought to the platform and received a standing ovation. Shortly after returning home, he died of a heart attack. Because his exact birth year is unclear, he was either 76 or 77.

  His funeral was held at the Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church, where he had kept a pew and donated two standing candelabras. The walking stick said to have been Lincoln's favorite, supposedly given to Douglass by Mary Lincoln, still rests at Cedar Hill, now preserved as the Frederick Douglass National Historic Site. In 1892 he built rental housing for Black families in the Fells Point area of Baltimore, known as Douglass Place, a complex that was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2003 and still stands today.