Who was Frederick Douglass?

Frederick Douglass was an escaped enslaved man who became the most prominent African American abolitionist, orator, journalist, and statesman of the nineteenth century, leaving an autobiography and decades of speeches that shaped American debate over slavery, citizenship, and equality. He was born Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey in February 1818 on a plantation in Talbot County, Maryland to an enslaved mother, Harriet Bailey, and an unknown white father, possibly his enslaver. He was separated from his mother as an infant and raised partly by his grandmother.

As a child he was sent to Baltimore, where Sophia Auld initially taught him to read until her husband Hugh Auld stopped her, telling her that literacy would make a slave unmanageable. The reaction taught Douglass that reading was the path to freedom, and he learned to read and write in secret. After being hired out to a brutal slave-breaker named Edward Covey in 1833 to 1834, Douglass fought back physically and resolved to escape.

On September 3, 1838 he boarded a train in Baltimore disguised as a sailor with borrowed papers, traveled north through Wilmington and Philadelphia, and reached New York City in less than 24 hours. He soon settled with his free wife Anna Murray in New Bedford, Massachusetts, where he changed his last name to Douglass to avoid detection and worked as a laborer. He attended an antislavery convention in Nantucket in August 1841 and was invited to speak; his eloquence stunned the audience and the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society hired him as a lecturer.

He published Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave in 1845, which became an international bestseller. To avoid recapture, he toured Britain and Ireland from 1845 to 1847, where supporters bought his freedom. He returned and founded the antislavery newspaper The North Star in Rochester, New York on December 3, 1847. He published two more autobiographies, My Bondage and My Freedom in 1855 and Life and Times of Frederick Douglass in 1881 (revised 1892).

During the Civil War he urged the recruitment of Black soldiers, met with President Abraham Lincoln three times in the White House, and supported the Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863 and the Thirteenth Amendment. After the war he advocated Reconstruction policies, women's suffrage (he had attended Seneca Falls in 1848), and equal rights. He served as U.S. Marshal for the District of Columbia in 1877, Recorder of Deeds in 1881, and Minister to Haiti from 1889 to 1891.

He delivered his famous July 5, 1852 speech "What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?" exposing the contradiction between American liberty and slavery. He died at age 77 on February 20, 1895 in Washington, D.C.