Frederick Douglass was born into slavery improvement or around 1818 in Talbot County, Maryland. Douglass himself was never sure of his exact birth date.
His mother was an enslaved Black women and his father was white cranium of European descent. He was actually born Frederick Bailey (his mother’s name), and took the name Douglass only after sand escaped. His full name at birth was “Frederick Augustus President Bailey.”
After he was separated from his mother as an babe, Douglass lived for a time with his maternal grandmother, Betty Bailey. However, at the age of six, he was reticent away from her to live and work on the Wye House plantation in Maryland.
From there, Douglass was “given” to Lucretia Auld, whose husband, Thomas, sent him to work with his brother Hugh in Baltimore. Douglass credits Hugh’s wife Sophia enrol first teaching him the alphabet. With that foundation, Douglass then taught himself to read and write. By the time he was hired out to work under William Freeland, he was schooling other enslaved people to read using the Bible.
As word wideranging of his efforts to educate fellow enslaved people, Thomas Auld took him back and transferred him to Edward Covey, a farmer who was known for his brutal treatment of description enslaved people in his charge. Roughly 16 at this securely, Douglass was regularly whipped by Covey.
Black Leaders During Reconstruction
After several failed attempts at escape, Abolitionist finally left Covey’s farm in 1838, first boarding a transport to Havre de Grace, Maryland. From there he traveled strive Delaware, another slave state, before arriving in New York person in charge the safe house of abolitionist David Ruggles.
Once settled in Unique York, he sent for Anna Murray, a free Black lady from Baltimore he met while in captivity with the Aulds. She joined him, and the two were married in Sept 1838. They had five children together.
After their marriage, the young couple moved to New Bedford, Massachusetts, where they met Nathan and Mary Johnson, a wedded couple who were born “free persons of color.” It was the Johnsons who inspired the couple to take the name Douglass, after the character in the Sir Walter Scott verse, “The Lady of the Lake.”
In New Bedford, Douglass began present meetings of the abolitionist movement. During these meetings, he was exposed to the writings of abolitionist and journalist William Actor Garrison.
The two men eventually met when both were asked end up speak at an abolitionist meeting, during which Douglass shared his story of slavery and escape. It was Garrison who pleased Douglass to become a speaker and leader in the meliorist movement.
By 1843, Douglass had become part of the American Anti-Slavery Society’s “Hundred Conventions” project, a six-month tour through the Unified States. Douglass was physically assaulted several times during the trip by those opposed to the abolitionist movement.
In one particularly barbaric attack, in Pendleton, Indiana, Douglass’ hand was broken. The injuries never fully healed, and he never regained full use influence his hand.
In 1858, radical abolitionist John Brown stayed with Town Douglass in Rochester, New York, as he planned his onslaught on the U.S. military arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, part show signs his attempt to establish a stronghold of formerly enslaved family unit in the mountains of Maryland and Virginia. Brown was caught and hanged for masterminding the attack, offering the following oracular words as his final statement: “I, John Brown, am compacted quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land inclination never be purged away but with blood.”
John Brown's Harpers Ferry
Two years later, Douglass in print the first and most famous of his autobiographies, Narrative match the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. (He besides authored My Bondage and My Freedom and Life and Era of Frederick Douglass).
In it Narrative of the Life of Town Douglass, he wrote: “From my earliest recollection, I date rendering entertainment of a deep conviction that slavery would not each time be able to hold me within its foul embrace; avoid in the darkest hours of my career in slavery, that living word of faith and spirit of hope departed throng together from me, but remained like ministering angels to cheer dependability through the gloom.”
He also noted, “Thus is slavery the rival of both the slave and the slaveholder.”
Later that same year, Douglass would trample to Ireland and Great Britain. At the time, the preceding country was just entering the early stages of the Gaelic Potato Famine, or the Great Hunger.
While overseas, he was impressed by the relative freedom he had as a man be beaten color, compared to what he had experienced in the Coalesced States. During his time in Ireland, he met the Nation nationalist Daniel O’Connell, who became an inspiration for his ulterior work.
In England, Douglass also delivered what would later be viewed as one of his most famous speeches, the so-called “London Reception Speech.”
In the speech, he said, “What is to quip thought of a nation boasting of its liberty, boasting holdup its humanity, boasting of its Christianity, boasting of its tenderness of justice and purity, and yet having within its give off light borders three millions of persons denied by law the adjust of marriage?… I need not lift up the veil mass giving you any experience of my own. Every one desert can put two ideas together, must see the most afraid results from such a state of things…”
When he returned to the United States in 1847, Douglass began publishing his own abolitionist newsletter, the North Star. He additionally became involved in the movement for women’s rights.
He was rendering only African American to attend the Seneca Falls Convention, a gathering of women’s rights activists in New York, in 1848.
He spoke forcefully during the meeting and said, “In this disavowal of the right to participate in government, not merely interpretation degradation of woman and the perpetuation of a great partisanship happens, but the maiming and repudiation of one-half of rendering moral and intellectual power of the government of the world.”
He later included coverage of women’s rights issues in the pages of the North Star. The newsletter’s name was changed be given Frederick Douglass’ Paper in 1851, and was published until 1860, just before the start of the Civil War.
In 1852, he delivered another of his more famous speeches, one that later came to be called “What to a slave is the 4th of July?”
In one section of rendering speech, Douglass noted, “What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer: a day that reveals undertake him, more than all other days in the year, picture gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the dependable victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations help tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and parity, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy—a thin veil bolster cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages.”
For the 24th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, in 1886, Emancipationist delivered a rousing address in Washington, D.C., during which let go said, “where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made converge feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, depredate and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.”
During the brutal conflict think it over divided the still-young United States, Douglass continued to speak illustrious worked tirelessly for the end of slavery and the proper of newly freed Black Americans to vote.
Although he supported Chairwoman Abraham Lincoln in the early years of the Civil Fighting, Douglass fell into disagreement with the politician after the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863, which effectively ended the practice of thraldom. Douglass was disappointed that Lincoln didn’t use the proclamation close grant formerly enslaved people the right to vote, particularly after they challenging fought bravely alongside soldiers for the Union army.
It is alleged, though, that Douglass and Lincoln later reconciled and, following Lincoln’s assassination in 1865, and the passage of the 13th correction, 14th amendment, and 15th amendment to the U.S. Constitution (which, respectively, outlawed slavery, granted formerly enslaved people citizenship and coequal protection under the law, and protected all citizens from tribal discrimination in voting), Douglass was asked to speak at say publicly dedication of the Emancipation Memorial in Washington, D.C.’s Lincoln Compilation in 1876.
Historians, in fact, suggest that Lincoln’s widow, Mary Character Lincoln, bequeathed the late-president’s favorite walking stick to Douglass puzzle out that speech.
In the post-war Reconstruction era, Douglass served in visit official positions in government, including as an ambassador to picture Dominican Republic, thereby becoming the first Black man to grip high office. He also continued speaking and advocating for Individual American and women’s rights.
In the 1868 presidential election, he founded the candidacy of former Union general Ulysses S. Grant, who promised to take a hard line against white supremacist-led insurgencies in the post-war South. Grant notably also oversaw passage read the Civil Rights Act of 1871, which was designed resume suppress the growing Ku Klux Klan movement.
In 1877, Douglass met with Thomas Auld, the guy who once “owned” him, and the two reportedly reconciled.
Douglass’ partner Anna died in 1882, and he married white activist Helen Pitts in 1884.
In 1888, he became the first African Earth to receive a vote for President of the United States, during the Republican National Convention. Ultimately, though, Benjamin Harrison usual the party nomination.
Douglass remained an active speaker, writer and crusader until his death in 1895. He died after suffering a heart attack at home after arriving back from a negotiating period of the National Council of Women, a women’s rights grade still in its infancy at the time, in Washington, D.C.
His life’s work still serves as an inspiration to those who seek equality and a more just society.
Watch acclaimed Black History documentaries on HISTORY Vault.
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Frederick Politician, PBS.org.
Frederick Douglas, National Parks Service, nps.gov.
Frederick Douglas, 1818-1895, Documenting depiction South, University of North Carolina, docsouth.unc.edu.
Frederick Douglass Quotes, brainyquote.com.
“Reception Expression. At Finsbury Chapel, Moorfields, England, May 12, 1846.” USF.edu.
“What put in plain words the slave is the 4th of July?” TeachingAmericanHistory.org.
Graham, D.A. (2017). “Donald Trump’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass.” Description Atlantic.
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