Frederick Douglass

Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey was born in February 1818 in a cabin on Holme Hill Farm near Tuckahoe Creek, Talbot County, Maryland. His mother, Harriet Bailey, was enslaved. His father was white and his identity was never confirmed, though Douglass believed he was likely his mother's owner. He was separated from Harriet before he was a year old. She walked twelve miles at night to visit him a handful of times before she died when he was around seven. He saw her only by candlelight.

At eight he was sent to Baltimore to live with Hugh and Sophia Auld. Sophia began teaching him the alphabet. When Hugh discovered the lessons he stopped them, and Douglass later wrote that this was the moment he understood the machinery: literacy was withheld because literacy was dangerous to the institution. He set out to master what had been forbidden. He carried a copy of The Columbian Orator in his pocket. He traded pieces of bread to poor white children in the Baltimore streets in exchange for reading lessons. By his early teens he could read and write.

Returned to the Eastern Shore at fifteen, he was hired out to Edward Covey, a man with a local reputation for breaking enslaved workers. Covey beat him for six months until, at sixteen, Douglass fought back. The two wrestled for two hours in the barnyard. Covey never struck him again. Douglass wrote later that this was the turning point: not the fight, but the knowledge that the fear could end.

On September 3, 1838, he boarded a train in Baltimore wearing a sailor's uniform and carrying the free-seaman protection papers of a friend. He crossed the Susquehanna River by ferry, caught a steamboat to Wilmington, another train to Philadelphia, and a steamer to New York. The journey took less than twenty-four hours. Anna Murray, a free Black woman in Baltimore who had planned and financed the escape, followed him north within days. They married in New York on September 15, 1838, and moved on to New Bedford, Massachusetts, where he took the surname Douglass from a character in Walter Scott's Lady of the Lake.

He read The Liberator, William Lloyd Garrison's abolitionist newspaper, from his first weeks in New Bedford. In August 1841 he attended an anti-slavery convention in Nantucket and was asked to speak. The account he gave of his life in bondage electrified the room. Garrison's society hired him as a traveling lecturer the next day. For the next four years he spoke across New England and the Mid-Atlantic. White organizers at first instructed him to speak only from experience, to be less literary, to retain what one of them called a little of the plantation manner of speech so audiences would believe he had been enslaved. He refused. He wrote instead.

The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, appeared in May 1845. It sold 4,500 copies in its first four months and eventually tens of thousands. It named his former owners and gave enough detail that his friends feared for his life. He sailed for Britain and Ireland that August and remained abroad for nearly two years, speaking to audiences in Cork, Belfast, Edinburgh, and London. While he was away, British supporters raised the 150 pounds sterling required to purchase his legal freedom. He returned to the United States in 1847 a free man under American law.

With the funds his British supporters had raised, he founded The North Star in Rochester, New York, in December 1847. The masthead read, Right is of no sex, truth is of no color, God is the Father of us all, and we are all Brethren. He edited and published the paper for four years before merging it into Frederick Douglass' Paper, which ran until 1860. The Rochester house became a station on the Underground Railroad. He and Anna sheltered hundreds of people moving north.

The 1847 split with Garrison was strategic and public. Garrison held that the Constitution was a slaveholders' document that ought to be renounced and that moral suasion alone would end slavery. Douglass, having studied the text more closely, concluded that the Constitution could be read as an anti-slavery document and that political action, including armed resistance, was necessary. The two men did not speak for more than a decade. In 1859, after John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry, federal authorities found letters from Douglass in Brown's papers. Douglass had refused to join the raid but had corresponded with Brown for years. He fled to Canada and then to Britain for six months until the investigation cooled.

He met with Abraham Lincoln three times at the White House. The first meeting, in August 1863, was to press for equal pay and promotion for Black soldiers. Lincoln listened and Douglass came away saying he had been received as a man. The second, in August 1864, concerned a plan to move enslaved people north if the election went against Lincoln. The third was at the second inaugural reception in March 1865, where the doorkeepers tried to turn Douglass away and Lincoln, spotting him across the room, called out, Here comes my friend Douglass. Lincoln was assassinated six weeks later.

After Reconstruction he held federal office for fourteen years. Rutherford B. Hayes appointed him U.S. Marshal for the District of Columbia in 1877, the first Black man confirmed by the Senate to a federal post requiring confirmation. James A. Garfield appointed him Recorder of Deeds for the District in 1881. Benjamin Harrison appointed him U.S. Minister Resident and Consul General to Haiti in 1889. He resigned the Haiti post in 1891 in protest over American pressure to seize the port of Môle-Saint-Nicolas as a naval base.

Anna Murray Douglass died in 1882 after forty-four years of marriage. In 1884 he married Helen Pitts, a white suffragist and abolitionist twenty years his junior who had been his secretary at the Recorder of Deeds office. Her family disowned her. The Black press questioned the marriage. Douglass answered that his first wife had been the color of his mother and his second was the color of his father, and that seemed reasonable enough.

He died of a heart attack on February 20, 1895, at Cedar Hill, his home in Anacostia, a few hours after returning from a women's rights meeting at which Susan B. Anthony had introduced him. He was seventy-seven. Helen Pitts Douglass spent the next eight years campaigning to preserve Cedar Hill as a memorial. She established the Frederick Douglass Memorial and Historical Association, bought the house outright, and willed it to the nation. It opened to the public in 1922 and became a National Historic Site in 1988.