Frederick Douglass

Frederick Douglass (Cordova, Maryland, 1818 – Washington, 1895) became one of the most prominent leaders of the abolitionist movement in the United States and a central voice in the fight for African American civil rights in the nineteenth century. Born into slavery, he escaped to the North in 1838 and went on to build a reputation as an orator and writer whose work helped disprove the claim that enslaved people lacked the intellect to be citizens.

He was born Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. Because no reliable record of his birth survived, he later chose February 14 as his birthday, remembering that his mother had called him her "Little Valentine". His mother, Harriet Bailey, died when he was about seven, and his father's identity remained uncertain, though he suspected it was a white man. Sent to Baltimore as a boy, he began learning letters from Sophia Auld, whose husband soon put a stop to the lessons. Douglass kept teaching himself, paying neighborhood boys with bread and studying whatever printed material he could find, and he later credited The Columbian Orator, a collection of speeches, with shaping his ideas about freedom.

His years with Edward Covey, a farmer known for breaking enslaved people, were especially harsh. At sixteen he fought back physically and Covey stopped beating him. Later he ran Sunday schools for enslaved workers, which provoked the anger of other slaveholders. In 1838 he escaped north, aided by borrowed papers and by his wife, Anna Murray, whom he had married shortly after reaching New York. In Massachusetts he joined antislavery circles and heard William Lloyd Garrison speak, an encounter that marked his development as a speaker.

His first public speech, delivered in Nantucket in 1841, opened a career that took him across the northern states and into campaigns such as the American Anti-Slavery Society's lecture tour. His style combined the testimony of his own enslavement with careful argument, aimed at readers who found slavery hard to imagine. He later edited newspapers, including The North Star, whose motto declared that right has no sex and truth has no color. He supported women's suffrage, took part in the Seneca Falls Convention, and signed its Declaration of Sentiments. He broke with Garrison over the Constitution, which he came to read as an antislavery document, and he favored broad alliances across political lines.

During the Civil War he pressed for the enlistment of Black soldiers and for emancipation, and after the war he worked for the rights of the newly freed. He held public office, and in 1872 he became the first African American nominated for vice president of the United States, as running mate of Victoria Woodhull, a nomination he had neither sought nor accepted in advance. His legacy lies in his insistence that emancipation meant full dignity and citizenship, and his autobiography remains one of the most widely read accounts of slavery in North America.