Born into slavery
Born in February 1818 in Talbot County, Maryland, the son of Harriet Bailey, he was raised at first by his grandmother Betsey Bailey.
Abolitionism · African American political thought · 1818–1895
Frederick Douglass
Learn to read, speak out, resist: freedom is won, not granted.
Talbot County, Maryland · Baltimore · Rochester · Washington, D.C.
Biography
The thread of a life.
Born into slavery on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, Frederick Douglass taught himself to read, escaped to the North in 1838 and became the foremost Black abolitionist orator, editor and autobiographer of his time. In three autobiographies, in speeches and in his newspapers he argued that slavery violated natural rights, that the Constitution could be read as a charter of liberty and that freedom requires both self-assertion and equal citizenship for all, women included.
Baltimore and Covey
Sent to Baltimore in 1826, he learned to read in secret; in 1834 he fought back against the slave-breaker Edward Covey, and in 1836 an escape plan was betrayed.
Escape
On 3 September 1838 he escaped to New York disguised as a sailor, married Anna Murray and settled in New Bedford under the name Douglass.
Lecturer, author, exile
A lecturer for the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society from 1841, he published the Narrative in 1845 and toured Ireland and Britain, where supporters bought his freedom in 1846.
Editor in Rochester
He founded The North Star in 1847, supported women’s suffrage at Seneca Falls in 1848, delivered his Fourth of July oration in 1852 and published My Bondage and My Freedom in 1855.
War and public life
He recruited Black soldiers during the Civil War, held federal posts in Washington, served as minister to Haiti from 1889 to 1891 and died on 20 February 1895.
Understanding a life in depth
01Childhood in slavery and the pathway to reading
Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey was born in February 1818 in Talbot County, on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, a date recorded in his owner’s ledger that he himself never knew. His mother, Harriet Bailey, was hired out on a distant farm and died when he was about seven; his father was a white man, rumoured to be his master, Aaron Anthony. Raised by his grandmother Betsey Bailey, he was taken at about six to the Wye House plantation of Colonel Edward Lloyd, where he witnessed hunger and the whipping of his Aunt Hester. In 1826 he was sent to Baltimore to the household of Hugh and Sophia Auld. Sophia began teaching him the alphabet until her husband forbade it, saying that learning would forever unfit him to be a slave; Douglass concluded that he had found the pathway from slavery to freedom. He paid white boys in bread for lessons and, at about twelve, bought The Columbian Orator, whose dialogues and speeches gave him a vocabulary of rights.
02Covey, the shipyards and escape
In 1833 Douglass was returned to Thomas Auld at St. Michaels, who in January 1834 hired him out for a year to Edward Covey, a farmer known for breaking enslaved workers. Months of labour and beatings nearly crushed him, until in August 1834 he fought Covey for nearly two hours and was never whipped again; he later wrote that this battle made a slave into a man. A plan to escape with several companions was betrayed in 1836, and he was jailed at Easton and then sent back to Baltimore, where white apprentices beat him at the shipyard and he became a skilled caulker allowed to hire out his own time. With the help of Anna Murray, a free Black woman, he escaped on 3 September 1838 dressed as a sailor and carrying a free seaman’s papers, travelling by train and steamboat to New York. They married there and settled in New Bedford, Massachusetts, where he took the name Douglass from Walter Scott’s The Lady of the Lake.
03Orator, author and editor
A reader of Garrison’s Liberator, Douglass spoke at an antislavery convention in Nantucket in August 1841 and was hired as a lecturer by the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society. On the Hundred Conventions tour of 1843 he was beaten by a mob in Indiana. Because audiences doubted that so eloquent a man had been enslaved, he published his Narrative in 1845, then spent nearly two years lecturing in Ireland and Britain, where friends raised the money to buy his legal freedom in 1846. Back in the United States he moved to Rochester, New York, and in December 1847 launched The North Star, against the advice of Garrison’s circle. In 1848 he spoke at Seneca Falls for the resolution demanding votes for women. By 1851 he had broken with the Garrisonians: he now judged the Constitution an antislavery document and accepted political action. The Fourth of July oration of 1852 and My Bondage and My Freedom in 1855 belong to this period, as does his refusal in 1859 to join John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry, after which he had to flee to Canada and Britain.
04War, Reconstruction and the unfinished republic
Douglass insisted that the Civil War must become a war against slavery and that Black men must be allowed to fight; after the Emancipation Proclamation he recruited soldiers for Massachusetts regiments, in which two of his sons enlisted, and in 1863 he met Abraham Lincoln to protest unequal pay and treatment. After the war he campaigned for the constitutional amendments that abolished slavery and guaranteed citizenship and Black men’s right to vote, a priority that strained his alliance with Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, although he never abandoned women’s suffrage. He moved to Washington in 1872, presided briefly over the failing Freedman’s Savings Bank in 1874 and held federal posts, as marshal and then recorder of deeds of the District of Columbia and as minister to Haiti from 1889 to 1891. He published Life and Times of Frederick Douglass in 1881, married Helen Pitts in 1884 after the death of Anna Murray Douglass, denounced lynching alongside Ida B. Wells and died at Cedar Hill on 20 February 1895, after attending a meeting of the National Council of Women.
Douglass’s Narrative became a model of the slave narrative and of American autobiography, and his Fourth of July oration remains among the most quoted speeches in the country’s history. Liberals, conservatives, integrationists and Black nationalists have all claimed him; philosophers read him on natural law, dignity, the ethics of resistance and democratic citizenship, while historians stress how his positions changed over five decades of struggle.
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