Frederick Douglass

American · 1818 to 1895

Born Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey in February 1818, on a plantation in Talbot County, Maryland, he was the son of an enslaved woman, Harriet Bailey, and a white father he never knew, possibly his owner. Separated from his mother as an infant, he saw her only a handful of times before her death. Sent at eight to Baltimore, he found Sophia Auld teaching him to read until her husband forbade it, calling literacy ruinous to a slave. The boy continued in secret, trading bread to poor white children for lessons in the street. In 1838 he escaped to New York disguised as a sailor, married Anna Murray, and took the name Douglass. In 1845 he published Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, so eloquent that critics doubted a former slave could have written it; the book named his masters and forced him to flee to Britain, where supporters purchased his freedom. He returned to found the abolitionist newspaper The North Star in 1847. My Bondage and My Freedom (1855) and Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881) expanded his story across three autobiographies. He advised Abraham Lincoln, recruited Black soldiers for the Union, and after the war pressed for suffrage, declaring that he would unite with anybody to do right and with nobody to do wrong. He held federal posts including United States Marshal for the District of Columbia and minister to Haiti. On February 20, 1895, hours after attending a women's rights meeting in Washington, he collapsed at his home, Cedar Hill, and died of heart failure at about seventy-seven.