Frederick Douglass

About this figure

Frederick Douglass (1818–1895) was an African American abolitionist, orator, and writer who escaped slavery in Maryland at around twenty years old and became the most prominent Black public figure in nineteenth-century America. Born enslaved -- he never knew his exact birth date and later chose to celebrate it on February 14 -- he taught himself to read and write in defiance of laws and customs meant to keep enslaved people illiterate, an act he later described as central to his sense that freedom was possible. In 1838 he escaped north by posing as a free Black sailor, using borrowed identification papers, and eventually settled in Massachusetts, where he began speaking publicly about his experience of slavery at abolitionist meetings.

Douglass's eloquence was so evident that some audiences doubted a formerly enslaved man could speak or write so well, a suspicion that led him to write Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845), naming his former enslavers and his exact origins in specific, verifiable detail as proof. The book's success also put him at risk of recapture under federal fugitive slave law, and he spent nearly two years lecturing in Britain and Ireland before British supporters purchased his legal freedom, allowing him to return to the United States and found his own newspaper, The North Star, in Rochester, New York. He expanded his life story twice more, in My Bondage and My Freedom (1855) and again in Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (first published 1881, revised 1892), each version adding detail about his years as a free man and public figure.

During the Civil War, Douglass advised Abraham Lincoln, argued forcefully for the enlistment of Black soldiers in the Union Army, and pressed the administration to treat the war as a fight against slavery itself rather than merely for preservation of the Union. After the war he held a series of federal appointments, including U.S. Marshal for the District of Columbia and Minister Resident and Consul General to Haiti, and continued speaking and writing on racial violence and injustice in America well into his seventies, including his forceful pamphlet Why Is the Negro Lynched?, an unflinching statistical and moral indictment of lynching. He publicly eulogized John Brown after Harpers Ferry and remained active in reform circles until his death from a heart attack in 1895, shortly after attending a women's rights meeting in Washington, D.C.

Written by Epoch Voices. Not the figure’s own words.