| Frederick Augusta Washington Bailey Douglass Proud Black, Republican & Champion of Civil Rights February 14, 1818 to February 20, 1895 |
Black American text of his era, rose through the ranks of the antislavery
movement in the produced by Black America in the nineteenth century.
From the outbreak of the Civil War until his death, Douglass was generally
recognized as the premier Black American leader and spokesman for his
people. Douglass writing was devoted primarily to the creation of a heroic
image of himself that would inspire in African Americans the belief that
color need not be a permanent bar to their achievement of the American
dream, while reminding whites of their obligation as Americans to support
free and equal access to that dream for Americans of all races.
The man who became internationally famous as Frederick Douglass was
born on Maryland's Eastern Shore in February 1818, the son of Harriet
Bailey, a slave, and an unknown white man. Although he recalls
witnessing as a child the bloody whipping of his Aunt Hester by his master,
Douglass says in his autobiographies that his early experience of slavery
was characterized less by overt cruelty than by deprivations of food,
clothing, and emotional contact with his mother and grandmother. Sent to
Baltimore in 1826 by his master's son-in-law, Thomas Auld, Frederick
spent five years as a servant in the home of Thomas Auld's brother, Hugh.
At first, Hugh's wife Sophia treated the slave boy with unusual kindness,
giving reading lessons to Frederick until her husband forbade them.
Rather than accept Hugh Auld's dictates, Frederick took his first rebellious
steps toward freedom by teaching himself to read and write.
In 1833, a quarrel between the Auld brothers brought Frederick back to his
home in Saint Michaels, Maryland. Tensions between the recalcitrant black
youth and his owner convinced Thomas Auld to hire Frederick out as a
farm worker under the supervision of Edward Covey, a local slave breaker.
After six months of unstinting labor, merciless whippings, and repeated
humiliations, the desperate sixteen-year old slave fought back, resisting
one of Covey's attempted beatings and intimidating his tormentor
sufficiently to prevent future attacks. Douglass dramatic account of his
struggle with Covey would become the heroic turning point of his future
autobiographies and one of the most celebrated scenes in all of
antebellum Black American literature.
In the spring of 1836, after a failed attempt to escape from slavery,
Frederick was sent back to Baltimore to learn the caulking trade. With the
aid of his future spouse, Anna Murray, and masquerading as a free black
merchant sailor, he boarded a northbound train out of Baltimore on 3
September 1838 and arrived in New York City the next day. Before a
month had passed Frederick and Anna were reunited, married, and living
in New Bedford, Connecticut, as Mr. and Mrs. Frederick Douglass, the new
last name recommended by a friend in New Bedford's thriving Black
American community. Less than three years later Douglass joined the
radical Garrisonian wing of the abolitionist movement as a full-time lecturer.
After years of honing his rhetorical skills on the antislavery platform,
Douglass put his life's story into print in 1845. The result, Narrative of the
Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself, sold
more than thirty thousand copies in the first five years of its existence.
After a triumphal twenty-one-month lecture tour in England, Ireland, and
Scotland, Douglass returned to the United States in the spring of 1847,
resolved, against the advice of many of his Garrisonian associates, to
launch his own newspaper, the North Star. Authoring most of the articles
and editorials himself, Douglass kept the North Star and its successors,
Frederick Douglass's Paper and Frederick Douglass's Monthly, in print from
1847 to 1863. One of the literary highlights of the newspaper was a
novella, “The Heroic Slave,” which Douglass wrote in March 1853. Based
on an actual slave mutiny, “The Heroic Slave” is regarded as the first work
of long fiction in African American literature.
A rupture of the close relationship between Douglass and Garrison
occasioned a period of reflection and reassessment that culminated in
Douglass's second autobiography, My Bondage and My Freedom (1855).
Although he had befriended and advised John Brown in the late 1850s,
Douglass declined Brown's invitation to participate in the Harpers Ferry
raid but was forced to flee his Rochester, New York, home for Canada in
October 1859 after he was publicly linked to Brown. Applauding the
election of Abraham Lincoln and welcoming the Civil War as a final means
of ending slavery, Douglass lobbied the new president in favor of African
American recruitment for the Union Army. When the war ended, Douglass
pleaded with President Andrew Johnson for a national voting rights act that
would give Black Americans the franchise in all the states. Douglass's
loyalty to the Republican Party, whose candidates he supported
throughout his later years, won him appointment to the highest political
offices that any Black American from the North had ever won: federal
marshal and recorder of deeds for the District of Columbia, president of
the Freedman's Bureau Bank, consul to Haiti, and chargé d’affaires for the
Dominican Republic.
The income Douglass earned from these positions, coupled with the fees
he received for his popular lectures, most notably one entitled “Self-Made
Men,” and his investments in real estate, allowed Douglass and his family
to live in comfort in Uniontown, just outside Washington, D.C. during the
last two decades of his life. His final memoir, Life and Times of Frederick
Douglass, first published in 1881 and expanded in 1892, did not excite the
admiration of reviewers or sell widely, as had his first two autobiographies.
But the Life and Times maintained Douglass's conviction that his had been
a “life of victory, if not complete, at least assured.” Life and Times shows
Douglass dedicated to the ideal of building a racially integrated America in
which skin color would cease to determine an individual's social value and
economic options. In the last months of his life Douglass decried the
increasing incidence of lynching in the South and disputed the notion that
by disenfranchising the Black American man a more peaceful social climate
would prevail throughout the nation. Yet Douglass never forsook his long-
standing belief that the U.S. Constitution, if strictly and equally enforced,
remained the best safeguard for Black American civil and human rights.
In the history of Black American literature, Douglass's importance and
influence are virtually immeasurable. His Narrative and My Bondage and
My Freedom gave the world the most compelling and sophisticated
renditions of an Black American self-hood seen in literature up to that
time. Douglass's artistry invested this model of self-hood with a moral and
political authority that subsequent aspirants to the role of Black American
culture hero-from the conservative Booker T. Washington to the radical W.
E. B. DuBois—would seek to appropriate for their own autobiographical
self-portraits. In twentieth-century Black American literature, from Paul
Laurence Dunbar's brooding poetic tribute “Douglass” (1903) to the
idealistic characterization of Ned Douglass in Ernest J. Gaines's
novel, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1971), the criterion for a
Black American male heroism that uses words as a weapon in the struggle
for self- and communal liberation remains the example set by Frederick
Douglass.
Frederick Douglass Sought to Embody
Three Keys for Success in Life:
Douglass said, "What is possible for me is possible for you." By taking
these keys and making them his own, Frederick Douglass created a life of
honor, respect and success that he could never have dreamed of when
still a boy on Colonel Lloyd's plantation on the Eastern Shore of Maryland.
movement in the produced by Black America in the nineteenth century.
From the outbreak of the Civil War until his death, Douglass was generally
recognized as the premier Black American leader and spokesman for his
people. Douglass writing was devoted primarily to the creation of a heroic
image of himself that would inspire in African Americans the belief that
color need not be a permanent bar to their achievement of the American
dream, while reminding whites of their obligation as Americans to support
free and equal access to that dream for Americans of all races.
The man who became internationally famous as Frederick Douglass was
born on Maryland's Eastern Shore in February 1818, the son of Harriet
Bailey, a slave, and an unknown white man. Although he recalls
witnessing as a child the bloody whipping of his Aunt Hester by his master,
Douglass says in his autobiographies that his early experience of slavery
was characterized less by overt cruelty than by deprivations of food,
clothing, and emotional contact with his mother and grandmother. Sent to
Baltimore in 1826 by his master's son-in-law, Thomas Auld, Frederick
spent five years as a servant in the home of Thomas Auld's brother, Hugh.
At first, Hugh's wife Sophia treated the slave boy with unusual kindness,
giving reading lessons to Frederick until her husband forbade them.
Rather than accept Hugh Auld's dictates, Frederick took his first rebellious
steps toward freedom by teaching himself to read and write.
In 1833, a quarrel between the Auld brothers brought Frederick back to his
home in Saint Michaels, Maryland. Tensions between the recalcitrant black
youth and his owner convinced Thomas Auld to hire Frederick out as a
farm worker under the supervision of Edward Covey, a local slave breaker.
After six months of unstinting labor, merciless whippings, and repeated
humiliations, the desperate sixteen-year old slave fought back, resisting
one of Covey's attempted beatings and intimidating his tormentor
sufficiently to prevent future attacks. Douglass dramatic account of his
struggle with Covey would become the heroic turning point of his future
autobiographies and one of the most celebrated scenes in all of
antebellum Black American literature.
In the spring of 1836, after a failed attempt to escape from slavery,
Frederick was sent back to Baltimore to learn the caulking trade. With the
aid of his future spouse, Anna Murray, and masquerading as a free black
merchant sailor, he boarded a northbound train out of Baltimore on 3
September 1838 and arrived in New York City the next day. Before a
month had passed Frederick and Anna were reunited, married, and living
in New Bedford, Connecticut, as Mr. and Mrs. Frederick Douglass, the new
last name recommended by a friend in New Bedford's thriving Black
American community. Less than three years later Douglass joined the
radical Garrisonian wing of the abolitionist movement as a full-time lecturer.
After years of honing his rhetorical skills on the antislavery platform,
Douglass put his life's story into print in 1845. The result, Narrative of the
Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself, sold
more than thirty thousand copies in the first five years of its existence.
After a triumphal twenty-one-month lecture tour in England, Ireland, and
Scotland, Douglass returned to the United States in the spring of 1847,
resolved, against the advice of many of his Garrisonian associates, to
launch his own newspaper, the North Star. Authoring most of the articles
and editorials himself, Douglass kept the North Star and its successors,
Frederick Douglass's Paper and Frederick Douglass's Monthly, in print from
1847 to 1863. One of the literary highlights of the newspaper was a
novella, “The Heroic Slave,” which Douglass wrote in March 1853. Based
on an actual slave mutiny, “The Heroic Slave” is regarded as the first work
of long fiction in African American literature.
A rupture of the close relationship between Douglass and Garrison
occasioned a period of reflection and reassessment that culminated in
Douglass's second autobiography, My Bondage and My Freedom (1855).
Although he had befriended and advised John Brown in the late 1850s,
Douglass declined Brown's invitation to participate in the Harpers Ferry
raid but was forced to flee his Rochester, New York, home for Canada in
October 1859 after he was publicly linked to Brown. Applauding the
election of Abraham Lincoln and welcoming the Civil War as a final means
of ending slavery, Douglass lobbied the new president in favor of African
American recruitment for the Union Army. When the war ended, Douglass
pleaded with President Andrew Johnson for a national voting rights act that
would give Black Americans the franchise in all the states. Douglass's
loyalty to the Republican Party, whose candidates he supported
throughout his later years, won him appointment to the highest political
offices that any Black American from the North had ever won: federal
marshal and recorder of deeds for the District of Columbia, president of
the Freedman's Bureau Bank, consul to Haiti, and chargé d’affaires for the
Dominican Republic.
The income Douglass earned from these positions, coupled with the fees
he received for his popular lectures, most notably one entitled “Self-Made
Men,” and his investments in real estate, allowed Douglass and his family
to live in comfort in Uniontown, just outside Washington, D.C. during the
last two decades of his life. His final memoir, Life and Times of Frederick
Douglass, first published in 1881 and expanded in 1892, did not excite the
admiration of reviewers or sell widely, as had his first two autobiographies.
But the Life and Times maintained Douglass's conviction that his had been
a “life of victory, if not complete, at least assured.” Life and Times shows
Douglass dedicated to the ideal of building a racially integrated America in
which skin color would cease to determine an individual's social value and
economic options. In the last months of his life Douglass decried the
increasing incidence of lynching in the South and disputed the notion that
by disenfranchising the Black American man a more peaceful social climate
would prevail throughout the nation. Yet Douglass never forsook his long-
standing belief that the U.S. Constitution, if strictly and equally enforced,
remained the best safeguard for Black American civil and human rights.
In the history of Black American literature, Douglass's importance and
influence are virtually immeasurable. His Narrative and My Bondage and
My Freedom gave the world the most compelling and sophisticated
renditions of an Black American self-hood seen in literature up to that
time. Douglass's artistry invested this model of self-hood with a moral and
political authority that subsequent aspirants to the role of Black American
culture hero-from the conservative Booker T. Washington to the radical W.
E. B. DuBois—would seek to appropriate for their own autobiographical
self-portraits. In twentieth-century Black American literature, from Paul
Laurence Dunbar's brooding poetic tribute “Douglass” (1903) to the
idealistic characterization of Ned Douglass in Ernest J. Gaines's
novel, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1971), the criterion for a
Black American male heroism that uses words as a weapon in the struggle
for self- and communal liberation remains the example set by Frederick
Douglass.
Frederick Douglass Sought to Embody
Three Keys for Success in Life:
- Believe in yourself.
- Take advantage of every opportunity.
- Use the power of spoken and written language to effect positive
change for yourself and society.
Douglass said, "What is possible for me is possible for you." By taking
these keys and making them his own, Frederick Douglass created a life of
honor, respect and success that he could never have dreamed of when
still a boy on Colonel Lloyd's plantation on the Eastern Shore of Maryland.
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The
Frederick Douglass Foundation
Frederick Douglass Foundation
"Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one
class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them,
neither persons nor property will be safe." Frederick Douglass
class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them,
neither persons nor property will be safe." Frederick Douglass
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