biography of frederick douglass summary

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Frederick Douglass

By: History.com Editors

Updated: March 8, 2024 | Original: October 27, 2009

Frederick Douglass was a formerly enslaved man who became a prominent activist, author and public speaker. He became a leader in the abolitionist movement , which sought to end the practice of slavery, before and during the Civil War . After that conflict and the Emancipation Proclamation of 1862, he continued to push for equality and human rights until his death in 1895.

Douglass’ 1845 autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave , described his time as an enslaved worker in Maryland . It was one of three autobiographies he penned, along with dozens of noteworthy speeches, despite receiving minimal formal education.

An advocate for women’s rights, and specifically the right of women to vote , Douglass’ legacy as an author and leader lives on. His work served as an inspiration to the civil rights movement of the 1960s and beyond.

Who Was Frederick Douglass?

Frederick Douglass was born into slavery in or around 1818 in Talbot County, Maryland. Douglass himself was never sure of his exact birth date.

His mother was an enslaved Black women and his father was white and of European descent. He was actually born Frederick Bailey (his mother’s name), and took the name Douglass only after he escaped. His full name at birth was “Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey.”

After he was separated from his mother as an infant, Douglass lived for a time with his maternal grandmother, Betty Bailey. However, at the age of six, he was moved away from her to live and work on the Wye House plantation in Maryland.

From there, Douglass was “given” to Lucretia Auld, whose husband, Thomas, sent him to work with his brother Hugh in Baltimore. Douglass credits Hugh’s wife Sophia with first teaching him the alphabet. With that foundation, Douglass then taught himself to read and write. By the time he was hired out to work under William Freeland, he was teaching other enslaved people to read using the Bible .

As word spread of his efforts to educate fellow enslaved people, Thomas Auld took him back and transferred him to Edward Covey, a farmer who was known for his brutal treatment of the enslaved people in his charge. Roughly 16 at this time, Douglass was regularly whipped by Covey.

Frederick Douglass Escapes from Slavery

After several failed attempts at escape, Douglass finally left Covey’s farm in 1838, first boarding a train to Havre de Grace, Maryland. From there he traveled through Delaware , another slave state, before arriving in New York and the safe house of abolitionist David Ruggles.

Once settled in New York, he sent for Anna Murray, a free Black woman from Baltimore he met while in captivity with the Aulds. She joined him, and the two were married in September 1838. They had five children together.

From Slavery to Abolitionist Leader

After their marriage, the young couple moved to New Bedford, Massachusetts , where they met Nathan and Mary Johnson, a married couple who were born “free persons of color.” It was the Johnsons who inspired the couple to take the surname Douglass, after the character in the Sir Walter Scott poem, “The Lady of the Lake.”

In New Bedford, Douglass began attending meetings of the abolitionist movement . During these meetings, he was exposed to the writings of abolitionist and journalist William Lloyd Garrison.

The two men eventually met when both were asked to speak at an abolitionist meeting, during which Douglass shared his story of slavery and escape. It was Garrison who encouraged Douglass to become a speaker and leader in the abolitionist movement.

By 1843, Douglass had become part of the American Anti-Slavery Society’s “Hundred Conventions” project, a six-month tour through the United States. Douglass was physically assaulted several times during the tour by those opposed to the abolitionist movement.

In one particularly brutal attack, in Pendleton, Indiana , Douglass’ hand was broken. The injuries never fully healed, and he never regained full use of his hand.

In 1858, radical abolitionist John Brown stayed with Frederick Douglass in Rochester, New York, as he planned his raid on the U.S. military arsenal at Harper’s Ferry , part of his attempt to establish a stronghold of formerly enslaved people in the mountains of Maryland and Virginia. Brown was caught and hanged for masterminding the attack, offering the following prophetic words as his final statement: “I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood.”

'Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass'

Two years later, Douglass published the first and most famous of his autobiographies, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave . (He also authored My Bondage and My Freedom and Life and Times of Frederick Douglass).

In it Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass , he wrote: “From my earliest recollection, I date the entertainment of a deep conviction that slavery would not always be able to hold me within its foul embrace; and in the darkest hours of my career in slavery, this living word of faith and spirit of hope departed not from me, but remained like ministering angels to cheer me through the gloom.”

He also noted, “Thus is slavery the enemy of both the slave and the slaveholder.”

Frederick Douglass in Ireland and Great Britain

Later that same year, Douglass would travel to Ireland and Great Britain. At the time, the former country was just entering the early stages of the Irish Potato Famine , or the Great Hunger.

While overseas, he was impressed by the relative freedom he had as a man of color, compared to what he had experienced in the United States. During his time in Ireland, he met the Irish nationalist Daniel O’Connell , who became an inspiration for his later work.

In England, Douglass also delivered what would later be viewed as one of his most famous speeches, the so-called “London Reception Speech.”

In the speech, he said, “What is to be thought of a nation boasting of its liberty, boasting of its humanity, boasting of its Christianity , boasting of its love of justice and purity, and yet having within its own borders three millions of persons denied by law the right of marriage?… I need not lift up the veil by giving you any experience of my own. Every one that can put two ideas together, must see the most fearful results from such a state of things…”

Frederick Douglass’ Abolitionist Paper

When he returned to the United States in 1847, Douglass began publishing his own abolitionist newsletter, the North Star . He also became involved in the movement for women’s rights .

He was the only African American to attend the Seneca Falls Convention , a gathering of women’s rights activists in New York, in 1848.

He spoke forcefully during the meeting and said, “In this denial of the right to participate in government, not merely the degradation of woman and the perpetuation of a great injustice happens, but the maiming and repudiation of one-half of the moral and intellectual power of the government of the world.”

He later included coverage of women’s rights issues in the pages of the North Star . The newsletter’s name was changed to Frederick Douglass’ Paper in 1851, and was published until 1860, just before the start of the Civil War .

Frederick Douglass Quotes

In 1852, he delivered another of his more famous speeches, one that later came to be called “What to a slave is the 4th of July?”

In one section of the speech, Douglass noted, “What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy—a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages.”

For the 24th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation , in 1886, Douglass delivered a rousing address in Washington, D.C., during which he said, “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 During the Civil War

During the brutal conflict that divided the still-young United States, Douglass continued to speak and worked tirelessly for the end of slavery and the right of newly freed Black Americans to vote.

Although he supported President Abraham Lincoln in the early years of the Civil War, Douglass fell into disagreement with the politician after the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863, which effectively ended the practice of slavery. Douglass was disappointed that Lincoln didn’t use the proclamation to grant formerly enslaved people the right to vote, particularly after they had fought bravely alongside soldiers for the Union army.

It is said, though, that Douglass and Lincoln later reconciled and, following Lincoln’s assassination in 1865, and the passage of the 13th amendment , 14th amendment , and 15th amendment to the U.S. Constitution (which, respectively, outlawed slavery, granted formerly enslaved people citizenship and equal protection under the law, and protected all citizens from racial discrimination in voting), Douglass was asked to speak at the dedication of the Emancipation Memorial in Washington, D.C.’s Lincoln Park in 1876.

Historians, in fact, suggest that Lincoln’s widow, Mary Todd Lincoln , bequeathed the late-president’s favorite walking stick to Douglass after that speech.

In the post-war Reconstruction era, Douglass served in many official positions in government, including as an ambassador to the Dominican Republic, thereby becoming the first Black man to hold high office. He also continued speaking and advocating for African American and women’s rights.

In the 1868 presidential election, he supported the candidacy of former Union general Ulysses S. Grant , who promised to take a hard line against white supremacist-led insurgencies in the post-war South. Grant notably also oversaw passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1871 , which was designed to suppress the growing Ku Klux Klan movement.

Frederick Douglass: Later Life and Death

In 1877, Douglass met with Thomas Auld , the man who once “owned” him, and the two reportedly reconciled.

Douglass’ wife Anna died in 1882, and he married white activist Helen Pitts in 1884.

In 1888, he became the first African American to receive a vote for President of the United States, during the Republican National Convention. Ultimately, though, Benjamin Harrison received the party nomination.

Douglass remained an active speaker, writer and activist until his death in 1895. He died after suffering a heart attack at home after arriving back from a meeting of the National Council of Women , a women’s rights group still in its infancy at the time, in Washington, D.C.

His life’s work still serves as an inspiration to those who seek equality and a more just society.

HISTORY Vault: Black History

Watch acclaimed Black History documentaries on HISTORY Vault.

Frederick Douglas, PBS.org . Frederick Douglas, National Parks Service, nps.gov . Frederick Douglas, 1818-1895, Documenting the South, University of North Carolina , docsouth.unc.edu . Frederick Douglass Quotes, brainyquote.com . “Reception Speech. At Finsbury Chapel, Moorfields, England, May 12, 1846.” USF.edu . “What to the slave is the 4th of July?” TeachingAmericanHistory.org . Graham, D.A. (2017). “Donald Trump’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass.” The Atlantic .

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Frederick Douglass

Frederick Douglass was a leader in the abolitionist movement, an early champion of women’s rights and author of ‘Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass.’

(1818-1895)

Who Was Frederick Douglass?

Abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass was born into slavery sometime around 1818 in Talbot County, Maryland. He became one of the most famous intellectuals of his time, advising presidents and lecturing to thousands on a range of causes, including women’s rights and Irish home rule.

Among Douglass’ writings are several autobiographies eloquently describing his experiences in slavery and his life after the Civil War , including the well-known work Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave .

Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey was born around 1818 into slavery in Talbot County, Maryland. As was often the case with slaves, the exact year and date of Douglass' birth are unknown, though later in life he chose to celebrate it on February 14.

Douglass initially lived with his maternal grandmother, Betty Bailey. At a young age, Douglass was selected to live in the home of the plantation owners, one of whom may have been his father.

His mother, who was an intermittent presence in his life, died when he was around 10.

Learning to Read and Write

Defying a ban on teaching slaves to read and write, Baltimore slaveholder Hugh Auld’s wife Sophia taught Douglass the alphabet when he was around 12. When Auld forbade his wife to offer more lessons, Douglass continued to learn from white children and others in the neighborhood.

It was through reading that Douglass’ ideological opposition to slavery began to take shape. He read newspapers avidly and sought out political writing and literature as much as possible. In later years, Douglass credited The Columbian Orator with clarifying and defining his views on human rights.

Douglass shared his newfound knowledge with other enslaved people. Hired out to William Freeland, he taught other slaves on the plantation to read the New Testament at a weekly church service.

Interest was so great that in any week, more than 40 slaves would attend lessons. Although Freeland did not interfere with the lessons, other local slave owners were less understanding. Armed with clubs and stones, they dispersed the congregation permanently.

With Douglass moving between the Aulds, he was later made to work for Edward Covey, who had a reputation as a "slave-breaker.” Covey’s constant abuse nearly broke the 16-year-old Douglass psychologically. Eventually, however, Douglass fought back, in a scene rendered powerfully in his first autobiography.

After losing a physical confrontation with Douglass, Covey never beat him again. Douglass tried to escape from slavery twice before he finally succeeded.

Wife and Children

Douglass married Anna Murray, a free Black woman, on September 15, 1838. Douglass had fallen in love with Murray, who assisted him in his final attempt to escape slavery in Baltimore.

On September 3, 1838, Douglass boarded a train to Havre de Grace, Maryland. Murray had provided him with some of her savings and a sailor's uniform. He carried identification papers obtained from a free Black seaman. Douglass made his way to the safe house of abolitionist David Ruggles in New York in less than 24 hours.

Once he had arrived, Douglass sent for Murray to meet him in New York, where they married and adopted the name of Johnson to disguise Douglass’ identity. Anna and Frederick then settled in New Bedford, Massachusetts, which had a thriving free Black community. There they adopted Douglass as their married name.

Douglass and Anna had five children together: Rosetta, Lewis Henry, Frederick Jr., Charles Redmond and Annie, who died at the age of 10. Charles and Rosetta assisted their father in the production of his newspaper The North Star . Anna remained a loyal supporter of Douglass' public work, despite marital strife caused by his relationships with several other women.

After Anna’s death, Douglass married Helen Pitts, a feminist from Honeoye, New York. Pitts was the daughter of Gideon Pitts Jr., an abolitionist colleague. A graduate of Mount Holyoke College , Pitts worked on a radical feminist publication and shared many of Douglass’ moral principles.

Their marriage caused considerable controversy, since Pitts was white and nearly 20 years younger than Douglass. Douglass’ children were especially displeased with the relationship. Nonetheless, Douglass and Pitts remained married until his death 11 years later.

Abolitionist

After settling as a free man with his wife Anna in New Bedford in 1838, Douglass was eventually asked to tell his story at abolitionist meetings, and he became a regular anti-slavery lecturer.

The founder of the weekly journal The Liberator , William Lloyd Garrison , was impressed with Douglass’ strength and rhetorical skill and wrote of him in his newspaper. Several days after the story ran, Douglass delivered his first speech at the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society's annual convention in Nantucket.

Crowds were not always hospitable to Douglass. While participating in an 1843 lecture tour through the Midwest, Douglass was chased and beaten by an angry mob before being rescued by a local Quaker family.

Following the publication of his first autobiography in 1845, Douglass traveled overseas to evade recapture. He set sail for Liverpool on August 16, 1845, and eventually arrived in Ireland as the Potato Famine was beginning. He remained in Ireland and Britain for two years, speaking to large crowds on the evils of slavery.

During this time, Douglass’ British supporters gathered funds to purchase his legal freedom. In 1847, the famed writer and orator returned to the United States a free man.

'The North Star'

Upon his return, Douglass produced some abolitionist newspapers: The North Star , Frederick Douglass Weekly , Frederick Douglass' Paper , Douglass' Monthly and New National Era .

The motto of The North Star was "Right is of no Sex – Truth is of no Color – God is the Father of us all, and we are all brethren."

DOWNLOAD BIOGRAPHY'S FREDERICK DOUGLASS FACT CARD

'Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass'

In New Bedford, Massachusetts, Douglass joined a Black church and regularly attended abolitionist meetings. He also subscribed to Garrison's The Liberator .

At the urging of Garrison, Douglass wrote and published his first autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave , in 1845. The book was a bestseller in the United States and was translated into several European languages.

Although the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass garnered Douglass many fans, some critics expressed doubt that a former enslaved person with no formal education could have produced such elegant prose.

Other Books by Frederick Douglass

Douglass published three versions of his autobiography during his lifetime, revising and expanding on his work each time. My Bondage and My Freedom appeared in 1855.

In 1881, Douglass published Life and Times of Frederick Douglass , which he revised in 1892.

Women’s Rights

In addition to abolition, Douglass became an outspoken supporter of women’s rights. In 1848, he was the only African American to attend the Seneca Falls convention on women's rights. Elizabeth Cady Stanton asked the assembly to pass a resolution stating the goal of women's suffrage. Many attendees opposed the idea.

Douglass, however, stood and spoke eloquently in favor, arguing that he could not accept the right to vote as a Black man if women could not also claim that right. The resolution passed.

Yet Douglass would later come into conflict with women’s rights activists for supporting the Fifteenth Amendment , which banned suffrage discrimination based on race while upholding sex-based restrictions.

Civil War and Reconstruction

By the time of the Civil War , Douglass was one of the most famous Black men in the country. He used his status to influence the role of African Americans in the war and their status in the country. In 1863, Douglass conferred with President Abraham Lincoln regarding the treatment of Black soldiers, and later with President Andrew Johnson on the subject of Black suffrage.

President Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation , which took effect on January 1, 1863, declared the freedom of enslaved people in Confederate territory. Despite this victory, Douglass supported John C. Frémont over Lincoln in the 1864 election, citing his disappointment that Lincoln did not publicly endorse suffrage for Black freedmen.

Slavery everywhere in the United States was subsequently outlawed by the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution .

Douglass was appointed to several political positions following the war. He served as president of the Freedman's Savings Bank and as chargé d'affaires for the Dominican Republic.

After two years, he resigned from his ambassadorship over objections to the particulars of U.S. government policy. He was later appointed minister-resident and consul-general to the Republic of Haiti, a post he held between 1889 and 1891.

In 1877, Douglass visited one of his former owners, Thomas Auld. Douglass had met with Auld's daughter, Amanda Auld Sears, years before. The visit held personal significance for Douglass, although some criticized him for the reconciliation.

Vice Presidential Candidate

Douglass became the first African American nominated for vice president of the United States as Victoria Woodhull 's running mate on the Equal Rights Party ticket in 1872.

Nominated without his knowledge or consent, Douglass never campaigned. Nonetheless, his nomination marked the first time that an African American appeared on a presidential ballot.

Douglass died on February 20, 1895, of a massive heart attack or stroke shortly after returning from a meeting of the National Council of Women in Washington, D.C. He was buried in Mount Hope Cemetery in Rochester, New York.

QUICK FACTS

• Name: Frederick Douglass
• Birth Year: 1818
• Birth State: Maryland
• Birth City: Tuckahoe
• Birth Country: United States
• Gender: Male
• Best Known For: Frederick Douglass was a leader in the abolitionist movement, an early champion of women’s rights and author of ‘Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass.’
• Interesting Facts
• Frederick Douglass first learned to read and write at the age of 12 from a Baltimore slaveholder's wife.
• To much controversy, Douglass married white abolitionist feminist Helen Pitts.
• Douglass became the first African American nominated for vice president of the United States.
• Death Year: 1895
• Death date: February 20, 1895
• Death City: Washington, D.C.
• Death Country: United States

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CITATION INFORMATION

• Article Title: Frederick Douglass Biography
• Author: Biography.com Editors
• Website Name: The Biography.com website
• Url: https://www.biography.com/activists/frederick-douglass
• Access Date:
• Publisher: A&E Television Networks
• Last Updated: July 15, 2021
• Original Published Date: April 3, 2014
• If there is no struggle there is no progress. . . . Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.
• Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have the exact measure of the injustice and wrong which will be imposed on them.
• I prefer to be true to myself, even at the hazard of incurring the ridicule of others, rather than to be false, and to incur my own abhorrence.
• No man can put a chain about the ankle of his fellow man without at last finding the other end fastened about his own neck.
• People might not get all they work for in this world, but they must certainly work for all they get.
• I would unite with anybody to do right and with nobody to do wrong.
• 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.
• The life of the nation is secure only while the nation is honest, truthful, and virtuous.
• [I]n all the relations of life and death, we are met by the color line. We cannot ignore it if we would, and ought not if we could.
• If I ever had any patriotism, or any capacity for the feeling, it was whipt out of me long since by the lash of the American soul-drivers.
• The ground which a colored man occupies in this country is, every inch of it, sternly disputed.
• The lesson of all the ages on this point is, that a wrong done to one man is a wrong done to all men. It may not be felt at the moment, and the evil day may be long delayed, but so sure as there is a moral government of the universe, so sure will the harvest of evil come.
• Believing, as I do firmly believe, that human nature, as a whole, contains more good than evil, I am willing to trust the whole, rather than a part, in the conduct of human affairs.
• To educate a man is to unfit him to be a slave.
• To deny education to any people is one of the greatest crimes against human nature. It is easy to deny them the means of freedom and the rightful pursuit of happiness and to defeat the very end of their being.
• There is no negro problem. The problem is whether the American people have loyalty enough, honor enough, patriotism enough, to live up to their own constitution.
• Let us have no country but a free country, liberty for all and chains for none. Let us have one law, one gospel, equal rights for all, and I am sure God's blessing will be upon us and we shall be a prosperous and glorious nation.

Abolitionists

Harriet Tubman

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Abraham Lincoln

Susan B. Anthony

Lucretia Mott

Harriet Beecher Stowe

Alexandre Dumas

Henry David Thoreau

Mary Ann Shadd Cary

James Garfield

Jean-Jacques Dessalines

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Frederick Douglass summary

Frederick Douglass , orig. Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey , (born February 1818?, Tuckahoe, Md., U.S.—died Feb. 20, 1895, Washington, D.C.), U.S. abolitionist. The son of a slave mother and a white father, he was sent to work as a house servant in Baltimore, where he learned to read. At age 16 he was returned to the plantation; later he was hired out as a ship caulker. In 1838 he fled to New York City and then to New Bedford, Mass., changing his name to elude slave hunters. His eloquence at an 1841 antislavery convention propelled him into a new career as an agent for the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, in which capacity he endured frequent insults and violent personal attacks. In 1845 he wrote his autobiography, now regarded as a classic. To avoid recapture by his owner, whose name he had given in the narrative, he embarked on a speaking tour of England and Ireland (1845–47), returning with enough money to buy his freedom and to start an antislavery newspaper North Star , which he published until 1860 in Rochester, N.Y. In 1851 he split with the radical abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison and allied himself with moderates led by James Birney. In the American Civil War he was a consultant to Pres. Abraham Lincoln . During Reconstruction he fought for full civil rights for freedmen and supported women’s rights. He served in government posts in Washington, D.C. (1877–86), and as U.S. minister to Haiti (1889–91).

Frederick Douglass

February 1818–February 20, 1895

After escaping from bondage on September 3, 1838, Frederick Douglass became a highly-acclaimed orator and writer supporting the abolition of slavery before the Civil War and the enactment of African American rights during Reconstruction.

On July 5, 1852, during a holiday celebration sponsored by the Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society, Douglass delivered what many consider to be his most famous speech, entitled “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” [ Wikimedia Commons ]

Birth and Early Life

Acclaimed abolitionist and women’s rights supporter Frederick Douglass was born into slavery in Talbot County, Maryland, near the Chesapeake Bay. His birth name was Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey. As with many slaves, Douglass did not know the exact date of his birth, but he celebrated it on February 14. Douglass was of mixed ancestry. His mother, Harriet Bailey, was an African American whose lineage may have included some Native American forebears. Douglass’ father was an unknown white man, possibly his mother’s owner.

Separated from his mother as an infant, Douglass lived the first years of his life with his maternal grandmother, Betty Bailey, on another plantation. Douglass’ mother died when the boy was about seven years old. Later, writing in his autobiography, Douglass recalled that his master refused to allow him:

to be present during her illness, at her death, or burial. She was gone long before I knew anything about it. Never having enjoyed, to any considerable extent, her soothing presence, her tender and watchful care, I received the tidings of her death with much the same emotions I should have probably felt at the death of a stranger.

About the time his mother died, Douglass became the property of Lucretia Auld, wife of Thomas Auld. The Aulds subsequently sent Douglass to Baltimore to serve Thomas’ brother Hugh Auld. When Douglass arrived in Baltimore, Hugh Auld’s wife, Sophia, began teaching him the alphabet, a clear violation of statutes against educating slaves. When Auld’s husband learned of his wife’s activities, he forbade her from continuing the lessons. Afterward, Douglass learned to read by trading scraps of food for lessons from poor white boys he met on the streets of Baltimore.

Douglass lived in Baltimore for about seven years. In March 1832, when he was fourteen years old, Douglass returned to Thomas Auld’s custody at St. Michael’s plantation in eastern Maryland. On January 1, 1833, Auld sent Douglass to toil as a field hand on the small farm of Edward Covey. Covey had a notorious reputation for breaking young slaves, and it took him only a week to inflict the first of many severe whippings to his new rented laborer. Douglass later recorded that “During the first six months, of that year, scarce a week passed without his whipping me.” The abuse went on until August when Douglass resolved to take no more and “seized Covey hard by the throat” as he attempted to administer another whipping. The two then engaged in a fiery brawl that eventually brought Covey to his knees. Douglass recalled that “The whole six months afterwards, that I spent with Mr. Covey, he never laid the weight of his finger upon me in anger.” Afterward, Douglass suggested that the reason Covey never reported him for committing the criminal act of laying his hands on a white man was that it would have tarnished his reputation as “a first-rate overseer and negro-breaker” if people learned that a fourteen-year-old boy bested him>

Douglass’ term of service to Covey ended on Christmas Day, 1833. Thomas Auld next hired out Douglas to William Freeland. Douglass found Freeland to be more lenient than Covey. While toiling on Freeland’s farm about three miles from St. Michael’s, Douglass secretly began teaching other slaves in the area to read during “Sabbath school” at “the house of a free colored man.” When Freeland did nothing to stop the meetings after learning of them, armed whites, enraged that Douglass was educating slaves, stormed into a session and permanently dispersed the congregation.

In 1835, Thomas Auld indentured Douglass to Freeland for another year. When authorities arrested Douglass for plotting an escape with two other slaves, he expected Auld to end his indenture and sell him into the Deep South. It elated Douglass to learn that Auld planned to send him back to live with his brother in Baltimore under the watch of Hugh Auld.

Upon Douglass’ return to Baltimore, Hugh Auld hired him out to William Gardner. Working as a caulker for Gardner’s shipbuilding company, Douglass earned a dollar and a half a day, all of which went to Auld. Understandably, Douglass “could see no reason why . . .  at the end of each week” he should “pour the reward of (his) toil into the purse of my master.” Gradually, his resentment renewed his longing to escape to the North.

Escape from Slavery

While living in Baltimore, Douglass began a love affair with Anna Murray, a free black woman. When Douglass shared his desire to escape from bondage, the two conspired to secure his freedom. On September 3, 1838, dressed as a sailor, Douglass used funds provided by Murray to board a train under an assumed identity in Baltimore bound for Wilmington, Delaware. From Wilmington, the fugitive sailed by steamboat to Philadelphia, where he caught a train to New York.  Upon his arrival in New York, Douglass continued on to the home of noted abolitionist David Ruggles, a free black man who reportedly helped over 600 African Americans escape bondage. Douglass’ uneventful journey to freedom spanned fewer than twenty-four hours.

Days after Douglass’ arrival in New York, Murray joined him. On September 15, 1838, the Reverend James Pennington, who was also a fugitive slave from Maryland, married the couple at Ruggles’ home. To avoid discovery by bounty hunters, the newlyweds assumed the surname of Johnson and heeded Ruggles’ advice and moved farther north to New Bedford, Massachusetts.

Upon his arrival in New Bedford, Nathan Johnson befriended Douglass. Douglass also changed his surname. Johnson was reading Sir Walter Scott’s Lady of the Lake at the time and suggested the name of the poem’s heroine, Ellen Douglas. From that time forward, Frederick Bailey became Frederick Douglass.

Although Douglass escaped slavery in New Bedford, he did not escape prejudice. When white caulkers refused to work beside him, Douglass had to abandon his craft and toil as a common laborer at any job he could secure for the next three years.

While living in New Bedford, Douglass began reading The Liberator , a weekly newspaper published by William Lloyd Garrison and Isaac Knapp in Boston. During its thirty-one years in publication, the weekly championed abolishing slavery and expanding women’s rights in the United States. Inspired by the paper’s message, Douglass began attending anti-slavery meetings and became active in the abolitionist movement. After rising to speak at an anti-slavery convention at Nantucket, on August 11, 1841, Douglass recalled that:

I spoke but a few moments, when I felt a degree of freedom, and said what I desired with considerable ease. From that time until now, I have been engaged in pleading the cause of my brethren . . . .

John A. Collins, the general agent for the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, attended the meeting that evening. Upon hearing the former slave’s stirring speech, Collins met with Douglass and hired him as a speaker on the spot. Douglass soon began traveling throughout New England speaking before large audiences. He also delivered speeches on behalf of the American Anti-Slavery Society .

In 1843, the New England Anti-Slavery Society resolved to host 100 meetings across the North. At the urging of William Lloyd Garrison, the group hired Douglass to join its corps of speakers. The escaped slave drew large audiences, but the possibility of being apprehended by bounty hunters prevented him from providing specific details that might reveal his true identity. When detractors began challenging the veracity of Douglass’ recollections of his life in bondage, he countered by publishing the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, in 1845, the first of several autobiographical works he penned during his life. Receiving positive reviews, the book quickly became a bestseller.

Life in Europe

On August 16, 1845, following the successful debut of his book, Douglass set sail for Europe where he spent the next two years lecturing, primarily in England and Ireland. During his stay, Douglass legally escaped the clutches of slavery when British supporters purchased his freedom from Hugh Auld at a cost of 150 pounds sterling ($711.66 in American currency) on December 5, 1846.

Newspaper Publisher

When Douglass returned to Boston in April 1847, determined to publish his own abolitionist newspaper, William Lloyd Garrison disapproved. Hoping to avoid competing with Garrison in Boston, the home of Garrison’s The Liberator , Douglass moved to the progressive city of Rochester, in western New York. There, on December 3, 1847, he issued the first edition of the North Star , under the masthead “Right is of no Sex—Truth is of no Color—God is the Father of us all, and we are all brethren.” The weekly publication remained in circulation until June 1851 when it merged with Gerrit Smith’s Liberty Party Paper (based in Syracuse, New York) to form Frederick Douglass’ Paper .

During the same month that Douglass published the first issue of the North Star , he also had his first meeting with the radical abolitionist John Brown in Springfield, Massachusetts. Over the course of their discussions, Brown revealed his plan to invade the South secretly with a small band of insurgents and encourage slaves to escape their bondage. Douglass did not endorse Brown’s scheme because he believed that it had little chance to succeed. Still, Douglass left the meeting convinced of the dwindling chances of ending slavery in the United States without bloodshed.

Women’s Rights Activist

Douglass did not limit his progressive views to the abolition of slavery. In July 1848, he was the only African American to attend the Seneca Falls Convention. Elizabeth Cady Stanton , Martha Coffin Wright, Mary Ann M’Clintock, Lucretia Mott , and Jane Hunt organized the event. They advertised it as “a convention to discuss the social, civil, and religious condition and rights of woman.” Historians often credit the two-day gathering, as the catalyst for the women’s rights movement in the United States.

The organizers invited men to attend the convention on the second day, and roughly forty did. Many of them joined with the first day’s participants in adopting twelve resolutions endorsing specific equal rights for women. Only the ninth resolution, which stated that “it is the duty of the women of this country to secure to themselves their sacred right to the elective franchise,” did not pass unanimously. When it seemed that the ninth resolution might not pass at all, Douglass delivered an impassioned speech in favor of enfranchising women. Following Douglass’ powerful address, a small majority of the delegates approved the resolution.

Abolitionist

During the 1850s, Douglass became increasingly active in the anti-slavery Liberty Party and later with the fledgling Republican Party. In 1851, he openly split with William Lloyd Garrison . The more-radical Garrison believed that the U.S. Constitution sanctioned slavery, and he publicly condemned it. Douglass, however, defended the document, arguing that its lofty rhetoric aspiring to “establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty” confirmed the “unconstitutionality of slavery.” The two friends afterward became bitter enemies.

On July 5, 1852, during a holiday celebration sponsored by the Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society, Douglass delivered what many consider his most famous speech. Over 500 enrapt abolitionists packed Corinthian Hall and listened to Douglass pose the question, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” He praised the vision of the Founding Fathers for a nation based upon “justice, liberty and humanity.” However, he also noted that “The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought life and healing to you, has brought stripes and death to me.” Finally, Douglass declared that Independence Day to the slave is:

a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy—a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour.

Predictably, after publication Douglass’ provocative words kindled mixed but strong reactions, ranging from anger to empathy. Despite the discord they may have evoked, however, his stinging, yet accurate, observations have withstood the test of time. They remain a powerful reminder that the pursuit of “liberty and justice for all” is still a work in progress.

John Brown’s Raid on Harpers Ferry

As the specter of slavery further divided the United States following the Compromise of 1850 and the Dred Scott decision in 1857, Douglass began to accept the inevitability of impending bloodshed. During the latter half of the decade, Douglass met with John Brown, spoke on his behalf, and solicited funds for the zealous abolitionist’s militant exploits to end slavery. When the two men secretly met at a stone quarry near Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, on August 20, 1859, to discuss Brown’s plan to take up arms against the U.S. government and attack the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry , Virginia, Douglass disapproved of the scheme and refused to get involved.

When Brown followed through with his plot on October 16, 1859, Douglass was addressing a crowd in Philadelphia. Upon learning of Brown’s raid and subsequent arrest, Douglass quickly made his way home to Rochester and then fled to Canada for fear of being falsely implicated in the conspiracy. His concerns were not unfounded. On November 13, 1859, Virginia Governor Richard Wise requested President James Buchanan ‘s help in apprehending Douglass who officials charged with “murder, robbery, and inciting servile insurrection in the State of Virginia.” On November 12, 1859, Douglass left Canada for the distant shores of England where he remained for six months, far from the reach of southern kidnappers.

In 1860, Douglass returned to the United States, passing through Canada to avoid detection. Not surprisingly, he supported President Abraham Lincoln ‘s call to arms after the Southern attack on Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861. However, when Lincoln proclaimed his goals were to quell the Southern insurrection and preserve the Union, he disappointed Douglass who viewed the ensuing conflict as a struggle to end slavery.

Despite his frustration, Douglass supported the war, especially after Lincoln issued his Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863. Two months later, on February 24, Douglass signed on as an agent for the government to recruit black soldiers for the volunteer army. Douglass was largely responsible for the successful recruitment of the Massachusetts 54th and 55th regiments, the former of which included his sons Lewis and Charles. As the war progressed, Douglass became one of Lincoln’s trusted advisors, and he endorsed the president’s reelection in 1864.

Reconstruction

Following the Civil War, Douglass actively crusaded for the enactment of the 13th , 14th , and 15th amendments to the U.S. Constitution, which abolished slavery, conferred citizenship on African Americans, and granted black Americans the right to vote. Douglass’ support of the 14th and 15th amendments led to a rift with leading members of the American Equal Rights Association, including Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony , because the proposed reforms granted voting rights to African American men, but did not enfranchise women. Douglass had been a vocal supporter of women’s rights for two decades, but he feared that linking the causes of black suffrage with female suffrage could doom the attainment either.

Return to Newspaper Publishing

Douglass had retired from journalism in 1863 when he ceased publication of Douglass’ Monthly , the successor of The North Star and Frederick Douglass’ Papers. In January 1870, Douglas re-entered the profession when he joined the staff of the New National Era as a corresponding editor. In December, he purchased the weekly publication and became editor-in-chief. Published until 1874, the newspaper provided a voice for black perspectives on national and local events in the Washington, DC. area.

During his stint as owner-editor of the New National Era , Douglass achieved a measure of political fame in 1872 when the Equal Rights Party nominated him as the vice-presidential running-mate of their U.S. presidential candidate Victoria Claflin Woodhull. Douglass did not seek the position, nor, in fact, was he aware that he had become the first African American nominated for Vice-President of the United States until after the party’s delegates selected him. Apparently unimpressed, Douglass did not acknowledge the nomination, and he actively campaigned for President Ulysses S. Grant ‘s re-election.

Post-Civil War Private Life

Also in 1872, on a more somber note, Douglass’ home in Rochester burned to ruins on June 2. Officials suspected arson but could never prove it. Following the fire, Douglass moved to the Washington, DC. area where he lived for the rest of his life.

In March 1874, trustees of the Freedmen’s Savings and Trust Company (also known as Freedmen’s Bank) appointed Douglass as president of the institution. Incorporated by an act of Congress on March 3, 1865, the privately chartered bank’s purpose was to assist newly emancipated African-Americans deal with their personal financial matters. During its short existence, the bank suffered from a series of fraudulent financial decisions by its managers, which imperiled the savings of thousands of freedmen. The Panic of 1873 , which triggered a worldwide economic depression, left the bank nearly in ruins.

Desperate to forestall a run against the bank’s assets, the institution’s trustees persuaded Douglass to assume oversight. Hoping to restore confidence among depositors, Douglass selflessly deposited thousands of dollars of his own money with the troubled institution. Unfortunately, neither Douglass’ personal sacrifice, nor his name and leadership were enough to avert disaster. On June 29, 1874, the Freedmen’s Bank collapsed, financially ruining tens of thousands of African Americans who had entrusted their savings to it.

Shortly after Rutherford B. Hayes took the oath of office as President of the United States on March 4, 1877, he nominated Douglass for the position of United States Marshal for the District of Columbia. When the U.S. Senate approved the nomination on March 18, Douglass became the first African American confirmed for a presidential appointment in U.S. history. Douglass held the office throughout the four years of Hayes’ presidency.

Six months after his confirmation, Douglass purchased an estate of nearly ten acres overlooking the Anacostia River, which he and his wife, Anna, named Cedar Hill. A year later he bought an adjacent tract of land that expanded the area of his holdings to over ten acres. The National Park Service now preserves the home at 1411 W Street SE, Washington, D.C., as the Frederick Douglass National Historic Site.

After President Hayes left office, his successor James A. Garfield installed Douglass as the Recorder of Deeds for the District of Columbia in 1881. During the same year, Douglass published his third autobiography, entitled Life and Times of Frederick Douglass. Sales of the book and a revised edition, published the following year, were disappointing.

Overshadowing the disappointment of his books’ sales, Douglass suffered a much larger personal tragedy in 1882 when his wife died unexpectedly of a stroke on August 4. Married for nearly forty-four years, the couple raised five children.

Two years after Anna’s death, Douglass married his former secretary and notable feminist, Helen Pitts, on January 24, 1884. Because Helen was white and nearly twenty years younger than Douglass, many people (including his family) did not approve of the marriage.

On January 5, 1886, Douglass resigned from his position as Recorder of Deeds for the District of Columbia and embarked on an extended tour of Europe, visiting England, Ireland, France, Switzerland, Italy, Egypt, and Greece. After Douglass returned home in 1887, President Benjamin Harrison appointed him as Minister Resident and Consul General to Haiti on July 1, 1889. Two months later, Harrison also named Douglass as Chargé d’affaires for Santo Domingo and Minister to Haiti. 1891, Douglass resigned from his appointments following a dispute with the state department. In 1893, Haiti named Douglass a co-commissioner of its pavilion at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago.

Death and Burial

On February 20, 1895, Douglass attended a meeting of the National Council of Women in Washington, D.C. During that meeting, he received a standing ovation after being welcomed to the speaker’s platform. When Douglass returned home that evening, he suffered a massive heart attack and died at age seventy-seven. Following funeral services at Cedar Hill, on February 25, thousands of mourners viewed Douglass’ body as it lay in state at Metropolitan African Methodist Church in Washington. Douglass’ remains were transported to Rochester where they were interred at Mount Hope Cemetery after additional memorial services.

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Frederick Douglass

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February 1818 (est) Talbot County, Maryland

February 20, 1895 Washington, D.C.

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Abolitionist, author, editor, diplomat

Anna Murray-Douglass (1838–1882) Helen Pitts

Frederick Douglass Articles

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Frederick Douglass summary: Frederick Douglass was a former slave who became a prominent voice in the Abolitionist Movement and one of the most widely known and influential African Americans of his day. He authored an autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself in 1845. He began publishing a newspaper in 1848; it took its name, North Star , from the directions given to slaves attempting to escape from the South, "Follow the North Star." During the Civil War he met with President Abraham Lincoln and helped recruit black troops from the North after the Union Army began accepting them for enlistment, believing it would aid in achieving citizenship for his race. Post-war he was appointed to several public posts.

Born in Slavery

Frederick Douglass was born Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey to a slave mother, Harriet Bailey, and an unknown white man, on Maryland’s eastern shore. His date of birth is unknown but February 1818 is the generally accepted date. Mother and son were the property of Aaron "Captain Anthony" Anthony, who is believed to have fathered the boy; Anthony owned a few slaves and small farms but worked as a clerk and superintendent—"what might be called the overseer of the overseers," as Douglass described it—on the plantation of Colonel Edward Lloyd. Douglass saw his mother less than a half-dozen times; after giving birth to him in the cabin of her mother, Betsey Bailey, she returned to the farm where she worked, and she died when he was seven or eight. His grandparents Isaac and Betsey Bailey and an aunt raised him until he was six, when he was sent to Wye Town plantation.

Attitudes among slaveowners toward their human property varied widely; Douglass had the misfortune to have been born into a situation where cruelty was the norm, and he witnessed brutal beatings administered to his aunt and other slaves while he was still young. Anthony’s overseer, whom Douglass identified in his autobiography only as Mr. Plummer, "a miserable drunkard, a profane swearer, and a savage monster," meted out harsh punishments frequently. He seemed to take special pleasure in whipping Hester, Douglass’ aunt. While still very young, Douglass witnessed one of these vicious whippings, an event he called, "the blood-stained gate, the entrance to the hell of slavery, through which I was about to pass."

Frederick Douglass learns to read in Baltimore

When Douglass was "about five," he was loaned to Hugh Auld, the brother-in-law of Anthony’s daughter Lucretia, who took him to Baltimore to be the servant of Hugh’s young son Thomas. Hugh Auld and his wife, Sophia, did not practice the same level of cruelty as that found on Col. Lloyd’s farms, providing the boy with a modicum of relief from the brutality that had surrounded him all his life. Sophia had never previously owned a slave and initially treated Douglass with kindness. She even taught him the alphabet and was teaching him how to spell simple words until her husband stopped her. Unintentionally, while explaining to his wife why the lessons must stop—among other reasons, the law forbade teaching slaves to read and write—Auld enlightened Douglass that blacks were denied education as a means of maintaining control over them. The young slave grasped that the opposite was also true: if he could become educated, he might have more power for himself. He took to concealing a book on his person when he was sent on errands and used bread taken from the house to give to the children of poor white families in the neighborhood in exchange for their assistance in continuing his lessons.

When he was about 12 he obtained a book called The Colombian Orator , which contained anti-slavery arguments. The portion that most affected Douglass was a fictional account of a conversation between a slave owner and his slave, who had run off and been returned three times. The slave owner makes all the arguments in favor of slavery, and the slave refutes them.

It was in Baltimore that he first heard the words abolition and abolitionist . He later credited being sent to Baltimore for laying the foundation and opening the gateway "to all my subsequent prosperity."

In March 1832, he was sent back to his owner, who by this time was Hugh Auld’s brother, Thomas, whose late wife, Lucretia, had been the daughter of Douglass’ original master, Captain Anthony. Thomas whipped Douglass on several occasions, saying Baltimore had "ruined" him. Finally, after about nine months, Thomas leased him to Edward Covey, who had a reputation as a "slavebreaker." He utilized deceptiveness and blatant brutality to keep slaves in a constant atmosphere of uncertainty and fear, to break their spirits and insure they would be subservient when he returned them to their masters. During the first six months he suffered at Covey’s hands Douglass endured frequent whippings and near starvation, but that summer, according to Narrative , he fought back and he and Covey went at each other for what he thought was about two hours.

Covey never gave him a severe whipping again nor called the constable to take him to town for a public whipping as punishment for striking a white man. Douglass decided Covey feared losing his reputation as a slavebreaker if a 16-year old could best him, and that meant he would no longer be able to hire at favorable prices slaves to work his farm. His servitude to Covey ended with the expiration of Thomas Auld’s contract with Covey on Christmas Day, 1833, and he returned to Auld, who repeatedly leased out his slave.

Frederick Douglass escapes to freedom

In 1838, going behind Thomas Auld’s back, Douglass convinced Hugh Auld to let him contract himself out as a caulker to a Baltimore shipbuilder. In return, he gave Hugh about six dollars of his weekly wages, the lion’s share of what he earned. On September 3, Douglass made his break for freedom by borrowing or purchasing papers from a free black sailor. From Baltimore he traveled by train and steamboat, reaching New York City the following day. There, he married Anna Murray, a free black housekeeper whom he had met through a debating club for free black men, the East Baltimore Mental Improvement Society.

Not long after their September 15 wedding, the couple moved to New Bedford, Massachusetts, and stayed with Nathan and Mary Johnson, caterers who were associated with the abolitionist movement. Nathan suggested Frederick take the last name Douglas, from James of Clan Douglas in Sir Walter Scott’s poem Lady of the Lake . He did but chose to spell it with a double s.

The Douglasses had five children. He became a licensed preacher in the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, began attending abolitionist meetings and subscribed to the Liberator , an abolitionist newspaper published by William Lloyd Garrison. At age 23, he was invited to speak as a featured guest during the annual convention of Garrison’s Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society. His moving speech led to a three-year contract as a traveling speaker for the society, and he developed a popular following.

In 1845, he published Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself . It became an overnight sensation and was widely circulated in Europe as well as in the northern United States. In August, he departed for the British Isles—in part because the book had identified him as a runaway slave, and in America he was under the constant threat of being seized and returned to his master. Article IV, Section 2 of the U.S. Constitution required such action if his owner demanded his return.

His speeches packed houses in England and Ireland, and in 1847 British friends purchased his freedom from his owner, to remove the threat of him being returned to servitude. It has been suggested that Douglass’ popularity in Britain and the intense anti-slavery feelings he helped reinforce there played a role in keeping England from intervening in the American Civil War on the pro-slavery Confederate side. Britain had enacted gradual emancipation, using an apprenticeship system, in 1833 and had ended the apprenticeship requirement in 1838.

William Lloyd Garrison and John Brown

The trip to Britain led to a change in Douglass. There, he was treated as an equal in his own right, rather than being in the shadow of Garrison as he was back home. After returning to America in 1847, he began distancing himself from Garrison, who had become so extreme in his zeal to see slavery ended that he was encouraging abolitionists not to vote or attend church because, Garrison maintained, the Constitution was a document of slavery and churches were not taking an active role in ending the "peculiar institution" of slavery. The United States should be split up, he said, to remove free states from the control of slave states.

Douglass, on the other hand, said in 1851 the Constitution could be "wielded in behalf of emancipation." He did not support dissolving the Union, thereby abandoning between three and four million slaves in the South.

When Douglass began publishing his own newspaper, North Star , it was the final betrayal in the eyes of Garrison, publisher of Liberator . The dispute ended their friendship until they reconciled during the Civil War.

Douglass may have felt Garrison had become too extreme but that didn’t prevent a friendship from forming between the former slave and another anti-slavery extremist, John Brown . The two met in 1848, and they corresponded and visited with each other over the following decade. Brown told Douglass of his plan to seize the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia (now West Virginia), and use the weapons there to arm slaves so they could rise up against their masters. Douglass did not agree with this violent approach, fearing that it would cause a negative reaction and hurt the abolitionist cause. After John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry in October 1859 failed, Douglass was sought as a co-conspirator. Once again, he fled the United States, this time going to Canada before traveling on to England. He returned home in 1860 following the death of his daughter, Annie. Abolitionists had made Brown into a martyr, and Douglass was never charged with involvement in the Harpers Ferry raid.

Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln

After the Civil War began, Douglass became one of the most outspoken advocates for admitting Negro troops into the Union armies, seeing this as a path not only to ending slavery but to achieving full citizenship. He argued, "Once let the black man get upon his person the brass letter, U.S., let him get an eagle on his button, and a musket on his shoulder and bullets in his pocket, there is no power on earth that can deny that he has earned the right to citizenship."

The war’s appallingly high battle casualties eventually led the Army and the government to reconsider and accept the service of black troops. Douglass and his son, Frederick Douglass, Jr., became recruiters. Another son, Lewis, joined the 54th Massachusetts Colored Infantry Regiment , was promoted to sergeant major, and was wounded during the unit’s famed attack on Fort Wagner in South Carolina.

Although the doors to military service had been opened, inequality still existed in the way black soldiers were treated, including paying them less than white soldiers were paid. In 1863, Douglass met with President Abraham Lincoln to discuss the inequalities in military service. The issue of equal pay was later resolved.

The two men met again in August 1864, when the president asked Douglass to help in aiding slaves to escape from the South. As long as they remained, they were a pillar shoring up the rebellion by growing crops, building fortifications, etc. In the coming months, however, Lincoln had won reelection and Confederate armies were being pushed back toward Richmond and Atlanta; the plan to aid escaping slaves was never enacted.

Douglass was present at the March 1865 White House reception following Lincoln’s second inauguration, the first black man or woman ever invited to such a reception as a guest. The guards, apparently not informed to expect Douglass, tried to usher him and a black lady he was escorting out a side door. He sent word to Lincoln, and soon was greeting the president again. It was the last time they would see each other.

Frederick Douglass after the Civil War

Douglass continued his career as a lecturer after the war. He had seen slavery abolished by the 13th Amendment in 1865; within the next five years he would see amendments passed that gave blacks the right to vote and conferred full citizenship upon them—although both were observed more in theory than in practice well into the 20th century, when the Civil Rights Movement broke down many barriers in the 1950s and ’60s.

After President Ulysses S. Grant took office in 1869 he appointed Douglass to a commission to investigate annexing the Dominican Republic (the U.S. rejected annexation). In 1877, President Rutherford B. Hayes named him U.S. Marshal for the District of Columbia; Hayes’ successor, James Garfield, gave that post to someone else but made Douglass the Recorder of Deeds for D.C. His other appointments included charge d’affaires to the Dominican Republic and minister-resident and consul-general to Haiti.

His wife, Anna, died in 1882. Two years later, in a very controversial move, he wed a white woman Helen Pitts, a feminist and the daughter of abolitionist Gideon Pitts. Unlike many who had been involved in the abolition movement, Douglass also wanted greater equality for women. At the 1848 Women’s Rights Convention at Seneca Falls, New York, he said, "We hold woman to be justly entitled to all we claim for man. We go farther, and express our conviction that all political rights which it is expedient for man to exercise, it is equally so for women."

On February 20, 1895, he suffered a fatal heart attack shortly after attending the National Council of Women meeting in Washington. Helen established the Frederick Douglass Memorial and Historical Association to memorialize him. Their home, Cedar Hill, which overlooks Washington, has been part of the National Park Service since 1962.

In the 1890s, a number of African American communities began celebrating the anniversary of his birth in February each year, just as they had celebrated Lincoln’s February 12 birthday since the end of the Civil War. In the 1920s, the dates of those traditional celebrations led Carter G. Woodson to choose a week in February, the month encompassing both men’s birthdays, as the time for Negro History Week, which became Black History Month in the 1960s.

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Frederick Douglass

Frederick Douglass (1818–1895). Prints and Photographs Division , Library of Congress. Digital ID # cph. 3b02728

Born a slave in Tuckahoe, Maryland, Frederick Douglass (1818–1895) would rise to become one of the foremost African American leaders of the nineteenth century.  Sent to Baltimore while still a boy to be trained as a house servant, he started to learn to read and write with the assistance of his owner’s wife, Sophia Auld, although it was against the law in Maryland at that time to educate slaves. In 1838, Douglass escaped slavery by traveling to New York in the disguise of a sailor. He soon thereafter married a free black woman, Anna Murray, and settled in New Bedford, Massachusetts. A regular subscriber to The Liberator , the abolitionist journal edited by William Lloyd Garrison, Douglass was invited to speak at a meeting of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society in 1841.  The oratorical power of the former slave amazed the audience and opened up a new career as a lecturer. More fame would come his way with the 1845 publication of Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass , the first of three autobiographies that he would write. In 1847, Douglass founded and assumed the editorship of The North Star , an anti-slavery newspaper. With the outbreak of the Civil War, Frederick Douglass believed strongly in emancipation as a war aim, and that it was critically important for blacks to be allowed entry into the armed forces in the fight to end slavery.  A good portion of his energies in 1863 were involved in the successful recruitment drives for the 54th and 55th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry regiments, in which his own sons Lewis and Charles served.  Following the Civil War, Douglass moved to Washington, D.C., and held several government positions, including the United States Marshal for the District of Columbia, and the United States Minister to Haiti. A life-long advocate for the rights of women and minorities, he was in attendance at a women suffrage meeting on the day of his death.

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The Narrative of Frederick Douglass

Frederick douglass.

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In approximately 1817, Frederick Douglass is born into slavery in Tuckahoe, Maryland. His mother is a slave named Harriet Bailey , and his father is an unknown white man who may be his master. Douglass encounters slavery’s brutality at an early age when he witnesses his first master, Captain Anthony , give a brutal whipping to Douglass’s Aunt Hester . Captain Anthony is employed by Colonel Edward Lloyd , and Anthony lives in a house on Lloyd’s sprawling property with his sons, Andrew and Richard ; his daughter, Lucretia ; and Lucretia’s husband, Captain Thomas Auld . Lloyd himself lives in the middle of his plantation on a property called the Great House Farm, which is so majestic that some slaves feel honored to work there.

Lloyd is an unkind master, and, like other slaveholders, he will discipline the slaves if they speak honestly about the discomfort of their circumstances. One of Lloyd’s overseers, Mr. Austin Gore , is a particularly cruel disciplinarian. His killing of a slave named Demby , which goes unpunished, illustrates that killing or harming a black person is not treated as a crime.

To Douglass’s delight, he is moved to Baltimore at age seven or eight to work for Mr. Hugh Auld , brother of Captain Thomas Auld. Hugh’s wife, Sophia Auld , is at first a kind and loving mistress who begins teaching Douglass to read. However, Hugh emphatically puts a stop to Douglass’s education. Hugh’s intervention only makes Douglass more determined to learn how to read, viewing education as a path to freedom. Sophia is warped by the power that owning slaves gives her. She becomes mean-spirited and works to thwart Douglass’s attempts to become literate. Douglass lives with the Aulds for seven years, and in this time he teaches himself to read. Douglass reads books that present arguments against slavery, and he begins to lose hope as he realizes the extent of his powerlessness. He resolves to attempt an escape.

Captain Anthony dies, and Douglass is sent back to Lloyd’s plantation to be humiliatingly evaluated alongside Anthony’s livestock. Douglass is inherited by Lucretia Auld and sent back to Baltimore, and Douglass is sent to live with Thomas and his new wife in the town of St. Michael’s, Maryland in 1832. Thomas is a cruel master and a religious hypocrite. He and Douglass do not get along, and Douglass is sent to work for Edward Covey , a farmer who has a reputation for breaking the spirits of difficult slaves.

Douglass spends six hellish months working for the malevolent Mr. Covey. Douglass’s spirits are broken by the work, and he goes to Thomas Auld to protest his treatment, but is sent back to Covey’s farm. Another slave, Sandy Jenkins , gives Douglass a mystical root to protect himself. Douglass stands up to Covey and stops receiving whippings. After a year with Covey, Douglass is sent to live with William Freeland. Douglass and four other slaves attempt to escape from Freeland’s, but their plan is betrayed and Douglass ends up in jail. After some time in prison, Douglass is sent back to Baltimore to work again for Hugh Auld.

In Baltimore, Douglass works for a shipbuilder, and is assaulted on his jobsite. Hugh apprentices him to another shipbuilder, and Douglass learns how to caulk. Douglass’s caulking skills allow him to earn good money for Hugh. Hugh temporarily allows Douglass to work for his own pay, but later revokes this permission. Douglass then decides to plan an escape.

Douglass escapes successfully. To protect those who helped him and enable future slaves’ escapes from slavery, Douglass does not describe his escape in detail. Once free, Douglass ends up in New York, and is helped by Mr. David Ruggles . In New York, Douglass weds a free woman named Anna . The newlyweds then make their way to New Bedford, where Douglass is aided by a man named Nathan Johnson . Douglass is amazed by the prosperity the north has achieved without slaves. After some time in New Bedford, Douglass begins reading The Liberator, an abolitionist newspaper. This inspires Douglass to speak at an anti-slavery convention in 1841, which launches his career as an anti-slavery advocate.

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Frederick Douglass

Frederick Douglass (c. 1817–1895) is a central figure in United States and African American history. [ 1 ] He was born a slave, circa 1817; [ 2 ] his mother was a Negro slave and his father was reputed to be his white master. Douglass escaped from slavery in 1838 and rose to become a principal leader and spokesperson for the U.S. Abolition movement. He would eventually develop into a towering figure for the U.S. Civil Rights Movement, and his legacy would be claimed by a diverse span of groups, from liberals and integrationists to conservatives to nationalists, within and without black America.

He wrote three autobiographies, each one expanding on the details of his life. The first was Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written By Himself (in 1845); [ 3 ] the second was My Bondage and My Freedom (in 1852a; FDAB: 103–452); [ 4 ] and the third was Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (in 1881; FDAB: 453–1045). They are now foremost examples of the American slave narrative. In addition to being autobiographical, they are also, as is standard, explicitly works of political and social criticism and moral suasion; they were aimed at the hearts and minds of the readers, and their greater purpose was to attack and to contribute to the abolition of slavery in the United States, and to argue for the full inclusion of black Americans into the nation.

Shortly after escaping from slavery, Douglass began operating as a spokesperson, giving numerous speeches about his life and experiences, for William Lloyd Garrison’s American Anti-Slavery Society. To spread his story and assist the abolitionist cause, as well as to counter early charges that someone so eloquent as he could not have been a slave, Douglass wrote and published his first autobiography, the Narrative . The Narrative brought Douglass fame in the United States and the United Kingdom, and it provided the funds to purchase his freedom.

After breaking with Garrison, Douglass founded and edited his first paper, the North Star , and authored a considerable body of letters, editorials, and speeches. These writings have been collected in Philip Foner’s multivolume, The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass (1950–1975, hereafter FDLW), [ 5 ] and in John W. Blassingame and John R. McKivigan’s multivolume, The Frederick Douglass Papers (1979–, hereafter FDP).

Douglass’s life, from slavery to statesman, his writings and speeches, and his national and international work have inspired many lines of discussion in debate within the fields of American and African American history, political science and theory, sociology, and in philosophy. His legacy is claimed, despite his links to ideas of cultural and racial assimilationism, by black Nationalists as well as by black liberals and black conservatives.

Douglass can be linked to the history of American philosophy, through his participation in national discussions about the nature of and future of the American Republic and its institutions. In that light he is linked to his contemporaries who had academic philosophic connections, in particular Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882), and by the uptake of his political and social legacy and writings by later African American philosophers, such as W.E.B. Du Bois (1868–1963) and Alain Locke (1884–1954; see Harris 1989). Frederick Douglass: A Critical Reader , edited by Bill E. Lawson and Frank M. Kirkland (1999), is a valuable guide to lines of inquiry about Douglass, and the debates he inspired, within philosophy in the United States. In contemporary philosophy in the United States, Douglass’s work is usually taken up within American philosophy, African American philosophy, and moral, social, and political philosophy; in particular, the debates in those areas focus on his views concerning slavery and (later in his career at the dawn of Jim Crow segregation) racial exploitation and segregation, natural law, the U.S. constitution, violence and self-respect in the resistance against slavery, racial integration versus emigration or separation, cultural assimilation, racial amalgamation, and women’s suffrage.

2. Natural Law

3. the u.s. constitution, 4. violence and self-respect, 5. assimilation and amalgamation, 6. integration versus emigration, 7. leadership, 8. women’s suffrage, 9. at the dawn of jim crow, primary sources, secondary literature, other internet resources, related entries.

In his three narratives, and his numerous articles, speeches, and letters, Douglass vigorously argued against slavery. He sought to demonstrate that it was cruel, unnatural, ungodly, immoral, and unjust. He laid out his arguments first in his speeches while he was with Garrison’s American Anti-Slavery Society, and then in his first autobiography, the Narrative . As the U.S. Civil War drew closer, he expanded his arguments in many speeches, editorials, and in his second autobiography, My Bondage and My Freedom.

In his own words he worked to pour out a “scorching irony” to expose the evil of slavery (1852b, FDLW v.2: 192). His rebellion against slavery began, as he recounted, while he was a slave. In his narratives, this depiction of early recognition, and general recognition among blacks and some whites, of the injustice, unnaturalness, and cruelty of slavery is a major element of his argument.

It marks his first argument against slavery. Some of the apologists for slavery claimed that blacks were beasts, subhuman, or at least a degenerated form of the human species. These arguments go back to at least Sepulveda’s arguments in the fifteenth century, which Bartolomé de las Casas famously countered (1552; see also, Frederickson’s review of the early history of racism [2002]), and were common in the American British Colonies and then the United States; for example, Thomas Jefferson famously intimates this point in his Notes on the State of Virginia (1785: Query 14). Douglass argued that blacks were fully rational humans, and mocked slavery’s apologists for its hypocrisies and contradictions when it claimed otherwise. In his Fourth of July Address, he derides the very idea that he would even need to argue this point (1852b).

Against the claim that blacks were beasts, he argued that rather slavery had brutalized them. He pointed to the obviousness of the humanity of blacks, and to the hypocrisy of the apologists for slavery in America on this question: why should there be special laws prohibiting the free actions of blacks, such as rebelling against the master or any other white person, if slaves were bestial and incapable of independent, responsible behavior? Why, indeed, had slave masters encouraged their slaves' Christianization, and then forbade their religious gatherings? Along with this hypocrisy, American slaveholders feared and banned the education of blacks, while demanding and profiting from their learning and development in the skilled trades. Thus, Douglass argued the accusation that blacks were beasts was predicated on the guilty knowledge that they were humans. Additionally, it subverted not only the natural goodness of blacks by brutalizing them, but it also did so to white slaveholders and those otherwise innocent whites affected by this wicked institution. Slavery, Douglass pointed out, making reference to Jefferson’s anxieties in Query 18 of the Notes on the State of Virginia (1785), that slavery was a poison in the body of the republic.

Second, since blacks were humans, Douglass argued they were entitled to the natural rights that natural law mandated and that the United States recognized in its Declaration of Independence and Constitution. Slavery subverted the natural rights of blacks by subjugating and brutalizing them: taking men and turning them, against God’s will and nature, into beasts. Third, as an affront to natural law, slavery contradicted God’s law. Douglass cited biblical passages and interpretations popular with abolitionists. As a witness and participant of the second Great Awakening, he took seriously the politicized rhetoric of Christian liberation from sin, and, as with other abolitionists, saw it intrinsically wrapped up with liberation from slavery, and indeed national liberation. Fourth, he argued that slavery was inconsistent with the idea of America, with its national narrative and highest ideals, and not just with its founding documents. Fifth, drawing on the ideas of manifest destiny, as well as the idea of natural law realized in historical progress, he argued that slavery was inconsistent with development: moral, political, economic, social, and ultimately historical. America was on the wrong side of history on the question of slavery.

To defend slavery, some of its apologists drew on the idea of historical progress to offer the defense that slavery was a benevolent and paternal system for the mutual benefit of whites and blacks. Douglass countered by drawing on his experiences, and the experiences of other slaves, that American slavery was in no way benevolent. It brutalized blacks, subjecting them to debilitating, murderous violence; to rape; to the splitting up of families (another crime against nature); to denying them education and self-improvement; and to the exploitation of their labor and denying them access to their natural right to property. Black slaves were not happy Sambos benefiting from the largesse of kind, gentile white masters—they were brutalized against all justice and reason. Neither were they lacking in agency or self-respect, nor were they, for all intents and purposes socially and morally dead, subjected to natal alienation. [ 6 ] They were moral beings, fully aware of the rights and capabilities they were unjustly deprived of, and most of all they wanted freedom, independence, the recognition of their full personhood, and their rights as U.S. citizens (McGary and Lawson 1992).

Howard McGary and Bill E. Lawson’s Between Slavery and Freedom: Philosophy and American Slavery (1992), is an indispensable source for philosophical analyses of these arguments, and the engagement of normative philosophy with historical and sociological theories of U.S. slavery, and Nicholas Buccola’s The Political Thought of Frederick Douglass: In Pursuit of American Liberty (2012), provides an excellent analysis of how Douglass’s critical examination of slavery fits into his liberalism and dominant conceptions of liberty of his time. An early, key contributor to the philosophical literature on Douglass, and to American philosophical literature on Douglass was Angela Davis, who of course is a key figure in the U.S. Civil Rights Movement and the emergence of both the black power movement and black feminism since the 1960s. Her groundbreaking essay on Douglass, “Unfinished Lecture on Liberation-II”, argued for an active rather than static conception of liberty, drew on and criticized Rousseau’s conception of slavery, and applied her analysis to the Civil Rights struggles she was involved in during the late 1960s and early 1970s ([1971] 1983). [ 7 ]

As was mentioned in the above section, Douglass drew on the idea of natural rights and the natural law tradition in his argument against slavery. Douglass was an Enlightenment thinker and a nineteenth century modernist (Moses 1978; Martin 1984; Myers 2008). As such, he had a firm faith in the progress of man, civilization, and Western Christendom; hence, he saw American slavery as a brutal backwardness that ran counter to the progress of history. God and the forward march of history, Douglass believed, would bring the realization of truth, justice, and the brotherhood of man.

His sources for his belief were many. The obvious sources include sources such as the American founding documents, popular intellectuals, such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, and his colleagues and acquaintances in the American Abolition movement, and the allies he encountered abroad; a particular source of his conception of natural law theory was George Combe’s The Constitution of Man , from 1834 (in Van Wyhe 2004). However, given the numerous religious references in his speeches and writings, and his drawing on the language of the King James Bible, and the rhetoric of manifest destiny, a primary source for his employment of the idea of natural law seems to be his adoption of the American Protestantism of the Second Great Awakening, with its democratic, republican, and generally independent spirit.

He believed that there were forces in operation, which must inevitably work the downfall of slavery:

“The arm of the Lord is not shortened,” and the doom of slavery is certain. I, therefore, leave off where I began, with hope. While drawing encouragement from the Declaration of Independence, the great principles it contains, and the genius of American Institutions, my spirit is also cheered by the obvious tendencies of the age. (1852b, FDLW v.2: 203)

Relying on the deus ex machina , however, was not enough for Douglass. His vision of human rights involved action (Myers 2008). Here he echoes the civic republican tradition by stressing the need for active participation to claim, or earn one’s rights and status as a citoyen (Pettit 1997; Gooding-Williams 2009; Rousseau [SC]). Humans resist providential justice; this could be seen in the resistance of the slave-holding states of America to the abolition of slavery and the apathy of many other Americans about slavery; thus, the end of slavery requires action: agitation, protest, and if needed military intervention. Douglass longed for God to cast his thunderbolts at the United States, but he knew that to achieve the abolition of slavery in America, action was needed. His view of providence is on full display at the end of his famous Fourth of July oration of 1852. Douglass uses Psalm 68:31 and pairs the idea of God’s fiat with the image of Africa and Asia rising:

The far off and almost fabulous Pacific rolls in grandeur at our feet. The Celestial Empire, the mystery of ages, is being solved. The fiat of the Almighty, “Let there be Light,” has not yet spent its force. No abuse, no outrage whether in taste, sport or avarice, can now hide itself from the all-pervading light. The iron shoe, and crippled foot of China must be seen, in contrast with nature. Africa must rise and put on her yet unwoven garment. “Ethiopia shall stretch out her hand unto God”. (1852b, FDLW v.2: 203) [ 8 ]

There are many concerns about Douglass’s view of natural law, manifest destiny and providence—these concerns are on display in the last quotation, and it is not merely the supernaturalism, the belief in a historical teleology, driven by cosmological ontological-theological determination; it is also the costs of the assumptions of such a conception of historical development (McCarthy 2009); namely, his adoption of nineteenth century conceptions of the backwardness (or in kinder terms, underdevelopment) of non-Western European groups; thus his relative silence about the United States’s destructive actions against and policies toward Native American groups. Douglass’s views have lead Wilson Jeremiah Moses to characterize him, along with other early black political figures, as a Moses figure: he is an exodus leader, recipient of the natural law for chosen peoples—African Americans in their travail for freedom as well as the American Republic as a whole—and he (paired eternally with Abraham Lincoln) is a law giver (Moses 1978).

His monumental, world-historical vita aside, Douglass’s faith, much abused as it was, resulted in his inability to understand the extent to which the United States was a racial republic (Frederickson 2002). He did not prognosticate, before or after the U.S. Civil War, that the progress he believed in would move at a glacial pace, and that for many of his black country men there would be no justice all. Nevertheless, Douglass had no time for this shortsightedness; which comes only with the luxury of the liberty he fought for, and, of course, time. Douglass was not looking behind him; he was fully engaged at every moment since his emancipation working to bring and end to slavery. Moreover, his view of natural law led to his critique of American slavery, and undergirded his arguments for active resistance to slavery and his interpretation of the U.S. Constitution. It is also worth noting, that natural law theorists have not ceded the field; thus Douglass is an important American historical figure in the intellectual history of natural law.

In 1851 Douglass broke from Garrison’s position that the U.S. Constitution was a pro-slavery document, and that the free states should peacefully secede from the union. In a letter to Smith he reported that he was “sick and tired of arguing on the slaveholder’s side…” (Douglass 1851). Douglass sided with Gerrit Smith and the Liberty party’s position that the United States’ founding documents were anti-slavery.

In his most famous speech, “What To the Slave Is The Fourth of July?”, he detailed what would come to be regarded as his signature positions, such as the view that slavery was unconstitutional and contrary to natural law, that blacks were self-evidently human and entitled to natural rights, and that slavery was contrary to the U.S. Constitution, American Republicanism, and Christian doctrine. He also began to defend violent resistance to slavery. Douglass’s second autobiography, My Bondage and My Freedom, reflected these changes, and his expanding intellectual independence (FDAB; for a stand-alone edition, see the 1987 version edited by Andrews).

Although he initially acknowledges that the intentions of the framers was to allow slavery to continue in the states where it was established, he reported that he was convinced by Smith’s argument that the meaning of the document was not set by the intention of the framers but by rules of legal interpretation that focused on natural law. By the following year he even altered his position on the framers’s intentions: they meant the U.S. Constitution to be an anti-slavery document.

Douglass depended heavily on the U.S. Declaration of Independence, as well as the documented disagreements and cross-purposes, of the founders. He was guided by his view of natural law, and argued that the general ideas of America’s founding documents, as part of the history of Western democracy and republicanism, pointed toward an interpretation of the U.S. Constitution as an evolving document that could potentially be in tune with civilizational development.

Douglass’s position on original intent, as it evolved through his life, is part of the critical discussion about the assimilationist tradition, and whether that tradition, and Douglass, squarely recognized the racialized character of the nation, how deeply embedded race and racism were in its institutions, and that it was in many respects a racial state. [ 9 ] This key critique of Douglass was given by Charles W. Mills, in his “Whose Fourth of July? Frederick Douglass and ‘Original Intent’” (Mills 1999). In short, Mills argues that Douglass fails to apprehend America’s racial contract. The practical problems of Douglass’s view aside, which U.S. history revealed in the Great Compromise and the end of Reconstruction after the Civil War, Douglass’s interpretation of the U.S. Constitution is reasonable and not blind to the facts; that Americans did not live up to the ideals of their founding documents is another matter.

As already noted above, Douglass was active in the years leading up to the U.S. Civil War, vigorously protesting the Dred Scott decision, agitating against laws that protected the property rights of slaveholders over their slaves in the Free States and the spread of slavery into new U.S. territory. He lobbied the newly formed Republican Party (the party of Abraham Lincoln) to support abolitionism, and met the militant abolitionist, John Brown. Although Douglass declined to join Brown’s militia—he sensed the deadly potential of Brown’s zealotry and the likelihood of its failure—he defended Brown’s ideals and denounced claims that Brown was merely mad. Douglass quickly appropriated Brown’s ideals, while distancing himself from the particular of Brown’s fatal actions, and used the raid at Harper’s Ferry to launch further criticisms against President Lincoln for his reluctance to support abolitionism.

Douglass’s rejection of pacifism and his support for Federal military intervention—Civil War—to end slavery was a major turning point in his thought, and part of his developing ideas about natural law, divine providence and manifest destiny, and constitutional interpretation. Douglass’s defense of jus ad bellum had a tremendous effect, not just on his contemporaries, but also on the resulting debate on slavery, struggle, and self-respect. The modern debate in African American philosophy, critical race theory, and black political theory begins with Douglass’s narratives, and in particular his famous fight with the “Negro breaker”, Edward Covey. This incident plays a major role in all of Douglass’s narratives: Covey represents the brutalizing institution of American slavery and Douglass’s fight and victory represents the assertion of manhood, [ 10 ] self-respect, dignity and freedom. Douglass’s time with Covey and the suffering he endured by Covey’s hand is given a lengthier description in My Bondage and My Freedom than in the Narrative ; moreover, Douglass adds his own political and theological interpretation to the later account. In My Bondage and My Freedom the fight stresses how Douglass’s struggles reflect the struggles of the slaves around him, and that it is an instance of a general phenomenon; lest someone think that Douglass narrative is too particular and peculiar to represent the attitudes of other black Americans. Additionally, his fight is given explicit national political connotations (Gooding-Williams 2009; Myers 2008). The scene as Douglass writes it in each version is powerful, and is indicative of the narrative (literary, rhetorical, and philosophical) brilliance of Douglass’s narratives, and so deserves to be quoted at length.

In the Narrative (1845), Douglass wrote:

The battle with Mr. Covey was the turning-point in my career as a slave. It rekindled the few expiring embers of freedom, and revived within me a sense of my own manhood. It recalled the departed self-confidence, and inspired me again with a determination to be free. The gratification afforded by the triumph was a full compensation for whatever else might follow, even death itself. He only can understand the deep satisfaction which I experienced, who has himself repelled by force the bloody arm of slavery. I felt as I never felt before. It was a glorious resurrection, from the tomb of slavery, to the heaven of freedom. My long-crushed spirit rose, cowardice departed, bold defiance took its place; and I now resolved that, however long I might remain as slave in form, the day had passed forever when I could be a slave in fact. I did not hesitate to let it be known of me, that the white man who expected to succeed in whipping, must also succeed in killing me. (FDAB: 65)

In My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), he gives the following expanded interpretation:

Well, my dear reader, this battle with Mr. Covey,—undignified as it was, and as I fear my narration of it is—was the turning point in my “life as a slave.” It rekindled in my breast the smouldering embers of liberty; it brought up my Baltimore dreams, and revived a sense of my own manhood. I was a changed being after that fight. I was nothing before; I WAS A MAN NOW. It recalled to life my crushed self-respect and my self-confidence, and inspired me with a renewed determination to be a FREEMAN. A man, without force, is without the essential dignity of humanity. Human nature is so constituted, that it cannot honor a helpless man, although it can pity him; and even this it cannot do long, if the signs of power do not arise. (FDAB: 286, original emphases)

The first passage displays Douglass’s romantic and religious influences; it swells with the longing for the freedom of the soul. The second passage, written without demands of Garrison’s pacifist politics directing his pen, screams independence and force, it recommends violence—it advocates for the coming U.S. Civil War—to throw off tyranny and to claim, to defend, even fulfill, one’s honor and humanity. The fight with Covey has inspired a number of philosophical interpretations about Douglass’s intentions and the meaning of his struggle; some have seen it an exemplar of conceptions of the state of war within liberal political theory (Davis [1971] 1983; FDN-Davis 2010), as deontological (Boxill 1997, 1998; see also Boxill 1984 [1992]), as existentialist (Gordon 1999), or as fruitfully understand using a number of political and social theoretical positions (Buccola 2012: 14–40; McGary and Lawson 1992: 163–209; Willett 1998, 2001: 188–202). Across these approaches, Douglass’s narrative of his fight with Covey stands as a vibrant reference point in debates regarding violence, self-respect, and dignity.

Douglass’s conception of providence, with its American themes of individualism, anti-supernaturalism, and activism, and his view of natural law influenced his view of universal human brotherhood. [ 11 ] This doctrine, with its religious and philosophical roots, was dearly held by Douglass. He argued that the idea of universal human brotherhood was consistent with the high ideals of American Republicanism and Christianity, and it was offered as a response to the rise in the United States of the racial theory of polygenesis , supported by the American School of ethnology, and argued for originally by Samuel Morton (1799–1851) and popularized by Josiah Nott and George Glidden’s Types of Mankind (1854; Martin 1984; Myers 2008).

Douglass put considerable effort into countering arguments that blacks were subhuman, intellectually and morally inferior, and fit to be dominated as children, forever to be a race in nonage. Although he flirted with historical developmental arguments that black civilizations had developed, he saw such arguments as too loosely related to the conditions of black Americans in his time, so he increasingly turned to his natural law arguments. He argued that by the high standard of Christian theology, blacks, as humans and creation of the divine, were all equally the children of God, no matter their present condition. One of his slogans got to the point: “A man’s a man for a’ that”. He used rhetoric that appealed to the piety of the nation that the Christian Bible had to be correct on this score, and that—just as the soul of the nation depended on emancipation—the authority of the biblical text depended on the affirmation of the unity of the human family:

What, after all, if they are able to show very good reasons for believing the Negro to have been created precisely as we find him on the Gold Coast—along the Senegal and the Niger—I say, what of all this?—“ A man’s a man for a’ that ”. I sincerely believe, that the weight of the argument is in favor of the unity of origin of the human race, or species—that the arguments on the other side are partial, superficial, utterly subversive of the happiness of man, and insulting to the wisdom of God. Yet, what if we grant they are not so? What, if we grant that the case, on our part, is not made out? Does it follow, that the Negro should be held in contempt? Does it follow, that to enslave and imbrue him is either just or wise ? I think not. Human rights stand upon a common basis; and by all the reason that they are supported, maintained and defended, for one variety of the human family, they are supported, maintained and defended for all the human family; because all mankind have the same wants, arising out of a common nature. A diverse origin does not disprove a common nature, nor does it disprove a united destiny. (1854; FDP1 v.2: 523)

Douglass emphasized that not only was slavery against natural law and Christian morality, but that the very arguments concerning the subhuman status of blacks that slavery’s apologists used to justify attempted slavery, contradicted the Bible and was heretical. Douglass, in short, leveraged the Bible, and obviously America’s reverence for it, against the rising tide of polygenesis race theory. He stated:

The unity of the human race—the brotherhood of man—the reciprocal duties of all to each, and of each to all, are too plainly taught in the Bible to admit of cavil.—The credit of the Bible is at stake—and if it be too much to say, that it must stand or fall, by the decision of this question, it is proper to say, that the value of that sacred Book—as a record of the early history of mankind—must be materially affected, by the decision of the question. (1854, FDP1 v.2: 505)

The doctrine of universal human brotherhood for Douglass, and the abolitionists, was based on the Bible’s creation story and Acts 17:26: “And hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth” (King James Version).

These words were not mere words for Douglass and the abolitionists; they were not just-so stories. The Christian doctrine of the unity of the human family or human brotherhood (as the sexist language that marked the idea at least since the Enlightenment), contained the world historical insight of equal human dignity, which implied—unleashed, as was seen in several revolutions in the 18 th and 19 th -century—the uncompromising demand for equal rights.

Douglass’s belief in the evil of slavery, universal human brotherhood, and the inevitability of human development, as well as his observation of the mixing of the so-called races in the United States, led his to support racial amalgamation. It is important to note here that he thought that there were races to amalgamate, and he affirmed the basic idea that there were biologically distinct races (1854, FDP1 v.2: 497-525). As should be clear from his view of universal human brotherhood, he did not however think that much followed from that admission. The existence of biological race did not in his view negate the theological-philosophical insight of universal human brotherhood.

Douglass understood that the sexual boundaries between the races were thin, and that indeed, the conditions of slavery led to a great deal of mixing. Recall that he held that his unacknowledged father was his white master. Beyond recognizing this condition, he began to promote amalgamation, although, obviously, between free peoples. He believed that blacks and white ought to be free to intermarry and indeed they should intermarry. Why should they marry? Douglass, sensing the transformation of the black and Native American population in the United States, believed this process was natural, that it would continue, and that a new third race, an American race, would emerge in this land. During his time such views were highly inflammatory and served, and continued to serve, as one reason offered against the emancipation of black slaves, and later as a justification for segregation (Sundstrom 2008: 11–35 and 93–107). Nonetheless, in the 1860s he boldly advocated for amalgamation between the races. He remarked to a journalist, the day after his second marriage to Helen Pitts, who was white,

…there is no division of races. God Almighty made but one race. I adopt the theory that in time the varieties of races will be blended into one. Let us look back when the black and the white people were distinct in this country. In two hundred and fifty years there has grown up a million of intermediate. And this will continue. You may say that Frederick Douglass considers himself a member of the one race which exists. (1884, FDP1 v.5: 147)

Douglass’s amalgamation is sometimes conflated with his support for assimilation. Amalgamation is conceptually distinct from assimilation; one does not have to accept amalgamation to support assimilation. Assimilation concerns various degrees of social and cultural adoption, adaptation, and absorption. It can theoretically go in either direction, say from black to white or white to black, or it can involve a subtle blending. In the United States, the assumption has been that non-whites or white Ethnics would and should enter the “melting pot”, and assimilate to dominant white Protestant mores (Sundstrom 2003). [ 12 ]

Douglass was not exceptional in his support of assimilation. A number of Douglass’s contemporaries, and several black leaders that followed him all supported some degree of assimilation. Some of Douglass’s early critics, such as Edward Blyden (1832–1912), Martin Delany (1812–1885), and Alexander Crummell (1819–1898), who did not support amalgamation, and in fact were separatists and racial nationalists, supported the assimilation by black Americans of Christianity and many of the standards and values Western civilization (Moses 1978).

Douglas, as an advocate of assimilation and amalgamation, was by extension a supporter of what would be come known as integration. He is considered by some political theorists to be a primary example of the political ideal of integration as distinct from separatism. Douglass’s amalgamationist-assimilationist views of the 1860s and on are not the integrationist ideas adopted in America of 1950s and 1960s; those views were influenced by cultural nationalists, like Du Bois, who advocated for social and political integration while the group maintained its own ethnic-racial ideals and identity. Yet, Douglass is a fitting hero for the integrationist impulse in general.

Douglass criticized the creation of separate societies, with distinct “negro pews, negro berths in steamboats, negro cars, Sabbath or week-day schools,…churches”, and so on (Douglass 1848a,b). Separatism, for Douglass, was in the interest of the defenders of slavery, and after the U.S. Civil War, he regarded separatism as a counter-ideal of the abolition movement. Self-separation, according to Douglass, served the interests of whites who wanted to deny blacks their right to integrate into society, to improve and develop, and to enjoy the fruits of their labor.

For similar reasons he opposed plans for black American emigration to Africa, the Caribbean, Mexico, or Latin America. He criticized the emigrationist visions of the American Colonization Society, founded by whites, and the African Civilization Society, founded by blacks. He had four reasons to oppose emigration schemes: First, for slavery to end, Douglass argued that black Americans needed to struggle against it in America. Second, Americans had no other home but the United States; they were uniquely American, and products of American history. Third, black Americans had a right to the property their labor had produced. By abandoning the United States, they were abandoning the land they built. He wrote,

The native land of the American Negro is America. His bones, his muscles, his sinews, are all American. His ancestors for two hundred and seventy years have lived and laboured and died, on American soil, and millions of his posterity have inherited Caucasian blood. It is pertinent, therefore, to ask, in view of this admixture, as well as in view of other facts, where the people of this mixed race are to go, for their ancestors are white and black, and it will be difficult to find their native land anywhere outside of the United States. (Douglass 1894b, in Brotz 1992: 329–30)

Fourth and finally, the real solution, according to Douglass, was not emigration, and separation, for that was contrary to historical progress, providence, and the emergence of the new American race. All the same, Douglass was not opposed to efforts of blacks in collective self-help and self-defense. Nonetheless, his opposition to emigration displayed the downside of his commitment to his natural law and manifest destiny-inspired principles. He did not understand how immigration might be, in the eyes of the black Americans that wanted to flee anti-black oppression and especially life-crushing oppression and murderous anti-black violence, a more than reasonable act of self-preservation and self-determination (much like his escape from slavery). [ 13 ] His opposition to emigration was such that it extended to the internal migration of black Americans from the south to the north—the Great Migration or Black Exodus; he initially opposed the individual choice of black Americans to flee the American South after the rise of Black Codes, Jim Crow laws, and the development of agricultural peonage, which for all practical purposes reduced the lives of black Americans to slavery and certainly devastated their life chances (Wilkerson 2010; Myers 2008). Douglass moderated his position on migration only at the end of his life when his disillusionment with the United States grew (Douglass 1879, 1888, 1894a).

The relation between Douglass and the topic of black political leadership is wrapped up with his life, activities, and writing. He was a leader among black Americans, and served as an unelected spokesperson for free and enslaved blacks during a monumental time for the nation. [ 14 ] He was presented as a victim of and witness to slavery by the Garrisonian abolitionists, but he freed himself from their restraints, just as he freed himself from slavery. He wanted to speak for himself, to be his own man and to be a leader among men. In his self-emancipation from slavery, his efforts to shape his own story, and to speak his mind, he stands as an exemplar of leadership and its virtues.

His example was quick to be seized and claimed by other prospective black leaders and spokespersons. The most significant example of this was the conflicting claim between W.E.B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington (1856–1915) over the meaning of Douglass’s legacy. Indeed both men competed for the opportunity to publish a biography of Douglass with the publishers George W. Jacobs & Company in their series The American Crisis Biographies (Sundstrom 2008: 11–35). Du Bois’s bid for this task was rejected in favor of Washington’s (Washington 1907). Du Bois was, instead, given the project of writing a biography of John Brown, which includes large sections on Douglass (Du Bois 1909).

After the death of Douglass, Du Bois published an elegiac poem, “The Passing of Douglass” (c. 1895), and incorporated his narrative in The Souls of Black Folk (1903, [1999: xxii), John Brown (1909), and Black Reconstruction in America (1935). Du Bois presented Douglass as a freedom fighter and a leader of an activist community that demanded full social and political liberty, equality, and inclusion. Du Bois’s Douglass was vigorous and fought for freedom through self-assertion. Douglass, according to Du Bois, was no accommodationist: he was not given to offering obeisance to white demands to maintain white political, social, and economic superiority over blacks. Du Bois made this pointed interpretation very clear in his The Souls of Black Folks . In the second chapter of that book Du Bois argues against Booker T. Washington’s accomodationism in favor of his and Douglass’s demand for, and assertion of, black political and social equality and rights. Economic liberty is not enough, and any gains in the economic sphere would be hampered and vulnerable without the protections and opportunities provided by social and political liberty and rights. And, of course, economic considerations aside, the fight for equal rights and liberty is not solely about economic opportunity—it is about equal dignity and one’s full humanity.

It is important to note, however, that Du Bois takes on Douglass’s mantle of leadership after he argued against Douglass’s view of assimilation and amalgamation. Du Bois, in the “The Conservation of Races”, rejects amalgamation, which Douglass supported, and argues for the conservation of a distinct black identity and community (Du Bois 1897). Here is his reduction of the amalgamationist position:

It may, however, be objected here that the situation of the our race in America renders this attitude impossible; that our sole hope of salvation lies in our being able to lose our race identity in the commingled blood of the nation; and that nay other course would merely increase the friction of races which we call race prejudice, and against which we have so long and so earnestly fought. (Du Bois 1897, in Brotz 1992: 488)

Du Bois argues that black Americans ought to embrace a “stalwart originality” that follows “Negro Ideals” and not dissolve into a general American identity (Du Bois 1897, in Brotz 1992: 488). His view is sometimes referred to as cultural pluralism, and his arguments in that early essay, are important landmarks in debates in African social and political thought over separation versus assimilation (Boxill 1992 [1997]; 1984 [1992]: 173–85; 1999; McGary 1999a; Pittman 1999; McGary 1999b: 43–61), and the conservation of race. [ 15 ] Because of his cultural pluralism, it is tempting to think that Du Bois rejects Douglass’s view of assimilation and integration; that would be a serious mistake. He rejects Douglass’s vision of total assimilation in favor of the retention of some black ideals, which he too easily assumes that all blacks qua blacks share, but his cultural pluralism has at its end the creation of a community that are “co-workers” in the “kingdom of culture” (Du Bois 1903 [1997: 39]).

In response to the amalgamationist objection quoted at length above, Du Bois offers an early version of his brilliant conception of black American double consciousness, and through his rhetorical questions at the end of the passage presages his arguments against Douglass’s hopes of amalgamation and for his view of black political, social, and cultural solidarity:

No Negro who has given earnest thought to the situation of his people in America has failed, at some time in life, to find himself at these cross-roads; has failed to ask himself at some time: What, after all, am I? Am I an American or am I a Negro? Can I be both? Or is it my duty to cease to be a Negro as soon as possible and be an American? If I strive as a Negro, am I not perpetuating the very cleft that threatens and separates Black and White America? Is not my only possible aim the subduction of all that is Negro in me to the American? Does my black blood place upon me any more obligation to assert my nationality than German, or Irish or Italian blood would? (Du Bois 1897, in Brotz 1992: 488)

Du Bois’s answers to these questions directly contradict Douglass’s view about amalgamation, though their views about assimilation share some similarities, such as the co-production and enjoyment of a common American higher culture. In the end, however, Du Bois’s image of Douglass is skewed toward his own political projects of elite leadership, racial solidarity, and uplift.

Booker T. Washington’s Douglass is equally a work of art that reflects the image of the artist. Washington’s The Life of Frederick Douglass presents an image of Douglass that is contrary to Du Bois’s, and, unfortunately, clearly contrary to many of Douglass’s views (Washington 1907). It is a work of self-promotion; although he does accurately and fruitfully point out the similarities between Douglass and himself (they both were born slaves, criticized the North’s complicity in slavery, and valued industrial education—however, Douglass did not denigrate higher education for black Americans, as Washington did), he fails to mention Douglass’s frequent and scorching demands for equal social and political rights, skews his relationship to John Brown and the Harper’s Ferry raid, and most of all he fails to mention Douglass’s view of amalgamation. Washington’s claim over Douglass’s legacy of leadership falls short of the facts. Douglass was a radical Republican, and demanded full inclusion of black Americans in the life of the nation, and the opening up of all opportunities for education and advancement for blacks, and Washington did not.

Du Bois’s claims over Douglass, however, also fall short. Despite Du Bois’s assumption that he has inherited the mantle of black political, social, and (he would add) cultural leadership from Douglass, Douglass’s leadership style and politics is markedly more democratic than Du Bois’s. Douglass did not envision himself as the embodiment of the spirit or culture of his people (Gooding-Williams 2009: 19–65). Although he probably saw himself as an instance of what Emerson called a “representative man”, (Emerson 1850: title) and certainly as a self-made man (Douglass 1860, 1893; Howe 1997: 137–56)—understood as moral rather than a commercial ideal—he did not envision himself as the embodiment of the spirit or culture of his people. He was a democratic thinker, and understood that particular individuals and especially leaders could fail to follow the guidance of the ideals natural law and civic republicanism.

Douglass’s political activities, however, do provide a model of sorts of democratic politics in action. He worked with a variety of groups, some underground while he was a slave, for example, eventually after becoming literate he, unbeknownst to his master, participated in at least one Sabbath School, and several other groups after his escape and emancipation (Douglass, 1852a, FDAB: 298). Some of these groups were all black, due to the condition of slavery, but as a free man he worked with integrated groups as well. These groups would have cross-cutting interests, such as in his work with the American Equal Rights Association, an organization devoted to universal suffrage. At no point did he think of himself as the singular spokesman for the movement or a group or his race. His politics were principled, in that his views were strongly directed by his acceptance of a liberal conception of natural law, and the related ideas of natural law, human liberty and equality, and the wrongness of slavery. He never shied away from pushing or arguing his views, but in terms of his practical politics, he supported active, participatory, and democratic action (Douglass 1848a).

His ideal of leadership was heavily influenced by his view of natural law, and his assumption that the role of heroes should be to stand up for what was mandated by that law. This did not lead him to a view of authoritarian, paternalistic liberalism. The principles of natural law and rights must be processed through a participatory democratic system. However, the role of the hero leadership, the political or social outsider, the heretic or eccentric, who stands against the tyranny of the majority or minority to defend human rights was absolutely valuable. In defense of the actions of John Brown, for example, Douglass wrote, putting him into heroic terms (with overtones of Carlyle and Emerson):

He believes the Declaration of Independence to be true, and the Bible to be a guide to human conduct, and acting upon the doctrines of both, he threw himself against the serried ranks of American oppression, and translated into heroic deeds the love of liberty and hatred of tyrants, with which he was inspired from both these forces acting upon his philanthropic and heroic soul. (Douglass 1859, FDLW v.2: 459) [ 16 ]

Thus, we see in his elegies to John Brown and Abraham Lincoln (Douglass 1876), in particular, the value he places on Emersonian representative men and the ideal of the statesman guided by the principles of American Civic Republicanism, and his belief in natural law, and the moral progress of the universe.

Throughout the duration of the Civil War, and in the years that followed, Douglass remained active in Republican Party politics. He was a staunch supporter of the full, uncompromising Reconstruction of the Union, and advocated for economic and education investment in free and newly-freed black Americans. He pressed for the expansion of and guarantee of civil rights for blacks, and in particular for the defense of the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which the Supreme Court declared unconstitutional in 1883 (Douglass 1883a).

In keeping with his civil rights efforts, and his view of natural rights and the development of the United States into a just Republic, he was was an early advocate of women’s suffrage (FDWR). The abolition and women’s suffrage movement, along with the temperance movement, were deeply intertwined. Douglass became involved with the American Equal Rights Association (E. DuBois 1978), and supported its dual platform of racial and sexual equality. He joined other prominent leaders in the abolition movement, such as Sojourner Truth, and emerging leaders in the suffrage movement, such as Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, in these efforts.

There were simmering divisions in the American Equal Rights Association, due to cross-cutting and conflicting interests, and the latent racism within the organization, which was largely lead by middle-class and wealthy white women. The tensions with the American Equal Rights Association, and the suffrage movement generally, erupted over the passing of the fifteenth amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The 15 th amendment franchised all male citizens, although, as U.S. history so brutally revealed, it did so in word but not in deed. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony demanded that black men and all women be enfranchised simultaneously, and opposed the fifteenth amendment on that principle. Some among the suffrage movement based their arguments for women suffrage, and against the enfranchisement of blacks, on racist grounds. Although the white women who lead the association were abolitionists, they also, and not inconsequentially, held that blacks, and in particular, black men, were inferior to white women and neither as ready for nor deserving of the vote as themselves. Occasionally even Stanton lowered herself to draw on these claims (Stanton 1997a: 194-99; 1997b: 236-38).

Douglass communicated his sympathy with the cause for the universal franchise; however, he condemned the arguments for women’s suffrage, such as those offered by the likes of Stanton, that were predicated on assumptions of black inferiority and degrading claims that black or “Oriental” men, and by extension black and Asian women—i.e., Stanton’s nasty references to “Sambo” and “Yung Tung”—were not as deserving as white women (Douglass 1869; Stanton 1997a: 194-99). Douglass did not want to delay black male suffrage to resolve this question over suffrage for all women. He believed it a practical matter to quickly get some protections for black Americans while the fight for suffrage for black and white women continued. Moreover, he argued it was imperative to obtain some measure of political, legal, and social rights for blacks to confront the rising level of horrific anti-black violence that was sweeping the United States. Douglass firmly made this claim in his speech at the American Equal Rights Association in 1869:

I must say that I do not see how any one can pretend that there is the same urgency in giving the ballot to women as to the negro. With us, the matter is a question of life and death. It is a matter of existence, at least in fifteen states of the Union. When women, because they are women, are hunted down through the cities of New York and New Orleans; when they are dragged from their houses and hung upon lamp-posts; when their children are torn from their arms, and their brains dashed out upon the pavement; when they are objects of insult and outrage at every turn; when they are in danger of having their homes burnt down over their heads; when their children are not allowed to enter schools; then they will have an urgency to obtain the ballot equal to our own. (Douglass 1869, FDP1 v.4: 216)

When asked if this did not apply to black women, Douglass replied that it did but because they were black and not women (Douglass 1869, FDP1 v.4: 216). He did not, however, have ready answers to concerns about how well black men, including elite black men, represented and protected the rights and interests of black women. Nor did he fully appreciate the need for women to represent themselves and to be fully autonomous and independent moral agents and citizens. His shortsightedness was repeated by generations of black male leaders. It was Anna Julia Cooper (c. 1859–1964), along with other black women leaders, who best articulated that argument (see Lemert and Bhan 1998; for a general history of early black feminism, see Hine 1994).

The controversies around the passage of the fifteenth amendment, and the divisions and the eventual splitting of the American Equal Rights Association, lead to the famous criticisms of “first wave feminism” by black women leaders such as Mary Church Terrell and Anna Julia Cooper, and has continued relevance today in debates about race in feminist and black feminist philosophy (Guy-Sheftall 1995; Hine 1994).

During and after the Reconstruction, Douglass remained deeply concerned about the prospect that the U.S. would compromise on the civil and human rights of black Americans. He became increasingly concerned about the denial of black civil rights and the rising waves of anti-black violence. He, thus, criticized the growing practice of black peonage in agriculture, and over time he expressed sympathy with blacks who were fleeing the American South, although he did not support the black Exodus ( see Section 6 ). He did not support the Exodus as a policy because he judged it bad for black labor, and that it did not address the institutional problems that caused the Exodus: peonage and exploitation, unequal justice, unrestrained violence, lack of resources and opportunities, and in particular, education. He received a great deal of criticism for his position for failing to support the individual choices of black Americans who sought to flee the inhospitable, degrading, and deadly conditions in the American South. He also criticized inequitable and unfair treatment of blacks in state criminal justice systems, in particular criticizing the Convict-Lease system (Davis 1999). And he joined with Ida B. Wells (1862–1931) in raising alarm over the growing practice of anti-black lynching in the United States (Wells-Barnett 2002; see also Lott’s “Frederick Douglass on the Myth of the Black Rapist”, in Lott 1999) He saw America’s failure to support the civil rights, and the very lives, of black Americans as indicative of its moral and political failure, and as evidence as he provocatively claimed that the Emancipation was a stupendous fraud. Douglass’s later-day activities are an important and impressive part of his record and life, and indeed a part of the evolving debates in African American philosophy and critical theory about the carceral society (Davis 1999). Notably, Angela Davis, who was a pioneer of Douglass research in philosophy in the United States, has lead the inquiry in this area; her scholarship continues to be ground-breaking, not only in relation to Douglass’s early role in this debate, but also on the issue of criminal justice, punishment, and incarceration in philosophy.

Works by Douglass

• Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave , 2 nd edition, David W. Blight (ed.), Boston, MA: Bedford Books of St. Martin’s Press, 2003.
• [FDN-Davis], Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself: A New Critical Edition , Angela Y. Davis (ed.), San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2010.
• 1848a, “Address to the Colored People of the United States”, in FDLW v.1: 331–36.
• 1848b, “The Folly of Racially Exclusive Organization”, in FDP1 v.2: 109–11.
• 1851, “To Gerrit Smith, Esq.”, January 21, in FDSW: 171–172.
• My Bondage and My Freedom , William L. Andrews (ed.), Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987.
• 1852b, “The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro”, in FDLW v.2: 181–204.
• 1854, “The Claims of the Negro Ethnologically Considered: An Address Before the Literary Societies, Western Reserve College”, July 12, Rochester, NY: Lee, Mann & co. Reprinted in FDP1 v.2: 497–525.
• 1859, “Capt. John Brown Not Insane”, in FDLW v.2: 458–60.
• 1860, “The Trials and Triumphs of Self-Made Men”, in FDP1 v.3: 289–300.
• 1869, “We Welcome the Fifteenth Amendment: Addresses Delivered in New York, on 12–13 May 1869”, in FDP1 v.4: 213–19.
• 1876, “Oration in Memory of Abraham Lincoln”, in FDLW v.4: 309–20.
• 1879, “The Negro Exodus from the Gulf States”, in FDP1 v.4: 510–33.
• 1881 Life and Times of Frederick Douglass , in FDAB 453–1045.
• 1883a, “The Civil Rights Case”, in FDLW v.4: 392–403.
• 1883b, “Address to the People of the United States”, delivered at a Convention of Colored Men, Louisville, Kentucky, September 25, in FDSW: 669–85.
• 1884, “God Almighty Made but One Race”, in FDP1 v.5: 145–47.
• 1888, “In Law Free; in Fact, Slave”, in FDP1 v.5: 357–73.
• 1893, “Self-Made Men”, in FDP1 v.5: 545–75.
• 1894a, “Lessons of the Hour”, in FDP1 v.5: 575–607.
• 1894b, “The Folly of Colonization”, in Brotz 1992: 328–31.

Collections

• [FDAB] Douglass: Autobiographies: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass | My Bondage and My Freedom | Life and Times of Frederick Douglass , 1994, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (ed.), New York, NY: Library of America.
• [FDLW] The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass , 1950–1975, 5 volumes (annotated v.1 – v.5 above), Philip Sheldon Foner (ed.), New York, NY: International Publishers.
• [FDP1] Series One, Speeches, Debates, and Interviews , 5 volumes (annotated v.1 – v.5 above), John W. Blassingame (ed.), 1979.
• [FDP2] Series Two, Autobiographical Writings , John W. Blassingame (ed.), 1979–1999.
• [FDP3] Series Three, Correspondence , John R. McKivigan (ed.), 2009.
• [FDSW] Frederick Douglass: Selected Speeches and Writings , 1999, 1 st edition, The Library of Black America, Philip Sheldon Foner and Yuval Taylor (eds.), Chicago, IL: Lawrence Hill Books.
• [FDWR] Frederick Douglass on Women’s Rights , 1976, Philip Sheldon Foner (ed.), Contributions in Afro-American and African Studies. Westport, CN: Greenwood Press.
• Appiah, Anthony, 1985, “The Uncompleted Argument: Du Bois and the Illusion of Race”, Critical Inquiry , 12(1): 21–37. Reprinted in 1986 “Race”, Writing and Difference , Henry Louis Gates. Jr. (ed.), Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 21–37. doi:10.1086/448319
• Boxill, Bernard R., 1984 [1992], Blacks and Social Justice , original edition, Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Allanheld, 1984; revised edition, Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1992. (Pages numbers from the revised edition.)
• –––, 1992 [1997], “Two Traditions in African American Political Philosophy”, Philosophical Forum , 24 (1992): 119–35; issue reprinted as a book, African-American Perspectives and Philosophical Traditions , John P. Pittman (ed.), New York, NY: Routledge, 1997, 119–35; also reprinted as African Philosophy: An Anthology , Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze (ed.), Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 1998.
• –––, 1997, “The Fight with Covey”, in Existence in Black: An Anthology of Black Existential Philosophy , Lewis R. Gordon (ed.), New York, NY: Routledge, 273–90.
• –––, 1998, “Radical Implications of Locke’s Moral Theory: The Views of Frederick Douglass”, in Lott 1998: 29–48.
• –––, 1999, “Douglass against the Emigrationists”, in Lawson and Kirkland 1999: 21–49.
• Brotz, Howard, 1992, African-American Social and Political Thought, 1850–1920 , New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers.
• Buccola, Nicholas, 2012, The Political Thought of Frederick Douglass: In Pursuit of American Liberty , New York: New York University Press.
• Casas, Bartolomé de las, 1552 [1992], The Devastation of the Indies: A Brief Account , Herma Briffault (trans.), Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
• Cruse, Harold, 1967, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual: A Historical Analysis of the Failure of Black Leadership , New York: Morrow. Reprinted 2005 New York Review Books Classics. New York: New York Review Books.
• Davis, Angela Y., 1971, Lectures on Liberation , New York: New York Committee to Free Angela Davis.
• –––, [1971] 1983, “Unfinished Lecture on Liberation-II”, in Philosophy Born of Struggle: Anthology of Afro-American Philosophy from 1917 , Leonard Harris (ed.), Dubuque, Iowa: Kendall/Hunt Publishing, 130–36.
• –––, 1999, “From the Prison of Slavery to the Slavery of Prison: Frederick Douglass and the Convict Lease System”, in Lawson and Kirkland 1999: 339–62.
• –––, 2005, Abolition Democracy: Beyond Empire, Prisons, and Torture , first edition, New York: Seven Stories Press.
• Delany, Martin Robison, 1852, The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States , reprinted in 1968 (The American Negro: His History and Literature series), New York: Arno Press and the New York Times.
• Du Bois, W.E.B., 1897, “The Conservation of Races”, in Brotz 1992: 483–92. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction.
• 1997, David W. Blight, and Robert Gooding-Williams (eds), Boston: Bedford Books.
• 1999, Henry Louis Gates, and Terri Hume Oliver (eds), 1 st edition, A Norton Critical Edition, New York: W.W. Norton.
• –––, 1909, John Brown , (American Crisis Biographies), Ellis Paxson Oberholtzer (ed.), Philadelphia: G.W. Jacobs & company.
• –––, 1935, Black Reconstruction in America: An Essay toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860–1880 , New York: Harcourt, Brace. Reprinted 2007 as part of the The Oxford W.E.B. Du Bois series, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (ed.), New York: Oxford University Press.
• DuBois, Ellen Carol, 1978, Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence of an Independent Women’s Movement in America, 1848–1869 , Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
• Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 1850 [2004], Representative Men: Seven Lectures , Brenda Wineapple (ed.), Modern Library pbk. ed. New York, NY: Modern Library.
• Foner, Philip Sheldon, 1964, Frederick Douglass: A Biography , New York: Citadel Press.
• Frederickson, George M., 2002, Racism: A Short History , Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
• Gooding-Williams, Robert, 2009, In the Shadow of Du Bois: Afro-Modern Political Thought in America , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Gordon, Lewis R., 1999, “Douglass as an Existentialist”, in Lawson and Kirkland 1999: 207–26.
• Gordon, Milton Myron, 1964, Assimilation in American Life: The Role of Race, Religion, and National Origins , New York: Oxford University Press.
• Guy-Sheftall, Beverly (ed.), 1995, Words of Fire: An Anthology of African-American Feminist Thought , New York: New Press.
• Haney-López, Ian, 2006, White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race , revised and updated, 10 th anniversary edition, (Critical America), New York, NY: New York University Press.
• Harris, Leonard (ed.), 1989, The Philosophy of Alain Locke: Harlem Renaissance and Beyond , Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
• Hine, Darlene Clark, 1994, Hine Sight: Black Women and the Re-Construction of American History , Brooklyn, NY: Carlson Pub..
• Howe, Daniel Walker, 1997, Making the American Self , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• James, Joy, 1997, Transcending the Talented Tenth: Black Leaders and American Intellectuals , New York: Routledge.
• ––– (ed.), 1998, The Angela Y. Davis Reader (Blackwell Readers), Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.
• Jefferson, Thomas, 1785, Notes on the State of Virginia , reprinted 1999, Frank Shuffelton (ed.), New York, NY: Penguin Books.
• Lawson, Bill E. and Frank M. Kirkland (eds), 1999, Frederick Douglass: A Critical Reader , Blackwell Critical Readers, Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers.
• Lee, Maurice S. (ed.), 2009, The Cambridge Companion to Frederick Douglass (Cambridge Companions to American Studies), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Lemert, Charles C. and Esme Bhan (eds), 1998, The Voice of Anna Julia Cooper: Including a Voice from the South and Other Important Essays, Papers, and Letters , Legacies of Social Thought. Lanham, MD: Rowan & Littlefield.
• Lott, Tommy Lee (ed.), 1998, Subjugation and Bondage: Critical Essays on Slavery and Social Philosophy , Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.
• –––, 1999, The Invention of Race: Black Culture and the Politics of Representation , Malden, MA: Blackwell.
• Martin, Waldo E., 1985, The Mind of Frederick Douglass , Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.
• McCarthy, Thomas, 2009, Race, Empire, and the Idea of Human Development , Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press.
• McFeely, William S., 1991, Frederick Douglass , New York: Norton & Company.
• McGary, Howard, 1999a, “Douglass on Racial Assimilation and Racial Institutions”, in Lawson and Kirkland 1999: 50–63.
• –––, 1999b, Race and Social Justice , Malden, MA: Blackwell.
• McGary, Howard, and Bill E. Lawson, 1992, Between Slavery and Freedom: Philosophy and American Slavery , Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
• Mills, Charles W., 1997, The Racial Contract , Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
• –––, 1999, “Whose Fourth of July? Frederick Douglass and ‘Original Intent’”, in Lawson and Kirkland 1999: 100–42.
• Moses, Wilson Jeremiah, 1978, The Golden Age of Black Nationalism, 1850–1925 , Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books.
• Myers, Peter C., 2008, Frederick Douglass: Race and the Rebirth of American Liberalism , American Political Thought. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas.
• Nott, Josiah Clark, and George R. Gliddon, 1854, Types of Mankind: Or, Ethnological Researches, Based Upon the Ancient Monuments, Paintings, Sculptures, and Crania of Races, and Upon Their Natural, Geographical, Philological and Biblical History; Illustrated by Selections from the Inedited Papers of Samuel George Morton … And by Additional Contributions from Prof. L. Agassiz, Ll. D., W. Usher, M.D., and Prof. H.S. Patterson, M.D. , Philadelphia: Lippincott, Grambo & co. [ Nott and Gliddon 1854 available online ]
• Outlaw, Lucius, 1996, “Against the Grain of Modernity: The Politics of Difference and the Conservation of ‘Race’”, in On Race and Philosophy , Lucius Outlaw (ed.), New York, NY: Routledge, 135–57.
• Patterson, Orlando, 1982, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Pettit, Philip, 1997, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government , Oxford Political Theory, New York, NY: Clarendon Press; Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/0198296428.001.0001
• Pittman, John, 1999, “Douglass’s Assimilationism and Antislavery”, in Lawson and Kirkland 1999: 64–81.
• Preston, Dickson J., 1980, Young Frederick Douglass: The Maryland Years , Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
• Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, [D], “The Discourses” and Other Early Political Writings , Victor Gourevitch (ed./trans.), Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought. Cambridge, U.K.; New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
• –––, [SC], “The Social Contract” and Other Later Political Writings , Victor Gourevitch (ed./trans.), Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought. Cambridge, U.K.; New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
• Schrader, David E., 1999, “Natural Law in the Constitutional Thought of Frederick Douglass”, in Lawson and Kirkland 1999: 85–99.
• Shelby, Tommie, 2005, We Who Are Dark: The Philosophical Foundations of Black Solidarity , Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
• Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, 1997a, “Manhood Suffrage”, in The Selected Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony: In the School of Anti-Slavery, 1866 to 1873 , volume 2, Ann D. Gordon (ed.), New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 194–99.
• –––, 1997b, “The Sixteenth Amendment”, in The Selected Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony: In the School of Anti-Slavery, 1866 to 1873 , volume 2, Ann D. Gordon (ed.), New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 236–38.
• Sundstrom, Ronald R., 2003, “Douglass & Du Bois’s Der Schwarze Volksgeist”, in Race and Racism in Continental Philosophy , Robert Bernasconi (ed.), Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 32–52.
• –––, 2008, The Browning of America and the Evasion of Social Justice , Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.
• Van Wyhe, John, 2004, Combe’s Constitution of Man, and Nineteenth-Century Responses , 3 volumes, Bristol, England: Thoemmes Continuum.
• Wallace, Maurice O., 2009, “Violence, Manhood, and War in Douglass”, in Lee 2009: 73–88.
• Washington, Booker T., 1907, Frederick Douglass , American Crisis Biographies. Philadelphia, PA; London: G.W. Jacobs & Co.
• Wells-Barnett, Ida B., 2002, On Lynchings , Classics in Black Studies. Amherst, NY: Humanity Books. Reprint of “Southern Horrors” (1892), “A Red Record” (1895), and “Mob Rule in New Orleans” (1900).
• Wilkerson, Isabel, 2010, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration , 1 st edition, New York: Random House.
• Willett, Cynthia, 1998, “The Master-Slave Dialectic: Hegel vs. Douglass”, in Lott 1998: 151–70.
• –––, 2001, The Soul of Justice: Social Bonds and Racial Hubris , Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

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• Frederick Douglass and American History , at the Oxford African American Studies Center
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Frederick Douglass, 1818-1895 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. Written by Himself Boston: Anti-Slavery Office, 1845.

Frederick Douglass is one of the most celebrated writers in the African American literary tradition, and his first autobiography is the one of the most widely read North American slave narratives. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave was published in 1845, less than seven years after Douglass escaped from slavery. The book was an instant success, selling 4,500 copies in the first four months. Throughout his life, Douglass continued to revise and expand his autobiography, publishing a second version in 1855 as My Bondage and My Freedom . The third version of Douglass' autobiography was published in 1881 as Life and Times of Frederick Douglass , and an expanded version of Life and Times was published in 1892. These various retellings of Douglass' story all begin with his birth and childhood, but each new version emphasizes the mutual influence and close correlation of Douglass' life with key events in American history.

Like many slave narratives, Douglass' Narrative is prefaced with endorsements by white abolitionists. In his preface, William Lloyd Garrison pledges that Douglass's Narrative is "essentially true in all its statements; that nothing has been set down in malice, nothing exaggerated" (p. viii ). Likewise, Wendell Phillips pledges "the most entire confidence in [Douglass'] truth, candor, and sincerity" (p. xiv ). Though Douglass counted Garrison and Phillips as friends, scholars such as Beth A. McCoy have argued that their letters serve as subtle reminders of white power over the black author and his text. Indeed, in all of his subsequent autobiographies, Douglass replaced Garrison and Phillips' endorsements with introductions by prominent black abolitionists and legal scholars.

Douglass begins his Narrative with what he knows about his birth in Tuckahoe, Maryland—or more precisely, what he does not know. "I have no accurate knowledge of my age," Douglass states; nor can he positively identify his father (p. 1 ). Douglass notes that it was "whispered that my master was my father . . . [but] the means of knowing was withheld from me" (p. 2). He recalls that he was separated from his mother "before I knew her as my mother," and that he saw her only "four or five times in my life" (p. 2 ). This separation of mothers from children, and lack of knowledge about age and paternity, Douglass explains, was common among slaves: "it is the wish of most masters . . . to keep their slaves thus ignorant" (p. 1 ).

As a child on the plantation of Colonel Edward Lloyd, Douglass witnesses brutal whippings of various slaves—male and female, old and young. But for the most part, he describes his childhood as a typical or representative story, rather than a unique or individual narrative. "[M]y own treatment . . . was very similar to that of the other slave children," he writes (p. 26 ). The early chapters of his Narrative emphasize the status of slaves and the nature of slavery over his individual experience. "I had no bed," he writes. "[I would] sleep on the cold, damp, clay floor, with my head in [a sack for carrying corn] and feet out" (p. 27 ). This description explicitly links Douglass' experience back to that of the other slaves: "old and young, male and female, married and single, drop down side by side, on one common bed,—the cold, damp floor,—each covering himself or herself with their miserable blankets" (p. 10-11 ).

At age seven, Douglass is sent to work for Hugh Auld, a ship carpenter in Baltimore. "A city slave is almost a freeman, compared with a slave on the plantation," he remarks, and the progression of Douglass' Narrative illustrates his increased liberty in the city (p. 34 ). The young Douglass' growing sense of freedom is due in part to his new master's wife, Sophia Auld, who "very kindly commenced to teach me the A, B, C" (p. 33 ). However, Hugh soon puts a stop to these reading lessons, warning his wife that learning to read "would forever unfit him to be a slave" (p. 33 ). Douglass takes this lesson to heart, noting that this incident "only served to inspire me with a desire and determination to learn" (p. 34 ). Over the next seven years, Douglass recalls, "I succeeded in learning to read and write . . . [through] various stratagems," including offering bread to hungry white children in exchange for reading lessons.

At age fifteen, Douglass is sent back to Colonel Lloyd's plantation to work for Hugh's brother, Thomas Auld, a ship captain. Here he is once again "made to feel the painful gnawings of hunger," and he begins to resist the tyranny of slavery more forcefully (p. 56 ). A few months later, Auld hires Douglass out to Edward Covey, a Methodist with a reputation for "breaking" recalcitrant slaves (p. 57 ). After a difficult year in which he is beaten, runs away, is recaptured, and finally battles Covey in a lengthy fistfight, Douglass is hired out to another landowner, William Freeland, to work as a field hand. Surviving his servitude under Mr. Covey seems to steel Douglass' desire for freedom, as his description of their fistfight reveals: "You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man" (p. 65-66 ).

Douglass does not provide the full details of his escape in his 1845 Narrative , for he fears that this information will prove useful to slave owners seeking to thwart or recapture future runaways. (He later provides an explanation of his escape in both versions of Life and Times of Frederick Douglass .) However, in his first autobiography Douglass does reveal that he is able to plan his escape when Hugh Auld allows him to work for wages at a Baltimore shipyard. Upon reaching the North, Douglass describes his sensations as "a moment of the highest excitement I have ever experienced . . . I felt like one who had escaped a den of hungry lions" (p. 107 ).

By the end of his Narrative , Douglass has resettled in New Bedford, Massachusetts, changed his name (which, until this time, was Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey), and married Anna Murray, a free black woman to whom he became engaged while still enslaved in Baltimore. In New Bedford, he is introduced to the members of William Lloyd Garrison's American Anti-Slavery Society. Douglass ends his narrative with a beginning, as he recalls his first public address before an audience of abolitionists. "From that time until now, I have been engaged in pleading the cause of my brethren," Douglass writes, leaving the future open for hopeful possibilities (p. 117 ).

Works Consulted : Andrews, William, To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography, 1760-1865 , Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1986; Blassingame, John W., and others, Eds., The Frederick Douglass Papers , Series Two, Vol. 1, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999; Douglass, Frederick, Autobiographies , Henry Louis Gates, Jr., ed., New York: Penguin Books, 1996; McCoy, Beth A, "Race and the (Para)Textual Condition," PMLA 121:1 (Jan 2006): 156-169.

Patrick E. Horn

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• Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass Summary

The Narrative begins with Douglass explaining that he was born in Talbot County, Maryland, but did not know his birthday because such information was often kept from slaves, which was lamentable and bothersome to him throughout his life. He rarely saw his mother and the identity of his father was unknown, although it was commonly assumed to be his first master, Captain Anthony . Anthony was a moderately wealthy slaveholder and was not particularly kind or conscientiousness. He rarely interfered when his overseers treated his slaves brutally.

Anthony was the clerk and superintendent for Colonel Lloyd , one of Maryland's wealthiest slaveholders. His plantation home was known as the Great House Farm, where Douglass resided when he was very young. Slaves received scanty allowances and had little time of their own; many were also cruelly beaten by the overseers. However, slaves on the outlying farm spoke highly of Great House Farm and considered it an honor to be sent there on errands.

Douglass detailed the sumptuous gardens of Colonel Lloyd's plantation and provided further information about the realities of slavery. He explained why slaves often praised their masters: they were afraid that the whites to whom they were speaking would report their insolence and they would be punished. Douglass also wrote of the wild and mournful beauty of the slave songs and how they suggested the horrors of slavery.

Douglass did not have many tasks on Colonel Lloyd's plantation. He was often cold and hungry. Thankfully, it was announced one day that he amongst several slave children was chosen to live with Anthony's son-in-law's brother, Hugh Auld , in Baltimore. Douglass attributed this fortuitous event to divine intervention; he knew God meant for him to one day escape the bonds of servitude.

Douglass's new mistress, Mrs. Auld , was sweet and untouched by the destructive effects of slavery. She refused to treat him ill and even decided she would teach him how to read. Her husband, however, knowing the effects of teaching a slave to read – intractability, unmanageability, disillusionment – forbade her from doing so. Douglass decided he would teach himself how to read and write; this he did by learning from the Baltimore street boys and using the Aulds' son's copybooks to practice writing. Douglass attained a copy of the Columbian Orator , which provided him with writings on emancipation and a denunciation of slavery.

After Captain Anthony died his assets, including all of the salves, were divided amongst two of his children. Thankfully Douglass was able to remain with Master Hugh, but this was short-lived: a quarrel between Hugh and his brother, Thomas, resulted in Douglass being sent to live with Thomas instead. He was not sad to go, as drink and the realities of slavery had ruined Mr. and Mrs. Hugh Auld, respectively, but living with Master Thomas was not pleasant either. Thomas was ignoble, cowardly, cruel, and virulently hypocritical in his faith. He and Douglass did not have a good relationship, and the latter was sent to work on the farm of Edward Covey , the famed "slave-breaker" known for "taming" slaves.

Living with Covey was the low point of Douglass's life. He was beaten frequently in the most unjust manner conceivable, he lost his desire to read and improve his intellect, and his spirits were broken. Covey was a most abominable man; he was duplicitous, merciless, fickle, and capable of savage brutality.

One day Douglass was very ill and could not complete his labor. This drew the attention of Covey, who beat Douglass until he was nearly senseless. Douglass resolved to journey to Master Thomas and beg him to protect him against Covey. Thomas was not amenable to this decision and Douglass had to travel back to the farm. On his way he stopped at the house of a wife of a fellow slave, Sandy. Sandy gave Douglass a special root and promised him that if he kept this root at his side he would never be touched again by a slaveholder. Douglass was skeptical but took the root.

When he arrived back at the farm Covey once again came upon him and began beating him. Douglass resolved that he would resist this time, and for over two hours the men were locked in combat. Douglass did not actually fight Covey but physically resisted the man's attacks. Finally Covey backed down and Douglass was free. For the duration of his stay on the farm Covey did not touch him, and Douglass believed it was his desire to keep his reputation that prevented him from turning Douglass in. This episode was the chief moment in Douglass's life; he viewed it as the time when he moved from being a slave to being a man.

After a year with Covey Douglass left and went to live on the farm of William Freeland . Freeland was the best master Douglass had; he was fair, honest, gave his slaves enough food and tools, and had no pretensions to piety. Douglass started a Sunday school for nearly forty slaves, teaching them how to read and write. As time passed Douglass became increasingly aware that he was getting older and he was still a slave. He resolved to devise a plan to escape. Several of his friends decided to join in the escape attempt, even though they were all aware of the possible dangers that awaited them.

However, the plot was discovered and the escape attempt foiled. Douglass and his friends were put into jail and Douglass's spirits were profoundly depressed. Finally he was released back into the custody of Hugh Auld in Baltimore. When he returned to the city he was allowed to be hired out to learn calking (waterproofing a ship). His first experience resulted in his being beaten by several white men, afraid they might lose their jobs to free blacks. Douglass went to another shipyard and worked diligently. Soon he was commanding high wages but was bitter that he had to turn nearly all of them over to Master Hugh. It was his taste of freedom and autonomy that revived within him the desire to escape, and he began to formulate a plan.

In order not to rouse the suspicions of his master, he worked assiduously at his calking. He was loath to leave his friends in Baltimore but knew that the time was come for him to try and go to the North. Finally, he achieved this escape; however, he did not publish any details in the Narrative as to not provoke danger to those who helped him or those who were still in slavery.

He arrived in New York and was exultant at his independence. Almost immediately, though, he felt lonely and lost in the city. If not for David Ruggles , a man who was most helpful to slaves and free blacks, he would have had a much more difficult time. In New York he was able to marry his love, Anna, and the two decided to move to New Bedford where it was safer. There Douglass found work and reveled in the ability to keep all of his wages and take on the responsibilities of an independent man. He even changed his name from Frederick Bailey to Frederick Douglass ; "Douglass" was suggested by a friend who had just read "Lady of the Lake".

Douglass experienced some prejudice working in New Bedford. He also began reading the prominent abolitionist newspaper, The Liberator , and was in awe of its impassioned denunciations of slavery. One day he attended an anti-slavery convention in Nantucket and was asked to speak. He took the stage, and although he was slightly nervous, he was able to tell his story. The Narrative concludes with his explanation that he has been doing this very thing ever since that fateful day.

The Appendix to the autobiography sets out Douglass's criticisms against the Christianity of slaveholders and explains to readers that Douglass is only critical of that very hypocritical type of religion, not religion in general. He locates authentic Christianity in the black community.

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass Questions and Answers

The Question and Answer section for Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.

In paragraph 3, Mr. Auld says that if you give a slave "an inch, he will take an ell." What does he mean by this statement?

In context, he is saying that if you make a concession, you will be taken advantage of. This saying or quote first appeared in 1546 in a collection by John Heywood,

What event did Douglass indicate "made him a man"?

Although those are not the words he used, Douglass sae his employment in New Bedford... the day he began working for himself and his wife, the day that he truly became a man.

I found employment, the third day after my arrival, in stowing a sloop...

Why is freedom tormenting Douglass?

Douglass sees freedom everywhere and roused his "soul to eternal wakefulness". He still, however, remained enslaved.  

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Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave: Written by Himself study guide contains a biography of Frederick Douglass, literature essays, a complete e-text, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

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• Embracing the In-between: The Double Mental Life of Frederick Douglass
• An Analysis of the Different Forms of Freedom and Bondage Presented in the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave
• Humanization of a Murdered Girl in Douglass's Narrative
• The Political Station in Douglass’s “Narrative of the Life” and Emerson’s “Self-Reliance”
• Bound by Knowledge: Writing, Knowledge, and Freedom in Ishmael Reed's Flight to Canada and Frederick Douglass's The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass

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Life and Times of Frederick Douglass

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Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1892) is an autobiographical account written by one of the 19th century’s most famous Americans. Born a slave in Talbot County, Maryland, probably in the year 1817, young Frederick, later known as Frederick Douglass , escaped from slavery, joining the abolitionists, traveled abroad, met and counseled some of the era’s greatest statesmen, and fought a lifelong battle against color prejudice and injustice.

Life and Times of Frederick Douglass is essentially a history of Frederick Douglass’s public life—that is, the points at which his life converged with the 19th century’s most momentous events and developments. As such, after the opening chapters, in which Douglass describes his grandparents and the mother he barely knew, readers will find few details about Douglass’s private life apart from very brief references to his two marriages and the death of his young daughter. This is the story of both Douglass’s life and the times in which he lived.

Douglass divides the book into three parts. The first two were published in 1881; 10 years later, Douglass added the third. Douglass died in 1895, so this three-part autobiography, published in 1892, represents his most complete account of his life.

In the first section, “Life as a Slave,” Douglass establishes one of the book’s key themes: Slavery victimized everyone, from slaves to slaveholders. This point is not simply a magnanimous expression of forgiveness toward an unworthy class of tyrants; it is an insight into human nature. This first section tells the story of how Frederick came to understand the true nature of the slave system. In Baltimore, he learns to read and to pray. Armed with knowledge, and filled with Christ’s peace, he begins to think about the doctrine of natural rights and to question why he or anyone must be a slave for life. In an epic fight with the “negro-breaker” Edward Covey , Frederick learns the value of courage—another of the book’s main themes. Most important, he comes to regard slavery itself as the enemy.

The second part describes Douglass’s life as a free man, from his escape to the North in 1838 to the early months of 1881, when the book was first published. This second section covers the abolitionists’ moral crusade against slavery, the escalating sectional conflict of the 1850s, the Civil War, and the post-war struggle for civil rights. Scattered anecdotes reveal Douglass’s painful experiences with racial segregation and proscription in the North. A visit to Great Britain, where he feels no such ill treatment on account of his skin, convinces Douglass that color prejudice must be a uniquely American phenomenon—another of the book’s major themes. In all, more than 40 years of history appear in this section, which is a confluence of Douglass’s own history with that of the era. From these parallel histories, heroes emerge, including John Brown , Ulysses S. Grant , and Abraham Lincoln .

The third part, written in the early 1890s, picks up the story where Douglass left off in 1881. The events of the 1880s are far less dramatic than those described in earlier sections, but in some ways they are melancholier and more ominous. In 1881, Douglass has reason to look to the future with optimism. Emancipation and enfranchisement of the former slaves, once unthinkable, have been achieved. An unfavorable 1883 Supreme Court decision, however, made federal civil rights for Freedmen virtually unenforceable. Meanwhile, as former slaves struggle to find their way in a hostile world, and as “Lost Cause” mythologists retroactively ennoble the vanquished Confederates, the nation has become more race-obsessed than ever. Instead of justice and equality, Douglass sees Black people increasingly relegated to second-class citizenship.

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Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass Introduction

Frederick Douglass 's Narrative is basically an autobiography. It's the story of his life from the time he was born a slave to the time of his escape to freedom in the North. But it's also a piece with a strong political message. When Douglass wrote this book in 1845, slavery was still legal in much of the United States. He became a public speaker and writer to try to stop it. He believed that if he showed people what slavery was really like, they would understand why it needed to be abolished. And who better than a former slave to tell the truth about slavery? So even though he wants to tell us his personal story, he never forgets the larger goal of abolishing slavery. Douglass's Narrative was an instant success, selling over 35 thousand copies in the U.S. and Europe, and was quickly translated into both French and German. But can a piece with a political agenda also be great art? Douglass's book isn't a novel or a poem, and he tries to keep the language simple and clear (at least by the standards of his day), so it can seem like there isn't much to it. But Douglass would eventually become the best-known abolitionist in the country (and the most famous black American of his era) because he managed to do so much more than just write a description of slavery. Instead of just arguing against slavery, Douglass asks some hard philosophical questions about what freedom really is.

What is Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass About and Why Should I Care?

Frederick Douglass 's Narrative is not just about slavery. It is about that, of course; as a historical document, it paints a powerful picture of what it was like to be a slave, how the world looked from the bottom, and what kind of place America was when "the land of the free" was only free for white people. But while a lot of books were written by ex-slaves in the 1840s and 1850s, a lot of slave narratives read like documentaries, or worse, like Public Service Announcements. Frederick Douglass's narrative is by far the most important one, because he wants us to think about more than just the legal, historical, and political issues of slavery and freedom. He wants us to think about it as a philosophical question: what does it take for the human spirit to be free? Douglass wants to show us that he made himself free. Freedom isn't something that's given to us; it's something we each have to find for ourselves. And although Douglass had it a lot harder than most of us ever will, we each have something to learn from his perseverance and courage in search of his own freedom, and his refusal to rest before finding it. One of the hardest lessons Douglass has to learn is that this battle never really stops. As long as anyone is a slave, Douglass knows he himself is not fully free. This is something that we can think about with regard to justice anywhere and anytime: can any of us be fully free if the least of us is oppressed?

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