Frederick Douglass

Frederick Douglass escaped slavery and became the most influential Black American of the nineteenth century. Born into slavery in Maryland around 1818, he was separated from his mother as an infant and never knew his birth date or his father's identity, though his father was probably white. Sent to Baltimore at about eight, the wife of his owner began teaching him to read until her husband stopped it, saying that learning would make a slave unmanageable. Douglass took that as instruction, and continued in secret, trading bread to poor white boys for lessons and reading The Columbian Orator. He was sent at sixteen to Edward Covey, a farmer with a reputation for breaking slaves, who whipped him weekly for months until Douglass fought back and beat him. He was never whipped again, and treated the fight as the moment he became a man in fact. He escaped in September 1838, disguised as a sailor with borrowed identification papers, reaching New York in about a day. He began speaking for the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society in 1841, and his ability was such that audiences doubted he had ever been enslaved. He answered with the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass in 1845, naming names — which put him in danger of recapture, so he spent two years in Britain and Ireland, where supporters bought his legal freedom. He founded the North Star in Rochester in 1847, supported women's suffrage at Seneca Falls in 1848, recruited Black troops during the Civil War including two of his own sons, and pressed Lincoln repeatedly on equal pay and emancipation. His 1852 speech asked what the Fourth of July meant to the slave. He died in 1895.

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