About the Author

Frederick Douglass, born Frederick Bailey, was the most important African-American civil rights leader in the nineteenth century. The son of a black slave and a white man in eastern Maryland, Douglass eventually ended up in the holdings of the Auld brothers of Maryland. A difficult subject, the young teenage slave bristled under the harsh treatment and suffered occasional beatings from Thomas Auld and Edward Covey, a known "slave breaker," to whom he was placed in service for a year. Returning to the Auld family, however, Douglass was soon recognized for his intelligence and skill and eventually allowed work privileges that few slaves ever experienced. He took advantage of free time to join a secret educational academy organized by other free blacks in Baltimore. There he met Anna Murray, a free black woman, with whom he fell in love. In their association, Frederick made plans for his escape. With money Anna gave him and a sailor's free papers a friend had loaned him, Douglass bought a train fare that took him from Baltimore to northern Maryland, from there to the Philadelphia, and on to New York and freedom.

Almost immediately, Frederick sent for Anna Murray, and they were married in September, 1838. Afraid of slave catchers who, under the "fugitive slave laws" were allowed to enter free states in search of escapees, he and his bride relocated to New Bedford, Massachusetts, where he was assured of work and security. To further protect his identity, he adopted the last name of Douglass. It was there in New Bedford that he first read The Liberator, the abolitionist paper published by William Lloyd Garrison and the American Anti-Slavery Association. Reading the paper changed his life, and he began attending meetings of the association in New Bedford. Not many months later, he met Garrison, and after hearing one of Douglass's speeches, Garrison hired him as one of his lecturers in the movement. At the young age of 23, Frederick Douglass had found his calling.

Douglass's education through the secret academy of his free black friends years earlier paid off, especially their coaching on the principles of debating, and from the beginning of his work for Garrison, Douglass was heralded as one of the finest lecturers on the American lecture circuit. At first, he spoke primarily to those features of his own experiences as a slave that would not reveal his true identity. Gradually, however, he began to address more of the specifics of his own abuse, and he became an even more compelling speaker. Finally, in 1844, he decided to write his autobiography, a record that would chronicle fully the details of what he referred to as his "kidnapping."

The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave became a best seller in the North. He had hoped that the success of the book would shield him from seizure by slave catchers under the "fugitive slave laws." Friends, however, urged him otherwise, and he took flight to England. There he found even wider success as a lecturer. In the social and political climate of England, Douglass felt relaxed, that he was free for the first time from the insufferable prejudice and discrimination that he and his other black American counterparts experienced, even in the North.

Douglass's lectures throughout the British Isles secured his fame as an international celebrity, but at home, under the "fugitive slave laws," he was still a runaway slave, subject to immediate incarceration and return to Hugh Auld, who held his ownership papers. Garrison urged him to remain for an extended tour in Europe, but Douglass needed badly to return to his family after a two-year lecture circuit. Then, at the point of potential crisis, two of his friends in England presented him with the $710 necessary to purchase his freedom. Douglass refused to accept the fee as anything other than a bribe paid to a criminal who had robbed him of his youth. Auld agreed to accept the payment, and Douglass returned to the United States a free man.

Back in the United States, Douglass found the country even more polarized over the issue of slavery and the expansion of the American territories. Conflict seemed inevitable. Douglass decided to initiate his own newspaper in the cause of abolition, but Garrison felt The Liberator didn't need the competition. Douglass left Massachusetts for New York where he settled with his family in Rochester, New York. In a short time, Douglass inaugurated The North Star, his own contribution to the journalism of abolition.

The North Star, later renamed as Frederick Douglass' Newspaper, gave him a voice independent of Garrison and The Liberator. In time, Garrison's support for the women's rights movement and a growing sense that pacifism and political action alone would not resolve the slavery issue created a rift between himself and his mentor that would not be resolved. Douglass even met with John Brown, and after his attack on the arsenal at Harper's Ferry, Virginia, failed to provoke a general uprising among slaves across the South and the militant was hanged, Douglass was forced to flee in order to defend his denial that he had supported the attack. In November 1859, he left for England on a trip he had planned much earlier than the Harper's Ferry incident.

Frederick Douglass returned to the United State a year later to be reunited with his family after the death of his youngest daughter, Anne. He and his family became heavily engaged in the "underground railroad," a clandestine routing of escaped Southern slaves into safe havens across the North and into Canada. Their home in Rochester became densely populated at times with African-Americans in route to Ontario.

Involved in the national presidential political arena, Douglass decided to support the Republicans and their candidate Abraham Lincoln. With Lincoln's election, southern states began their secession from the Union, and with the firing on Federal installations at Fort Sumter, South Carolina, the inevitable Civil War had begun. In an effort, in part, to strengthen the cause of the North, Lincoln announced the "Emancipation Proclamation" on December 31, 1862. Douglass celebrated the occasion and pressed for the induction of blacks in the Northern armies. Eventually, thousands of free African-Americans were to serve with distinction, but not without discrimination, and Douglass took up their concerns when he met with Lincoln in 1863. Lincoln called upon the distinguished journalist a year later to draft a plan for leading slaves out of the South if the North were to begin losing the war.

Abraham Lincoln was not the only president with whom Douglass consulted and served. In a failing bid, he pressed Lincoln's successor, Andrew Johnson to extend suffrage to all African-Americans. Douglass refused an offer to head the Freedman's Bureau under Johnson whose policies and appointments in support of Southern racists he found abominable. Douglass campaigned actively for the Republicans and Ulysses S. Grant in both his 1868 and 1872 elections. President Grant chose Douglass as one of the two electors-at-large from New York, and in 1877, Rutherford B. Hayes, Grant's successor in the White House, appointed Douglass as the United States Marshal of Washington, D.C. This appointment was the occasion that brought him from New York to Washington, D.C. for his last years, and he bought "Cedar Hill," a large fifteen acre estate including a handsome house with an expansive library. More a ceremonial rather than a demanding position, Douglass used the time the position as United States marshal afforded to continue his lecturing and public service. In 1880, President James Garfield appointed Douglass as the recorder of deeds for Washington, D.C., a post he enjoyed and served diligently.

In 1881, Douglass published The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, the third volume of his autobiographical writings. Two years after his beloved wife Anna died, he shocked many in 1882 with his marriage to Helen Pitts, a white woman, with whom he lived happily for nine years. On February 20, 1895, Douglass was struck down by a massive heart attack and died. The nation began its mourning of one of the most important public servants in nineteenth-century American society.