(Frederick Douglass was born an American slave. In his tee...)
Frederick Douglass was born an American slave. In his teenage years he taught himself to read. Before long Frederick was teaching his fellow slaves how to read the New Testament. This was not looked well upon.The beatings that followed nearly broke him, but instead he resolvedupon escape. After a number of unsuccessful attempts, Douglass escaped to the northern states.He quickly became a public figure in the abolitionist movement. This is the first book Douglass wrote on his life and the subject of slavery. It documents his early life, his escape to the north, and his early career as an abolitionist.
Frederick Douglass was an African-American social reformer, abolitionist, orator, journalist and statesman. He became the central figure in the famous "One Hundred Conventions" of the New England Antislavery Society.
Background
Douglass was born c. February, 1817, in Cordova, Maryland, the son of an unknown white father and Harriet Bailey, a slave who had also some Indian blood. He was named Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey, but assumed the name of Douglass after his escape from slavery. As a child he experienced neglect and cruelty, indulgence and hard work; but particularly the tyranny and circumscription of an ambitious human being who was legally classed as real estate.
Education
When the boy was eight years old, his owner sent him to Baltimore to live as a house servant with the family of Hugh Auld, whose wife defied state law by teaching the boy to read. After she discontinued the practice, Douglass continued, secretly, to teach himself how to read and write. As Douglass began to read newspapers, pamphlets, political materials, and books of every description, this new realm of thought led him to question and condemn the institution of slavery.
Career
Douglass first tried to escape from Freeland, who had hired him out from his owner Colonel Lloyd, but was unsuccessful. In 1836, he tried to escape from his new master Covey, but failed again. His master's forbearance secured his return to Baltimore, where he learned the trade of a ship's calker and eventually was permitted to hire his own time. A third attempt to escape, September 3, 1838, was entirely successful. Douglass together with his wife went to New Bedford, where he became a common laborer. Suddenly a career opened. He had read Garrison's Liberator, and in 1841 he attended a convention of the Massachusetts Antislavery Society in Nantucket. An abolitionist who had heard him speak to his black friends asked him to address the convention. He did so with hesitation and stammering, but with extraordinary effect. Much to his own surprise, he was immediately employed as an agent of the Massachusetts Antislavery Society. He took part in the Rhode Island campaign against the new constitution which proposed the disfranchisement of the blacks; and he became the central figure in the famous "One Hundred Conventions" of the New England Antislavery Society.
It was a baptism of fire and brought out the full stature of the man. Douglass was mobbed and mocked, beaten, compelled to ride in "Jim Crow" cars, and refused accommodations; but he carried the programme through to the bitter end. Persons who had heard him on the platform began to doubt his story. They questioned if this man who spoke good English and bore himself with independent self-assertion could ever have been a slave. Thereupon he wrote his Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass which Wendell Phillips advised him to burn. It was a daring recital of facts and Phillips feared that it might lead to his reenslavement. Douglass published the little book in 1845, however, and then, to avoid possible consequences, visited Great Britain and Ireland. Here he remained two years, meeting nearly all of the English Liberals. For the first time in his life he was treated as a man and an equal. The resultant effect upon his character was tremendous. He began to conceive emancipation not simply as physical freedom; but as social equality and economic and spiritual opportunity.
Douglass returned to the United States in 1847 with money to buy his freedom and to establish a newspaper for his race. Differences immediately arose with his white abolitionist friends. Garrison did not believe such a journal was needed and others, even more radical, thought that the very buying of his freedom was condoning slavery. Differences too arose as to political procedure in the abolition campaign. He allowed his freedom to be bought from his former master; he established the North Star and issued it for seventeen years.
Douglass lectured, supported woman suffrage, took part in politics, endeavored to help Harriet Beecher Stowe establish an industrial school for colored youth, and counseled with John Brown. When Brown was arrested, the Governor of Virginia tried to apprehend Douglass as a conspirator. Douglass hastily fled to Canada and for six months again lectured in England and Scotland. With the Civil War came his great opportunity. He thundered against slavery as its real cause; he offered black men as soldiers and pleaded with black men to give their services. He assisted in recruiting the celebrated 54th and 55th Massachusetts colored regiments, giving his own sons as first recruits. Lincoln called him into conference and during Reconstruction, Douglass agitated in support of suffrage and civil rights for the freedmen.
His last years were spent in ease and honor. He was successively secretary of the Santo Domingo Commission, marshaland recorder of deeds of the District of Columbia, and finally United States minister to Haiti. He was active to the very close of his career, having attended a woman-suffrage convention on the day of his death, which occurred on February 20, 1895.
(Frederick Douglass was born an American slave. In his tee...)
Personality
Physically, Douglass was a commanding person, over six feet in height, with brown skin, frizzly hair, leonine head, strong constitution, and a fine voice. He was eminently practical. With all his intense feeling and his reasons for greater depth of feeling than any white abolitionist, he had a clear head and a steady hand.
Connections
Douglass married Anna Murray, a free black woman whom he had met in Baltimore, and together they went to New Bedford. His second marriage, in 1884, to Helen Pitts, a white woman, brought a flurry of criticism, but he laughingly remarked that he was quite impartial - his first wife "was the color of my mother, and the second, the color of my father. "