Frederick Douglass

Frederick Douglass was born into slavery in February 1818 at Tuckahoe in Talbot County on MarylandMarylandMaryland is a Middle Atlantic state of the United States, deeply indented by Chesapeake Bay and bordered by Pennsylvania, Delaware, Virginia, the District of Columbia and West Virginia; its capital is Annapolis and its largest city is Baltimore. One of the original 13 states, it ratified the U.S. Constitution on April 28, 1788, as the seventh state to do so, and had a population of 6,177,224 in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020).Open the full entry’s Eastern Shore, as Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey. His mother, Harriet Bailey, was enslaved; his father was a white man, rumored to be his enslaver, Aaron Anthony. He had three older siblings, Perry, Sarah and Eliza, and two younger sisters, Kitty (born 1820) and Arianna (born 1822). From 1819 to 1823 he was raised by his grandmother, Betsey Bailey, at Holme Hill Farm and saw his mother only a few times.⁠[1][2]

In 1824 he was sent to a plantation on the Wye River. In 1826 his mother died and he was sent to Baltimore to live with Hugh and Sophia Auld; that year Aaron Anthony died, and Anthony’s son-in-law Thomas Auld inherited him but sent him back to Hugh Auld. In 1827 Sophia Auld began teaching him to read at his request until Hugh Auld stopped the lessons; he went on to work as a general assistant in a shipyard while secretly practicing reading and writing, and in 1831 bought Caleb Bingham’s The Columbian Orator. That year a newspaper article about John Quincy AdamsJohn Quincy AdamsJohn Quincy Adams (1767–1848) was an American diplomat and politician who served as secretary of state from 1817 to 1825 and as the sixth President of the United States from 1825 to 1829, and afterwards sat in the House of Representatives until his death.Open the full entry’s antislavery petitions in Congress introduced him to the abolitionist movement.⁠[1]

In 1833 he was sent to St. Michaels, Maryland, to work for Thomas Auld; in 1834 he was rented to Edward Covey, a farmer known as a “slave breaker,” and after repeated beatings he fought back, after which Covey never beat him again. In 1835 he was hired out to the farmer William Freeland and secretly ran a Sunday school teaching enslaved people to read. In 1836 an escape plan was discovered; he was jailed, released and returned to Baltimore, where he was hired out as a caulker in a shipyard. In 1837 he joined the East Baltimore Mental Improvement Society, a debating club of free Black men, where he met Anna Murray, a free Black housekeeper.⁠[1]

On September 3, 1838, with help from Anna Murray, he escaped disguised as a sailor, using papers borrowed from a free Black seaman, and reached New York City within a day; for a time he took the surname Johnson. On September 15 he married Anna Murray in a ceremony performed by the minister James W. C. Pennington, himself formerly enslaved in Maryland.⁠[2][1]

The couple then moved to New Bedford, MassachusettsMassachusettsMassachusetts (officially the Commonwealth of Massachusetts) is a state in the New England region of the northeastern United States; its capital and largest city is Boston. One of the original 13 states, it ratified the U.S. Constitution on February 6, 1788, the sixth state to do so. Its population in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020) was 7,029,917.Open the full entry, where they stayed with Mary and Nathan Johnson. Nathan Johnson suggested the surname Douglas, from Sir Walter Scott’s The Lady of the Lake, which he adopted with the spelling Douglass. When he sought work as a caulker, white workers threatened to quit if he were hired, and he worked as an unskilled laborer.⁠[1]

In 1839 he subscribed to William Lloyd Garrison’s abolitionist weekly The Liberator and became a licensed preacher of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church. In 1841, persuaded by William C. Coffin, he spoke about his life in slavery at a Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society convention, after which the society hired him as a lecturer and he became a close ally of Garrison. In 1843 a mob beat him at an antislavery meeting in Pendleton, IndianaIndianaIndiana is a state in the Midwestern United States; its capital and largest city is Indianapolis. It was admitted to the Union on December 11, 1816, as the 19th state, and its population in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020) was 6,785,528.Open the full entry, breaking his right hand, which never fully healed.⁠[1]

In 1845 he published his first autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself, whose details exposed him to arrest as a fugitive. That year he began a lecture tour of Great Britain and Ireland, and friends there raised money to buy his freedom; he was manumitted after Hugh Auld received $711.66.⁠[1][3]

Returning in 1847, he moved to Rochester, New York, bought a printing press with money from British and Irish friends and began publishing the abolitionist weekly North Star, which ran until 1851. In 1848 he attended the first women’s rights convention at Seneca Falls, New York, the only African American present; that year he met the abolitionist John Brown and began sheltering freedom seekers on the Underground Railroad. After his daughter Rosetta was asked to leave a Rochester school because she was Black, he campaigned to end segregation in the city’s public schools.⁠[1][2]

In 1851 he merged North Star with Gerrit Smith’s Liberty Party Paper to form Frederick Douglass’ Paper, printed until 1860. In this period he concluded that the Constitution was an antislavery document, reversing the view he had shared with Garrison and opening a rift between them. After John Brown’s 1859 raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, authorities found a letter from Douglass to Brown, and Douglass fled to Canada and then on a lecture tour of England to avoid arrest as an accomplice; his daughter Annie died in Rochester in March 1860, and he returned in April that year without being charged. From 1859 to 1863 he also published Douglass’ Monthly.⁠[1]

In February 1863 he became a recruiter for the 54th Massachusetts Infantry, the first regiment of African American soldiers; his sons Lewis and Charles enlisted, and Frederick Douglass Jr. later also became a recruiter. On August 10, 1863, he met President Abraham LincolnAbraham LincolnAbraham Lincoln (February 12, 1809 – April 15, 1865) was the 16th president of the United States (1861–1865). Born to a frontier farming family in Kentucky, he had less than a year of formal schooling, taught himself law, and served in the Illinois legislature and the U.S. House of Representatives before winning the presidency as the Republican candidate in 1860. During the Civil War he preserved the Union, issued the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 and pushed the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery through Congress. He was shot by John Wilkes Booth at Ford’s Theatre in Washington on April 14, 1865, and died the next day.Open the full entry about the unequal pay and poor treatment of Black soldiers; at a second meeting on August 19, 1864, Lincoln asked him to prepare an effort to aid people escaping slavery in case the war did not end in total Union victory.⁠[1]

After the war he pressed for the citizenship rights embodied in the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments and lectured on Reconstruction and women’s rights. In 1866 he helped found the American Equal Rights Association with Elizabeth Cady StantonElizabeth Cady StantonElizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902) was an American leader of the women’s rights movement and a social reformer. In 1848 she helped organize the first women’s rights convention at Seneca Falls, New York, making the first sustained demand for women’s suffrage in the United States; she worked for decades with Susan B. Anthony and served as president of the National Woman Suffrage Association and of the National American Woman Suffrage Association.Open the full entry and Susan B. Anthony; the group disbanded three years later.⁠[2][1]

In 1870 he became editor, and later owner, of the New National Era, a weekly for African Americans; when it folded in 1874 he lost $10,000. In 1871 President Ulysses S. GrantUlysses S. GrantUlysses S. Grant (1822–1885) was an American soldier and politician who commanded the Union armies in the final years of the Civil War (1864–1865) and served as the 18th president of the United States from 1869 to 1877.Open the full entry appointed him to a commission studying the annexation of the Dominican Republic. In 1872 the Equal Rights Party nominated him for vice president on a ticket headed by Victoria C. Woodhull; that year a fire, which he attributed to arson, destroyed his Rochester home, and he moved his family to Washington, D.C. In March 1874 he became president of the struggling Freedman’s Savings and Trust Company and worked with the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee to save it, but the bank failed.⁠[1]

In 1877 President Rutherford B. HayesRutherford B. HayesRutherford B. Hayes (1822–1893) was an American lawyer, soldier and politician who served as a U.S. representative and governor of Ohio and was the 19th president of the United States from 1877 to 1881.Open the full entry appointed him U.S. marshal for the District of Columbia; BritannicaEncyclopædia BritannicaEncyclopædia Britannica is a general English-language encyclopedia first published in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1768; the name also refers to its publisher, Chicago-based Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. (which presents itself as The Britannica Group). The print edition ended in 2012, and the company’s main businesses since then have been the online encyclopedia Britannica.com, digital education products for schools and libraries, and Merriam-Webster dictionaries.Open the full entry notes that he was the first Black U.S. marshal. That year he paid $6,700 to the Freedman’s Savings and Trust Company for Cedar Hill, a house with just over nine acres in Anacostia, Washington, whose original deed had barred Black buyers; he later bought adjoining lots to enlarge the estate to 15 acres and expanded the house from 14 rooms to 21. He lived there from 1878 until his death.⁠[1][4][5]

In 1881 he published his third and final autobiography, The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, and President James A. GarfieldJames A. GarfieldJames A. Garfield (1831–1881) was an American educator, soldier and politician who rose to major general in the Civil War, served for many years in the U.S. House of Representatives and was the 20th president of the United States in 1881, dying in office after being shot.Open the full entry appointed him recorder of deeds for the District of Columbia. On August 4, 1882, Anna Murray Douglass, his wife of 44 years, died after a stroke. On January 24, 1884, he married Helen Pitts, a white woman who had been his secretary; the interracial marriage caused controversy. In 1886–1887 the couple toured Europe and Africa.⁠[1][2][3]

On June 26, 1889, he was appointed U.S. minister resident and consul general to Haiti, concurrently chargé d’affaires to the Dominican Republic; he presented his credentials in Haiti on November 14, 1889, and in the Dominican Republic on January 25, 1890. In 1890 the U.S. government asked him to seek Haiti’s permission for the U.S. Navy to use the port of Môle St. Nicholas as a refueling station; in April 1891 Haiti rejected the request as too intrusive. Amid U.S. press criticism that he was too sympathetic to Haitian interests, he resigned and left his post in July 1891. In 1892–1893 he served as commissioner in charge of the Haitian exhibit at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago.⁠[6][1]

On February 20, 1895, after attending a meeting of the National Council of Women in Washington, he died of a heart attack that evening at Cedar Hill while describing the meeting to his wife; he was 77. Services were held at his home and at the Metropolitan Methodist Episcopal Church, where Susan B. Anthony spoke. In Rochester his body lay in state at Old City Hall before a funeral at Central Presbyterian Church. He was buried beside Anna in Mount Hope Cemetery in Rochester, where Helen Pitts Douglass was also buried in the same plot after her death in 1903.⁠[1][2][7]

Douglass and his first wife, Anna Murray Douglass, had five children: Rosetta Douglass Sprague (born 1839), Lewis Henry Douglass (born 1840), Frederick Douglass Jr. (born 1842), Charles Remond Douglass (born 1844) and Annie Douglass (born 1849). In 1848 he hired a tutor to teach Anna to read, but the effort failed.⁠[3][1]

His three autobiographies are Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself (1845), My Bondage and My Freedom (1855) and The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881). Other works include “The Heroic Slave” (1853), “An Appeal to Congress for Impartial Suffrage” and “Reconstruction.” The German journalist Ottilia Assing translated My Bondage and My Freedom into German.⁠[3][1]

Under Douglass’s will, Helen Pitts Douglass inherited Cedar Hill and about 15 acres; she took a $15,000 mortgage to buy out other family claims, hoping to keep the house as a national memorial. On June 6, 1900, Congress chartered the Frederick Douglass Memorial and Historical Association for the sole purpose of preserving the Douglass home and its contents, and on her death in 1903 Helen left the house and land to the association. In 1916 the association partnered with the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs, which paid off the loan and restored the house, celebrated in 1922. On September 6, 1962, President John F. KennedyJohn F. KennedyJohn F. Kennedy (1917–1963) was an American politician who represented Massachusetts in the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate and served as the 35th president of the United States from 1961 to 1963. The youngest person elected president and the first Roman Catholic to hold the office, he was assassinated in Dallas on November 22, 1963.Open the full entry signed legislation transferring the home to the federal government; after about ten years of restoration by the National Park Service it opened to the public in 1972. It is now the Frederick Douglass National Historic Site at 1411 W Street SE in Washington.⁠[8][5]

On June 19, 2013, Juneteenth, Congress unveiled a bronze statue of Douglass in Emancipation Hall of the U.S. Capitol Visitor Center. The roughly seven-foot statue is by the sculptor Steven Weitzman; District of Columbia residents chose Douglass as its subject by public vote, and P.L. 112-174, enacted in 2012, directed its placement in Emancipation Hall. It is not part of the National Statuary Hall Collection.⁠[9]

Britannica describes him as one of the most prominent human rights leaders of the 19th century and as “the most photographed American man of the 19th century”; the National Park Service calls him America’s foremost abolitionist.⁠[3][4][2]

Frederick Douglass National Historic Site (National Park Service): Web page: https://www.nps.gov/articles/frederickdouglass.htm (opens in a new window).⁠[5]

Library of Congress (Frederick Douglass Papers timeline): Web page: https://www.loc.gov/collections/frederick-douglass-papers/articles-and-essays/frederick-douglass-timeline/ (opens in a new window).⁠[1]

Office of the Historian, U.S. Department of State (Frederick Douglass diplomatic record): Web page: https://history.state.gov/departmenthistory/people/douglass-frederick-augustus-washington-bailey (opens in a new window).⁠[6]

Architect of the Capitol (Frederick Douglass statue): Web page: https://www.aoc.gov/capitol-hill/other-statues/frederick-douglass (opens in a new window).⁠[9]