"...American abolitionist, orator, and writer, who escaped slavery and urged other blacks to do likewise before and during the American Civil War. Originally named Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey, Douglass was born on Feb. 7, 1817, in Tuckahoe, Md. He was the son of a slave, Harriet Bailey (d. 1824?)
,
and was largely
self-educated. He failed in an attempt to escape in 1836, but two years later
he succeeded and reached New Bedford,
Mass.,
where he assumed the name of Douglass.
His
career as an abolitionist began dramatically in 1841 at an antislavery
convention in Nantucket, Mass., where his impromptu
address to the convention revealed
him to be an orator of great eloquence. As “a recent graduate from the
institution of slavery with his diploma on his back,” he was engaged as an
agent of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society. His speeches in the following
years in the northern states and his work for the UNDERGROUND RAILROAD,
(q.v.) did much to further the cause of the abolitionists and made his name a
symbol of freedom and achievement among whites and blacks alike.
In
1845, Douglass, at the urging of his friends, went to England to escape the
danger of seizure under the FUGITIVE SLAVE LAWS,
(q.v.). His lectures
in the
British Isles on the slavery question in the U.S. aroused sympathy for the
abolitionists’ cause and prompted his admirers to raise funds to purchase his
freedom. After
returning to the U.S. in 1847, Douglass became the “station-master and
conductor” of the Underground Railroad in Rochester, N.Y., where
he also established the abolitionist newspaper North Star, which he
edited until 1860.
During
these years, Douglass became friendly with the American abolitionist John
Brown and was given a hint
of
Brown’s strategy of
destroying “the money
value of slave property” by training a force of men to help large numbers of
slaves escape to freedom
in the North via the Underground Railroad. When Douglass learned on the eve
of the raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859 that it was Brown’s intention to seize
the federal arsenal there, he objected. Warning
Brown that an attack on the arsenal would be tantamount to an assault on the
U.S. government and would prove disastrous, Douglass withdrew from
further participation.
After
the raid, fearing reprisals by the government, Douglass fled to Europe, where
he stayed for six months. On his return to the U.S., he campaigned for Abraham
Lincoln during the presidential election of 1860 and, following the outbreak
of the Civil War, helped raise two regiments of black soldiers, the Massachusetts
54th and 55th. After the war, Douglass, as a recognized leader of and
spokesman for the former black slaves, fought for enactment of the 13th,
14th, and 15th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution. He became U.S. marshal for
the District of Columbia (1877–81), recorder of deeds for the District
of Columbia (1881–86), and U.S. minister to Haiti (1889–91). He died in
Washington, D.C., on Feb. 20, 1895.
So
impressive were Douglass’s oratorical and intellectual abilities that
opponents refused to believe he had been a slave and alleged that he was an impostor
foisted on the public by the abolitionists. In reply, Douglass wrote Narrative
of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845), which he
revised in later years; in final form, it appeared in 1882 under the title Life
and Times of Frederick Douglass."
[photo above: Historical marker installed on the campus of
West Chester University on April 20th, 2006, located between the
Francis Harvey Green Library and Main Hall.]
This biography is from the
History Channel website.