Basic Information
Name: Frederick Douglass
Nickname: Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey was Douglass' given name at birth. After his escape from slavery, he changed his last name to Johnson to hide his identity. Some time later, he and his wife took Douglass as their married name, after the hero of Sir Walter Scott's The Lady of the Lake. They also added an extra "s," just for fun.
Born: The exact date is unknown, but Douglass was most likely born in February 1818. He celebrated Valentine's Day, February 14th, as his birthday because his mother called him her little "valentine" and baked him a heart-shaped cake before he was separated from her. BRB, we're getting all the tissues.
Died: February 20th, 1895, of a massive stroke or heart attack
Nationality: American
Hometown: Talbot County, Maryland
WORK & EDUCATION
Occupation: Born into slavery, Douglass worked on various farms in Maryland. As a child, he served as a companion to the white son of a plantation owner. After his escape to the North, he became a writer, activist, newspaper publisher, and speaker. All these activities were directed at ending slavery. During the Civil War, he worked for Union causes, and afterward, he served as a diplomat for the U.S. government.
Education: At some point in his childhood, Douglass was sent to the Auld family in Maryland. Sophia Auld, wife of the plantation owner, taught him to read. When Sophia Auld's husband put a stop to the lessons, Douglass learned from other children and from watching people write. He continued to read avidly and was mostly self-educated through voracious reading. He cited The Columbian Orator as an important influence. It was a classroom reader designed to teach students rhetoric and grammar.
FAMILY & FRIENDS
Parents: Douglass lived first with his maternal grandmother, Betty Bailey. He saw his mother, Harriet, only occasionally, and she died when he was around 10. He knew his father was a white man, possibly his first master, Aaron Anthony.
Siblings: Douglass mentions "my four sisters and my brothers" in his speech, "The Church and Prejudice." His grandmother was responsible for caring for about a dozen children when Douglass was a child. He considered them his brothers, sisters, and cousins, though the actual biological relationship might have been different or nonexistent. Douglass had four sisters named Sarah, Eliza, Kitty, and Arianna, and a brother named Perry.
Spouse: Anna Murray (1813-1882), a free Black woman who had fallen in love with Douglass, helped him to escape slavery on September 3rd, 1838. She joined him in New York, where they were married on September 15th, 1838. They remained married until her death in 1882. In 1884, Douglass married a white feminist, Helen Pitts (1838-1903), and they were married until his death in 1895.
Children: All of Douglass' children were with his first wife, Anna Murray:
Rosetta Douglass (1839-1906)
Lewis Henry Douglass (1840-1908)
Frederick Douglass Jr. (1842-1892)
Charles Remond Douglass (1844-1920)
Annie Douglass (1849-1859)
Friends: Abolitionists, supporters of women's rights
Foes: Slaveholders and supporters of slavery, opponents of women's rights
Like many activists with long careers, Douglass was friendly or foe-ly (yes, we made that word up) with the same people at different times. Over the years, he agreed and disagreed with big names like William Lloyd Garrison, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and even Abraham Lincoln. Douglass famously said, "I would unite with anybody to do right and with nobody to do wrong." (Source)
Analysis
Here's what we remember from elementary school: Frederick Douglass was a stern-looking dude who was born a slave and grew up to escape to freedom, become an abolitionist, and write a few autobiographies.
But, of course, there's more to the story. There always is.
20 Years a Slave (More or Less)
Douglass was born around 1818 and grew up on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, where he was a slave and hired out to several families, most notably the Aulds, who passed him from house to house like he was a casserole dish. He was held by several branches of the Auld family and encountered different kinds of slaveholders, in that some of them were nicer than others, but they were all, ultimately, okay with slavery. (Obviously.)
Sophia Auld taught Douglass to read when he was a child, but after her husband ordered her not to continue the lessons, she snatched a newspaper away from the kid. Ouch.
(Psst: in Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, which is a book that you should definitely pick up, Douglass uses her transformation to demonstrate that slavery is bad for slaveholders as well as slaves. Sophia Auld was a nice lady before she got mixed up in slavery, which turned her into a...much less nice lady.)
At 15, Douglass was sent to a "slave-breaker," a man known for breaking the spirits and wills of rebellious slaves, or the most evil occupation ever. With Douglass, both slaveholders and slave-breakers bit off more than they could chew. The slave-breaker engaged in a physical altercation with Douglass, from which Douglass emerged victorious. He was sent back to the family he came from, where he began plotting his escape.
In short, slave-breaking didn't work on Douglass.
Escape Alarms and Wedding Bells
At around age 20, Douglass fell in love with Anna Murray, a free Black woman who worked as a laundress. She provided falsified papers and money for Douglass' escape, and even stole a naval uniform for him to wear. (She sounds like she was awesome. We approve of this union.)
Disguised as a sailor, Douglass boarded a train headed north on September 3rd, 1838, and arrived in New York City in less than 24 hours. It was just a regular railroad, not the Underground kind.
Anna Murray followed her fiancé to New York City, where they were married on September 15th. They moved to New Bedford, Massachusetts, where they lived with abolitionists Nathan and Polly Johnson.
Still technically enslaved, Douglass needed to disguise his identity, so Nathan Johnson suggested the name "Douglas" after the hero of Sir Walter Scott's The Lady of the Lake, which he was then reading.
An Active Abolitionist Activist
Douglass found work as a laborer in the North, but he had bigger fish to fry than just his own freedom. He joined the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, with whom he eventually got a job as a speaker. He went on multiple speaking tours across the North and the Midwest, drumming up support for the abolition movement.
Unfortunately, with notoriety came an increased chance that he would be recognized and forced to return to slavery because the Fugitive Slave Law (among others) stipulated that slaves must be returned to their holders if they escaped. (A lot of people ignored that law, but the more famous Douglass got, the greater the chance he would be caught. With great fame came great risk.)
Some people had a hard time believing that such an accomplished speaker could really have been a slave. They thought it might be one of those "this guy's being paid to protest," situations. To prove the naysayers wrong, Douglass published his first autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, in 1845. In it, he named names and places. Specificity was a double-edged sword because while it gave him increased credibility, it also said, "Hey, these are the people I ran away from. Know them? You can let them know where I am."
To avoid a return to slavery after the publication of his autobiography, Douglass skipped town (er, the entire country) for a two-year speaking tour of Ireland and Great Britain from 1845-1847. Abolitionists there contributed money to buy Douglass' freedom, so he was able to return to the United States legally free.
Upon his return, Douglass moved his family to Rochester, New York (a pretty forward-thinking kind of place), where he supported abolitionist politics, the women's rights movement, and the Underground Railroad. It was a busy time in Rochester.
Douglass also took over an abolitionist newspaper, The North Star, in 1847. He changed the name to Frederick Douglass' Paper in 1851 because Douglass knew personal branding before personal branding was cool, and he knew he could sell a lot more papers if he put his name on them. (Source)
The motto of the paper was "Right is of no Sex—Truth is of no Color—God is the Father of us all, and we are all brethren," which is, incidentally, a fantastic idea for a tattoo. The motto reflected Douglass' lifelong belief that all people are equal, which sounds obvious, but take a look at history and you'll see that a lot of people really struggle with that one. (Source)
Not content with simply publishing a newspaper, in 1855, Douglass published his second autobiography, My Bondage and My Freedom. It dealt with the same anti-slavery themes as Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, but it also addressed racism and segregation in the North.
Douglass frequently took criticism for working with slaveholders to find a solution to slavery, but he responded, "I would unite with anybody to do right and with nobody to do wrong."
Hey, if it got the job done, Douglass would work with anybody.
Bringing out the Big (Textual) Guns: the Constitution and the Bible
Pro-slavery jerks often tried to use certain passages in both the U.S. Constitution and the Bible to justify slavery. Douglass argued that both were in fact anti-slavery documents that supported the rights and humanity of all people.
He and famous abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison split in the late 1840s over interpretation of the Constitution; Garrison regarded it as a pro-slavery document that needed to be opposed, while Douglass regarded it as an anti-slavery document that supported abolition.
In response to Bible-thumping slaveholders, Douglass (who was a devout Christian) made a distinction between the Christianity of Christ, which he regarded as a belief system that supported marginalized people, and the Christianity of America, which he regarded as a belief system that supported blind patriotism and personal property rights. Yeah—those definitely sound like two different things to us.
Check it out:
It is something to give the Negro religion. It is more to give him justice. It is something to give him the Bible; it is more to give him the ballot. It is something to tell him that there is a place for him in the Christian's heaven; it is more to let him have a place in this Christian country to live upon in peace. (Source)
Douglass frequently highlighted the complicity of the white church in slavery and called out those Christians who used the Bible to defend slavery. They liked to tell slaves that if they were good and obeyed their masters on earth, their reward was in heaven. That is some cold, cold comfort right there.
Douglass in the Civil War
Douglass was right in the thick of things during the Civil War (1861-1865). It comes as no surprise that he strongly supported Union causes, especially by recruiting Black troops. Two of his sons served with the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, a famous Black regiment. He also worked with President Lincoln to address the grievances of Black soldiers, such as equal treatment and equal pay.
After the Emancipation Proclamation declared slaves in the states in rebellion free on January 1st, 1863, Douglass realized that full abolition was about to occur. He redirected his energies toward advocating for full citizenship for freed slaves. The 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, all passed after the war, began this process.
Douglass understood that there would still be tons o' work to do on race relations and equality after abolition. He famously said:
We are fighting for unity; unity of idea; unity of sentiment, unity of object, unity of institutions, in which there shall be no North, no South, no East, no West, no black, no white, but solidarity of the nation, making every slave free, and every free man a voter. (Source)
White people who hoped to continue to control free Black people through political means couldn't fool Douglass. He knew that voting rights were essential to freedom and fair treatment.
Douglass and the Women's Movement
The abolition movement was a precursor to the women's rights movement, and a bunch of men and women who worked for women's rights, including Douglass, learned about activism from working for abolition. Douglass was a strong supporter of equal rights for all. However, he was also practical and realized that equal rights for all probably wouldn't happen all at once. This led him to clash with leaders of the women's movement for prioritizing issues of race over those of sex.
Nonetheless, Douglass was an important figure in the women's movement. He attended the famous Seneca Falls Convention in 1848 and helped to pass a motion to support women's suffrage. Writing in The North Star, Douglass said:
In respect to political rights, we hold woman to be justly entitled to all we claim for man [...] all the political rights which it is expedient for man to exercise, it is equally so for women. (Source)
Preach on, Douglass. Preach on.
Douglass always supported the women's rights movement, but he and Elizabeth Cady Stanton had a bitter falling out over the 15th Amendment in 1869, which gave Black men the right to vote but said nothing about women of all races.
Stanton and Douglass presented their arguments at Steinway Hall in New York City in 1869. Check it out:
During a heated meeting in New York City's Steinway Hall in 1869, Stanton wondered, "Shall American statesmen [...] so amend their constitutions as to make their wives and mothers the political inferiors of unlettered and unwashed ditch-diggers, bootblacks, butchers and barbers, fresh from the slave plantations of the South?" At which point, Douglass rose, paid tribute to Stanton's years of work on civil rights for all, and replied, "When women, because they are women, are hunted down through the cities of New York and New Orleans; when they are dragged from their houses and hung from lampposts; when their children are torn from their arms and their brains dashed out upon the pavement; when they are objects of insult and rage at every turn; when they are in danger of having their homes burnt down...then they will have an urgency to obtain the ballot equal to our own." (Source)
Don't worry about their falling out too much, though: Stanton and Douglass eventually made up, and they continued to work together for women's rights. We're glad because there were way too many people in nasty opposition for equal rights advocates to fight among themselves.
Douglass and the Presidents
After abolition was achieved through the 13th Amendment and the Union was secured at the end of the Civil War, Douglass moved into a career in the federal government and moved from Rochester to Washington in 1872. He served under five presidential administrations, as the U.S. Marshal for D.C. (1877-1881), Recorder of Deeds for D.C. (1881-1886), and Minister Resident and Consul General to Haiti (1889-1891).
During this time, Douglass kept up his speaking and writing, continuing to work for equal rights for all, but especially for Black people and women. Whew, Douglass went at it nonstop. We need to take a breather just thinking about his workload.
Winding Down: Later Life and Death
Douglass published his third and final biography, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, in 1881. This was an overview of his life and work and what he felt still needed to be accomplished—a rhetorical passing of the baton, if you will.
A year later, Douglass' wife, Anna, died, and two years after that, Douglass married white feminist Helen Pitts. Both of their families disapproved. Douglass' children felt his remarriage was an insult to their mother's memory, and Pitts' family wasn't thrilled about the fact that he was 20 years older than she was. Some white and Black people criticized them for having an interracial marriage, but Douglass, ever the master of the mic drop, responded that his first wife was the color of his mother and his second wife was the color of his father.
Douglass stayed active until the literal end. On February 20th, 1895, he returned home from a meeting of the National Council of Women. He was preparing to speak at a local church when he died suddenly of a heart attack or massive stroke.
Through his activism and accomplishments, Douglass proved that slavery didn't have to define a life, that slavery demeaned slaveholders more than slaves, and that Black people were in no way essentially inferior to whites.
Today, he's generally acknowledged to be one of the most important Black Americans of the 19th century. In fact, many historians regard him as the most important American of the 19th century—of any race.