I do not recollect of ever seeing my mother by the light of day. It is a common custom, in the part of Maryland from which I ran away, to part children from their mothers at a very early age. My mother and I were separated when I was but an infant. whispered that my master was my father but of the correctness of this opinion I know nothing. He later wrote of his earliest times with his mother: Douglass said his mother Harriet Bailey gave him his name Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey and, after he escaped to the North in September 1838, he took the surname Douglass, having already dropped his two middle names. Blight's 2018 biography of Douglass, "For the rest of his life he searched in vain for the name of his true father." Douglass's genetic heritage likely also included Native American. Though the exact date of his birth is unknown, he chose to celebrate February 14 as his birthday, remembering that his mother called him her "Little Valentine." Birth familyĭouglass's mother, enslaved, was of African descent and his father, who may have been her master, apparently of European descent in his Narrative (1845), Douglass wrote: "My father was a white man." According to David W. Preston determined that Douglass was born in February 1818. However, based on the extant records of Douglass's former owner, Aaron Anthony, historian Dickson J. In his first autobiography, Douglass stated: "I have no accurate knowledge of my age, never having seen any authentic record containing it." In successive autobiographies, he gave more precise estimates of when he was born, his final estimate being 1817. The plantation was between Hillsboro and Cordova his birthplace was likely his grandmother's cabin east of Tappers Corner, and west of Tuckahoe Creek. When radical abolitionists, under the motto "No Union with Slaveholders", criticized Douglass's willingness to engage in dialogue with slave owners, he replied: "I would unite with anybody to do right and with nobody to do wrong." Life as an enslaved personįrederick Augustus Washington Bailey was born enslaved on the Eastern Shore of the Chesapeake Bay in Talbot County, Maryland. ĭouglass believed in dialogue and in making alliances across racial and ideological divides, as well as in the liberal values of the U.S. Without his knowledge or consent, Douglass became the first African American nominated for vice president of the United States, as the running mate of Victoria Woodhull on the Equal Rights Party ticket. Douglass also actively supported women's suffrage, and he held several public offices. First published in 1881 and revised in 1892, three years before his death, the book covers his life up to those dates.
Following the Civil War, Douglass was an active campaigner for the rights of freed slaves and wrote his last autobiography, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass. ĭouglass wrote three autobiographies, describing his experiences as an enslaved person in his Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845), which became a bestseller and was influential in promoting the cause of abolition, as was his second book, My Bondage and My Freedom (1855). It was in response to this disbelief that Douglass wrote his first autobiography. Northerners at the time found it hard to believe that such a great orator had once been enslaved. Accordingly, he was described by abolitionists in his time as a living counterexample to enslavers' arguments that enslaved people lacked the intellectual capacity to function as independent American citizens. After escaping from slavery in Maryland, he became a national leader of the abolitionist movement in Massachusetts and New York, during which he gained fame for his oratory and incisive antislavery writings.
February 1817 or 1818 – February 20, 1895) was an American social reformer, abolitionist, orator, writer, and statesman. Frederick Douglass (born Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey, c.
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