Frederick Douglass
1 book analyzed
Biography
Frederick Douglass was born Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey around 1818 on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. He never knew his precise birthday — this is the first sentence of his Narrative, and it is not incidental. Separated from his mother in infancy, taught to read accidentally and covertly, broken by the slave-breaker Edward Covey and then broken back into personhood by his own hands, Douglass escaped to the North in September 1838 wearing a sailor's uniform and carrying borrowed papers. Within three years he was the most compelling orator in the American abolitionist movement. Within seven years he had published three autobiographies, founded a newspaper (The North Star), met Abraham Lincoln multiple times, recruited Black soldiers for the Union Army, and become — by any measure — the most famous Black man in America. He lived until 1895, long enough to see Reconstruction rise and collapse. He never stopped being angry about the collapse.