Frederick Douglass

Biography

Frederick Douglass was born into slavery as Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey on Maryland's Eastern Shore around February 1818. Separated from his mother as an infant, he was raised by his grandmother and largely taught himself to read and write. In September 1838 he escaped to the North, reaching New York in less than a day, and settled with his wife Anna Murray in New Bedford, Massachusetts, where he took the surname Douglass.

Encouraged by William Lloyd Garrison, he became an anti-slavery lecturer in 1841. His Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845) became a bestseller. While he was lecturing in Britain and Ireland, British supporters bought his freedom. Returning in 1847, he founded the North Star in Rochester, New York, broke with Garrison by arguing that the Constitution could be used against slavery, backed the women's rights cause after the Seneca Falls Convention, and in 1852 delivered "What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?".

During the Civil War he pressed for Black men to be allowed to fight and helped recruit them for the Union army. Afterwards he campaigned for the rights of freed people, ran the newspaper New National Era and briefly headed the Freedman's Savings Bank before it failed in 1874. In 1872 the Equal Rights Party named him as Victoria Woodhull's running mate without his consent.

He held a series of federal posts: United States Marshal for the District of Columbia from 1877, Recorder of Deeds for the District from 1881, and Minister Resident to Haiti from 1889 to 1891. He also supported women's suffrage to the end of his life. He died in Washington, D.C., in 1895.