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A great orator and writer, a leading figure in the abolitionsist movement, Frederick Douglass was born in or around 1817 into slavery in Maryland. He escaped in 1838. In 1841 he addressed an abolitionist meeting in Nantucket, recounting his life as a slave. This was followed by lectures throughout the East, with the publication in 1845 of The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: an American slave. The book revealed his master's identity and he took refuge in England where he was helped by sympathetic liberals to buy his freedom.
Back in America he published the abolitionist North Star, the first of a series of journals he was to create. Increasingly, he came to reject Garrison's moralist stance against slavery in favour of political struggle and support of the Republican party, also championing the rights of women. During the Civil War he helped recruit black soldiers for the Union army, afterwards supporting Reconstruction and campaigning for Republican Presidents.
Douglass wrote two other autobiographies, My Bondage and My Freedom (1855) and Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881). He held several government posts, the last as minister to Haiti. He died in Washington in 1895.
The
Narrative |
The Narrative
My
Bondage and My Freedom
My Escape
from Slavery
Collected Articles of Frederick Douglass, a Slave
Reconstruction
An Appeal to Congress
for Impartial Suffrage
Associated sites:
Biography of Frederick Douglass, Sandra Thomas (Rochester)
The Frederick Douglass Museum & Cultural Center (Rochester)
Frederick Douglass National Historic Site (Washington D.C.)
Frederick Douglass Colloquium at Keele, September '95
Frederick Douglass, by Alan Rice
MIMI: Nineteenth-Century American Literature
Photograph of Frederick Douglass, courtesy of the Library of Congress
Other Portraits (Keele American Studies Portrait Gallery)
Please contact the webmaster with any queries : page last updated March 21, 2006
