Frederick Douglass facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Frederick Douglass
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Douglass, c. 1879
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| United States Minister Resident to Haiti | |
| In office November 14, 1889 – July 30, 1891 |
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| Appointed by | Benjamin Harrison |
| Preceded by | John E. W. Thompson |
| Succeeded by | John S. Durham |
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| Born |
Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey
c. February 14, 1818 Cordova, Maryland, U.S. |
| Died | February 20, 1895 (aged 77–78) Washington, D.C., U.S. |
| Resting place | Mount Hope Cemetery, Rochester, New York, U.S. |
| Political party | Republican |
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| Relatives | Douglass family |
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Frederick Douglass (born Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey, around February 14, 1818 – February 20, 1895) was an American who fought for social change. He was a leading abolitionist (someone who wanted to end slavery), a powerful speaker, a talented writer, and a respected statesman. In the 1800s, he became the most important leader in the fight for African-American civil rights.
After escaping from slavery in Maryland in 1838, Douglass became a famous leader of the abolitionist movement in Massachusetts and New York. He was known for his amazing speeches and his sharp, clear writings against slavery. Many people who supported slavery claimed that enslaved people weren't smart enough to be independent American citizens. Douglass, with his intelligence and skill, proved them wrong. People in the North sometimes found it hard to believe that such a great speaker had once been enslaved. Because of this, Douglass wrote his first autobiography to share his story.
Douglass wrote three autobiographies. His first, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845), described his life as an enslaved person. It became a bestseller and helped gain support for the abolitionist cause. His second book was My Bondage and My Freedom (1855). After the Civil War, Douglass continued to fight for the rights of formerly enslaved people. He wrote his last autobiography, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, first published in 1881 and updated in 1892, three years before he died. This book covered his life up to those years. Douglass also strongly supported women's suffrage (the right for women to vote) and held several government jobs. Interestingly, without him knowing or agreeing, Douglass became the first African American nominated for Vice President of the United States in 1872. He was the running mate of Victoria Woodhull on the Equal Rights Party ticket.
Douglass believed in talking and working with people from different backgrounds and with different ideas. After disagreements with William Lloyd Garrison, another abolitionist, Douglass came to believe that the U.S. Constitution could be interpreted as being against slavery. Some radical abolitionists, who used the motto "No Union with Slaveholders," criticized Douglass for being willing to talk with slave owners. He responded, "I would unite with anybody to do right and with nobody to do wrong."
Contents
Early Life and Slavery
Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey was born into slavery in Talbot County, Maryland, on the Eastern Shore of the Chesapeake Bay. His birthplace was likely his grandmother's cabin. In his first autobiography, Douglass said, "I have no accurate knowledge of my age, never having seen any authentic record containing it." He later estimated he was born in 1817. However, records from his former owner, Aaron Anthony, suggest Douglass was born in February 1818. Although he didn't know his exact birth date, he chose to celebrate February 14 as his birthday, because his mother called him her "Little Valentine."
Birth Family
Douglass's mother, Harriet Bailey, was of African descent. His father was a white man, possibly his master. Douglass wrote in his Narrative (1845): "My father was a white man." He searched for his father's name his whole life but never found it. Douglass likely also had Native American ancestors. His mother named him Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey. After he escaped to the North in 1838, he changed his last name to Douglass and dropped his middle names.
He wrote about his early memories of his mother:
The opinion was also whispered that my master was my father; but of the correctness of this opinion, I know nothing. ... My mother and I were separated when I was but an infant. ... 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. ... I do not recollect of ever seeing my mother by the light of day. She was with me in the night. She would lie down with me, and get me to sleep, but long before I waked she was gone.
After being separated from his mother, young Frederick lived with his maternal grandmother, Betsy Bailey, who was also enslaved, and his maternal grandfather Isaac, who was free. His mother lived about 12 mi (19 km) away and visited him only a few times before she died when he was seven.
Later in life, around 1883, when he returned to Talbot County, he told a group of students at a school for Black children about his early life, describing a boy who overcame extreme hardship to become successful. That boy, he revealed, was himself.
Early Learning and Experience
The Auld Family
When Frederick was six, he was sent to the Wye House plantation. After Aaron Anthony, his overseer, died in 1826, Frederick was given to Lucretia Auld. She sent him to live with Hugh Auld and his wife Sophia in Baltimore. Sophia Auld was kind to Frederick at first. She made sure he had enough food and clothes and a proper bed. Douglass said she treated him like a human being. He felt lucky to be in the city, where enslaved people had a bit more freedom than on plantations.
When Frederick was about 12, Sophia Auld started teaching him the alphabet. However, Hugh Auld strongly disapproved. He believed that if enslaved people learned to read, they would want freedom. Douglass later said this was the "first decidedly antislavery lecture" he had ever heard. He thought, "Knowledge unfits a child to be a slave." From that moment, he understood that learning was his path to freedom.
Influenced by her husband, Sophia stopped teaching Frederick and tried to keep all reading materials away from him. But Frederick was determined. He secretly taught himself to read and write by getting help from white children in his neighborhood and by studying writings he found. He often said, "knowledge is the pathway from slavery to freedom." Reading newspapers, pamphlets, and books made him question and hate slavery. He credited a book called The Columbian Orator, which he found around age 12, with helping him understand his ideas about freedom and human rights. He later learned his mother had also been able to read.
William Freeland
When Douglass was hired out to William Freeland, he started a secret Sunday school where he taught more than thirty enslaved men to read.
Edward Covey
In 1833, Thomas Auld, Frederick's owner, sent him to work for Edward Covey, a farmer known as a "slave-breaker." Covey whipped Frederick often and cruelly. The constant beatings nearly broke his spirit. However, when Frederick was 16, he fought back against Covey. After Douglass won the fight, Covey never tried to beat him again. Douglass saw this fight as a turning point, saying, "You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man."
Escape from Slavery
Douglass first tried to escape from Freeland but failed. In 1837, he met Anna Murray, a free black woman in Baltimore who was about five years older than him. Her freedom inspired him. Anna encouraged him and helped him with money for his escape.
On September 3, 1838, Douglass successfully escaped. He boarded a northbound train in Baltimore, possibly from the Canton Depot. He was dressed in a sailor's uniform that Anna Murray had given him. She also gave him some of her savings. He carried identification papers from a free Black sailor.
Douglass traveled through Havre de Grace, Maryland, then by train through Delaware (another slave state) to Wilmington, Delaware. From there, he took a steamboat to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, a city known for its anti-slavery views. He then went to New York City, where abolitionist David Ruggles helped him. His journey to freedom took less than 24 hours. Douglass wrote about arriving in New York:
I have often been asked, how I felt when first I found myself on free soil. ... A new world had opened upon me. ... I lived more in one day than in a year of my slave life. It was a time of joyous excitement... I felt as one might feel upon escape from a den of hungry lions.
Once in New York, Douglass sent for Anna Murray. They married on September 15, 1838, just eleven days after he arrived. They initially used the last name Johnson to avoid being caught.
Religious Views
As a child, Douglass heard religious sermons, and Sophia Auld sometimes read the Bible to him. He wanted to learn to read the Bible himself and eventually became a Christian. He was mentored by Rev. Charles Lawson, a Black man.
Douglass often used biblical references in his speeches. Although he was a believer, he strongly criticized religious people who supported or ignored slavery. He said that slaveholders who claimed to be Christian were hypocrites. He distinguished between the "Christianity of Christ" and the "Christianity of America." He believed that ministers who defended slavery were the worst kind of sinners.
In his famous speech, "What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?", he criticized religious leaders who stayed silent about slavery. He said they committed a "blasphemy" by teaching that slavery was approved by religion. He praised ministers like Henry Ward Beecher and Samuel J. May who spoke out against slavery. He called on religious groups to use their power to fight against slavery.
During his visits to the United Kingdom, Douglass asked British Christians not to support American churches that allowed slavery. When he returned to the U.S., he started a newspaper called the North Star. Its motto was "Right is of no sex, Truth is of no color, God is the Father of us all, and we are all Brethren." Douglass remained a deeply spiritual man throughout his life.
Family Life
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Douglass and Anna Murray had five children: Rosetta, Lewis Henry, Frederick Jr., Charles Remond, and Annie (who died at age ten). Charles and Rosetta helped him with his newspapers.
Anna Douglass supported her husband's public work. His close professional relationships with two other women, Julia Griffiths and Ottilie Assing, led to public discussion. Assing, a German journalist, hoped Douglass would leave his wife, but he did not.
Anna died in 1882. In 1884, Douglass married Helen Pitts, a white suffragist (someone who fights for voting rights) and abolitionist from Honeoye, New York. Pitts was the daughter of one of Douglass's abolitionist friends. She had worked as his secretary.
This marriage caused a lot of controversy because Pitts was white and nearly 20 years younger than Douglass. Many people in her family stopped speaking to her, and his children felt it disrespected their mother. However, feminist Elizabeth Cady Stanton congratulated them. Douglass said that his first marriage was to someone the color of his mother, and his second was to someone the color of his father.
Career
Abolitionist and Preacher
Frederick and Anna Douglass settled in New Bedford, Massachusetts, in 1838, and later moved to Lynn, Massachusetts, in 1841. They adopted the surname Douglass after a character in Walter Scott's poem The Lady of the Lake.
Douglass joined the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, an independent Black church, and became a licensed preacher in 1839. This helped him develop his speaking skills. He attended abolitionist meetings and subscribed to William Lloyd Garrison's newspaper, The Liberator. Garrison greatly influenced him.
In 1841, Douglass was unexpectedly asked to speak at an anti-slavery meeting. He told his story with such power that he was encouraged to become a full-time anti-slavery lecturer. He was only 23.
In September 1841, Douglass and his friend James N. Buffum were thrown off a train in Lynn for refusing to sit in the segregated coach, an early protest against unfair treatment.
In 1843, Douglass toured the Eastern and Midwestern U.S. with the American Anti-Slavery Society. He often faced angry mobs. In Pendleton, Indiana, he was attacked and his hand was broken. It never healed properly.
Autobiography
Douglass's most famous work is his first autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, published in 1845. Some people doubted that a Black man could write so well. The book was a bestseller, reprinted nine times in three years, and translated into French and Dutch. It greatly helped the abolitionist cause.
He published two more autobiographies: My Bondage and My Freedom (1855) and Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881, revised 1892).
Travels to Ireland and Great Britain
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Friends worried that his fame would lead his former owner, Hugh Auld, to try and recapture him. So, in 1845, Douglass traveled to Ireland and Great Britain. This was during the Great Famine in Ireland.
Douglass was amazed by the freedom from racial discrimination he experienced:
Eleven days and a half gone, and I have crossed three thousand miles of the perilous deep. ... I breathe, and lo! the chattel [slave] becomes a man. I gaze around in vain for one who will question my equal humanity, claim me as his slave, or offer me an insult. ... I find myself regarded and treated at every turn with the kindness and deference paid to white people.
He met the Irish nationalist Daniel O'Connell, who inspired him. Douglass lectured widely for two years. In 1846, British supporters, led by Anna Richardson, raised money to buy his freedom from Thomas Auld. Douglass became legally free. He returned to America in 1847. Plaques in Cork, Waterford, London, and Edinburgh now mark his visit.
Return to the United States; the Abolitionist Movement
Back in the U.S. in 1847, Douglass started his first abolitionist newspaper, the North Star, in Rochester, New York. Its motto was "Right is of no Sex – Truth is of no Color – God is the Father of us all, and we are all brethren." He and his wife also helped over four hundred fugitive slaves escape through the Underground Railroad.
Douglass soon disagreed with William Lloyd Garrison. Garrison believed the Constitution supported slavery. Douglass, influenced by Lysander Spooner's book The Unconstitutionality of Slavery, came to believe the Constitution could be used to fight slavery. This disagreement caused a split in the abolitionist movement. Douglass argued that ending the Union, as Garrison wanted, would actually give slave states more control over slavery.
Letter to His Former Owner
In 1848, ten years after his escape, Douglass wrote an open letter to his former master, Thomas Auld. He criticized Auld's cruelty and asked about family members still enslaved by him. He powerfully described the horrors of slavery and how it affected families. Yet, he ended by saying he felt no personal hatred and would offer Auld safety and comfort in his own home.
Women's Rights
In 1848, Douglass was the only Black person at the Seneca Falls Convention, the first women's rights convention. When many opposed a resolution for women's suffrage (women's right to vote), Douglass spoke strongly in its favor. He said he couldn't accept the right to vote as a Black man if women couldn't also have that right. His words helped pass the resolution.
In this denial of the right to participate in government, not merely the degradation of woman and the perpetuation of a great injustice happens, but the maiming and repudiation of one-half of the moral and intellectual power of the government of the world.
After the Civil War, when the 15th Amendment was proposed to give Black men the right to vote, Douglass disagreed with some women's rights leaders like Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Stanton opposed the amendment because it didn't include women. Douglass supported it, believing it was a crucial step and that linking it with women's suffrage at that time might cause both to fail. He assured women he still supported their right to vote.
John Brown
Douglass met with the radical abolitionist John Brown several times. Brown stayed at Douglass's home for two weeks before his raid on Harpers Ferry, an attempt to start a slave rebellion. Douglass met Brown secretly before the raid but decided not to join. Shields Green, a fugitive slave staying with Douglass, chose to go with Brown.
After the raid in October 1859, Douglass was accused of involvement. He fled to Canada and then to England for a planned lecture tour to avoid arrest. His youngest daughter, Annie, died while he was away. He returned to the U.S. the following year.
Photography
Douglass understood the power of photography. He believed it could help end slavery and racism because cameras showed the truth. He was the most photographed American of the 19th century. He used photographs to promote his political views. He rarely smiled in photos. He usually looked directly at the camera with a serious expression.
Civil War Years
Fight for Emancipation and Suffrage
During the Civil War, Douglass argued that African Americans should be allowed to fight for their own freedom. When President Abraham Lincoln finally allowed Black soldiers to join the Union army, Douglass helped recruit them. His famous poster read Men of Color to Arms!. His sons, Charles and Lewis, served in the army.
Douglass met with President Lincoln in 1863 to discuss the treatment of Black soldiers and plans for freed slaves. Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, declared slaves in Confederate territory free. Douglass described the hope and excitement of that moment.
In the 1864 election, Douglass supported John C. Frémont because he was disappointed that Lincoln didn't publicly support voting rights for Black men.
After Lincoln's Death
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After the war, the 13th Amendment (1865) officially ended slavery. The 14th Amendment granted citizenship and equal protection under the law. The 15th Amendment protected voting rights regardless of race. Douglass met with President Andrew Johnson to discuss Black suffrage.
On April 14, 1876, Douglass gave a powerful speech at the unveiling of the Emancipation Memorial in Washington, D.C. He spoke honestly about Lincoln, calling him "the white man's President" but also acknowledging his role in emancipation. He criticized the statue's design, saying the Black figure should be shown standing "erect on his feet like a man," not kneeling.
Reconstruction Era
After the Civil War, Douglass continued to work for equality. He served as president of the Freedman's Savings Bank. However, violent groups like the Ku Klux Klan rose in the South, trying to restore white supremacy and take away rights from African Americans.
Douglass supported President Ulysses S. Grant in 1868. In 1870, he started his last newspaper, the New National Era. Grant used federal power to fight the Klan, which Douglass praised.
In 1872, Douglass was nominated for Vice President of the United States on the Equal Rights Party ticket with Victoria Woodhull, without his knowledge. He did not campaign. That same year, his home in Rochester burned down, possibly due to arson. He then moved to Washington, D.C.
Douglass continued speaking about the importance of work, voting rights, and education. He advocated for school desegregation. In an 1869 speech, he defended Chinese immigration and their rights as citizens.
Frederick Douglass House
In 1877, Frederick Douglass bought a house in Washington, D.C., with a large yard and a studio. He lived there from 1878 until his death in 1895. It is now known as the Frederick Douglass National Historic Site.
Final Years in Washington, D.C.
In 1877, President Rutherford B. Hayes appointed Douglass as United States Marshal for the District of Columbia, the first person of color in that role. Later that year, Douglass visited his former enslaver, Thomas Auld, who was dying. The two men reconciled. Douglass also bought his final home in Washington, D.C., which he named Cedar Hill.
In 1881, Douglass published the final version of his autobiography, The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass. He was also appointed Recorder of Deeds for the District of Columbia. His wife Anna died in 1882. He remarried Helen Pitts in 1884.
Douglass continued to travel and speak. He and Helen toured Europe and Egypt from 1886 to 1887. He supported Irish Home Rule.
At the 1888 Republican National Convention, Douglass became the first African American to receive a vote for President in a major party's roll call. President Benjamin Harrison appointed him as U.S. minister to Haiti in 1889, but Douglass resigned in 1891 over U.S. policy towards Haiti.
Douglass opposed movements for Black people to leave the South or go back to Africa. He urged African Americans to stay and fight for their rights in the U.S. Speaking in Baltimore in 1894, he said, "I hope and trust all will come out right in the end, but the immediate future looks dark and troubled."
Death
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On February 20, 1895, Frederick Douglass attended a meeting of the National Council of Women in Washington, D.C. He received a standing ovation. Shortly after returning home, he died of a heart attack at age 77.
His funeral was held at the Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church. Thousands of people paid their respects. His coffin was taken to Rochester, New York, where he had lived for 25 years. He was buried in Mount Hope Cemetery next to his first wife, Anna. His second wife, Helen, was later buried there too. His grave is one of the most visited in the cemetery.
Works
Writings
- 1845. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself (first autobiography).
- 1853. "The Heroic Slave." A short story.
- 1855. My Bondage and My Freedom (second autobiography).
- 1881 (revised 1892). Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (third and final autobiography).
- 1847–1851. The North Star, an abolitionist newspaper he founded and edited.
- 1886. Three Addresses on the Relations Subsisting between the White and Colored People of the United States
- Many collections of his writings and speeches have been published.
Speeches
- 1841. "The Church and Prejudice"
- 1852. "What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?" (A very famous speech questioning what Independence Day meant to enslaved people)
- 1859. Self-Made Men.
- 1863, July 6. "Speech at National Hall, for the Promotion of Colored Enlistments."
- 1869. "Our Composite Nationality"
- 1881. John Brown: An Address by Frederick Douglass
Legacy and Honors
Frederick Douglass is remembered as a key figure in American history. He fought tirelessly to end slavery and for equal rights for all people. His advice to a young Black man near the end of his life was: ″Agitate! Agitate! Agitate!″
Many places and institutions are named in his honor:
- The Frederick Douglass Memorial Bridge in Washington, D.C.
- The Frederick Douglass National Historic Site (his home, Cedar Hill).
- Numerous schools across the country.
- In 1965, the U.S. Postal Service issued a stamp honoring him.
- Yale University established the Frederick Douglass Book Prize for books on slavery and abolition.
- In 2013, a statue of Douglass was unveiled in the United States Capitol Visitor Center.
- In 2017, the U.S. Mint issued a quarter featuring Frederick Douglass and his historic site.
- The Frederick Douglass Greater Rochester International Airport in Rochester, New York.
See also
In Spanish: Frederick Douglass para niños
