Frederick Douglass

Frederick Douglass
©2003 by Amanda Brooks Home

Frederick Douglass was born in Tuckahoe, near Easton, Talbot county Maryland in 1817. He was born to Harriet Bailey. He never knew who his father was, but he knew his father was a white man. His given name at birth was Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey.⁽¹⁾ As was common in the slave system, he was separated from his mother before he was a year old. He was brought up by his grandmother, Betsy Bailey, for the first six years of his life. These years were spent playing, hunting, fishing, and doing small chores. Douglass remembers on several occasions his mother walking the twelve mile distance from the farm she worked on to rock him to sleep. When he would wake up, she'd be gone. Hearing of her death was like hearing that a stranger had died. He was unmoved because the slave system proved effective in tearing up families. Douglass later declares that "there is not, beneath the sky, an enemy to filial affection so destructive as slavery. It had made my brothers and sisters strangers to me; it converted the mother that had bore me into a myth; it shrouded my father in mystery, and left me without an intelligible beginning in the world."⁽²⁾

He loved his grandmother very much but, he would soon be torn away from her too. At the age of six, Douglass was sent to his master, Aaron Anthony's, house. Anthony was the owner of three farms with the Lloyd Plantation being the largest. This is where Douglass was sent. The separation from his grandmother was very traumatic for the little boy. This was his first introduction to the cruelties and realities of the slave system. This became fundamental in "his understanding of the slavery system and his desire to run to freedom."⁽³⁾ He did the same simple work that other slave children did, such as "feeding cows in the evening, cleaning the yard, and sending messages."⁽⁴⁾

Douglass was treated almost like a son by Anthony, and it is possible that he was Anthony's son. He was well taken care of, talked kindly to, and ate well. At the Lloyd home he was chosen to be the playmate of twelve-year-old Daniel, the youngest son of Colonel Lloyd. They played together as equals doing things that most little boys like to do like hunting, fishing, and chasing small animals. It was through his playmate that he learned to speak in the white man's words (as Daniel learned the Negro slang!) as he mimicked his friend. Douglass's correct language brought him favor in the eyes of the white men, as they were very impressed with his intellect. In 1825 he was sent to Baltimore to live with a relative of his master, Hugh and Sophia Auld. The mistress, Sophia, was raised by adamant anti-slavery parents and was unfamiliar with some of the unwritten rules of owning slave, such as you do not teach your slaves to read and write. She treated Douglass as though he were a son. She even had her own son, Tommy, "call him in an intimate manner."⁽⁵⁾ He was allowed to eat at the table with the family and even slept in his own bedroom. Douglass took to her as a mother figure.

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Hearing Sophia read the Bible stirred in young Douglass the desire to learn how to read. When he expressed his desire, his mistress was quick to respond. She taught him the alphabet and how to spell words. All of her loving kindness soon came crashing down. She was bragging to her husband one night about how much Douglass was learning and how quickly he learned. Her husband was outraged by her report and introduced her to another side of slavery: "If you give a niger an inch, he will take an ell. Learning will spoil the best niger in the world. If he learns to read the Bible, it will forever unfit him to be a slave. He should know nothing but the will of his master, and learn to obey it. As to himself, learning will do him no good, but a great deal of harm, making him disconsolate and unhappy. If you teach him how to read, he'll want to know how to write, and this accomplished, he will be running away with himself."⁽⁶⁾ "This dialogue gave Douglass unexpected knowledge.

Later, he recalled that 'Master Hugh's discourse was the first decidedly anti-slavery lecture to which it had been my lot to listen.'"⁽⁷⁾ At this point, his loving mother-like mistress "almost became the enemy of his study."⁽⁸⁾ She forbade him to read, but Douglass had tasted enough to wet his appetite and was not going to let her or anyone else stop him. He began hanging around the shipyard where "schoolboys and carpenters became his teachers."⁽⁹⁾ He would go there with a Webster's Spelling Book and a slice of bread. Most of the schoolboys were poor and hungry so the bread served as payment for the lessons. By the time he was fourteen years old, Douglass Douglass had done well in reading and writing and had even learned simple math despite the hurdles he had to overcome.

Master Hugh's words proved to be accurate. The more Douglass learned the more he began to see that the "pathway from slavery to freedom was knowledge."⁽¹⁰⁾ He began to see that it was ignorance that the white man used to keep the Negro slaves oppressed. The white masters understood that with knowledge they would began to see ever so more clearly the injustice of slavery and begin to rise in opposition.

In 1833 Douglass was sent back to St. Michael at the request of Thomas, his new master. It pained him to leave Baltimore and the relative freedom he had in the city, but the choice was not his to make. Douglass was put in the field for the first time in his life. He did not take to his new life style vary well. He expressed his dissatisfaction with the food the slaves ate and he refused to call Thomas "master" instead of "Captain" (Thomas had been the Anthony's Captain). His new masters became scared that if he did nothing to control Douglass, he would end up like Nat Turner. So, Douglass was sent to Edward Covey, a professional slavebreaker, for one year to be "broken in." From January to August, 1834, he was overworked, flogged daily, and underfed. The day came when Douglass could stand no more. "He turned on his tormentor one day and soundly defeated the slavebreaker. The result was that Covey abandoned the whip and ignored Douglass for his remaining four months."⁽¹¹⁾

This was a life changing point for Douglass:

The battle with Mr. Covey was the turning point in my career. I was a changed being after that fight. I was nothing before, I was a man now....With a renewed determination to be a free man....The gratification afforded by the triumph was a full compensation for whatever else might follow, even death itself....I now resolved that, however long I might remain a slave in form, the day that passed forever when I could be a slave in fact.⁽¹²⁾

All of the events in Douglass's childhood played a role in his future in the abolitionist movement. It was through the teachings of his kind mistress that Douglass was first exposed to the path to freedom: knowledge. In the following years, Douglass made unsuccessful attempts to escape. In 1838, his persistence paid off. He was able to escape slavery and fled to New York.⁽¹³⁾ Just three years later, Douglass found himself as the keynote speaker in the anti-slavery convention on Nantucket Island.⁽¹⁴⁾ He told the gathering of his life as a slave and when he sat down the crowd was obviously moved by this handsome young man.

The goal of the Anti-Slavery Society had been for Douglass to bring the vividness and realness of slavery to life for the audience, which he did quite well. The Society liked him so well they decided to hire him to be on the leadership team of the Anti-Slavery Society. The following several years were filled with anti-slavery campaigns and conventions. In 1845 he wrote his first autobiography, Frederick Douglass's Narrative. This book gave a detailed account of his life as a slave and his escape to freedom.

During his successful campaigns in the United States against the evils of slavery, he decided to take his cause a step further. He spent 1845-1846 in Great Britain. He continued to speak out against slavery and temperance to large crowds throughout Great Britain and Ireland. These years proved not only to further the anti-slavery movement, but they were also a time from personal growth and development for Douglass. "The[se] two years...upon this visit were active and fruitful ones, and did much to bring him to that full measure of development scarcely possible for him in slave-ridden America."⁽¹⁵⁾

In 1847 Frederick Douglass returned to the United States. He picked up his family and moved to Rochester, New York.⁽¹⁶⁾ He returned with a fire in his heart: to publish a newspaper. Some of his English friends had furnished him with the means to do this, but there was a lot of opposition he would have to overcome first. While waiting to clear these hurdles, he continued speaking out in conventions and other anti-slavery gatherings. "In June he was elected president of the New England Anti-slavery Convention."⁽¹⁷⁾ He and some fellow leaders continued their campaign through the North during August and September. Their meetings got to be so big that the churches that would normally house them were becoming too small. This moved the meetings out to the open air. By December, Douglass had published his first edition of the North Star despite the slowness of his abolitionist friends to catch on. Once again in his life, Douglass succeeded despite the attempts of people "above" him to stop him.⁽¹⁸⁾

Douglass went as far as to aid in the work of the Underground Railroad, helping fugitive slaves make it to safety. "It was exciting and dangerous, but inspiring and soul-satisfying. He kept a room in his house always ready for fugitives, having with him as many as eleven at a time. He would keep them over night, pay their fare on the train for Canada, and give them half a dollar extra."⁽¹⁹⁾ He never forgot where he came from and his desire to see freedom for the Negro was not a selfish desire, but sparked out of a love for his fellow brother and a love for true justice. He went above and beyond the politics of the movement and involved himself, his very being, to the movement. He believed so much in what he stood against that he opened his home to a countless number of strangers so that they might taste the freedom he now tasted.

Douglass continued his campaign for freedom until his death. He fought for the freedom of women as well as Negroes. It was suggested that: "Frederick's commitment to feminism...might have represented in part his life long attempt to grapple with his stunted maternal tie."⁽²⁰⁾ He went on in 1852 to support the Free Soil Party in which he was elected delegate from Rochester to the convention at Pittsburg. Douglass used the North Star to "pursue the great public issues that touched on slavery."⁽²¹⁾ In 1855 he published another book, My Bondage and My Freedom.

Douglass was not a passivist by any means and he became more directly involved in the political arena. He was a supporter of Lincoln and helped to get the Fifty-fourth and Fifty-fifth Massachusetts colored regiments up and going. He was elected a delegate from Rochester to the National Loyalists' Convention in 1866. In 1869 he and his family moved to Washington, DC and established New National Era. He continued his travels around the world protesting against injustices against people.⁽²²⁾

Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, the third and final of his autobiographies, was published in 1882. Frederick Douglass died on February 20, 1895 in his home on Anacostia Heights, near Washington, DC. He was in good health and had attended two sessions of the Women's National Council that day. While he and his wife walked down the hall talking, he collapsed and died before anyone could assist him. He was about seventy-eight years old.

Frederick Douglass was born an orphaned slave. He faced and overcame many obstacles throughout his life. He took it on himself to learn to read and write when he was young. Later in life, he took it upon himself to see to it that slavery with all of its evilness was abolished, not just in America, but throughout the world. Frederick Douglass was one of this nations greatest abolitionist leaders.

1. Huggins, Nathan Irvin. Slave and Citizen: the life of Frederick Douglass. Boston: Little, Brown. 1980. p. 3.

2. Wu, Jin-Ping. Frederick Douglass and the Black liberation movement : the North Star of American Blacks. New York : Garland, 2000. p 28.

3. Ibid.

4. Ibid p 29.

5. Ibid. p 30.

6. Douglass, Frederick. Life and Times of Frederick Douglass. New York: Collier Macmillan Publishers, 1962. Pp 78-79.

7. Wu, Jin-Ping. Frederick Douglass and the Black liberation movement : the North Star of American Blacks. New York : Garland, 2000. p31.

Douglass, Frederick. Life and Times of Frederick Douglass. New York: Collier Macmillan Publishers, 1962 Pp 78-79.

8. Ibid.

9. Ibid.

10. Ibid. p32.

11. Ibid.

12. Ibid. p 34. Quote taken from Philip S. Foner, Frederick Douglass, p. 20.

13. Chesnutt, Charles Waddell, Pickens, Ernestine Williams. Frederick Douglass. Atlanta, Ga. : Clark Atlanta University Press, 2001.

14. Huggins, Nathan Irvin. Slave and Citizen: the life of Frederick Douglass. Boston: Little, Brown. 1980.

15. Chesnutt, Charles Waddell, Pickens, Ernestine Williams. Frederick Douglass. Atlanta, Ga. : Clark Atlanta University Press, 2001. p. 53.

16. Ibid. p. 63.

17. Ibid.

18. Making reference in particularly to Sophia and Hugh forbidding him to continue to learn reading and writing.

19. Ibid. p. 77. Taken from Douglass, Frederick. Life and Times. Part 2, chapter 7, p. 710.

20. Wu, Jin-Ping. Frederick Douglass and the Black liberation movement : the North Star of American Blacks. New York : Garland, 2000. p.29.

21. McFeely, William S. Frederick Douglass. New York: Norton, 1991. 1^st edition. p. 158.

22. Chesnutt, Charles Waddell, Pickens, Ernestine Williams. Frederick Douglass. Atlanta, Ga. : Clark Atlanta University Press, 2001.

Bibliography

Chesnutt, Charles Waddell, Pickens, Ernestine Williams. Frederick Douglass. Atlanta, Ga. : Clark Atlanta University Press, 2001.

Douglass, Frederick. Life and Times of Frederick Douglass. New York: Collier Macmillan Publishers, 1962..

Huggins, Nathan Irvin. Slave and Citizen: the life of Frederick Douglass. Boston: Little, Brown. 1980.

McFeely, William S. Frederick Douglass. New York: Norton, 1991. 1^st edition.

Wu, Jin-Ping. Frederick Douglass and the Black liberation movement : the North Star of American Blacks. New York : Garland, 2000.

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