Frederick Douglass, who was named Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey at the time of his birth, c. February 14, 1818, in Talbot County, Maryland, was born into enslavement. His exact date of birth is not known, but it was estimated to be sometime in February. He chose to celebrate February 14 as his birthday because he remembered that his mother, Harriet Bailey, called him her ‘Little Valentine.’ He and his mother were separated when he was still an infant. She was sold off to a plantation about 12 miles from where he lived with his maternal grandmother, Betsy Bailey, who was also enslaved, and his maternal grandfather, who was a free Black. He recalled a few visits from his mother before she died when he was 7 years old.
When Douglass was 6 years old, he was taken from his grandparents and moved to the Wye House plantation, and then, in 1826, he was given to Lucretia Auld, who sent him to Baltimore to work for her husband’s brother and his family.
Even though the Auld’s of Baltimore treated him decently, he still had to secretly teach himself to read and write from white children in his Baltimore neighborhood and by observing the writing of the men for whom he worked.
In 1833, Douglass was taken from Baltimore and sent to work for a poor farmer who was known as a ‘slave breaker.’ He was beaten often until, at the age of 16, he fought back and, miraculously, was never beaten again by that farmer. In 1835, he was hired out to a ship caulker in Fells Point, Baltimore, where he was abused by the white workers who resented competition from enslaved labor.
On September 3, 1838, he escaped by boarding a northbound train in Baltimore, dressed in a sailor’s uniform provided to him by Anna Murray, a free Black woman whom he’d met and fallen in love with, who supported his desire to be free. He made his way to New York and sent for Murray, and they were married on September 15, 1838. Douglass (whom he later married), and he changed his name from Bailey to Johnson to avoid detection.
In 1841, Douglass attended a convention of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, where he was invited to speak, and he was subsequently recruited as an agent for the group. In this position, he traveled throughout the country promoting nonviolent resistance to slavery. In 1845, he published his first autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself. He wrote two subsequent autobiographies, which were popular in Europe. From 1845 to 1847, he traveled to the United Kingdom, where he lectured throughout the country, and in 1847, he returned to the United States a free man with enough money to start his own newspaper, The North Star. He moved to Rochester, New York, to publish this and subsequent abolitionist newspapers, avoiding competition with New England abolitionist newspapers.
In 1851, Douglass changed his philosophy from the view that the Constitution was invalid and that Black people shouldn’t participate in American politics to the view that the Constitution was valid and could be used to advance emancipation. This was at a time when tensions about slavery were high. His Rochester home became part of the Underground Railroad, helping enslaved people escape to freedom in the north and Canada, and also served as a gathering place for fellow abolitionists. He also met with John Brown just before his abortive raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry in what was then Virginia. He was invited to participate in the raid, but declined. Because it was known that he’d met with Brown, the authorities wanted to arrest him as an accomplice, so he fled to Canada and then on to Europe on a lecture tour.
He returned to the U.S. in April 1860. When the Civil War began, he strongly advocated the inclusion of Black soldiers in the Union Army. He served as a recruiter for the Massachusetts 54th Infantry Regiment, in which his sons Lewis and Charles also served. In 1863, he met with Abraham Lincoln at the White House to advocate for better pay and conditions for the Black soldiers, in 1864 to discuss what could be done for Blacks should the Union lose the war, and a third time, a month before Lincoln’s assassination.
After the Emancipation Proclamation freed millions of Black people and the end of the Civil War, Douglass strongly supported the Fourteenth Amendment, which granted Black people citizenship, and the Fifteenth Amendment, which granted suffrage to all men and women. While he initially encouraged free Blacks to stay in the South, violence against them caused him to change and support Black migration to safer parts of the country.
In 1872, he moved from Rochester to Washington, DC, where he published a newspaper for a short period, served as president of the Freedman’s Bank, and held numerous government jobs, including becoming the first Black US marshal in 1877, when he was appointed to the post for the District of Columbia by Rutherford B. Hayes; recorder of deeds for DC in 1881, by James A. Garfield; and in 1889, U.S. minister to the Republic of Haiti by Benjamin Harrison.