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Frederick Douglass

Maryland Historical Society

Fugitive slave, autobiographer, and masterful statesman, Frederick Douglass inspired a generation Americans to rise against slavery, then led an effort toward racial reconciliation. During his lifetime and since his death, statues, schools, and public buildings across the nation have risen bearing his name. He stands as a national icon more than a century after his death.

Born in February 1818, on a plantation near Easton inTalbot County on the Eastern Shore, Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey's childhood was shaped by his family's love and the hard realities of slavery. Betsey Bailey, a maternal grandmother, cared for him until the age of six, when she was made to surrender Frederick to be trained in work. His mother, Harriet Bailey, could see him only occasionally (distance and her untimely death prohibited a closer relationship). Frederick's white owner is suspected to have been his father.

Frederick Douglass

Maryland Historical Society

At eight years old Frederick was sent to Baltimore to serve the relatives of his Talbot County owner. Yet, in that city an entirely new world opened to him. Frederick came to appreciate black freedom and the possibilities of life beyond the plantation, for he witnessed both first hand as most of the city's blacks were free. But in 1833 he was sent back to the fields of Talbot County. Three years later, as punishment for conspiring to run away, Frederick's owner, Thomas Auld, sent him back to Baltimore.

In the shipyards of Fells Point in Baltimore, he learned the ship caulker's trade (a process of making the hulls of ships watertight) and lived semi-autonomously for a time. Even so, he grew increasingly uncomfortable with his enslavement. He developed a social circle of free and enslaved blacks, and even fell in love with a free black woman, Anna Murray. Drawing on his friends for logistical and financial support, Frederick conceived an escape plot. On September 3, 1838, dressed as a sailor and carrying money borrowed from Anna and a friend's seaman's papers (documentation certifying the bearer to be a sailor), Frederick boarded a northbound train. Filled with great anxiety along the way, Douglass arrived safely in New York the following day. The next week, Anna joined him, and the two were married. To complete the transformation from slavery to freedom, he took on a new identity. Frederick Bailey became Frederick Douglass.

Frederick Douglass

Maryland Historical Society

As a fugitive in exile, Frederick Douglass attacked slavery. In speeches he spoke of the hypocrisy of freedom-loving slaveholders. To combat propaganda about happy slaves and kind masters, Douglass published two (of an eventual three) autobiographies, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845), and My Bondage, My Freedom (1855) detailing slavery's horrors. Although friends secured his legal freedom through a negotiated purchase with his owner in 1846, Douglass never ceased to aid other fugitives. His attack on slavery was relentless throughout the 1840s and 1850s.

When the Civil War (1861-65) began, Douglass immediately recognized in it an opportunity to kill slavery. He lobbied for the formation of black regiments, and recruited the men who would serve in them, including two of his own sons. Following the Emancipation Proclamation (1863) and the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution (1865), Douglass shifted his energies toward protecting that newly won freedom, which he believed could only be done through full and equal citizenship for the former slaves. Indeed, of all the Reconstruction amendments, Douglass fought hardest for voting rights for black men. Ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment (1870) marked a true turning point as Douglass, the former slave, fugitive, and freedman, began life anew as citizen.

Promoting faith in the possibilities of African American achievement, interracialism, and the Republican Party, Douglass entered his postwar life determined to secure freedom's promises. He worked for a time as a labor organizer and officer with the Colored National Labor Union, a group begun by Baltimorean Isaac Myers. Douglass also maintained an active (and well attended) lecture schedule for the remainder of his life. In recognition of his stature and skill as a statesman, Douglass won appointments to many public posts in the late nineteenth century.

Frederick Douglass

Maryland Historical Society

In 1882, after the death of Anna Murray Douglass, his wife of 44 years, Frederick created somewhat of a controversy by remarrying a few years later. Not only was his new wife, Helen Pitts Douglass, white, but she was twenty years younger than her husband as well. The initial public reaction notwithstanding, Frederick and Helen lived happily together for nearly a decade. Their marriage ended on February 20, 1895, when a heart attack killed Frederick Douglass.

Before he died, Douglass made several trips back to Maryland. He first returned in 1864, toward the close of the war, to lecture in Baltimore. The event was apparently so well advertised that Eastern Shore folk trekked across the Chesapeake to hear him, including his sister, Eliza Bailey Mitchell, with whom he was reunited. They had neither seen nor heard from one another since Frederick left Talbot County thirty years earlier.

In 1870, Douglass was back in Baltimore, this time as a conquering hero. The Fifteenth Amendment had just been ratified, and Baltimore put on the biggest celebration in the nation. Tens of thousands turned out for festivities that included a speech by now-favorite son, Douglass. Yet, of all the returns Douglass made to Maryland, perhaps a trip made to Talbot County in 1877, where his life began and his deepest roots lay, proved the most important. The central event of that trip was a few moments of reconciliation with Thomas Auld, his former owner.

—David Taft Terry