Douglass, Frederick

Douglass, Frederick (1818–1895), abolitionist, reformer, author.Born Frederick Bailey in rural Maryland to an enslaved woman and her master, he spent his youth alternately as a field hand and household servant in Baltimore, where his mistress gave him an aborted education. Returned to farm labor when his Baltimore master died, he attempted to flee, resulting in an often‐recounted showdown with the slave breaker Edward Covey, whom he vanquished. Douglass recorded his slave experiences in three autobiographies: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845), My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), and Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881).

In 1838 he fled North, married a free black, and worked on the docks in New Bedford, Massachusetts. He met the abolitionist‐leader William Lloyd Garrison in 1839; in 1841, after an impromptu antislavery speech in Nantucket, Massachusetts, he became an agent of the Massachusetts Anti‐Slavery Society. He lectured widely, and his Narrative sold more than any other autobiography by a former slave. Only Uncle Tom's Cabin rivaled its impact. After two years in the British Isles (1845–1847), Douglass broke with Garrison over the latter's rejection of political means to end slavery. Purchasing his freedom and settling in Rochester, New York, he edited a series of antislavery periodicals: North Star (1847–1851), renamed Frederick Douglass' Paper (1851–1860), and Douglass' Monthly (1859–1863). His writings, urging the nation to return to first principles and warning of the dangers of apostasy, exemplify the jeremiad (an allusion to the biblical prophet Jeremiah), a literary genre stretching from Cotton Mather to Martin Luther King Jr. His autobiographies embody another long American literary tradition extolling the individual's capacity for self‐fashioning and social mobility through the cultivation of moral virtue. His thought never represented a consensus, however. His advocacy of racial assimilation, his rejection of black nationalism as impractical, and his support for the woman suffrage movement all roused criticism, as did his 1884 marriage to a white woman.

Douglass viewed the Civil War as a millennial struggle between liberty and tyranny. Through his wartime writings and his role in recruiting two black regiments (the Massachusetts Fifty‐fourth and Fifty‐fifth), he sought to transform a war to preserve the Union into one to abolish slavery—a goal achieved with the Thirteenth Amendment (1865). Douglass continued his journalistic efforts with the New National Era (1870–1874), but the promise of the post‐slavery era quickly faded as reformers encountered entrenched racism in the Reconstruction Era South. As the North's commitment to biracial democracy gave way to efforts at sectional reconciliation, Douglass's faith in the nation waned. As race relations reached their nadir, he consoled himself with a series of minor government posts: U.S. marshal (1877–1881) and recorder of deeds (1881–1886) in Washington, D.C., and consul general in Haiti (1889–1891). Like many of his generation, he had attributed the evils of racism to the institution of slavery. The post–Civil War Era exposed the fallacy of that view as well as the limits of his self‐help ideology as a vehicle for racial equality and African American social mobility.
See also African Americans; Antebellum Era; Civil War: Causes; Gilded Age; Literature: Early National and Antebellum Eras; Literature: Civil War to World War I; Mather, Increase and Cotton; Slave Uprisings and Resistance.

Bibliography

David W. Blight , Frederick Douglass' Civil War: Keeping Faith in Jubilee, 1989.
William S. McFeely , Frederick Douglass, 1991.

Patrick Rael