Douglass, Frederick

Douglass, Frederick (1818–1895), abolitionist, journalist, and orator.Born in bondage on the eastern shore of Maryland, Douglass worked for several different slaveholders in both eastern Maryland and Baltimore between 1818 and 1838. During his youth, Douglass became proficiently literate by reading the Bible and classic orations and listening to the sermons of antislavery black preachers and Quakers. These experiences later contributed to his unyielding abolitionism and fierce egalitarianism. In 1838, while a ship caulker's apprentice, Douglass acquired free seaman papers and escaped to New York City. He then moved to Massachusetts and became involved in antislavery activism, under the tutelage of William Lloyd Garrison. Eventually rejecting the apolitical nature of Garrisonian abolitionism, Douglass moved to Rochester, New York, and founded his own abolition journal, The North Star. Between 1847 and 1863, he edited that journal and subsequently the Douglass Monthly.

A tireless abolitionist, Douglass campaigned for the Liberty, Free Soil, and Republican parties in the 1840s and 1850s, although he opposed a nonextension, gradualist approach to slavery. His activist approach to abolition contributed to his hawkish position once the slaveholding states seceded in 1860 and 1861. Douglass stressed the importance of black loyalty during the Civil War and actively recruited Northern blacks—including his two sons, who volunteered for the 54th Massachusetts Infantry—for the Union effort. His egalitarianism, however, led to his criticism of the discriminatory pay and promotion practices of the Federal army. Nevertheless, Douglass's investment in assimilation through self‐help and racial uplift undergirded his conviction that the rights of citizenship would accompany black military participation—a rationale that, according to one of his intellectual biographers, anticipated W. E. B. Du Bois's “Close Ranks” argument concerning World War I and the “Double Victory” campaign of the black press during World War II.
[See also Colored Troops, U.S.]

Bibliography

David W. Blight , Frederick Douglass' Civil War, 1989.
William S. McFeely , Frederick Douglass, 1991.

Martin Summers