Frederick Douglass was an escaped slave who became a prominent activist, author and public speaker. He became a leader in the abolitionist movement, which sought to end the practice of slavery, before and during the Civil War.
After that conflict and the Emancipation Proclamation of , he continued to push for equality and human rights until his death in It was one of five autobiographies he penned, along with dozens of noteworthy speeches, despite receiving minimal formal education.
His work served as an inspiration to the civil rights movement of the s and beyond. Frederick Douglass was born into slavery in or around in Talbot County, Maryland. Douglass himself was never sure of his exact birth date. His mother was of Native American ancestry and his father was of African and European descent.
After he was separated from his mother as an infant, Douglass lived for a time with his maternal grandmother, Betty Bailey. However, at the age of six, he was moved away from her to live and work on the Wye House plantation in Maryland.
From there, he taught himself to read and write. By the time he was hired out to work under William Freeland, he was teaching other enslaved people to read using the Bible. As word spread of his efforts to educate fellow enslaved people, Thomas Auld took him back and transferred him to Edward Covey, a farmer who was known for his brutal treatment of the enslaved people in his charge.
Roughly 16 at this time, Douglass was regularly whipped by Covey. From there he traveled through Delaware , another slave state, before arriving in New York and the safe house of abolitionist David Ruggles. She joined him, and the two were married in September They would have five children together. In New Bedford, Douglass began attending meetings of the abolitionist movement. During these meetings, he was exposed to the writings of abolitionist and journalist William Lloyd Garrison.
The two men eventually met when both were asked to speak at an abolitionist meeting, during which Douglass shared his story of slavery and escape. It was Garrison who encouraged Douglass to become a speaker and leader in the abolitionist movement. Douglass was physically assaulted several times during the tour by those opposed to the abolitionist movement.
The injuries never fully healed, and he never regained full use of his hand. Two years later, Douglass published the first and most famous of his autobiographies, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. At the age of 20, after several failed attempts, he escaped from slavery and arrived in New York City on Sept.
Anguish and grief, like darkness and rain, may be depicted, but gladness and joy, like the rainbow, defy the skill of pen or pencil. In doing so, Douglass went on to become a great writer, orator, publisher, civil rights leader and government official. Douglass authored three autobiographies, with his first and best-known, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave , published in In his first two memoirs, he writes bluntly about forced sexual relations between slave and master, and what perverse family relations they produced, including the fact that rape was turning the black slave population half white:.
The slave woman is at the mercy of the fathers, sons or brothers of her master. The thoughtful know the rest. What is still worse, perhaps, such a child is a constant offense to the wife. She hates its very presence. He had a tutelary and then an adversarial relation with William Lloyd Garrison; then an admiring and allergic relation with John Brown; next, a prophet-and-politician relation with Abraham Lincoln ; and, finally, a deep, romantic relation with a woman named Ottilie Assing.
They met and became friends at that gathering in Nantucket. Garrison, the most famous abolitionist of the period, was the headliner when Douglass was asked to tell the story of his life. Less than a decade later, they broke, bitterly and for life. He believed that the Constitution was so deeply implicated in slavery—including its creation of the small-state-favoring Senate—that it could not be salvaged. Douglass came to believe that the Constitution was a good document gone wrong—that, in its democratic premises, it breathed freedom, and that it needed only to be amended to be restored to its first purposes.
It is a masterpiece of startling argumentative twists. He begins with unstinting praise of the values and character of the Founding Fathers—the only forewarning of dissent being his speaking of the events of the seventeen-seventies in the second person: your Founders did this. Read its preamble, consider its purposes. Is slavery among them? Is it at the gateway? It is neither. The constitutional issue was, and remains, epic.
All of American liberalism remains at stake in this choice—it is what divides Obama from Cornel West and his other critics on the left. For Garrison, the failure of liberal constitutionalism to achieve its stated aim was a reason to abandon it. For Douglass, the failure of liberal constitutionalism to achieve its stated aim was a reason to re-state the aim more forcefully and more inclusively.
If the aim was in the document, the arc could yet be completed. He thought the aim was there, and the arc was possible. Wrongly decided once, it was still on the agenda of the nation as a whole. In the name of the Constitution, slavery was to be assaulted frontally. How frontally Lincoln could not decide, until events overtook him as President. For Douglass, this urge to fight for principle, while making sure that the fight could be won, shaped his strange push-and-pull relationship with John Brown, in itself a mini American epic.
Simple arithmetic, he saw, meant that it would achieve nothing and endanger the lives of any slaves who participated. Violent means would be necessary, but violence was justified only when it had a chance to prevail. It was a mistake on the part of his persecutors to force him into exile, however temporary.
A huge hit as a lecturer in England and Scotland, he rallied the already strong antislavery forces there. Moral consensus can shift with enormous rapidity. Not so very long ago, it was acceptable to cast the American Civil War as a tragic clash between two decent sides.
It has since become harder to deny the truth that slavery was the sole cause of the war. The one conceivable compromise that might have been tried was a gradual program of subsidized emancipation, but, as Lincoln discovered from his correspondence in early with Alexander Stephens, the eventual Vice-President of the Confederacy, the Southern ruling class had made up its mind: slavery or secession.
To the antislavery cause was added the pro-Union cause, a narrowly nationalist crusade. Douglass came to see that Lincoln had wrapped the right cause around the wrong cry.
The ingenuity of the Gettysburg Address as a forensic argument lies in the way it made the two causes—nationalism and emancipation—seem one. The nation was born in the view that all men are created equal; slavery denies that view; if we lose the war, it shows the world that a nation with that premise cannot survive unfragmented; and therefore fighting for the Union is the same thing as fighting for its first principles. Douglass admired the somewhat sophistic logic. During the war years, he spent a surprising amount of intellectual energy opposing what now seems to us an obvious chimera—a plan to resettle ex-slaves outside the United States, in Central America or the West Indies or Africa.
Delany, advocated what was, in effect, a form of black Zionism. Why, then, did Douglass think it so important to battle? It was because Douglass saw culture and civilization almost entirely in what we now call Eurocentric terms. He took his language and his lore and his moral categories from the Bible, Shakespeare, Milton, Scott. He did not see these as the alien property of white people.
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