Frederick Douglass: United States official and diplomat

May 8, 2020

The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica have written a series of mini-biographies. Here is an excerpt from Editors’ profile of Frederick Douglass. To learn more about him and others, please click here.

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Frederick Douglass, original name Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey, (born February? 1818, Tuckahoe, Maryland, U.S. —died February 20, 1895, Washington, D.C. ), African American who was one of the most eminent human rights leaders of the 19th century. His oratorical and literary brilliance thrust him into the forefront of the U.S. abolition movement, and he became the first black citizen to hold high rank in the U.S. government.Douglass was born in 1818, though the month and day are uncertain; he later opted to celebrate his birthday on February 14. Separated as an infant from his slave mother (he never knew his white father), Frederick lived with his grandmother on a Maryland plantation until he was eight years old, when his owner sent him to Baltimore to live as a house servant with the family of Hugh Auld, whose wife defied state law by teaching the boy to read. Auld, however, declared that learning would make him unfit for slavery, and Frederick was forced to continue his education surreptitiously with the aid of schoolboys in the street. Upon the death of his master, he was returned to the plantation as a field hand at 16. Later he was hired out in Baltimore as a ship caulker. Frederick tried to escape with three others in 1833, but the plot was discovered before they could get away. Five years later, however, he fled to New York City and then to New Bedford, Massachusetts, where he worked as a labourer for three years, eluding slave hunters by changing his surname to Douglass.

At a Nantucket, Massachusetts, antislavery convention in 1841, Douglass was invited to describe his feelings and experiences under slavery. These extemporaneous remarks were so poignant and eloquent that he was unexpectedly catapulted into a new career as agent for the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society. From then on, despite heckling and mockery, insult, and violent personal attack, Douglass never flagged in his devotion to the abolitionist cause.

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