Frederick Douglass. [Credit: Courtesy of the Holt-Messer Collection, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College, Cambridge, Massachusetts]
(born February 1818?, Tuckahoe, Md., U.S.—died Feb. 20, 1895, Washington, D.C.) U.S. abolitionist. The son of a slave mother and a white father, he was sent to work as a house servant in Baltimore, where he learned to read. At age 16 he was returned to the plantation; later he was hired out as a ship caulker. In 1838 he fled to New York City and then to New Bedford, Mass., changing his name to elude slave hunters.
His eloquence at an 1841 antislavery convention propelled him into a new career as an agent for the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, in which capacity he endured frequent insults and violent personal attacks. In 1845 he wrote his autobiography, now regarded as a classic. To avoid recapture by his owner, whose name he had given in the narrative, he embarked on a speaking tour of England and Ireland (1845–47), returning with enough money to buy his freedom and to start an antislavery newspaper North Star, which he published until 1860 in Rochester, N.Y. In 1851 he split with the radical abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison and allied himself with moderates led by James Birney. In the American Civil War he was a consultant to Pres. Abraham Lincoln. During Reconstruction he fought for full civil rights for freedmen and supported women's rights. He served in government posts in Washington, D.C. (1877–86), and as U.S. minister to Haiti (1889–91).
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