Frederick Douglass was born Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey in the cabin of his grandmother, Betsey Bailey, on Tuckahoe Creek in Talbot County, Maryland, sometime around February of 1818. Born of a slave mother and white father (who was probably his master), Douglass tells a powerful tale of the beatings and mistreatment that he observed and endured. The story spans Douglass's twenty years in slavery, his success in escaping it, and his initial involvement in the abolitionist movement.
Slavery in Maryland. Maryland, where Frederick Douglass was born and where he spent his years in slavery, was one of the so-called border states that marked the boundary between North and South prior to the Civil War. Though a slaveholding state, it contained an unusually large number of free blacks prior to the Civil War.
As Douglass grew up, he witnessed a reversal of sorts in voting rights in Maryland. By 1810 the state had abandoned racial barriers to voting; to qualify for this right, however, people had to own property, an impossibility for the majority of blacks.
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