Frederick Douglass et al.

Frederick Douglass was one of the foremost black leaders of his time. Born a slave in 1818 in Maryland, he escaped in 1838 and became a noted abolitionist speaker for William Lloyd Garrison’s Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society. His autobiography The Narrative Life of Frederick Douglass was first published in 1845. In 1847 he began publishing his own abolitionist newspaper, the North Star.

On August 21, 1850, Douglass presided at a convention in Cazenovia, New York, known as the Fugitive Slave Convention. More than two thousand people attended, of whom about thirty were fugitives. The convention drafted an open letter to the slaves of America, portions of which are excerpted below. The letter openly encourages slaves to seek escape, and, if necessary, to take up arms against their masters, likening slaveholders to tyrants and slaves to prisoners of war. The letter was...