30 Frederick Douglass
Frederick Douglass
Frederick Douglass is one prominent example of how these trends: helping and protecting runaway slaves; and establishing international antislavery support networks to help put pressure on the United States to abolish the institution, came together. (2) Douglass was born a slave in Maryland in 1818 and escaped to New York in 1838. He later moved to New Bedford, Massachusetts, with his wife.
After escaping from slavery, Douglass soon came to the forefront of the abolitionist movement as a gifted orator and a powerful narrator of his experiences as a slave. Douglass’s commanding presence and powerful speaking skills electrified his listeners when he began to provide public lectures on slavery. He came to the attention of William Lloyd Garrison and others who encouraged him to write his story. In 1845, he published his autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave Written by Himself , in which he told about his life of slavery in Maryland. It was perhaps the most powerful and famous piece of African American literature from the nineteenth century. It was so widely read that it was reprinted in nine editions and translated into several languages. In it, Douglass identified by name the whites who had brutalized him, and for that reason, along with the mere act of publishing his story, Douglass had to flee the United States to avoid being murdered. (11) He traveled to Great Britain and met with famous British abolitionists like Thomas Clarkson, drumming up moral and financial support from British and Irish antislavery societies. He was neither the first nor the last runaway slave to make this voyage, but his great success abroad contributed significantly to rousing morale among weary abolitionists at home. (2)
British abolitionist friends ultimately bought his freedom from his Maryland owner, and Douglass returned to the United States. He began to publish his own abolitionist newspaper, North Star , in Rochester, New York. During the 1840s and 1850s, Douglass fought to bring about the end of slavery by telling the story of his life and highlighting how slavery destroyed families, both black and white. (11)
In this excerpt from Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass , he explains the consequences for the children fathered by white masters and slave women:
“Slaveholders have ordained, and by law established, that the children of slave women shall in all cases follow the condition of their mothers… this is done too obviously to administer to their own lusts, and make a gratification of their wicked desires profitable as well as pleasurable… the slaveholder, in cases not a few, sustains to his slaves the double relation of master and father… Such slaves [born of white masters] invariably suffer greater hardships… They are… a constant offence to their mistress… she is never better pleased than when she sees them under the lash, … The master is frequently compelled to sell this clas