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• Born: February 1818
• Birthplace: Near Easton, Maryland
• Died: 20 February 1895 (heart attack)
• Best Known As: Former slave turned anti-slavery leader

Name at birth: Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey

Frederick Douglass was a former slave who became one of the great American anti-slavery leaders of the 1800s. Douglass was born into slavery in Maryland but in 1838, at age 20, he escaped to freedom in New York. A few years later he went to work for abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, travelling and speaking on behalf of Garrison's paper The Liberator. Douglass published his memoir Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave in 1845. Eloquent, smart and determined, Douglass gained fame as a speaker, began his own anti-slavery publications and became a 'conductor' on the Underground Railroad. In later years he became a personal friend of Abraham Lincoln and helped persuade Lincoln to issue the Emancipation Proclamation. He also was a strong supporter of women's rights. He is often described as the founder of the American civil rights movement.

After his escape from slavery, Douglass chose his new last name from a character in the Sir Walter Scott book The Lady of the Lake... Douglass married Anna Murray, a free black woman, shortly after his escape from slavery in 1838. They had four children: Rosetta (b. 1839), Lewis (b. 1840), Frederick Jr. (b. 1842) and Charles (b. 1844). Anna Douglass died in 1882, and two years later Douglass married Helen Pitts, a white woman who had been his secretary.

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Douglass, Frederick (1818–1895), orator, journalist, editor, and autobiographer. Frederick Douglass, author of the most influential African American text of his era, rose through the ranks of the antislavery movement in the 1840s and 1850s to become the most electrifying speaker and commanding writer produced by black America in the nineteenth century. From the outbreak of the Civil War until his death, Douglass was generally recognized as the premier African American leader and spokesman for his people. Douglass's writing was devoted primarily to the creation of a heroic image of himself that would inspire in African Americans the belief that color need not be a permanent bar to their achievement of the American dream, while reminding whites of their obligation as Americans to support free and equal access to that dream for Americans of all races.

The man who became internationally famous as Frederick Douglass was born on Maryland's Eastern Shore in February 1818, the son of Harriet Bailey, a slave, and an unknown white man. Although he recalls witnessing as a child the bloody whipping of his Aunt Hester by his master, Douglass says in his autobiographies that his early experience of slavery was characterized less by overt cruelty than by deprivations of food, clothing, and emotional contact with his mother and grandmother. Sent to Baltimore in 1826 by his master's son-in-law, Thomas Auld, Frederick spent five years as a servant in the home of Thomas Auld's brother, Hugh. At first, Hugh's wife Sophia treated the slave boy with unusual kindness, giving reading lessons to Frederick until her husband forbade them. Rather than accept Hugh Auld's dictates, Frederick took his first rebellious steps toward freedom by teaching himself to read and write.

In 1833 a quarrel between the Auld brothers brought Frederick back to his home in Saint Michaels, Maryland. Tensions between the recalcitrant black youth and his owner convinced Thomas Auld to hire Frederick out as a farm worker under the supervision of Edward Covey, a local slave breaker. After six months of unstinting labor, merciless whippings, and repeated humiliations, the desperate sixteen-year-old slave fought back, resisting one of Covey's attempted beatings and intimidating his tormentor sufficiently to prevent future attacks. Douglass's dramatic account of his struggle with Covey would become the heroic turning point of his future autobiographies and one of the most celebrated scenes in all of antebellum African American literature.

In the spring of 1836, after a failed attempt to escape from slavery, Frederick was sent back to Baltimore to learn the caulking trade. With the aid of his future spouse, Anna Murray, and masquerading as a free black merchant sailor, he boarded a northbound train out of Baltimore on 3 September 1838 and arrived in New York City the next day. Before a month had passed Frederick and Anna were reunited, married, and living in New Bedford, Connecticut, as Mr. and Mrs. Frederick Douglass, the new last name recommended by a friend in New Bedford's thriving African American community. Less than three years later Douglass joined the radical Garrisonian wing of the abolitionist movement as a full-time lecturer.

After years of honing his rhetorical skills on the antislavery platform, Douglass put his life's story into print in 1845. The result, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself, sold more than thirty thousand copies in the first five years of its existence. After a triumphal twenty-one-month lecture tour in England, Ireland, and Scotland, Douglass returned to the United States in the spring of 1847, resolved, against the advice of many of his Garrisonian associates, to launch his own newspaper, the North Star. Authoring most of the articles and editorials himself, Douglass kept the North Star and its successors, Frederick Douglass's Paper and Frederick Douglass's Monthly, in print from 1847 to 1863. One of the literary highlights of the newspaper was a novella, “The Heroic Slave,” which Douglass wrote in March 1853. Based on an actual slave mutiny, “The Heroic Slave” is regarded as the first work of long fiction in African American literature.

A rupture of the close relationship between Douglass and Garrison occasioned a period of reflection and reassessment that culminated in Douglass's second autobiography, My Bondage and My Freedom (1855). Although he had befriended and advised JohnBrown in the late 1850s, Douglass declined Brown's invitation to participate in the Harpers Ferry raid but was forced to flee his Rochester, New York, home for Canada in October 1859 after he was publicly linked to Brown. Applauding the election of Abraham Lincoln and welcoming the Civil War as a final means of ending slavery, Douglass lobbied the new president in favor of African American recruitment for the Union Army. When the war ended, Douglass pleaded with President Andrew Johnson for a national voting rights act that would give African Americans the franchise in all the states. Douglass's loyalty to the Republican Party, whose candidates he supported throughout his later years, won him appointment to the highest political offices that any African American from the North had ever won: federal marshal and recorder of deeds for the District of Columbia, president of the Freedman's Bureau Bank, consul to Haiti, and chargé d’affaires for the Dominican Republic.

The income Douglass earned from these positions, coupled with the fees he received for his popular lectures, most notably one entitled “Self-Made Men,” and his investments in real estate, allowed Douglass and his family to live in comfort in Uniontown, just outside Washington, D.C., during the last two decades of his life. His final memoir, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, first published in 1881 and expanded in 1892, did not excite the admiration of reviewers or sell widely, as had his first two autobiographies. But the Life and Times maintained Douglass's conviction that his had been a “life of victory, if not complete, at least assured.” Life and Times shows Douglass dedicated to the ideal of building a racially integrated America in which skin color would cease to determine an individual's social value and economic options. In the last months of his life Douglass decried the increasing incidence of lynching in the South and disputed the notion that by disenfranchising the African American man a more peaceful social climate would prevail throughout the nation. Yet Douglass never forsook his long-standing belief that the U.S. Constitution, if strictly and equally enforced, remained the best safeguard for African American civil and human rights.

In the history of African American literature, Douglass's importance and influence are virtually immeasurable. His Narrative and My Bondage and My Freedom gave the world the most compelling and sophisticated renditions of an African American selfhood seen in literature up to that time. Douglass's artistry invested this model of selfhood with a moral and political authority that subsequent aspirants to the role of African American culture hero-from the conservative Booker T. Washington to the radical W. E. B. Du Bois—would seek to appropriate for their own autobiographical self-portraits. In twentieth-century African American literature, from Paul Laurence Dunbar's brooding poetic tribute “Douglass” (1903) to the idealistic characterization of Ned Douglass in Ernest J. Gaines's novel, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1971), the criterion for an African American male heroism that uses words as a weapon in the struggle for self- and communal liberation remains the example set by Frederick Douglass.

Bibliography

• Benjamin Quarles, Frederick Douglass, 1948.
• Philip S. Foner, ed., The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass, 1950–1975.
• John W. Blassingame, ed., The Frederick Douglass Papers, 1979-.
• Dickson J. Preston, Young Frederick Douglass, 1980.
• Waldo E. Martin, The Mind of Frederick Douglass, 1984.
• William L. Andrews, To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography, 1760–1865, 1986.
• William S. McFeely, Frederick Douglass, 1990.
• Eric Sundquist, ed., Frederick Douglass: New Literary and Historical Essays, 1990.
• William L. Andrews, ed., Critical Essays on Frederick Douglass, 1991.
• John Ernest, Resistance and Reformation in Nineteenth-Century African-American Literature, 1995.
• Robert S. Levine, Martin Delany, Frederick Douglass, and the Politics of Representative Identity, 1997

William L. Andrews

(1818–1895), abolitionist, journalist, and orator

Born in bondage on the eastern shore of Maryland, Douglass worked for several different slaveholders in both eastern Maryland and Baltimore between 1818 and 1838. During his youth, Douglass became proficiently literate by reading the Bible and classic orations and listening to the sermons of antislavery black preachers and Quakers. These experiences later contributed to his unyielding abolitionism and fierce egalitarianism. In 1838, while a ship caulker's apprentice, Douglass acquired free seaman papers and escaped to New York City. He then moved to Massachusetts and became involved in antislavery activism, under the tutelage of William Lloyd Garrison. Eventually rejecting the apolitical nature of Garrisonian abolitionism, Douglass moved to Rochester, New York, and founded his own abolition journal, The North Star. Between 1847 and 1863, he edited that journal and subsequently the Douglass Monthly.

A tireless abolitionist, Douglass campaigned for the Liberty, Free Soil, and Republican parties in the 1840s and 1850s, although he opposed a nonextension, gradualist approach to slavery. His activist approach to abolition contributed to his hawkish position once the slaveholding states seceded in 1860 and 1861. Douglass stressed the importance of black loyalty during the Civil War and actively recruited Northern blacks—including his two sons, who volunteered for the 54th Massachusetts Infantry—for the Union effort. His egalitarianism, however, led to his criticism of the discriminatory pay and promotion practices of the Federal army. Nevertheless, Douglass's investment in assimilation through self‐help and racial uplift undergirded his conviction that the rights of citizenship would accompany black military participation—a rationale that, according to one of his intellectual biographers, anticipated W. E. B. Du Bois's “Close Ranks” argument concerning World War I and the “Double Victory” campaign of the black press during World War II.

[See also Colored Troops, U.S.]

Bibliography

• David W. Blight, Frederick Douglass' Civil War, 1989.
• William S. McFeely, Frederick Douglass, 1991

The foremost African American abolitionist in antebellum America, Frederick Douglass (ca. 1817-1895) was the first African American leader of national stature in United States history.

Frederick Douglass was born, as can best be determined, in February 1817 (he took the 14th as his birthday) on the eastern shore of Maryland. His mother, from whom he was separated at an early age, was a slave named Harriet Bailey. She named her son Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey; he never knew or saw his father. (Frederick adopted the name Douglass much later.) Douglass's childhood, though he judged it in his autobiography as being no more cruel than that of scores of others caught in similar conditions, appears to have been extraordinarily deprived of personal warmth. The lack of familial attachments, hard work, and sights of incredible inhumanity fill the text of his early remembrances of the main plantation of Col. Edward Lloyd. In 1825 his masters decided to send him to Baltimore to live with Hugh Auld.

Mrs. Auld, Douglass's new mistress and a Northerner unacquainted with the disciplinary techniques Southern slaveholders used to preserve docility in their slaves, treated young Douglass well. She taught him the rudiments of reading and writing until her husband stopped her. With this basic background he began his self-education.

Escape to Freedom

After numerous ownership disputes and after attempting to escape from a professional slave breaker, Douglass was put to work in the Baltimore shipyards. There in 1838 he borrowed a African American sailor's protection papers and by impersonating him escaped to New York. He adopted the name Douglass and married a free African American woman from the South. They settled in New Bedford, Mass., where several of their children were born.

Douglass quickly became involved in the antislavery movement, which was gaining impetus in the North. In 1841, at an abolitionist meeting in Nantucket, Mass., he delivered a moving speech about his experiences as a slave and was immediately hired as a lecturer by the Massachusetts Antislavery Society. By all accounts he was a forceful and even eloquent speaker. His self-taught prose and manner of speaking so inspired some Harvard students that they persuaded him to write his autobiography. The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass was published in 1845. (Ten years later an enlarged autobiography, My Bondage and My Freedom, appeared. His third autobiography, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, was published in 1881 and enlarged in 1892.) The 1845 publication, of course, meant exile for Douglass, a fugitive slave.

Fearing capture, Douglass fled to Britain, staying from 1845 to 1847 to speak on behalf of abolition and to earn enough money to purchase his freedom when he returned to America. Upon his return Douglass settled in Rochester, N.Y., and started publishing his newspaper, North Star (which continued to be published under various names until 1863).

In 1858, as a consequence of his fame and as unofficial spokesman for African Americans, Douglass was sought out by John Brown as a recruit for his planned attack on the Harpers Ferry arsenal. But Douglass could see no benefit from what he considered a futile plan and refused to lend his support.

Civil War and Reconstruction

The Civil War, beginning in 1861, raised several issues, not the least of which was what role the black man would play in his own liberation - since one of the main objectives of the war was emancipation of the slaves. Douglass kept this issue alive. In 1863, as a result of his continued insistence (as well as of political and military expediency), President Abraham Lincoln asked him to recruit African American soldiers for the Union Army. As the war proceeded, Douglass had two meetings with Lincoln to discuss the use and treatment of African American soldiers by the Union forces. In consequence, the role of African American soldiers was upgraded each time and their military effectiveness thereby increased.

The Reconstruction period laid serious responsibilities on Douglass. Politicians differed on the question of race and its corresponding problems, and as legislative battles were waged to establish the constitutional integrity of the slaves' emancipation, Douglass was the one African American with stature enough to make suggestions.

In 1870 Douglass and his sons began publishing the New National Era newspaper in Washington, D.C. In 1877 he was appointed by President Rutherford B. Hayes to the post of U.S. marshal for the District of Columbia. From this time until approximately 2 years before his death Douglass held a succession of offices, including that of recorder of deeds for the District of Columbia and minister-resident and consul-general to the Republic of Haiti, as well as chargé d'affaires to Santo Domingo. He resigned his assignments in Haiti and Santo Domingo when he discovered that American businessmen were taking advantage of his position in their dealings with the Haitian government. He died in Washington, D.C., on Feb. 20, 1895.

Further Reading

Douglass's writings can be found in The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass, edited by Philip S. Foner (4 vols., 1950-1955). Frederick Douglass, edited by Benjamin Quarles (1968), contains excerpts from Douglass's writings, portrayals of him by his contemporaries, and appraisals by later historians.

Benjamin Quarles, Frederick Douglass (1948), is a well-written, scholarly biography. See also Philip S. Foner, Frederick Douglass: A Biography (1964), and Arna Bontemps, Free at Last: The Life of Frederick Douglass (1971). There is a biographical sketch of Douglass in William J. Simmons, Men of Mark: Eminent, Progressive and Rising (1887; repr. 1968). Works that discuss Douglass at length are John Hope Franklin, From Slavery to Freedom: A History of American Negroes (1947; 3d ed. 1967); Louis Filler, The Crusade against Slavery, 1830-1860 (1960); and Martin Duberman, ed., The Antislavery Vanguard: New Essays on the Abolitionists (1965).

For more information on Frederick Douglass, visit Britannica.com.

(1818-1895), abolitionist, writer, and orator. Douglass was the most important black American leader of the nineteenth century. Born Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey on Maryland's Eastern Shore, he was the son of a slave woman and, probably, her white master. Upon his escape from slavery at age twenty, he adopted the name of the hero of Sir Walter Scott's The Lady of the Lake. Douglass immortalized his years as a slave in Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845). This and two subsequent autobiographies, My Bondage and My Freedom (1855) and The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881), mark his greatest contributions to American culture. Written as antislavery propaganda and personal revelation, they are regarded as the finest examples of the slave narrative tradition and as classics of American autobiography.

Douglass's life as a reformer ranged from his abolitionist activities in the early 1840s to his attacks on Jim Crow and lynching in the 1890s. For sixteen years he edited an influential black newspaper and achieved international fame as an orator and writer of great persuasive power. In thousands of speeches and editorials he levied an irresistible indictment against slavery and racism, provided an indomitable voice of hope for his people, embraced antislavery politics, and preached his own brand of American ideals. In the 1850s he broke with the strictly moralist brand of abolitionism led by William Lloyd Garrison; he supported the early women's rights movement; and he gave direct assistance to John Brown's conspiracy that led to the raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859.

Rhetorically, Douglass was a master of irony, as illustrated by his famous Fourth of July speech in 1852: "This Fourth of July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn," he declared. Then he accused his unsuspecting audience in Rochester, New York, of mockery for inviting him to speak and quoted Psalm 137, where the children of Israel are forced to sit down "by the rivers of Babylon," there to "sing the Lord's song in a strange land." For the ways that race have caused the deepest contradictions in American history, few better sources of insight exist than Douglass's speeches. Moreover, for understanding prejudice, there are few better starting points than his timeless definition of racism as a "diseased imagination."

Douglass welcomed the Civil War in 1861 as a moral crusade against slavery. During the war he labored as a propagandist of the Union cause and emancipation, a recruiter of black troops, and (on two occasions) an adviser to President Abraham Lincoln. He viewed the Union victory as an apocalyptic rebirth of America as a nation rooted in a rewritten Constitution and the ideal of racial equality. Some of his hopes were dashed during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, but he continued to travel widely and lecture on racial issues, national politics, and women's rights. In the 1870s Douglass moved to Washington, D.C., where he edited a newspaper and became president of the ill-fated Freedman's Bank. As a stalwart Republican, Douglass was appointed marshal (1877-1881) and recorder of deeds (1881-1886) for the District of Columbia, and chargé d'affaires for Santo Domingo and minister to Haiti (1889-1891).

Brilliant, heroic, and complex, Douglass became a symbol of his age and a unique voice for humanism and social justice. His life and thought will always speak profoundly to the meaning of being black in America, as well as the human calling to resist oppression. Douglass died in 1895 after years of trying to preserve a black abolitionist's meaning and memory of the great events he had witnessed and helped to shape.

Bibliography:

David W. Blight, Frederick Douglass' Civil War: Keeping Faith in Jubilee (1989); Waldo E. Martin, The Mind of Frederick Douglass (1984).

Author:

David W. Blight

See also Abolitionist Movement; Free Negroes, 1619-1860; Lynching; Reconstruction; Segregation; Slavery; Suffrage.

(dŭg'ləs) , c.1817–1895, American abolitionist, b. near Easton, Md. The son of a black slave, Harriet Bailey, and an unknown white father, he took the name of Douglass (from Scott's hero in The Lady of the Lake) after his second, and successful, attempt to escape from slavery in 1838. At New Bedford, Mass., he found work as a day laborer. An extemporaneous speech before a meeting at Nantucket of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society in 1841 was so effective that he was made one of its agents. Douglass, who had learned to read and write while in the service of a kind mistress in Baltimore, published his Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass in 1845. Fearing capture as a fugitive slave, he spent several years in England and Ireland and returned in 1847, after English friends had purchased his freedom. At Rochester, N.Y., he established the North Star and edited it for 17 years in the abolitionist cause. Unlike William L. Garrison, he favored the use of political methods and thus became a follower of James G. Birney. In the Civil War he helped organize two regiments of Massachusetts African Americans and urged other blacks to join the Union ranks. During Reconstruction he continued to urge civil rights for African Americans. He was secretary of the Santo Domingo Commission (1871), marshal of the District of Columbia (1877–81), recorder of deeds for the same district (1881–86), and minister to Haiti (1889–91). Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1962) is a revised edition of his autobiography, which has also been published as My Bondage and My Freedom.

Bibliography

See also biographies by B. T. Washington (1907), P. Foner (1964), B. Quarles (1968), A. Bontemps (1971), and W. McFreely (1991); E. Fuller, A Star Pointed North (1946); P. S. Foner, ed., Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass (4 vol., 1950–55).

(1817-1895)

1845

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself. Douglass's autobiography vividly describes his years as a slave. Written after he had escaped north in 1838 and begun work in William Lloyd Garrison's abolitionist movement, the work sells more than eleven thousand copies in its first year and proves to be the most popular and influential of the published slave narratives. Douglass would issue two additional autobiographical works, My Bondage and Freedom (1855) and Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881, revised 1892).

1853

The Heroic Slave. Douglass's only work of fiction is a novella describing a mutiny aboard a slave ship. It is noteworthy for showing Douglass's shift away from a nonviolent stance and his contention that blacks must rely on themselves to gain their freedom.

An abolitionist (see abolitionism) of the nineteenth century. Douglass, an escaped slave, was an especially captivating speaker. His autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, tells of the violence he suffered because of his beliefs. Late in his life, he attacked Jim Crow laws.

A very influential African American leader of the nineteenth century, Frederick Douglass used his exceptional skills as an orator, writer, journalist, and politician to fight for the abolition of slavery and an end to racial discrimination. He helped shape the climate of public opinion that led to the ratification of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution, which were created in large measure to protect, respectively, the freedom, citizenship, and voting rights of ex-slaves. His Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845) is a classic account of the dehumanizing effects of slavery for slave and slaveholder alike.

Douglass was born Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey in 1817 or 1818, on a Talbot County, Maryland, plantation. His mother was a black slave and his father most likely her white owner. Douglass was separated from his mother at an early age, and at seven years was sent to Baltimore to work for a family. He later regarded this change from the plantation to the city as a great stroke of fortune because in Baltimore, he was able to begin to educate himself. His master's wife taught him the alphabet, and Douglass, under the tutelage of young boys on the streets and docks, proceeded to teach himself how to read and write. Even when he was very young, his limited reading convinced him of the evils of slavery and the need to seek his freedom.

But Douglass continued to suffer under slavery. At times during the 1830s, he was sent back to the plantation to endure its scourges, including beatings and whippings. He briefly attempted to teach fellow slaves to read and write, but his efforts were quickly put to an end by whites.

In 1838, living again in Baltimore and caulking ships, Douglass escaped north and won his freedom. He married a free African American woman, Anna Murray, and settled in New Bedford, Massachusetts. Now a fugitive slave, he changed his name to Frederick Douglass in order to avoid capture. Douglass quickly became a respected member of the African American community in New Bedford. However, he was disappointed to find that racism was prevalent in the North as well as in the South.

Shortly after his arrival in the North, Douglass became an avid reader of the Liberator, a newspaper published by a leading abolitionist, William Lloyd Garrison. He became involved in abolitionist campaigns and soon earned a reputation as an eloquent speaker for the cause. In 1841, he met Garrison and was recruited to speak for the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society. Throughout his life, he would travel all over the United States on speaking engagements, becoming a famous and sought-after orator.

In part to refute those who did not believe that someone as eloquent as he had once been a slave, Douglass published Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass in 1845. The book became a best-seller and made Douglass into a celebrity. It also made known his status as a fugitive slave, and he was forced to flee to the British Isles for safety in 1845. During his travels, he was greatly impressed by the relative lack of racism in Ireland, England, and Scotland. English friends purchased his legal freedom in 1846, paying his old master $711.66.

Upon his return to the States in 1847, Douglass settled in Rochester, New York, and founded his own abolitionist newspaper, the North Star. In its pages, he published African American writers and focused on African American achievements. He also wrote highly influential editorials for the paper. Douglass published a series of newspapers, including Frederick Douglass' Weekly, until 1863.

Douglass continued to lecture widely and became sympathetic to other reformist causes of the day, including the temperance, peace, and feminist movements. By the 1850s and 1860s, he increasingly came to doubt that slavery could be ended by peaceful means. He became friends with the militant abolitionist John Brown, although he did not join Brown in his ill-fated 1859 military campaign against slavery at Harpers Ferry, Virginia.

During the Civil War (1861-65), Douglass fought hard to make the abolition of slavery a Union goal, and he also lobbied for the enlistment of African Americans into the Union armed forces. In public speeches and even in private meetings with President Abraham Lincoln, Douglass made his case forcefully. Aided by rising sentiment against slavery in the North, both of Douglass's goals became a reality. Lincoln's 1863 Emancipation Proclamation sent a strong signal that the North would seek the abolition of slavery in the South, and in 1865, the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution formally ended the institution of slavery in the United States. By the end of the war, nearly two hundred thousand African Americans had enlisted in the Union armed forces. Douglass personally helped enlist men for the Fifty-fourth and Fifty-fifth Massachusetts Colored Regiments and served as a leading advocate for the equal treatment of African Americans in the military.

After the Thirteenth Amendment had been ratified in 1865, some abolitionists pronounced their work over. Douglass argued that much more remained to be done, and he continued to struggle for the rights of African Americans. He called for voting rights for African Americans, the repeal of racially discriminatory laws, and the redistribution of land in the South. Although disappointed that land redistribution was never achieved, he was encouraged by the passage of the Fourteenth (1868) and Fifteenth (1870) Amendments, which, respectively, protected against the infringement of constitutional rights by the states and established the right of all citizens to vote.

Although these constitutional amendments appeared to guarantee the civil rights of African Americans, the actual laws and practices of states and localities continued to discriminate against blacks. African Americans were also harassed by violence from private groups. The Ku Klux Klan waged a campaign of terror against African Americans who sought to exercise their civil rights, and white lynch mobs killed hundreds of black men each year. Douglass spoke out against these forms of terrorism and called for federal laws against lynching.

Douglass was a loyal spokesman for the Republican party and vigorously campaigned for its candidates. His support helped gain hundreds of thousands of black votes for Republicans. As a result of such work, several Republican presidents rewarded him with political offices. In 1871, President Ulysses S. Grant named him assistant secretary to the Santo Domingo Commission. Later, Republican presidents appointed him marshal (1877-81) and recorder of deeds (1881-86) for the District of Columbia. In 1888, President Benjamin Harrison appointed Douglass minister resident and consul general to Haiti, the first free black republic in the Western Hemisphere. He resigned the position in 1891, over policy differences with the Harrison administration. Although such positions did not afford Douglass great political power in themselves, they provided a comfortable living as well as some recognition for his significant contributions to the public life of the country.

Douglass was also the first African American ever nominated for the vice presidency. He declined the nomination, which came from the little known Equal Rights party in 1872.

To the end of his life, Douglass continued to lecture and write for the cause of freedom. He died on February 20, 1895, in Washington, D.C., after attending a meeting of the National Council of Women.

Quotes:

"A gentleman will not insult me, and no man not a gentleman can insult me."

"One and God make a majority."

"Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is in an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob, and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe."

"We have to do with the past only as we can make it useful to the present and the future."

"Man's greatness consists in his ability to do and the proper application of his powers to things needed to be done."

"If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will."

See more famous quotes by Frederick Douglass