Fredrick Douglass

Fredrick Douglass

Biographical Details

• Born 1818 and died in 1895
• After death of mother and father from 1825 - 26, Fredrick learnt to read and write as a Household slave in Baltimore
• From 1834 - 35 Douglass became a plantation worker in the field and then escaped to New York where he began work as a labourer and then further moved to Massachusetts
• Joined the abolitionist movement in 1839
• In 1841 he first heard Garrison speak at a meeting of the Bristol Anti-Slavery Society. At one of these meetings, Douglass was unexpectedly invited to speak.
• In 1843, Douglass participated in the American Anti-Slavery Society's Hundred Conventions project, a six-month tour of meeting halls throughout the Eastern and Midwestern United States. During this tour, he was frequently accosted, and at a lecture in Pendleton, Indiana, was chased and beaten by an angry mob before being rescued by a local Quaker family

Views on Slavery

• Joined the abolitionist movement in 1839
• After escaping from slavery he became a leader of the abolitionist movement, gaining note for his dazzling oratory and incisive antislavery writing.
• Douglass was a firm believer in the equality of all people, whether black, female, Native American, or recent immigrant, famously quoted as saying, "I would unite with anybody to do right and with nobody to do wrong."
• Frederick can be seen as a moderate emancipator of Slavery with reference to the break up of himself and William Lloyd Garrison in 1855 where Garrison failed to see how the constitution could be anti - slavery and making drastic public statements such as burning a copy of the constitution. Frederick began to see this as relatively extreme.

Tactics

• 1841 - Gave his first speech to Massachusetts Anti - slavery society which was an immediate success and he was hired to conduct a regional speaking tour
• Douglass was a polemicist and he published his best ever , Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, in 1845
• 1846 - Embarked on a successful lecturing tour of Britain - Experienced equality in Ireland which he mentioned in his future works.
• Douglass developed his own abolitionist paper The North Star in 1847 -
• Despite close friendship with John Brown, he did not join his raid on Harper's Ferry - Douglass does not believe in violence to emancipate slavery, similar to Garrison
• 1862-5 Douglass urges both freed and enslaved blacks to join the Union Army to help to emancipate slavery.
• Douglass used creative ways to influence his northern audiences. he would state phrases such as, "I appear this evening as a thief and robber. I stole this head, these limbs, this body from my master and run off with them.

 Achievements

• He published his best ever narrative in 1845
• Douglass became the most famous and influential African American of his time
• He was a great campaigner for abolition, a talented polemicist and inspirational speaker
• He stood as a living counter-example to slaveholders' arguments that slaves did not have the intellectual capacity to function as independent American citizens.^[
• Without his approval, he became the first African American nominated for Vice President of the United States
• At the time, some sceptics questioned whether a black man could have produced such an eloquent piece of literature. The book received generally positive reviews and became an immediate bestseller. Within three years of its publication, it had been reprinted nine times with 11,000 copies circulating in the United States; it was also translated into French and Dutch and published in Europe.