Frederick Douglass

Frederick Douglass was an American abolitionist, social reformer, orator, and writer whose 19th-century career as the most-prominent African-American intellectual leader of the American antislavery movement made him one of the foundational figures of African-American history. He was born Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey in February 1818 (the precise date is unknown — Douglass adopted February 14 as his birthday in adulthood) on a Talbot County, Maryland plantation. He was born enslaved to an enslaved Black mother (Harriet Bailey) and an unknown white father (possibly his enslaver Aaron Anthony).

He learned to read and write secretly during his teens — a skill that was illegal under Maryland slave codes. After multiple unsuccessful escape attempts, he successfully escaped slavery on September 3, 1838, by boarding a Baltimore-to-Wilmington train using borrowed sailor's papers. He arrived in New York City a free man and changed his surname from Bailey to Douglass.

His career as an antislavery lecturer began in 1841 at the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society convention in Nantucket, where William Lloyd Garrison hired him as a paid traveling lecturer. His 1845 autobiography Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave sold over 30,000 copies in its first five years in print and became one of the foundational documents of American abolitionist literature. Two subsequent autobiographies — My Bondage and My Freedom (1855) and Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881) — extended and revised his published account.

His subsequent career spanned the 1840s American antislavery movement, his 1845–1847 British and Irish lecture tour (during which sympathetic British supporters raised funds to purchase his legal freedom from his Maryland enslaver), his 1847 founding of the The North Star abolitionist newspaper, his 1860s Civil War-era counsel to Abraham Lincoln on Black Union Army recruitment, and his post-Reconstruction service as US Marshal of the District of Columbia (1877–1881), Recorder of Deeds for D.C. (1881–1886), and US Minister to Haiti (1889–1891). He died of a heart attack on February 20, 1895, at age 77, at his Washington, D.C. home.

His name Frederick is from the Old Germanic Fridurik meaning "peaceful ruler." Frederick has been continuously among the most-popular American boys' names for over a century.