Frederick Douglass

His grandmother Betsey Bailey raised him in a cabin near Tuckahoe Creek, Maryland practice being to part enslaved children from their mothers early. Harriet Bailey lived about 12 miles off and came at night, and her son wrote afterward that he never once saw her by daylight. She died when he was about seven. He was moved to the Wye House plantation at six, sent on to Baltimore, handed back to the Eastern Shore, and in 1833 hired out to Edward Covey, a poor farmer with a local reputation for breaking people. Covey whipped him so often the wounds had no time to close. At 16 he fought back, won, and was never whipped again.

He got out on September 3, 1838, in a sailor's uniform Anna Murray provided and carrying protection papers borrowed from a free Black seaman. A train out of Baltimore, a ferry over the Susquehanna, a steamboat up the Delaware, New York in under 24 hours. The 57 years that followed — the lecture circuit, the newspapers, three autobiographies, and federal posts no Black American had held, marshal of the District of Columbia, recorder of deeds, minister to Haiti — are BriefHistory's territory. This page takes the household and the quarrels that record leaves out.

Anna Murray Douglass ran the house for 44 years. Julia Griffiths lived in it. So did Ottilie Assing, a German journalist who stayed months at a stretch until 1872, held Anna in open contempt, and waited for Douglass to leave her. His biographer David Blight concludes the two were probably lovers and notes that the surviving letters do not prove it. Anna died in 1882. Two years later Douglass married Helen Pitts, white and nearly 20 years younger. Her relatives stopped speaking to her, and his children read the marriage as a repudiation of their mother. Assing, by then dying of breast cancer, killed herself in France that same year and left him a 13,000 dollar trust.

He died of a heart attack at Cedar Hill on February 20, 1895, aged either 76 or 77 depending on which record of his birth you accept. The will left the house to Helen, but it carried too few witnesses to convey real estate and a court voided it. His children wanted it sold and the money split. Helen borrowed, bought the place herself, and lectured across the Northeast for eight years to clear the mortgage. She died in 1903 with 5,500 dollars still owing, and the National Association of Colored Women finished the job. Cedar Hill is a national historic site. A statue of him in Rochester was pulled off its base over the July 4 weekend in 2020.

Frederick Douglass's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave book
  Written partly to answer Northerners who did not believe he had been enslaved 1845
• The North Star company
  Founded at Rochester with 500 pounds raised by English supporters 1847
• What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July? speech
  Delivered in Rochester to a white abolitionist audience 1852
• My Bondage and My Freedom book
  The second autobiography, written after the break with Garrison 1855
• Our Composite Nationality speech
  A defense of Chinese immigration and naturalization, against most of his own party 1869
• Life and Times of Frederick Douglass book
  The third autobiography, updated again in 1892 1881

• 1826 aged ~8 Sent to Baltimore after the death of Aaron Anthony He had been moved from his grandmother's cabin to the Wye House plantation at six.
• 1834 aged ~16 Fights Edward Covey and is never whipped again Thomas Auld had hired him out to a farmer known locally for breaking people.
• September 3, 1838 aged 20 Escapes north by train, ferry and steamboat in under 24 hours Anna Murray supplied the sailor's uniform and part of her savings.
• September 15, 1838 aged 20 Marries Anna Murray in New York, 11 days after arriving
• 1846 aged ~28 British supporters buy his freedom from Thomas Auld Anna and Ellen Richardson of Newcastle raised the money during his two-year tour.
• July 1848 aged 30 Speaks for the suffrage resolution at Seneca Falls He was the only Black person present, and the resolution passed after he spoke.
• 1869 aged ~51 Splits with the Stanton wing over the Fifteenth Amendment He backed suffrage for Black men now. Stanton would not separate it from suffrage for women.
• June 29, 1874 aged 56 The Freedman's Savings Bank fails three months after he takes it over His last newspaper, the New National Era, folded that September.
• 1877 aged ~59 Visits the dying Thomas Auld, who had once owned him Some of his allies criticized the reconciliation.
• February 20, 1895 aged 77 Dies of a heart attack at Cedar Hill

• William Lloyd Garrison 1805–1879
  Editor of The Liberator and founder of the American Anti-Slavery Society. broke with
• Elizabeth Cady Stanton 1815–1902
  Principal theorist and organizer of the nineteenth-century women’s rights and suffrage movements. allied with, then opposed
• Abraham Lincoln 1809–1865
  16th President who preserved the Union during the Civil War and issued the Emancipation Proclamation. lobbied
• John Brown 1800–1859
  Militant abolitionist whose raid on Harpers Ferry sharpened sectional conflict preceding the Civil War. declined to join the raid of
• Ida B. Wells 1862–1931
  Journalist and anti-lynching crusader whose investigative reporting exposed racial terror in the South. worked with in later life
• Rutherford B. Hayes 1822–1893
  Nineteenth president whose disputed election settlement ended federal Reconstruction in the South. appointed by