born Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey; c. February 1818 – February 20, 1895

was an African-American social reformer, abolitionist, orator, writer, and statesman.Northerners at the time found it hard to believe that such a great orator had once been a slave. 

Douglas was born into slavery in Maryland circa 1818. Like many slaves, he never knew his actual date of birth and so chose February 14 as his birthday. He was given the name Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey but decided to change it when he became a free man. Although he was set on keeping his first name “Frederick”, he asked his friend Nathan Johnson to help him choose a last name. Johnson had been reading Sir Walter Scott’s narrative poem, Lady of the Lake.

In his youth, Douglass taught himself to read, aided by scraps of reading material he found and with the help of some white children he came into contact with in his neighborhood. Soon after, while hired out to a Maryland farmer, he surreptitiously taught other slaves to read the New Testament at a weekly Sunday school. It was during these meeting that he plotted his first escape attempt, for reading and writing 

After escaping to the North, Douglass settled in New Bedford, Massachusetts where he became a preacher in an African Methodist Episcopal Zion church. Honed in the pulpit, his oratorical skills would make him one of the most sought after abolitionist speakers he attempted to use his writings and speaking events to educate slaveholders and Southerners about the evils of slavery.

The End