Description
Frederick Douglass was born in his grandmother’s cabin in Tuckahoe Creek, Maryland.[1] He grew up as an enslaved child and was separated from his grandmother to work at the Wye House plantation in Talbot County, Maryland at the age of six. He was then given to Hugh Auld who lived in the city of Baltimore where Douglass felt lucky, as slaves in urban places were almost freedmen, compared to those in plantations.[2] At the age of twelve, Auld’s wife Sophia started teaching him the alphabet and treated him like a normal child, but was quickly stopped by her husband.[3] This first access to knowledge and education gave him the desire to learn more, but it also gave him a taste of freedom as he said: “Once you learn to read, you will forever be free.”[4] From then on, Douglass decided to continue to learn how to read and write by himself: for him, “knowledge is the pathway from slavery to freedom.”[5]
His original name was Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey, but he changed it to Douglass when he decided to escape as a way to break with his enslaved life and not to be recognized. In September 1838, Douglass successfully escaped from his owner Colonel Lloyd and reached Havre de Grace, Maryland. He became an influential activist for the abolition of slavery. In 1845, he described his experiences as a slave in Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. It exposed the reality of slavery and his path from bondage to freedom. It became a crucial testimony of the horrors of slavery.
Throughout his life, Douglass never stopped writing about slavery and became a prominent activist in the fight for abolition across the United States. In 1843, the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society sent speakers to New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Indiana to hold the “One Hundred Conventions” on abolition.[6] The Anti-Slavery Society was founded by William Lloyd Garrison, editor of the abolitionist newspaper The Liberator, and Arthur Tappan, another abolitionist. Douglass became part of the Anti-Slavery Society, along with William Wells Brown and Micajah C. White, two other freed men.
In September 1843, Frederick Douglass and other speakers went to Madison County, Indiana to give a speech at a meeting at the Pendleton Baptist church. The Anti-slavery society focused their action on small towns like Pendleton where the African American population constituted an important proportion of the inhabitants. Situated in the periphery of Indianapolis, people relied on the church to gather and get news on politics. Douglass wanted to prove that the fight for abolition should be everybody’s concern. However, the crowd they encountered was deeply racist: more than thirty white men marched in, armed with stones and brickbats, asking for them to leave.[7] Douglass and others were injured, even though they were defended by the local supporters. In his autobiography My Life and Times (1881), he described the event saying, “They tore down the platform on which we stood, assaulted Mr. White and knocked out several of his teeth (…).” Rioters went unpunished, showing that progress was still to be made in justice and that racial violence was still not publicly condemned, even in the North.
In 2013, the Indiana Historical Bureau, Madison County Council, Madison County Council of Governments, Town of Pendleton, Historic Fall Creek Pendleton Settlement, Pendleton Business Association, and Friends installed a historical marker at the site of the 1843 mob.
Source
[1] Douglass, Frederick. My Bondage and My Freedom. Edited by John David Smith. New Ed edition. New York: Penguin Classics, 2003. P.44
[2] Gopnik, Adam. “The Prophetic Pragmatism of Frederick Douglass,” October 8, 2018. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/10/15/the-prophetic-pragmatism-of-frederick-douglass.
[3] Douglass, Frederick, "Chapter VII", Narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass, an American slave.
[4] Ibid. Chapter VI, P.52
[5] Douglass, Frederick, "Chapter VI", Narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass, an American slave.
[6] "Social Reform and Human Progress," The Liberator, February 17, 1843
[7] "Of the Board of managers of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, to the Abolitionists of the Western and Middle States," The Liberator, June 16, 1843
Contributor
Student Author: Emma Guichon
Faculty/Staff Editors: Dr. Ronald V. Morris, Dr. Kevin C. Nolan, and Christine Thompson
Graduate Assistant Researchers: Carrie Vachon and JB Bilbrey
Rights
PHOTO & VIDEO:
Frederick Douglass (circa 1879), attributed to George Kendall Warren, Public domain, via Wikimedia commons
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Frederick_Douglass_(circa_1879).jpg