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Written for young adults, this biography of Frederick Douglass covers the life of the most famous black abolitionist and intellectual of the 19th century.

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October 3, 1894
Cedar Hill: Anacostia D.C.
Dear Mr. Philips:
I think I may safely promise you a lecture on the first—February 1895 if life and health permit. I will therefore put West Chester, Penna. for that date. I find myself unable to be as confident in making appointments than I once was. I begin to feel the weight of age. I am glad to know that a few of my Abolitionist friends in West Chester are still living—and it will give me joy to be there.
Yours Truly,
(signed) Frederick Douglass
Frederick Douglass gave his last public lecture on the campus of West Chester University of Pennsylvania on February 1, 1895, 19 days before he died. He was a frequent guest in the town of West Chester, visiting every decade after his escape from slavery in 1838.
Located approximately 25 miles from center city Philadelphia, the Borough of West Chester, originally called Turk's Head, had been a seat of radical abolitionism, primarily due to its Quaker roots and to a certain degree of high-mindedness among its civic leadership. West Chester offered Douglass rest from the demanding schedule of the abolitionist movement, time for fellowship with friends and supporters such as the prominent Darlington family and George Morris Philips, his host on February 1, and the first principal of West Chester Normal School, now West Chester University of Pennsylvania. The borough was an oasis for Douglass, enabling him to relax and reflect upon the stages of a life that made his name among the most internationally recognized of Americans and the most distinguished voice of freedom to come from the African American community in the 19th century.
By the time of this lecture, and nearing his death on February 20, 1895, Douglass's name and recognition were synonymous with social reform, particularly in the movement to abolish chattel slavery. He became famous in 1845 with the publication of the first of three autobiographies, the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave. Written by Himself. The ex-slave wrote compellingly about the experience of chattel slavery. In some of the most memorable prose in American letters, he drew readers into the traumatic experience of this captivity by describing what he saw with his own eyes. His direct accounts and the narrative skills used to tell his story opened up new understandings for his first readers and left a historical document for future generations.
For all of slavery's damage to human souls, Douglass showed how it was possible to transform the trauma of chattel slavery into a triumphant journey toward freedom. One has only to read chapters 6 and 7 of the 1845 Narrative to discover the personal meaning of truth that came to him through reading and writing in an age when slave culture in America forbade it. These two chapters are among a number of exceptional discussions in Douglass's body of writings and speeches in which learning about one's self and the world is achieved through literacy and rigorous thought, although he never spent a day of his life in a schoolroom. And they are two of the best chapters to be found on this subject in Douglass's body of writing. The chapters are repeated in the two autobiographical sequels, My Bondage and My Freedom (1855) and the Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1882). The three autobiographies, a triptych of revelations about his life and times, along with his surviving speeches and editorials, continue to be relevant resources today for understanding the nature of subjugation, its victims, and their malefactors, and the victory made possible through human struggle and growth.
In the brutal and ambiguous world of slavery in which normal human interactions were replaced by unexplainable cruelty and forced acts of human degradation, Douglass and his works are primary sources for having initiated a broader discussion of slavery and eventually its constitutional abolishment.
The struggles of his life made him well known, first as a speaker much sought after for the abolitionist movement and then as a writer. But he made certain to note over and over again in the spoken or written word about his thoughts and feelings that his struggles mirrored the pain of others in bondage and in freedom as well.
While including the major facts and dates surrounding this historical figure, I have attempted in this biography to call attention to the spiritual dimensions of Douglass's life as an important part of his legacy. "Spirituality" is not easy to define, but that does not justify ignoring it when it can help us to understand our subject. I am using it primarily because Douglass used the word. The word exists repeatedly throughout his speeches and written works, although the meaning shifts. Semanticists and other philosophers of language would acknowledge that "spirituality" is a polymorphous term. In other words, it is the name for a wide range of ideas and concepts that have significance in ordinary, day-to-day conversations, usually referring to the unseen and the unexplainable; among philosophers it is a term used to symbolize the process for interpreting meaning in the subjective life; among theologians it is a term for the divine, the supernatural, and the unseen but powerful forces in religious thought and experience.
What are the roots of this spirituality in the slave environment that Douglass knew? We know from sound scholarly sources, especially the seminal histories written by John Blassingame, John Hope Franklin, and Herbert Gutman, much more about the characteristics of slave plantations and slave life than did previous generations. Thanks to their scholarship and the splendid biographies on Douglass by Benjamin Quarles, Philip S. Foner, Nathan Huggins, Waldo Martin, and William McFeely, and the intellectual discussions by David Blight, John Stauffer, Robert S. Levine, Gregory P. Lampe, Maria Diedrich, Charles Blockson, Margaret Aymer, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Houston Baker, David Chesebrough, Cynthia Willett, Paul and Stephen Kendrick, James Oakes, and Robert Wallace, they all demonstrate that slaves were not passive figures at all; in other words, they were not asleep at the switch of their existence. Collectively, the slaves had a capacity for mentally turning down the noisy chatter of their insignificance and turning off many of the negative messages sent out through a culture of bondage that they were nothing at all. Now more than ever, information is available about the survival skills of slaves: the significance of their prayers, their worship rituals, and songs as measures of resistance that sought to alter, at least in their minds, the dismal grind of life for them into the epic development of a group within America's multicultural fabric and its multilayered history.
The former slave turned citizen-reformer spoke and wrote about spirituality as a private source for describing his subjective struggles with identity and for understanding the dynamics of slavery. For Douglass, the word had authority and a number of interpretations that enabled him to explain history to himself and to others as he experienced it, wrote and spoke about it. Beyond the benefits of personal understanding, the word provided him with a vocabulary to articulate the development of his own world vision. In this context, therefore, by reviewing some familiar and some lesser known works from his writings and speeches, I hope to provide a picture of the uses of spirituality as a term embracing the complexity of his feelings, to identify it as a powerful and personal source for establishing his personal identity, and to see it used as a means to present the complexity of his faith. Douglass had faith in the divine, in God, and he was a Christian, but he was not bound to a denomination, although he regularly attended the Washington, D.C., Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church in his later years. It is one of the complexities in examining the role of spirituality in Douglass's life that while he acknowledged a supreme being and was ordained as a youth in the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, he was nevertheless unyieldingly critical in his speeches and writings of religious institutions for their support of slavery.
I have used the names of well-known spirituals from African American culture as chapter titles for this book. They are an acknowledged source of black folk life and they predate acquired literacy in the black community. They are as much a part of a process of critical thought among slaves as they are a part of human history. They are rooted in the collective expression of an oppressed people who uttered words and sounds together, to make sense of their lives, before schooling was permitted and before their music became acceptable to the larger society. This music spoke in simple terms about a complex world the slaves experienced and about those who oppressed them.
The spirituals are of course religious by nature, but their connection with the supernatural or divine is not just to provide a backdrop for the presentation of history and culture. They are meaningful and serious human actions. They were calls to worship. They brought about healing to many and hope against the bleakness of the moment for slaves. They represent artifacts of the past to be sure, but they are as much about today as they are about yesterday. They have evolved within creative hands like Douglass's to mold the literary form we know as the slave narrative. The spirituals became a resource for future novelists, poets, and prose writers. They were also a primary ingredient for the institution we know as the black church, which is not a religious denomination at all, but the name for the powerful religious force in the African American community shielding black women, men, children, and families collectively and individually from the horrific and alienating consequences of racism. And at their core is the use of the Bible.
When Douglass was in Belfast, Ireland, in 1846, speaking on abolitionism, he was presented with a Bible as a token of the Irish reformers regard for him. His response described the importance of the Bible to him:This is an excellent token of your regard. It is just what I want from you. It contains all the Words of Heavenly Wisdom—it is opposed to everything that is wrong and it is in favor of all that is right. It is filled with that Wisdom from above, which is pure, and peaceable, and full of mercies and good fruits, without prolixity, and without hypocrisy. It knows no one by the color of his skin. It confers no privilege upon one class, which it does not confer upon another. The fundamental principle running through and underlying the whole is this—"Whatsoever ye would that men do to you, do you even so to them."
Today, in the celebrated artistry of the painter Jacob Lawrence, the poetry of Rita Dove, and the prose mastery of the Nobel Prize–winning novelist Toni Morrison, the legacy of the spirituals continues as a source for artists and their vision of the human condition. For this book, they serve to remind us of ancient sounds and meanings that gave fortitude to those who had nothing else but hope in the songs to lift them up as they rose with the morning sun. The spirituals are therefore a legacy within any account of the American life of Frederick Douglass.
Chapter 1, "I Been [Re]'Buked," benefits from Frederick's 1845 Narrative, as do most discussions about his early life. It begins on the Wye Plantation in Maryland, with the drama of chattel slavery personalized through its impact on his childhood. Through his story, readers witness the relationships with his grandparents, his loss of childhood innocence, and then participate with him through his exceptional social analysis of the plantation's systematic violence and control of those under its domination. The slave society as presented on the Wye Plantation served to reverse most of the ordinary relationships between human beings. One of the continued interests of this story is the manner in which Douglass's skills as a storyteller are used to illustrate the tragic drama of plantation life itself.
Chapter 2, "Nobody Knows the Trouble I've Seen," follows Frederick's early years when he lived in Baltimore beginning in 1826. One of the ways that slave masters turned a profit was to create a contract with others for the use of their slaves, in return for which the master received the slave's pay. The centerpiece of this chapter is Frederick's intellectual growth shown by describing the events leading to his learning to read and the circumstances under which that happened. The growth discussed in the chapter was physical and mental, as the restlessness of his nature became abundantly clear to his masters. One book, The Columbian Orator, helped him to think through some of the critical questions related to his own personal identity and slavery. We then see him organizing an escape from freedom, only to realize failure at first. Hugh Auld, his master, sends him back to live in St. Michaels, where he confronts the slave-breaker Covey. It is an episode that changed Frederick's life. He is then sent back to Baltimore where he meets the love of his life, Anna Murray. He escapes from chattel slavery with Anna's help. He becomes a father for the first time and learns about the political strategies for abolishing slavery, setting the path for a career in political reform. The efforts to escape the plantation are described alongside his determination to become a free man, a family man, and a responsible citizen.
Chapter 3, "Amazing Grace," focuses upon Frederick's initial response to freedom after having escaped slavery in 1838. The chapter describes the new life for the fugitive and his bride. His contacts with the Underground Railroad in New Bedford result in his changing his name, which for slaves and others is an important part of the American experience. We see him living in relative freedom, although there was always the threat of slave catchers. Frederick attended abolitionist meetings in New Bedford, Massachusetts, and met William Lloyd Garrison, the leader of the radical wing of the movement and certainly one of its most passionate voices. When he heard Frederick speak, he heard something special. It was the authentic and articulate voice that the struggling abolitionist movement needed to affirm itself and its public repudiation of slavery. Their meeting became mutually beneficial as each found a need for the other and their common goal: the elimination of slavery. Garrison's abolitionist group hired Frederick to lecture. Those lectures became the basis for his first autobiography. Threats to his life follow, forcing him to leave the United States for a lecture series in England, the British Isles, and in Ireland. He was an innocent abroad when he landed in Liverpool in 1845. Less than two years later, however, his speeches and lectures had been so well received that their success transformed him into a celebrity for the abolitionist movement. In England, the antislavery organization in England, led by British women, raised enough money to purchase his freedom from his Maryland master, Thomas Auld.
Chapter 4, "Steal Away," traces Frederick's return from a nearly two-year exile in Europe to his founding of the North Star in 1847, an abolitionist newspaper. The turn to journalism represented his movement into the mainstream where he could expand upon his work and voice as a social reformer. At this point in his life, we see him engaging feminist leadership, writing on women's rights, and increasingly receiving their help and support on other political topics. Julia Griffiths and Ottilie Assing represent European women who come to America and are part of his life. These white women were the sources of innuendo given 19th-century attitudes toward black and white relationships. Frederick is now confronting society as a free man, developing his own independent thoughts on the ideas commonly held by the abolitionist movement, especially the Garrison branch of it. The year 1848 is as important as any in his life. For the first time, he meets with John Brown and over the next decade converses with Brown about the Kansas preacher's plans to eliminate slavery with the famed insurrection at the military arsenal at Harper's Ferry in Virginia. Later in 1848, Douglass joined the feminists at the Seneca Falls Convention in New York. In the next decade, he delivered the signature speeches of his career on American democracy and slavery in the famous 1852 Corinthian Hall address, "What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?" Five years later he presented a critique of American law by challenging the Supreme Court in its ruling of the Dred Scott decision of 1857, a case famous for its legalizing slavery and for denying the slave citizenship. In addition to these speeches, other important speeches are highlighted in a decade in which Douglass's voice bursts forth for justice while he distances himself from the bedrock Garrison belief that the Constitution is a slave document.
Chapter 5, "Wrestlin' Jacob," follows the significance of John Brown's attack on Harper's Ferry in 1859 and its consequences. Douglass is linked with Brown's assault and is forced to flee the country, first to Canada and then to England. The Civil War dominates the decade of the 1860s with Douglass's life divided between the politics of recruiting black men for the Union army and making the case for the Emancipation Proclamation. He meets with President Abraham Lincoln three times, urging him on two of these occasions to use the momentum of the Emancipation Proclamation to push for an end to slavery and to enlist black men as soldiers in the war. Lincoln's death leaves Douglass without a valuable ally, but nothing deters him from his quest to push for legislation that would create citizenship status for blacks.
In chapter 6, "Roll, Jordan, Roll," we see Frederick Douglass serving the cause of social and political reform in several capacities. With the end of the Civil War, he reached out to support radical Republican reconstruction plans and continued his advisory role with U.S. presidents, meeting first with President Andrew Johnson and later campaigning for President Ulysses S. Grant. We also see him resuming his conversation with women leaders and extending his public service. At one point during the 1870s, he is nominated for the office of vice president of the United States. He did not run for the office but he did accept several other appointments, including serving as the president of the Freedmen's Bank. President Benjamin Harrison appointed him to lead the diplomatic mission to Haiti and to the Dominican Republic. He also paid a sentimental visit to his former slave owner and his home on the Maryland eastern shore. He then resumed his journalistic career by purchasing majority ownership of the New National Era newspaper. A fire destroyed his Rochester home, which led him to move his family to Washington. In addition, this is also a period of very profound personal change and loss. Anna, his wife of 44 years, died. He remarried Helen Pitts, a white woman, the union between the two creating its own controversy as a result of their racially mixed marriage. Finally, the chapter concludes by discussing his leadership role in the Chicago World's Fair of 1892.
Chapter 7, "Climbing Jacob's Ladder," ends the book by considering the subject of Douglass's legacy. One source for discussing Douglass's place in history is his own self-reflections. He is well aware of the significance of his life. Another and perhaps more persuasive source is his impact on others, using here as a case in point his impact on the renowned painter Jacob Lawrence, whose earliest work was inspired by Douglass's life. Although there are numerous examples of Douglass's presence in world culture, the final chapter argues for his life to resonate on a broad contemporary scale, with none more fitting than continuing to bring his life before today's readers, and thus continue his legacy of agitating for a better world and a more effective democracy for all of us.
NOTES1. Margaret P. Aymer, First Pure, Then Peaceable: Frederick Douglass, Darkness and the Epistle of James, New York: T &T Clark International, 2008, p. 1.

About the Author

C. James Trotman, PhD, is professor of English and founding director of the Frederick Douglass Institute at West Chester University, West Chester, PA.