Who Was Frederick Douglass? Escaped, Self-Educated and the Most Photographed Man of His Century

The episode he returned to throughout his life took place when he was around eight, sent to Baltimore as a household servant. His owner's wife began teaching him the alphabet, and her husband stopped it, telling her that education would make a slave unmanageable and unfit to be a slave. Douglass wrote that he understood at that moment exactly what the path from slavery to freedom was, and he set about obtaining it by trading bread to white boys in the street for reading lessons and by studying a book of speeches on liberty that he bought with money earned shining shoes. The insight he drew, and repeated for fifty years, was that slavery depended on ignorance as a matter of policy rather than accident, and that literacy was therefore a political act. He later taught other enslaved people to read in a secret Sunday school that was broken up by armed men.

He escaped on 3 September 1838, dressed as a sailor and carrying identification papers borrowed from a free Black seaman, travelling by train and steamboat to New York in under twenty-four hours. He did not describe the method in print until 1881, because doing so would have closed the route for others. Settled in New Bedford, he began speaking at abolitionist meetings, and his effect on audiences was immediate: he was tall, had a powerful voice, and spoke with a command that led some listeners to doubt he had ever been enslaved, which is one reason he wrote his first autobiography in 1845. Publishing it under his own name identified him to his legal owner and made him liable to be seized and returned, so he sailed for Britain and Ireland, where he spoke for two years to enormous audiences, and where British supporters raised the money to purchase his legal freedom, a transaction he accepted and that some abolitionists criticised as legitimising the idea that a person could be bought.

His speeches and writing worked by a consistent method, which was to take his audience's own stated principles and hold them against their practice:

• •The 1852 address usually known by the question of what the Fourth of July means to a slave, delivered to an anti-slavery society in Rochester, which praises the founders at length and then turns to say that the celebration is not his and that the sunlight that warmed his hearers brought stripes and death to him
• •A break with the abolitionist leader William Lloyd Garrison over whether the American constitution was a pro-slavery document, with Garrison burning a copy and Douglass arguing after study that it could be read as an anti-slavery instrument and should be used as one
• •Sustained insistence that Black men should be permitted to fight in the Civil War, which he pressed on Lincoln in person, and after which he recruited for the Massachusetts regiments, including two of his own sons
• •Support for women's suffrage from the start, attending the Seneca Falls convention in 1848 and speaking for the resolution on the vote when it was in doubt, though he later split with former allies over whether Black male suffrage should be pursued ahead of women's
• •A refusal of the paternalism common among his white allies, who had suggested he speak more simply and let them do the analysis, which he pointedly declined

He sat for at least one hundred and sixty separate photographs, more than any other American of the century, and he did it deliberately. His reasoning, set out in several lectures on pictures, was that the visual culture of the period depicted Black people almost exclusively through caricature, in cartoons, minstrel imagery and the grotesque illustrations that accompanied even sympathetic publications, and that photography was a technology that could not caricature because it recorded what was in front of it. He never smiled in a portrait, dressed formally, and looked directly or slightly past the camera with an expression of composed severity, presenting an image of dignity and intellect that contradicted the available stereotypes by existing. He also understood distribution, and the portraits circulated as cartes de visite, the cheap collectible format of the period, reaching households that would never attend a lecture.

Emancipation did not end the work and he was clear-eyed about that. He held federal appointments including marshal of the District of Columbia and consul general to Haiti, spoke continuously about the collapse of Reconstruction, the rise of lynching and the abandonment of Black southerners by northern allies, and coined formulations about agitation and power conceding nothing without a demand that have been quoted ever since. His second marriage, to Helen Pitts, a white woman and a former colleague, in 1884, produced hostility from both families and from the public, and he replied that his first wife had been the colour of his mother and his second the colour of his father. He died in 1895 on the day he had spent at a women's rights meeting. His three autobiographies, revised and expanded across forty years, are among the most important American texts of the century, and the 1845 narrative remains the standard first-hand account of what the system was.

Born into slavery around 1818, he learned to read after his owner forbade it, escaped in 1838 dressed as a sailor with borrowed papers, and became the century's most prominent Black American orator and writer. He published his own name in 1845 despite the legal risk, spent two years speaking in Britain, broke with Garrison over whether the constitution could be used against slavery, pressed Lincoln to let Black men enlist, and sat for more photographs than any other American because the alternative images available were caricatures.