Frederick Douglass - Life and Times of Frederick Douglass: Written by Himself

Frederick Douglass was born into slavery as Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey in Maryland, U.S.A., in February 1818. Barely escaping the hell of unending slavery with his life, he went on to become the most famous antislavery and human rights author, orator, philosopher, and freedom-fighter of African descent in U.S. history. A witness to the blood-stained hell of slavery, Douglass told and retold the story of the slave in impassioned speeches he delivered to audiences in their thousands. In 1845, he published his first autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave. In the same year, he crossed the Atlantic Ocean for an eighteen-month tour campaigning for the end of slavery in Scotland, Ireland, Wales, and England. On his return to the U.S.A., he began editing his own newspapers, The North Star, later Frederick Douglass Paper, Douglass Monthly, and The New National Era. Living in Rochester, New York, he and his familyhis wife Anna Murray, his daughters Rosetta and Annie, and his sons, Lewis Henry, Frederick Jr, and Charles Remond Douglassworked tirelessly as conductors on the Underground Railroad: the clandestine system of safe houses and transportation networks which made it possible for thousands of women, men, and children escaping from the southern enslaving states to make it to liberty. In 1853, he wrote his novella, The Heroic Slave, and in 1855, he published his second autobiography, My Bondage and My Freedom. During the Civil War, he acted as a recruiting agent for Black soldiers while his sons, Lewis Henry and Charles Remond Douglass, served in segregated combat regiments. In the post-emancipation era, he campaigned for the rights of my people to all legal, social, and political freedoms. He not only delivered speeches and wrote essays and letters in which he protested against the survival of the spirit of slavery as well as the spirit of mastery in white racist persecution, murder, segregation, and lynchlaw but he continued his fight for womens rights, temperance reform, and education for all. In 1881, he published his final autobiography, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass Written By Himself which he extended in 1892. He held numerous government positions, including his appointments as U.S. Marshal, Recorder of Deeds, and Minister-Resident-and-Consul-General to Haiti. Douglass died in Washington, D.C., on 20 February 1895.

Celeste-Marie Bernier is Professor of United States and Atlantic Studies at the University of Edinburgh. She is the author of African American Visual Arts (2008), Characters of Blood (2012), Suffering and Sunset (2015), Stick to the Skin (2018), and Battleground (2022). Her co-authored works include Picturing Frederick Douglass (2015; 2018), Visualizing Slavery (2017), Nineteenth-Century American Letters and Letter-Writing (2017), Pictures and Power: Imaging and Imagining Frederick Douglass (18182018) (2018), If I Survive: The Frederick Douglass Family in the Walter O. Evans Collection (2018), and Inside the Invisible (2019). She is editor of Frederick Douglass Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave (2018), My Bondage and My Freedom (2019), and co-editor of Life and Times of Frederick Douglass Written By Himself (2022). She is author of the forthcoming The Anna Murray and Frederick Douglass Family Papers Collection Volumes 15, The Anna Murray and Frederick Douglass Family Reader, and Douglass Family Lives: The Biography.

Andrew Taylor is Professor of American Literature at the University of Edinburgh. He has published on numerous aspects of nineteenth- and twentieth-century American writing.