Frederick Douglass

Who Was Frederick Douglass?

Frederick Douglass was the most important African American leader of the nineteenth century and one of the finest writers and orators in American history — a man who escaped from slavery and became the most effective advocate for its abolition, whose three autobiographies constitute the most significant body of slave narrative literature, and whose 1852 address “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” remains the most powerful piece of prophetic rhetoric in American literary history.

Born into slavery in Talbot County, Maryland, around 1818 (he never knew his exact birth date), he taught himself to read against the explicit wishes of his enslaver, escaped to the North in 1838, and within three years had become the most celebrated speaker on the abolitionist circuit. His Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845), written to prove that he had actually been enslaved, is the founding text of the African American literary tradition.

His theological significance is inseparable from his literary significance. He understood, with unusual clarity, that the Christianity which sanctioned slavery was a perversion of the gospel and that the genuine gospel was the most powerful argument against slavery available. His appendix to the Narrative — distinguishing between “the slaveholding religion of this land” and “the Christianity of Christ” — is one of the most important theological statements in American literature.

In Their Own Words

Selected Bibliography

• Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave — 1845
• My Bondage and My Freedom — 1855
• What to the Slave is the Fourth of July? — 1852 — speech
• Life and Times of Frederick Douglass — 1881, revised 1892