As a stalwart Republican, he was appointed marshall (1877-81) and recorder of deeds (1881-86) for the District of Columbia, and chargé d'affaires for Santo Domingo and minister to Haiti (1889-91). He traveled and lectured widely on racial issues, but his most popular topic was "Self-Made Men." By the 1870s Douglass had moved to Washington, D.C., where he edited the newspaper The New National Era and became president of the ill-fated Freedmen's Bank. During Reconstruction and the Gilded Age Douglass's leadership became less activist and more emblematic. Douglass made a major contribution to the intellectual tradition of millennial nationalism, the outlook from which many Americans, North and South, interpreted the Civil War. During the war he labored as a fierce propagandist of the Union cause and emancipation, as a recruiter of black troops, and on two occasions as an advisor to President Abraham Lincoln. In thousands of speeches and editorials Douglass levied an irresistible indictment against slavery and racism, provided an indomitable voice of hope for his people, embraced antislavery politics, and preached his own brand of American ideals.ĭouglass welcomed the Civil War in 1861 as a moral crusade to eradicate the evil of slavery. Douglass achieved international fame as an orator with few peers and as a writer of persuasive power. Douglass lived the bulk of his career in Rochester, N.Y., where for 16 years he edited the most influential black newspaper of the mid-19th century, called successively The North Star (1847-51), Frederick Douglass' Paper (1851-58), and The Douglass Monthly (1859-63). Written both as antislavery propaganda and as personal revelation, they are universally regarded as the finest examples of the slave narrative tradition and as classics of American autobiography.ĭouglass's public life ranged from his work as an abolitionist in the early 1840s to his attacks on Jim Crow segregation in the 1890s. This and two subsequent autobiographies, My Bondage and My Freedom (1855) and The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881), mark Douglass's greatest contributions to southern culture. Douglass immortalized his formative years as a slave in the first of three autobiographies, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, published in 1845. Upon his escape from slavery at age 20, Douglass adopted a new surname from the hero of Sir Walter Scott's The Lady of the Lake. He was born Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey, in Talbot County, on Maryland's Eastern Shore in 1808, the son of a slave woman, and in all likelihood, her white master. Douglass, Frederick (1808-1895) Black leader.įrederick Douglass was the most important black American leader of the 19th century.
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