Basic Information
Name: Frederick Douglass
Nickname: Douglass was born Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey, so go ahead and toss out any stereotypes you've heard about slaves not having impressive names.
But what's tops on the to-do list when you escape slavery? Not getting re-enslaved.
With that in mind, Douglass changed his name twice. First, he went with Frederick Johnson. Later, he and his wife switched to Douglass, after the protagonist of Sir Walter Scott's poem, The Lady of the Lake. They added an extra "s," though, and Shmoop is always in favor of adding more letters of our beloved alphabet. (We were born Shmop.)
Born: Like many slaves, Douglass didn't know his exact birthday. His best guess was sometime in February 1818. Douglass' mom called him her little Valentine and baked him a heart-shaped cake prior to their separation, so he celebrated Valentine's Day, February 14, as his birthday.
Died: February 20, 1895
Nationality: U.S.
Hometown: Talbot County, Maryland
WORK & EDUCATION
Occupation: Douglass was a man of many talents and many trades. He was born into slavery and worked on various farms in Maryland. As a child, he also served as a companion to the white son of a plantation owner. Once he escaped to the North, he became active in the abolition movement as a writer, activist, newspaper publisher, and speaker. Later on, he worked for Union causes during the Civil War, and afterward he served the U.S. government as a diplomat. Suddenly, we feel like our résumé is looking a little thin.
Education: For some time during his childhood, Douglass lived with the Auld family, where Sophia Auld, wife of the plantation owner, taught him to read. Her husband soon red-lighted the lessons, but Douglass had learned enough to keep teaching himself by watching others read and write. Eventually, he became mostly self-educated, thanks his bookaholic ways. The Columbian Orator, a classroom reader for rhetoric and grammar, was his fave. It was one of the few things he took with him when he escaped slavery.
FAMILY & FRIENDS
Parents: Douglass' mother was an enslaved woman named Harriet. He saw her only occasionally and was mostly raised by his grandmother, another slave named Betty Bailey. The only thing he knew for sure about his father was that he was white. The overseer Aaron Anthony has been suggested as the most likely dude.
Siblings: Douglass mentions "my four sisters and my brothers" (30) in "The Church and Prejudice." His grandmother was responsible for caring for about a dozen children when Douglass was a child. He considered them his brothers, sisters, and cousins, though the actual biological relationship might have been different or…nonexistent. Douglass had four sisters named Sarah, Eliza, Kitty, and Arianna, and a brother named Perry.
Spouse: Douglass' first wife was Anna Murray (1813-1882), the free black woman who helped him escape slavery on September 3, 1838. She followed him to New York, where they were married on September 15, 1838 and stayed married until her death in 1882. Douglass married white feminist Helen Pitts (1838-1903) in 1884. They were married until his death in 1895.
Children: Douglass had five children with his first wife, Anna Murray:
Rosetta Douglass (1839-1906)
Lewis Henry Douglass (1840-1908)
Frederick Douglass, Jr. (1842-1892)
Charles Remond Douglass (1844-1920)
Annie Douglass (1849-1859)
Friends: Abolitionists, supporters of women's rights, progressive politicians and philosophers
Foes: Slaveholders and supporters of slavery, opponents of women's rights, less progressive politicians and philosophers, religious hypocrites
Douglass famously said, "I would unite with anybody to do right and with nobody to do wrong." Douglass was a political activist with a long career (think over fifty years), so he aligned with or opposed many of the same people at different times.
Over the course of half a century, he worked with or against people like William Lloyd Garrison, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and even Abraham Lincoln. Sometimes Douglass would even get into it with another activist, but then they'd kiss and make up.
Welcome to politics, people.
Analysis
Check out our in-depth biography of Douglass, and then come on back.
Ready? Okay. Now we're going to zoom in and take a closer look at how Douglass' faith informed his belief in abolition. This is "The Church and Prejudice," after all.
When Douglass Was a Child, He Thought Like an Activist
In the first line of "The Church and Prejudice," Douglass declares: "At the South I was a member of the Methodist Church."
Context:
Douglass grew up during the Second Great Awakening, a time of religious revival, especially among the Methodist, Baptist, and Presbyterian denominations. In the early years of the 19th century, religious beliefs brought from Africa became less prominent, and more African Americans began to embrace Christianity.
Simultaneously, many slaveholders became more concerned with what they considered their paternalistic duty toward their slaves—namely, to convert them to Christianity and save their souls.
Er…
In some cases, this backfired, because religious philosophy in the Second Great Awakening took seriously the following verses from the Bible:
So in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith, for all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. If you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham's seed, and heirs according to the promise. (Galatians)
Well, they weren't going to get too crazy and go for that whole "no male or female" thing. "Walk it back, there, Paul," said the 19th century church. Women were obviously not as holy as men. But racial equality? Yeah, that they could see.
If everyone was the same in Christ, Douglass and many others wondered, then how was slavery okay?
Conclusion: It wasn't. And boom: problem solved, right?
If only it were that simple. Unsurprisingly, not everyone reached the same conclusion about that pesky verse from Galatians. Still, Douglass believed it, and that belief in God's mandate for racial equality informed his work in the abolition movement and most of his speeches and written work. (To Douglass' credit, he also believed in and worked for gender equality.)
Douglass started a secret Sunday School to teach slaves to read in 1835, three years before his escape. He remembered: "I had at one time over forty scholars, and those of the right sort, ardently desiring to learn. They were of all ages, though mostly men and women. I look back to those Sundays with an amount of pleasure not to be expressed. They were great days to my soul" (source).
In other words, expressing his faith through education was Douglass' jam.
At the time, there was a big kerfuffle over whether or not slaveholders should teach slaves to read. By the time Douglass escaped, it was illegal in most places, but some slaveholders still felt that they had an obligation to enable their slaves to read so they could read the biggie: the Bible.
Talk about a catch-22 for slaveholders: They believed God had given them responsibility for their slaves' immortal souls, but they also really didn't want those slaves using that information to organize and rebel and perhaps send the masters' souls to heaven in the near future.
Tough noogies, as they say.
When Douglass Became a Man
When he moved to New Bedford, Massachusetts shortly after escaping from slavery, Douglass found that Methodist churches in the North still suffered from prejudice and segregation (as he discusses in "The Church and Prejudice"). He became an ordained minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Zion church in 1839, but eventually broke with that church as well because it wasn't devoted enough to the cause of abolition.
Not a lot of options here.
At an integrated Methodist church in New Bedford, Douglass met leading abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, who became his mentor in the anti-slavery movement, encouraging him to write and speak out against slavery.
He was so good at it that, early in Douglass' career, many people didn't believe he could have been a slave: he spoke and wrote too well. In response to the doubters, he wrote his first autobiography in 1845, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. In it, he calls out American Christianity:
I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ: I therefore hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land. Indeed, I can see no reason, but the most deceitful one, for calling the religion of this land Christianity. I look upon it as the climax of all misnomers, the boldest of all frauds, and the grossest of all libels… (Source).
Tell us what you really think, Mr. Douglass.
He also recognized the inherent irony in the use of the Bible—in which Jesus claims to have come to set oppressed people free—to defend slavery. He wasn't having any of that, and he frequently noted how convenient it was for slaveholders to claim, "The Bible tells me so," re: owning slaves.
We have men sold to build churches, women sold to support the gospel and babes sold to purchase Bibles for the poor heathen! all for the glory of God and the good of souls! The slave auctioneer's bell and the church-going bell chime in with each other, and the bitter cries of the heart-broken slaves are drowned in the religious shouts of his pious master. Revivals of religion and revivals of the slave trade go hand in hand. (Source)
It's sickening to think of churches using and selling slaves as part of fundraisers, but that's what was going down at the time.
In Douglass' weekly newspaper, The North Star, which he started in 1847, he frequently asked readers to compare and contrast the Christianity of Christ with American Christianity and the practice of slavery. He knew which conclusion they should come to: American Christianity has very little to do with Christ at all.
Douglass died in 1895, shortly after attending a meeting of the National Council for Women, but he's been a household name ever since.
The man who was probably the most well-known African American of the 18th century is a topic of a bunch of exhibits at the new Museum of African American History and Culture on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. To honor the museum's opening in 2017, President Trump made specific reference to Douglass as "an example of someone who's done amazing things and is being recognized more and more, I notice" (source).
Sounds like the great man just stepped out for coffee.