Frederick Douglass: First Editorial of the North Star

About the Author

Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey was born in a slave cabin at the Holme Hill Farm in Talbot County, Maryland, in February 1818. Later changing his name to Frederick Douglass, he became renowned as a civil rights activist and eternal opponent of slavery. He spent twenty years in slavery, first on Maryland’s Eastern Shore and then in the shipbuilding city of Baltimore. During his years in bondage, he was the property of two men, first Aaron Anthony, who may have been his father, and then Thomas Auld, who inherited Douglass in the distribution of Anthony’s estate. He learned to read and write with the assistance of one of his owners and from white youths with whom he traded food for lessons. His favorite lesson book was The Columbian Orator, a collection of famous speeches, which helped him develop his skill as a public speaker. When he was twenty, Douglass borrowed identity papers from a free black sailor and, on September 3, 1838, boarded a train to freedom in the North.

Douglass was assisted in his escape by Anna Murray, a free black woman from Baltimore. He was reunited with her when he reached New York City, and on September 15, 1838, the two were married. They settled in New Bedford, Massachusetts, where he hoped to find employment as a caulker. However, racial segregation was more evident in the shipyards of New Bedford than in Baltimore, where whites and blacks often worked side by side. Douglass worked for three years in the only job he could find, as a stevedore loading and unloading cargo from the harbor’s ships. He also began to read antislavery newspapers and interact with the abolitionist community. In August 1841 he was invited to address an abolitionist meeting on Nantucket Island in Massachusetts, where he detailed his personal experience in slavery. Soon after, he was hired as an antislavery lecturer by the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society and toured New England and the western states with other abolitionists. Among his new associates was William Lloyd Garrison, publisher of the antislavery weekly, The Liberator, and the most prominent white abolitionist in the North.

Douglass became an accomplished lecturer and the most recognized black abolitionist of the pre–Civil War era. In 1845 he published his first autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself. To dispel the criticism of those who did not believe that he had ever been enslaved, Douglass departed from the common practice of slave narrative authors of hiding their own identity and disguising names and locations. His autobiography named his slave owner and described events, including his torture and that of other slaves, and locations and individuals with whom he had interacted as a slave in Maryland. Because he was still legally a fugitive slave at the time of the Narrative’s publication, and thus subject to capture and return to Maryland, Douglass was advised to put himself out of harm’s way abroad. He embarked on a lengthy tour of Great Britain and Ireland, traveling in the company of other American and British reformers and gaining an international reputation as America’s most famous fugitive slave. He experienced significantly less discrimination and had the opportunity to meet activists involved in a variety of causes in addition to the abolition of slavery.

British reformers raised funds to purchase Douglass’s freedom and permit his return to the United States. Following the publication of Douglass’s autobiography, Thomas Auld transferred ownership of Douglass to his brother Hugh Auld for the sum of $100. The reformers Anna and Henry Richardson negotiated the purchase of Douglass’s freedom for the sum of 150 sterling, or approximately $711.66 in U.S. currency. A combination of British and American abolitionists coordinated the purchase, and Hugh Auld filed Douglass’s manumission papers in Baltimore County, Maryland, on December 5, 1846. On that date, more than eight years after leaving slavery, Douglass legally became a free man.

Douglass’s reform colleagues in Britain were also eager to aid in his aspirations to begin his own antislavery paper. Fund-raising in England raised $2,175. When this money was combined with the money contributed by reformers in other areas of Britain and Ireland, Douglass left for home with almost $4,000 to begin operation of his weekly antislavery newspaper the North Star. Returning to the United States in the spring of 1847, Douglass moved his family to Rochester, New York, and began publication on December 3. He continued to lecture on the evils of slavery but broke away from his association with Garrison in 1851 to pursue a brand of antislavery activism that embraced politics. He renamed the weekly Frederick Douglass’ Paper and made it an organ for the antislavery Liberty Party. In contrast to the Garrisonians, who rejected politics and condemned the Constitution as a proslavery document, Douglass came to associate with politically active abolitionists first in the Liberty Party and then in the Free Soil and Republican Parties.

Douglass continued to advocate for civil rights and the abolition of slavery. During the Civil War, he acted as an army recruiter and saw two of his sons enlist in the famed Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts Infantry unit. He was twice invited to the White House to advise President Abraham Lincoln on the participation of African Americans in the Union war effort. In 1872, Douglass moved his family to Washington, D.C., where he served briefly as president of the Freedman’s Savings Bank in 1874. He subsequently held minor political appointments as a U.S. marshal and as recorder of deeds for the District of Columbia. In 1889, President Benjamin Harrison appointed him as resident minister and consul general (ambassador) to Haiti. Douglass died at Cedar Hill, his home in Washington, D.C., on February 20, 1895.