Frederick Douglass: Letter “To My Old Master”

About the Author

Heralded as one of the most significant civil rights activists of the nineteenth century, Frederick Douglass was born a slave in Talbot County, Maryland, on February 7, 1818. From the most humble of beginnings, Douglass rose to become a world-famous orator, newspaper editor, and champion of the rights of women and African Americans.

Known in his youth as Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey, Douglass spent his first twenty years in bondage, first on a plantation owned by Edward Lloyd IV and then in the shipbuilding city of Baltimore, Maryland. Although it was illegal for slaves to gain an education, Douglass learned to read and write with the aid of his master's wife and through his own ingenuity. During his time in Baltimore, he secured a copy of Caleb Bingham's Columbian Orator, a collection of speeches by famous orators and politicians. The experience gained from practicing these speeches led Douglass to develop a powerful oratorical style that later allowed him to hold sway with audiences around the world.

Douglass began his life in freedom on September 3, 1838, when at the age of twenty he fled Baltimore, boarded a train, and headed for freedom in the North. Settling in New Bedford, Massachusetts, he changed his last name to Douglass and subsequently became acquainted with the movement to abolish slavery. In 1841 he was invited to speak before an antislavery meeting at Nantucket, Massachusetts, and was soon hired as a lecturing agent for the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society. His lectures detailing his experience in slavery were so eloquent that some charged that Douglass was an imposter who could never have been enslaved. In response, in 1845 he penned the first of three autobiographies, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, quieting his critics by offering details of his life in slavery, including the name of his master, Thomas Auld. He also spoke critically of Auld's brother, Hugh, with whom Douglass had lived during many of his years in slavery. Following the publication of the Narrative, Hugh Auld purchased Douglass from his brother and determined to bring him back to slavery in Maryland. To escape capture, Douglass departed for an extended tour of Ireland and Great Britain following publication of the Narrative and, through his many lectures there, gained an international reputation as an orator and reformer. His British admirers paid Douglass's slave master $711.66, and he returned to the United States a truly free man in April 1847.

For the remainder of the antebellum years, Douglass fought tirelessly for the rights of African Americans, for the abolition of slavery, and for women's rights. In 1848 he attended the Seneca Falls Convention on women's rights, where he persuaded the gathering to support a resolution calling for women's right to vote. While he continued to lecture on behalf of the antislavery movement, Douglass's reform horizon expanded to include temperance and especially voting and civil rights for black Americans. In the period 1847 through 1861, he edited a succession of newspapers beginning with the North Star. In 1851 Douglass's activism took a more political turn, and he renamed his weekly Frederick Douglass' Paper; it became an important organ for the antislavery Liberty Party. Once the Civil War erupted in 1861, Douglass supported the Union war effort and acted as a recruiter for African American troops. Twice during the war he was invited to the White House to advise President Abraham Lincoln on the participation of blacks in the war effort.

Following the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865, Douglass rejoiced in the official abolition of slavery in the United States. He turned his efforts toward gaining the vote for African American men through the Fifteenth Amendment and improving the condition of his fellow black Americans. He also benefited from continued loyalty to the Republican Party through appointment to several offices. Douglass moved his family to Washington, D.C., in 1872 to be nearer the center of political change and served briefly as president of the Freedman's Savings Bank in 1874. As Reconstruction came to a close, President Rutherford B. Hayes appointed Douglass U.S. marshal for the District of Columbia. This post was followed in 1881 by his appointment by President James A. Garfield to the lucrative position of recorder of deeds for the District, whereby Douglass received a commission from all land transactions recorded in the office. His prominence and knowledge of world events led President Benjamin Harrison to designate Douglass as resident minister and consul general to the nation of Haiti, a post he held from 1889 to 1891, through the controversial attempt of the United States to secure a naval base on the island. Although his ministry left him on poor terms with some in Washington, Haiti appointed Douglass commissioner of that nation's pavilion at the World's Columbian Exposition held at Chicago in 1893.