Frederick Douglass

Life

Douglass was born into slavery around February 1818 on a plantation in Talbot County, Maryland. His birth name was Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey. Because no record of his birth existed, he later adopted February 14 as his birthday. As a boy working in Baltimore, he secretly learned to read and write.

In 1838 he escaped to the North and settled in New Bedford, Massachusetts, and that same year he married Anna Murray. Around this time he took the surname "Douglass" from a character in Walter Scott's poem The Lady of the Lake. In 1847 he moved to Rochester, New York, and in his later years he lived in Washington, D.C. He died in Washington on February 20, 1895, and was buried in Rochester.

Ministry and Achievements

In New Bedford he initially attended a white Methodist church. After witnessing the discriminatory practice of seating Black members separately at the back, however, he left that church. He then joined the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church (AME Zion), a Methodist denomination founded by Black Christians in New York in 1821. There he received a license to preach and became a lay preacher. A historian of the denomination explains that he was not an ordained minister but served in such roles as steward (an office responsible for the church's material affairs) and Sunday school superintendent. Some sources, however, state that he was ordained.

In 1841 he gained recognition for an impromptu speech at an abolitionist meeting in Nantucket. He published three autobiographies, in 1845, 1855, and 1881. In December 1847 he founded the abolitionist newspaper The North Star in Rochester; the paper is said to have been produced in the basement of an AME Zion church. In his July 5, 1852, speech "What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?" he charged that the ideals of liberty proclaimed by America were nothing but an insult to the enslaved. He later became the first Black United States Marshal, serving in Washington, D.C. (1877–1881). He went on to serve as Recorder of Deeds for Washington, D.C. (1881–1886) and as U.S. Minister Resident and Consul General to Haiti (1889–1891).

Critique of the Church

In the appendix to his first autobiography, Douglass wrote that "the Christianity of this land" and "the Christianity of Christ" were utterly different. He also made clear that what he was criticizing was the American religion that upheld slavery, not Christianity itself. He likened the faith of slaveholders to the hypocrisy of those who "strain at a gnat, and swallow a camel" (Matthew 23:24). In his 1852 speech he likewise rebuked the American churches that shielded slavery, contrasting them with the British churches that opposed it.

Assessment

• He is regarded as the most important African American leader of the nineteenth century.
• The Episcopal Church observes February 20 as his commemoration in its liturgical calendar.
• Because he sharply criticized churches that justified slavery, his writings were sometimes read as a rejection of religion itself. He stated explicitly that he added the appendix to his autobiography to prevent such a misunderstanding.
• He also supported women's suffrage. During Reconstruction (the period immediately after the Civil War when the Southern states were reintegrated into the Union), however, he is known to have stopped pressing for the inclusion of women in the Fifteenth Amendment, out of concern that including them would block ratification in a number of states.