50 Fun Facts About Frederick Douglass

Frederick Douglass was born with his mother Harriet's surname; what was it?

Bailey: his mother named him Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey. He fled Baltimore in 1838 as 'Stanley', became 'Johnson' in New York, and only then took the name he made famous.

In which state was Douglass born into slavery?

Maryland, on the Eastern Shore of Chesapeake Bay. His mother was hired out twelve miles away and could visit only by walking there at night after a day in the fields; he saw her only a handful of times before she died.

Douglass never knew his birth date; which day did he choose to celebrate it, in memory of his mother?

Valentine's Day. On the last night he saw his mother she took him on her knee and gave him a ginger cake shaped like a heart, and he is said to have picked February 14 for that reason.

Who began teaching the young Douglass his ABCs in Baltimore, until her husband ordered her to stop?

Sophia Auld. Her husband forbade the lessons, warning that reading would 'forever unfit him to be a slave'; the boy took that as proof that literacy was the pathway from slavery to freedom.

At about twelve, Douglass bought which book of speeches and dialogues that shaped his case against slavery?

The Columbian Orator, a popular schoolbook he bought for 50 cents earned shining boots. In one dialogue an enslaved man out-argues his master and is set free, which gave the boy words for what he already felt.

Douglass fought and defeated which 'slave-breaker' at the age of 16?

Edward Covey never laid a hand on him again after the fight. Douglass guessed why he was never sent to the whipping-post for it: a famous breaker of men could not admit that a boy of sixteen had beaten him.

What trade did the teenage Douglass learn on the Baltimore waterfront, soon earning top wages that went to his enslaver?

Ship caulker, sealing hull seams with mallet and irons. Within a year he commanded the highest wages in the yards, and had to hand over every cent each Saturday night, an injustice that hardened his resolve to run.

On September 3, 1838, Douglass escaped Baltimore by what means?

Boarding a northbound train dressed as a sailor, with papers borrowed from a free Black seaman. The conductor gave them the merest glance, and by rail, ferry and steamboat he reached New York in under 24 hours.

Whose savings paid for Douglass's escape from Baltimore in 1838?

Anna Murray, his future wife, was a free Black woman who risked her own safety to pay a fugitive's way. She followed him to New York, and they married eleven days after he arrived.

Douglass's surname was suggested by a friend who had just read which poem by Walter Scott?

The Lady of the Lake, whose exiled Scottish lord is James Douglas. His host Nathan Johnson chose it at the breakfast table, because their town already held so many Johnsons that the newcomer could not stay one.

In which Massachusetts whaling town did the newly escaped Douglass and his wife first settle in 1838?

New Bedford, where for the first time no master stood by to take his pay. White tradesmen on the wharves refused to work beside him, so he sawed wood, shovelled coal and loaded ships instead.

In which denomination did the young Douglass serve as a local preacher in Massachusetts?

African Methodist Episcopal Zion, a small Black congregation he joined after a white Methodist church refused him a seat in the body of the house. An abolitionist who heard him speak there invited him onto his first big platform.

Which abolitionist paper did young Douglass rank 'second only to The Bible' in his heart?

The Liberator, William Lloyd Garrison's Boston weekly. Douglass was too poor to pay when its agent called, but was signed up anyway, and wrote that the paper 'became my meat and my drink'.

On which Massachusetts island did the 23-year-old Douglass give his first major abolitionist speech in 1841?

Nantucket, at a summer convention of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society. He had come only to listen; asked without warning to speak, he trembled so that he could hardly stand, yet left the island as the society's new lecturer.

After an Indiana mob broke Douglass's hand in 1843, who rescued him?

A Quaker family, the Hardys, carried him off in their wagon and nursed him until he was back on his feet. The broken bones were never properly set, and his right hand troubled him for the rest of his life.

Which 1845 bestseller was Douglass's first autobiography?

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass answered audiences who doubted that so polished a speaker had ever been enslaved. It was so well written that sceptics then doubted a Black man could have written it.

Why did Douglass's early memoirs omit how he escaped?

Helpers' safety: naming the route would have exposed them and closed it to others still enslaved. He told the full story only in his third memoir, in 1881, once slavery was gone and the secret could hurt no one.

Why did Douglass sail for Britain and Ireland months after publishing his Narrative in 1845?

To avoid being recaptured: the book named his enslaver and the places he had lived, so a fugitive had made himself easy to find. He sailed on the Cambria in August 1845 and stayed almost two years.

Which Irish leader, the winner of Catholic emancipation, did Douglass meet in Dublin in 1845 and praise ever after?

Daniel O'Connell, who refused donations from American slaveholders for his own Irish cause. Douglass recalled being introduced to a packed Dublin hall as 'the Black O'Connell of the United States'.

How did Douglass become legally free in 1846?

British supporters raised funds to buy his freedom: the Richardson family of Newcastle sent his enslaver £150. Douglass wrote that some allies thought paying conceded a right to own people; to him it was a ransom paid to a robber.

Which instrument did Douglass play as a lifelong hobby, a love he shared with a grandson who became a concert soloist?

Violin. In a Genoa museum Douglass lingered longest over Paganini's, writing that he would have given more for it than for any picture there; his grandson Joseph Douglass became a touring concert violinist.

What was the name of the abolitionist newspaper Douglass founded in upstate New York in 1847?

The North Star carried the motto 'Right is of no Sex, Truth is of no Color'. British friends paid for the press; Douglass recalled American allies astonished that 'a wood-sawyer' should offer himself as an editor.

Where did Douglass send the fugitives he hid at home, once eleven at a time, when he had raised their fares?

Canada, a steamer ride across Lake Ontario from his door. He wrote that the work was like bailing out the ocean with a teaspoon, yet every person passed along brought him unspeakable joy.

Douglass broke with his mentor William Lloyd Garrison after changing his mind about which document?

The US Constitution, which Garrison burned in public as a pro-slavery document. After a decade of echoing him, Douglass decided it was an anti-slavery instrument worth voting under, and old friends treated him as an apostate.

At which 1848 gathering did Douglass speak up for Elizabeth Cady Stanton's demand that women get the vote?

Seneca Falls Convention, the first women's rights convention. Stanton's call for the vote was the one resolution in real doubt until Douglass spoke for it, and he was among the 32 men who signed its Declaration of Sentiments.

Douglass gave his speech 'What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?' in which city?

Rochester, his home city, where a ladies' anti-slavery society had invited him to Corinthian Hall on July 5, 1852. He told his hosts the holiday was theirs, not his: 'You may rejoice, I must mourn.'

What did Douglass press Abraham Lincoln about at their first White House meeting, in 1863?

Equal pay for Black soldiers, who were earning less than white troops. Douglass recalled Lincoln's answer: the lower pay had eased their enlistment against popular prejudice, and in the end they would receive the same.

Where did Douglass secretly meet John Brown shortly before the Harpers Ferry raid?

An abandoned stone quarry near Chambersburg, Pennsylvania. Douglass told Brown he was walking into 'a perfect steel-trap' and went home, but Shields Green, the fugitive he had brought along, stayed with Brown and was hanged.

Which document did John Brown draft while boarding for weeks at Douglass's home in early 1858?

His Provisional Constitution, a frame of government for the men he meant to lead into the mountains, adopted by his followers at Chatham that May. Douglass recalled that Brown insisted on paying three dollars a week in board.

Scholars rank Douglass ahead of even Abraham Lincoln as the 19th century's most what American?

Photographed more than any other American of his century, by one scholarly count of surviving portraits. He never smiled for the camera, refusing to feed the caricature of the happy slave.

What title did Douglass give his March 1863 broadside calling for Black recruits to the Union army?

Men of Color to Arms! ran in his own paper and was copied across the North. 'Liberty won by white men would lose half its luster,' he argued, and 'Better even die free, than to live slaves.'

Which regiment did two of Douglass's sons join during the Civil War?

54th Massachusetts Infantry, the Black regiment whose assault on Fort Wagner the film Glory retells. Lewis Douglass came through that assault as its sergeant major.

Which general, whose 1861 order freeing Missouri rebels' slaves Lincoln had revoked, did Douglass first back for president in 1864?

John C. Frémont, the radicals' nominee, because Lincoln would not yet endorse votes for freedmen. Frémont quit the race that September, and Douglass wrote that he then did his uttermost for Lincoln rather than 'swap horses'.

Douglass told an 1876 crowd that Black Americans were only Lincoln's step-children, and called him what?

'The white man's President', he said as the Emancipation Memorial was unveiled before President Grant. Yet he ended by judging that, measured by his country's sentiment, Lincoln was 'swift, zealous, radical, and determined'.

In 1872 Douglass became the first African American nominated for vice president, on which ticket?

Victoria Woodhull's Equal Rights Party put him on its ticket without asking him. He never acknowledged the nomination, and that year he served instead as a presidential elector, carrying New York's electoral vote to the capital.

Douglass named the three 'boxes' in which a man's rights rest as the ballot box, the jury box and what?

The cartridge box. After the war he argued that American liberties depended on the ballot-box, the jury-box and the cartridge-box, and that no class of people could live and flourish in the country without all three.

Which financial institution did Douglass become president of in 1874, only for it to fail within months?

Freedman's Savings Bank, founded to keep the earnings of the newly freed. Douglass lent it $10,000 of his own before he grasped that the money was already gone; he had, he wrote, been 'married to a corpse'.

Which president, fresh from the disputed election of 1876, made Douglass US Marshal for the District of Columbia?

Rutherford B. Hayes. Douglass was the first Black man in the post, and when the president had someone else present guests at White House receptions, a customary part of the job, he refused friends' calls to resign over it.

Whose sickbed did Douglass visit in 1877 to make his peace?

His former enslaver Thomas Auld, by then bedridden with palsy. Auld greeted him as 'Marshal Douglass'; he answered 'not Marshal, but Frederick to you as formerly', and Auld said that in his place he would have run too.

What did Douglass name his final home, the Washington estate that is now a National Historic Site?

Cedar Hill, the Anacostia estate he bought in 1877. After his death his widow Helen fought to keep it as a memorial to him, and it has been shown to visitors for more than a century.

Douglass's second wife, Helen Pitts, caused controversy because she was what?

White and nearly 20 years younger. Helen Pitts came from an abolitionist family and had been a clerk in his office; they married in 1884, his children were especially displeased, and the pair stayed together until his death.

To which republic, born of a slave revolt, did President Harrison send Douglass as US minister in 1889?

Haiti. He resigned in 1891 as Washington pressed for a naval station on Haitian soil, and Haiti's president then chose him to represent the country at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, which he called a crowning honour.

At the 1888 Republican convention, Douglass became the first African American in a major party to receive what?

A vote for president: one delegate named him in the roll call, and Benjamin Harrison went on to win the nomination. Douglass had gone to Chicago backing Senator John Sherman.

Complete Douglass's famous 1857 line: 'If there is no struggle, there is no' what?

Progress. He said it at Canandaigua, New York, in August 1857, marking West India emancipation, and went on to warn that 'Power concedes nothing without a demand.'

Douglass died in February 1895 shortly after returning home from a meeting of which organisation?

National Council of Women. He spent his last day among the suffragists he had backed for nearly fifty years, went home in the late afternoon, and collapsed while getting ready to speak at a local church.

Which fellow reformer shares Mount Hope Cemetery with Douglass?

Susan B. Anthony. Douglass had been a Sunday guest at her family's farm, and in 1866 the two helped found a group demanding votes for all, only to split three years later over whether Black men should get the vote first.

Which future president spoke when Douglass's statue was unveiled in his adopted home city in 1899?

Theodore Roosevelt, then governor of New York, gave the address in June 1899. Douglass had died four years earlier, and the sculptor used his son Charles as the model for the bronze.

What news brought Douglass home from Britain in 1860?

His daughter's death: Annie, ten, was the youngest of his five children and, he wrote, 'the light and life of my house'. Regardless of the peril, he took the first steamer home and kept out of sight for nearly a month.

Douglass and a waiting crowd listened 'as for a bolt from the sky' for word of what?

The Emancipation Proclamation, on January 1, 1863. Hours dragged by until a man pushed through the crowd crying that it was coming, 'on the wires', and Douglass recalled joy that ran from shouts of praise to sobs and tears.

What happened to Douglass's family home on June 2, 1872, shortly before he moved to Washington?

Fire destroyed it, along with the bound volumes of his newspaper from 1848 to 1860. Only weeks earlier Harvard had invited him to store them in its fire-proof library, and he had put off sending them.