Frederick Douglass was the leading spokesman of African Americans in the 1800's. Never knowing his mother or even the identity of his father, he was born a slave and escaped to the north when he was twenty years old. He learned how to read and write in secret, and it became his passion. The abolition of slavery and the fight for equal rights was the subject of all of his speeches, debates and interviews. He founded an antislavery newspaper, wrote several autobiographical books, and helped recruit African Americans for the Union army during the Civil War. His final home was a station along the underground railroad system. Frederick Douglass is one of the most important people in American History.
The exact birth-date of Frederick Douglass is unknown, even to him. "Slaves know as little of their ages as horses know of theirs, and it is the wish of most masters within my knowledge to keep their slaves thus ignorant. I do not remember to have ever met a slave who could tell his birthday" (Douglass 13). Keeping knowledge from their slaves was the masters" key to dominance. Evidence of a restless spirit within a slave was deemed improper and impertinent, and treated with a trip to the whipping-post. Never the less, Douglass" careful ear heard his master say, sometime during 1835, that he was about seventeen years old. .
Sometime during 1818, Harriet Bailey gave birth to Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey in Tuckahoe, Maryland, near Easton. She was the daughter of Isaac and Betsy Bailey, both colored, and quite dark. Frederick's father, however, was white. Color was the only fact he knew about his father. Whispered opinions claimed that his master was his father, but the truth (or lack thereof) of these rumors was never known.