ABSTRACT

Frederick Douglass (1817-1895) was born in Talbot County, Maryland, of an unknown white father and an African-American slave named Harriet Bailey-”Douglass” being a name he adopted after gaining his freedom. He escaped from bondage in 1838, finding employment as a wage-worker in New Bedford, Massachusetts. From his early youth as a slave he’d had a voracious appetite for learning. As a free worker in a brass foundry, he continued to study:

Hard work, night and day, over a furnace hot enough to keep metal running like water was more favorable to action than thought, yet here I often nailed a newspaper to the post near my bellows and read while I was performing the up and down motion of the heavy beam by which the bellows were inflated and discharged.