DAVID BLIGHT FREDRICK DOUGLASS FREE

And he had a relative freedom of movement within the city on its confines. He got involved in three or four different churches. And it's there that he would have met Anna Murray, who became his first wife probably, when he was 18 or 19. And he grows up amidst them as well - especially amidst them. It was a very large, very active, energetic freed black community.

DAVID BLIGHT FREDRICK DOUGLASS FREE

It only had about 3,000 slaves, but it had about 17,000 free blacks. And when - in the year he escaped, 1838, Baltimore had about 130,000 people. Baltimore was a great ocean port and a great shipbuilding city.

In Baltimore, he lived among a lot of freed black men - right? - and women.īLIGHT: That's right.

And then he grows up for 20 years as a slave - about 11 of them on the Eastern Shore, and about nine of those years in Baltimore, which, in fact, the city has everything to do with the fact that he would ever be able to escape.ĭAVIES: Right. So as a child, he's essentially a - not altogether abandoned, but he's left without parents. And he had to practically invent images of her. He never knew his father, and he never saw his mother after the age of 6. So one of the facts of his youth that everyone should know is that he was, in essence, an orphan. Douglass was always told that his father was his master or one of his masters. He was probably born in his grandmother Betsy Bailey's cabin, although we don't know for sure.Īnd he never will know exactly who his father was, although one candidate is Aaron Anthony himself. His mother was a still young woman named Harriet Bailey. He was born on the Holme Hill Farm, which was owned by his then master Aaron Anthony. It's a - kind of a remote backwater, at that point, of the American slave society. Frederick Douglass was born along a horseshoe bend in the Tuckahoe River on the Eastern Shore of Maryland in 1818. Where was he born? What was his life like as a slave?ĭAVID BLIGHT: Well, first, thank you, Dave. Tell us about Frederick Douglass early life. He spoke with FRESH AIR's Dave Davies about his new book 'Frederick Douglass: Prophet Of Freedom.'ĭAVE DAVIES, BYLINE: Well, David Blight, welcome back to FRESH AIR. David Blight is a professor of history at Yale and the author or editor of a dozen books, including annotated editions of Douglass's first two autobiographies. It illuminates many facets of Douglass's life - his break with leading abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, his complicated personal life, his support for and bitter feud with leaders of the women's suffrage movement and his years as a Republican Party functionary when he took patronage jobs in the government. And he did plenty of both in the 20 years leading up to the Civil War and for decades after, condemning the restoration of white supremacists in the former slave states and the denial of basic rights to black citizens.īlight's new biography of Douglass is on The New York Times list of the 10 best books of the year. Douglass was a passionate writer and powerful orator. Our guest, historian David Blight, says there's a lot more people don't know about Douglass's long and remarkable life, like the fact that he was the most photographed person in the 19th century and probably the most well-traveled public figure of his century.

The 19th-century abolitionist Frederick Douglass is probably best known for his compelling autobiographies in which he described his experiences as a slave and his escape to freedom.

David blight fredrick douglass